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Unprincipled virtue: an inquiry into moral agency

New York: Oxford University Press (2003)

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  1. Intellectually Humble, but Prejudiced People. A Paradox of Intellectual Virtue.Matteo Colombo, Kevin Strangmann, Lieke Houkes, Zhasmina Kostadinova & Mark J. Brandt - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (2):353-371.
    Intellectual humility has attracted attention in both philosophy and psychology. Philosophers have clarified the nature of intellectual humility as an epistemic virtue; and psychologists have developed scales for measuring people’s intellectual humility. Much less attention has been paid to the potential effects of intellectual humility on people’s negative attitudes and to its relationship with prejudice-based epistemic vices. Here we fill these gaps by focusing on the relationship between intellectual humility and prejudice. To clarify this relationship, we conducted four empirical studies. (...)
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  • Huckleberry Finn’s Conscience: Reckoning with the Evasion.Steve Clarke - 2020 - The Journal of Ethics 24 (4):485-508.
    Huck Finn’s struggles with his conscience, as depicted in Mark Twain’s famous novelThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(AHF) (1884), have been much discussed by philosophers; and various philosophical lessons have been extracted from Twain’s depiction of those struggles. Two of these philosophers stand out, in terms of influence: Jonathan Bennett and Nomy Arpaly. Here I argue that the lessons that Bennett and Arpaly draw are not supported by a careful reading of AHF. This becomes particularly apparent when we consider the final (...)
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  • The Right Wrong‐Makers.Richard Yetter Chappell - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2):426-440.
    Right- and wrong-making features ("moral grounds") are widely believed to play important normative roles, e.g. in morally apt or virtuous motivation. This paper argues that moral grounds have been systematically misidentified. Canonical statements of our moral theories tend to summarize, rather than directly state, the full range of moral grounds posited by the theory. Further work is required to "unpack" a theory's criterion of rightness and identify the features that are of ground-level moral significance. As a result, it is not (...)
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  • Willpower Satisficing.Richard Yetter Chappell - 2019 - Noûs 53 (2):251-265.
    Satisficing Consequentialism is often rejected as hopeless. Perhaps its greatest problem is that it risks condoning the gratuitous prevention of goodness above the baseline of what qualifies as "good enough". I propose a radical new willpower-based version of the view that avoids this problem, and that better fits with the motivation of avoiding an excessively demanding conception of morality. I further demonstrate how, by drawing on the resources of an independent theory of blameworthiness, we may obtain a principled specification of (...)
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  • Punishment and Bad Upbringing.Peter Chau - 2018 - Criminal Justice Ethics 37 (2):103-121.
    This article examines whether bad upbringing affects just or deserved punishment. There are two possible rationales for this claim. First,...
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  • Incommensurability, incomparability, and practical reason.Ruth Chang (ed.) - 1997 - Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard.
    Can quite different values be rationally weighed against one another? Can the value of one thing always be ranked as greater than, equal to, or less than the value of something else? If the answer to these questions is no, then in what areas do we find commensurability and comparability unavailable? And what are the implications for moral and legal decision making? This book struggles with these questions, and arrives at distinctly different answers.".
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  • Why Care About Non-Natural Reasons?Richard Yetter Chappell - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2):125-134.
    Are non-natural properties worth caring about? I consider two objections to metaethical non-naturalism. According to the intelligibility objection, it would be positively unintelligible to care about non-natural properties that float free from the causal fabric of the cosmos. According to the ethical idlers objection, there is no compelling motivation to posit non-natural normative properties because the natural properties suffice to provide us with reasons. In both cases, I argue, the objection stems from misunderstanding the role that non-natural properties play in (...)
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  • Responsibility for Reason-Giving: The Case of Individual Tainted Reasoning in Systemic Corruption.Emanuela Ceva & Lubomira Radoilska - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (4):789-809.
