Nearly all philosophers agree that only true things can be known. But does this principle reflect actual patterns of ordinary usage? Several examples in ordinary language seem to show that ‘know’ is literally used non-factively. By contrast, this paper reports five experiments utilizing explicit paraphrasing tasks, which suggest that non-factive uses are actually not literal. Instead, they are better explained by a phenomenon known as protagonist projection. It is argued that armchair philosophical orthodoxy regarding the truth requirement for knowledge withstands (...) current empirical scrutiny. (shrink)

Uno de los principales esfuerzos de la ética aristotélica es la evaluación de las acciones y pasiones humanas. Para ser virtuosas, éstas deben ser loables, es decir, dignas de ser elogiadas por la comunidad a la que pertenece el agente. Pero para ser loables deben ser, a la vez, voluntarias y responsables. ¿Son las condiciones de la responsabilidad las mismas que las de la voluntariedad? Creo que, para Aristóteles, la voluntariedad es sólo la primera condición de la responsabilidad. La segunda, (...) tan necesaria como la primera, es la elección. Para mostrarlo, analizo las condiciones de una y otra, señalando lo que las condiciones de la elección añaden a las de la voluntariedad. Aristóteles las desarrolla en debate con la ética griega que le precede, principalmente con la de su maestro. (shrink)

This article is about the distinction between justification and excuse, a distinction which, while familiar, remains controversial. My discussion focuses on three questions. First, what is the distinction? Second, why is it important? And third, what are some areas of inquiry in which the distinction might be philosophically fruitful? I suggest that the distinction has practical and theoretical consequences, and is therefore worth taking seriously; I highlight two philosophical issues in which the distinction might play a useful role; but I (...) express skepticism about the prospects for drawing a firm distinction between justification and excuse. (shrink)

In my article I summarize a 'Humean' view of deliberation, and in particular deliberation with an ethical aspect. I regard Hume as having paved the way for a 'naturalistic' account of these things, avoiding Kantian fantasies of agency that dominate much current work. Contrary to what is often supposed, the Humean story gives a satisfactory account of dutiful or principled motivations, and a rich account of the ways in which different aspects of character are selected as 'useful or agreeable to (...) ourselves or others'. (shrink)

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 (...) claims are counter examples to the justification thesis. The aim of this paper is to defend the justification thesis against Rosen’s two cases. The argument will proceed in the following way. First, I clarify a few things about the nature of culpable ignorance generally and why the justification thesis is so intuitive. I then present Rosen’s purported counterexamples. Once this is done, I argue that Rosen misses an important view of justification in the epistemology literature that I call the pragmatic view. I present a general picture of the pragmatic view, and explain how it fits naturally with our practices of criticizing people’s beliefs, including claims of culpable ignorance. Finally, I address Rosen’s cases arguing that, if the pragmatic view is right, then Rosen’s cases are not counterexamples to the justification thesis. (shrink)

Martin Gustafsson and Richard Sørli. The Philosophy of J. L. Austin. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780199219759 Reviewed by Claudia Bianchi.

The defense of necessity, also known as the “choice of evils,” reflects popular moral intuitions and common sense: sometimes, breaking the rules is the right—indeed, the only—thing to do in order to avoid a greater evil. Citing a classic example, mountain climbers may break into a cabin to wait out a deadly snow storm and appropriate the owner’s provisions because their property violations are a lesser evil compared to the loss of life. At the same time, this defense contradicts the (...) fundamental principles of criminal responsibility in that it authorizes violation of rights of innocent bystanders. By allowing the mountain climbers to override the property rights of the cabin owner, the defense effectively forbids the cabin owner to use force in response—a different rule would perpetuate violence. This outcome is at odds with the basic criminal law doctrines. There is no general duty to rescue in Anglo-American law. Yet, by forbidding the cabin owner to use force, the defense of necessity essentially imposes on him the duty to forego his interests in favor of those of the mountain climbers. The paper explores the origins and boundaries of the defense of necessity. It argues that the existing public and private theories of necessity are unsatisfactory and concludes that a viable theory of necessity should be able to explain why it is sometimes permissible to override individual rights of citizens without their consent or fault. (shrink)

This paper presents a critique of a prevailing conception of the relation between moral reasoning and judgment on the one hand, and moral goodness on the other. I argue that moral reasoning is inescapably vulnerable to moral, as opposed to merely theoretical