    The paper articulates a new understanding of individual responsibility focused on exercises of agency in reason-giving rather than intentional actions or attitudes towards others. Looking at how agents make sense of their actions, we identify a distinctive but underexplored space for assessing individual responsibility within collective actions. As a case in point, we concentrate on reason-giving for one's own involvement in systemic corruption. We characterize systemic corruption in terms of its public ‘unavowability’ and focus on the redescriptions to which corrupt (...)
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  • Are moral intuitions intellectual perceptions?Dario Cecchini - 2022 - Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 13 (1):31-40.
    This paper discusses an influential view of moral intuition, according to which moral intuition is a kind of intellectual perception. The core claim of this quasi-perceptualist theory is that intuitions are like perceptual experiences in presenting propositions as true. In this work, it is argued that quasi-perceptualism is explanatorily superfluous in the moral domain: there is no need to postulate a sui generis quasi-perceptual mental state to account for moral intuition since rival theories can explain the salient mental features of (...)
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  • Social Constraints On Moral Address.Vanessa Carbonell - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1):167-189.
    The moral community is a social community, and as such it is vulnerable to social problems and pathologies. In this essay I identify a particular way in which participation in the moral community can be constrained by social factors. I argue that features of the social world—including power imbalances, oppression, intergroup conflict, communication barriers, and stereotyping—can make it nearly impossible for some members of the moral community to hold others responsible for wrongdoing. Specifically, social circumstances prevent some marginalized people from (...)
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  • Emotionally guiding our actions.Mary Carman - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (1):43-64.
    If emotions have a rational role in action, then one challenge for accounting for how we can act rationally when acting emotionally is to show how we can guide our actions by our emotional considerations, seen as reasons. In this paper, I put forward a novel proposal for how this can be so. Drawing on the interconnection between emotions, cares and caring, I argue that, as the emotional agent is a caring agent, she can be aware of the emotional consideration (...)
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  • Blameworthiness as Deserved Guilt.Andreas Brekke Carlsson - 2017 - The Journal of Ethics 21 (1):89-115.
    It is often assumed that we are only blameworthy for that over which we have control. In recent years, however, several philosophers have argued that we can be blameworthy for occurrences that appear to be outside our control, such as attitudes, beliefs and omissions. This has prompted the question of why control should be a condition on blameworthiness. This paper aims at defending the control condition by developing a new conception of blameworthiness: To be blameworthy, I argue, is most fundamentally (...)
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  • A Review of Elinor Mason’s Ways to be Blameworthy. [REVIEW]Andreas Brekke Carlsson - 2022 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (1):215-221.
    In this review, I summarize Elinor Mason’s Ways to be Blameworthy and raise some worries concerning three aspects of her book: her account of the knowledge condition on moral responsibility, her notion of blame and its justification as well as Mason’s conception of extended blameworthiness.
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  • What Should we Believe About Free Will?Jeremy Byrd - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (3):505-522.
    Given the available evidence, I argue that we face considerable uncertainty about free will. In particular, I argue that the available philosophical evidence does not support being highly confident in our theories about the nature of free will, though this does not necessarily mean that we should suspend judgment about either incompatibilism or compatibilism. For those who accept incompatibilism, however, I argue that there is enough uncertainty about libertarian free will that they should suspend judgment about whether we are ever (...)
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  • The Role of ‘Autonomy’ in Teaching Expertise.Irene Bucelli - 2017 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 51 (3):588-604.
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  • Implicit attitudes and the ability argument.Wesley Buckwalter - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):2961-2990.
    According to one picture of the mind, decisions and actions are largely the result of automatic cognitive processing beyond our ability to control. This picture is in tension with a foundational principle in ethics that moral responsibility for behavior requires the ability to control it. The discovery of implicit attitudes contributes to this tension. According to the ability argument against moral responsibility, if we cannot control implicit attitudes, and implicit attitudes cause behavior, then we cannot be morally responsible for that (...)
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  • The Normativity of Automaticity.Michael Brownstein & Alex Madva - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (4):410-434.
    While the causal contributions of so-called ‘automatic’ processes to behavior are now widely acknowledged, less attention has been given to their normative role in the guidance of action. We develop an account of the normativity of automaticity that responds to and builds upon Tamar Szabó Gendler's account of ‘alief’, an associative and arational mental state more primitive than belief. Alief represents a promising tool for integrating psychological research on automaticity with philosophical work on mind and action, but Gendler errs in (...)
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  • Self-Control and Overcontrol: Conceptual, Ethical, and Ideological Issues in Positive Psychology.Michael Brownstein - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (3):585-606.
    In what they call their “manual of the sanities”—a positive psychology handbook describing contemporary research on strengths of character—Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman argue that “there is no true disadvantage of having too much self-control.” This claim is widely endorsed in the research literature. I argue that it is false. My argument proceeds in three parts. First, I identify conceptual confusion in the definition of self-control, specifically as it pertains to the claim that you cannot be too self-controlled. Second, I (...)
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  • Group motivation.Jessica Brown - 2022 - Noûs 56 (2):494-510.
    In this paper I discuss a key issue for group moral responsibility, namely whether we can make sense of a group acting for one reason rather than another. The notion of acting for one reason rather than another is central to standard accounts of individual agency and responsibility; and also determines whether an individual is blameworthy or praiseworthy for an action. Thus if we model group responsibility on individual responsibility, we need to be able to make sense of a group (...)
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  • Ethical Automaticity.Michael Brownstein & Alex Madva - 2012 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (1):68-98.
    Social psychologists tell us that much of human behavior is automatic. It is natural to think that automatic behavioral dispositions are ethically desirable if and only if they are suitably governed by an agent’s reflective judgments. However, we identify a class of automatic dispositions that make normatively self-standing contributions to praiseworthy action and a well-lived life, independently of, or even in spite of, an agent’s reflective judgments about what to do. We argue that the fundamental questions for the "ethics of (...)
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  • Blame and wrongdoing.Jessica Brown - 2017 - Episteme 14 (3):275-296.
    The idea that one can blamelessly violate a norm is central to ethics and epistemology. The paper examines the prospects for an account of blameless norm violation applicable both to norms governing action and norms governing belief. In doing so, I remain neutral on just what are the norms governing action and belief. I examine three leading suggestions for understanding blameless violation of a norm which is not overridden by another norm: doxastic accounts; epistemic accounts; and appeal to expected value. (...)
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  • Attributionism and Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias.Michael Brownstein - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (4):765-786.
    Implicit intergroup biases have been shown to impact social behavior in many unsettling ways, from disparities in decisions to “shoot” black and white men in a computer simulation to unequal gender-based evaluations of résumés and CVs. It is a difficult question whether, and in what way, agents are responsible for behaviors affected by implicit biases. I argue that in paradigmatic cases agents are responsible for these behaviors in the sense that the behavior is “attributable” to them. That is, behaviors affected (...)
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  • Prejudiced beliefs based on the evidence: responding to a challenge for evidentialism.Anna Brinkerhoff - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14317-14331.
    According to evidentialism, what is epistemically rational to believe is determined by evidence alone. So, assuming that prejudiced beliefs are irrational, evidentialism entails that they must not be properly based on the evidence. Recently, philosophers have been interested in cases of beliefs that seem to undermine evidentialism: these are beliefs that seem both prejudiced (and, thus, irrational) and properly based on the evidence (and, thus, rational). In these cases, a believer has strong statistical evidence that most members of a social (...)
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  • Temptation and the Agent’s Standpoint.Michael E. Bratman - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (3):293-310.
    Suppose you resolve now to resist an expected temptation later while knowing that once the temptation arrives your preference or evaluative assessment will shift in favor of that temptation. Are there defensible norms of rational planning agency that support sticking with your prior intention in the face of such a shift at the time of temptation and in the absence of relevant new information? This article defends the idea that it might be rational to stick with your prior intention in (...)
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  • Ought-contextualism and reasoning.Darren Bradley - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2977-2999.
    What does logic tells us how about we ought to reason? If P entails Q, and I believe P, should I believe Q? I will argue that we should embed the issue in an independently motivated contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, with parameters for a standard and set of propositions. With the contextualist machinery in hand, we can defend a strong principle expressing how agents ought to reason while accommodating conflicting intuitions. I then show how our judgments about blame and guidance (...)
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  • Assertion, practical reasoning, and epistemic separabilism.Kenneth Boyd - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (7):1907-1927.
    I argue here for a view I call epistemic separabilism , which states that there are two different ways we can be evaluated epistemically when we assert a proposition or treat a proposition as a reason for acting: one in terms of whether we have adhered to or violated the relevant epistemic norm, and another in terms of how epistemically well-positioned we are towards the fact that we have either adhered to or violated said norm. ES has been appealed to (...)
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  • Child euthanasia: should we just not talk about it?Luc Bovens - 2015 - Journal of Medical Ethics 41 (8):630-634.
    Belgium has recently extended its euthanasia legislation to minors, making it the first legislation in the world that does not specify any age limit. I consider two strands in the opposition to this legislation. First, I identify five arguments in the public debate to the effect that euthanasia for minors is somehow worse than euthanasia for adults—viz. arguments from weightiness, capability of discernment, pressure, sensitivity and sufficient palliative care—and show that these arguments are wanting. Second, there is another position in (...)
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  • Epistemic normativity and the justification-excuse distinction.Cameron Boult - 2017 - Synthese 194 (10):4065-4081.
    The paper critically examines recent work on justifications and excuses in epistemology. I start with a discussion of Gerken’s claim that the “excuse maneuver” is ad hoc. Recent work from Timothy Williamson and Clayton Littlejohn provides resources to advance the debate. Focusing in particular on a key insight in Williamson’s view, I then consider an additional worry for the so-called excuse maneuver. I call it the “excuses are not enough” objection. Dealing with this objection generates pressure in two directions: one (...)
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  • In praise of animals.Rhys Borchert & Aliya R. Dewey - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (4):1-26.
    Reasons-responsive accounts of praiseworthiness say, roughly, that an agent is praiseworthy for an action just in case the reasons that explain why they acted are also the reasons that explain why the action is right. In this paper, we argue that reasons-responsive accounts imply that some actions of non-human animals are praiseworthy. Trying to exclude non-human animals, we argue, risks neglecting cases of inadvertent virtue in human action and undermining the anti-intellectualist commitments that are typically associated with reasons-responsive accounts. Of (...)
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  • Modesty as a Virtue of Attention.Nicolas Bommarito - 2013 - Philosophical Review 122 (1):93-117.
    The contemporary discussion of modesty has focused on whether or not modest people are accurate about their own good qualities. This essay argues that this way of framing the debate is unhelpful and offers examples to show that neither ignorance nor accuracy about the good qualities related to oneself is necessary for modesty. It then offers an attention-based account, claiming that what is necessary for modesty is to direct one’s attention in certain ways. By analyzing modesty in this way, we (...)
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  • Biases and Heuristics in Decision Making and Their Impact on Autonomy.J. S. Blumenthal-Barby - 2016 - American Journal of Bioethics 16 (5):5-15.
    Cognitive scientists have identified a wide range of biases and heuristics in human decision making over the past few decades. Only recently have bioethicists begun to think seriously about the implications of these findings for topics such as agency, autonomy, and consent. This article aims to provide an overview of biases and heuristics that have been identified and a framework in which to think comprehensively about the impact of them on the exercise of autonomous decision making. I analyze the impact (...)
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  • Epistemic justification and the ignorance excuse.Nathan Biebel - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (12):3005-3028.
    One of the most common excuses is ignorance. Ignorance does not always excuse, however, for sometimes ignorance is culpable. One of the most natural ways to think of the difference between exculpating and culpable ignorance is in terms of justification; that is, one’s ignorance is exculpating only if it is justified and one’s ignorance is culpable only if it not justified. Rosen :591–610, 2008) explores this idea by first offering a brief account of justification, and then two cases that he (...)
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  • The Epistemology of Prejudice.Endre Begby - 2013 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):90-99.
    According to a common view, prejudice always involves some form of epistemic culpability, i.e., a failure to respond to evidence in the appropriate way. I argue that the common view wrongfully assumes that prejudices always involve universal generalizations. After motivating the more plausible thesis that prejudices typically involve a species of generic judgment, I show that standard examples provide no grounds for positing a strong connection between prejudice and epistemic culpability. More generally, the common view fails to recognize the extent (...)
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  • Straight Thinking in Warped Environments.Endre Begby - 2018 - Analysis 78 (3):489-500.
    Part of a symposium on *The Rationality of Perception* by Susanna Siegel (2017 Oxford University Press).
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  • Motivational Indeterminacy.Avner Baz - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (2):336-357.
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  • To be or Not to be Authentic. In Defence of Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal.Katharina Bauer - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (3):567-580.
    It has recently been pointed out that the cloudiness of the concept of authenticity as well as inflated ideologies of the ‘true self’ provide good reasons to criticize theories and ideals of authenticity. Nevertheless, there are also good reasons to defend an ethical ideal of authenticity, not least because of its critical and oppositional force, which is directed against experiences of self-abandonment and self-alienation. I will argue for an elaborated ethical ideal of authenticity: the ambitious ideal of a continuous self-reflective (...)
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  • The wrongs of racist beliefs.Rima Basu - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 176 (9):2497-2515.
    We care not only about how people treat us, but also what they believe of us. If I believe that you’re a bad tipper given your race, I’ve wronged you. But, what if you are a bad tipper? It is commonly argued that the way racist beliefs wrong is that the racist believer either misrepresents reality, organizes facts in a misleading way that distorts the truth, or engages in fallacious reasoning. In this paper, I present a case that challenges this (...)
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  • How Did She Get So Good? On Virtue and Skill. [REVIEW]Bana Bashour - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2):563-575.
    In his recent book on skill and virtue, Matt Stichter provides an account based on work in empirical psychology, specifically on self-regulation. In this paper I wish to argue that while this account is novel and well informed, it falls short. I present several examples that I believe Stichter’s view cannot explain and I try to identify the reasons for that. I argue that while trying to avoid the completely anti-intellectualist account of skill especially when it comes to virtue, Stichter (...)
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  • Rational Moral Ignorance.Zach Barnett - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (3):645-664.
    What should a person do when, through no fault of her own, she ends up believing a false moral theory? Some suggest that she should act against what the false theory recommends; others argue that she should follow her rationally held moral beliefs. While the former view better accords with intuitions about cases, the latter one seems to enjoy a critical advantage: It seems better able to render moral requirements ‘followable’ or ‘action-guiding.’ But this tempting thought proves difficult to justify. (...)
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  • On a neglected feature of moral agency.Zachary L. Barber - 2020 - Ratio 34 (1):68-80.
    Ratio, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 68-80, March 2021.
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  • Character control and historical moral responsibility.Eric Christian Barnes - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (9):2311-2331.
    Some proponents of compatibilist moral responsibility have proposed an historical theory which requires that agents deploy character control in order to be morally responsible. An important type of argument for the character control condition is the manipulation argument, such as Mele’s example of Beth and Chuck. In this paper I show that Beth can be exonerated on various conditions other than her failure to execute character control—I propose a new character, Patty, who meets these conditions and is, I argue, morally (...)
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  • Epistemic Blame and the New Evil Demon Problem.Cristina Ballarini - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (8):2475-2505.
    The New Evil Demon Problem presents a serious challenge to externalist theories of epistemic justification. In recent years, externalists have developed a number of strategies for responding to the problem. A popular line of response involves distinguishing between a belief’s being epistemically justified and a subject’s being epistemically blameless for holding it. The apparently problematic intuitions the New Evil Demon Problem elicits, proponents of this response claim, track the fact that the deceived subject is epistemically blameless for believing as she (...)
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  • Four Varieties of Character-Based Virtue Epistemology.Jason Baehr - 2008 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (4):469-502.
    The terrain of character-based or “responsibilist” virtue epistemology has evolved dramatically over the last decade -- so much so that it is far from clear what, if anything, unifies the various views put forth in this area. In an attempt to bring some clarity to the overall thrust and structure of this movement, I develop a fourfold classification of character-based virtue epistemologies. I also offer a qualified assessmentof each approach, defending a certain account of the probable future of this burgeoning (...)
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  • Non-accidental piety: reliable reasoning and modally robust adherence to the divine will.Joona Auvinen - 2021 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 91 (1):43-61.
    In this article I formulate a skeptical argument against the possibility of adhering to the divine will in a non-accidental way. In particular, my focus in the article is on a widely embraced modal condition of accidentality, according to which non-accidentality has to do with a person manifesting dispositions that result in a given outcome in a modally robust way. The skeptical argument arises from two observations: first, various authors in the epistemology of religion have argued that it is often (...)
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  • On not getting out of bed.Samuel Asarnow - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (6):1639-1666.
    This morning I intended to get out of bed when my alarm went off. Hearing my alarm, I formed the intention to get up now. Yet, for a time, I remained in bed, irrationally lazy. It seems I irrationally failed to execute my intention. Such cases of execution failure pose a challenge for Mentalists about rationality, who believe that facts about rationality supervene on facts about the mind. For, this morning, my mind was in order; it was my action that (...)
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  • Two ways of relating to (and acting for) reasons.Caroline T. Arruda & Daniel J. Povinelli - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (5):441-459.
    Most views of agency take acting for reasons (whether explanatory or justifying) to be an important hallmark of the capacity for agency. The problem, however, is that the standard analysis of what it is to act in light of reasons is not sufficiently fine grained to accommodate what we will argue are the myriad types of ways that agents can do so. We suggest that a full account of acting for reasons must also recognize the relationship that agents have with (...)
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  • Reply to Pippin.Nomy Arpaly - 2007 - Philosophical Explorations 10 (3):303 – 307.
    I argue that in his response to me Robert Pippin misrepresents my view of akrasia (partially because of what looks like his strong disbelief in the existence of akrasia) as well as expresses a false view of the way a generalizing moral theory is supposed to apply to specific cases. The last issue is related to particularism, which I turn to discuss, arguing that one familiar way in which it seems attractive is a misleading one.
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  • Précis of In Praise of Desire.Nomy Arpaly & Timothy Schroeder - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2):490-495.
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  • Practical reasons to believe, epistemic reasons to act, and the baffled action theorist.Nomy Arpaly - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):22-32.
    I argue that unless belief is voluntary in a very strict sense – that is, unless credence is simply under our direct control – there can be no practical reasons to believe. I defend this view against recent work by Susanna Rinard. I then argue that for very similar reasons, barring the truth of strict doxastic voluntarism, there cannot be epistemic reasons to act, only purely practical reasons possessed by those whose goal is attaining knowledge or justified belief.
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  • I—On Benevolence.Nomy Arpaly - 2018 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 92 (1):207-223.
    It is widely agreed that benevolence is not the whole of the moral life, but it is not as widely appreciated that benevolence is an irreducible part of that life. This paper argues that Kantian efforts to characterize benevolence, or something like it, in terms of reverence for rational agency fall short. Such reverence, while credibly an important part of the moral life, is no more the whole of it than benevolence.
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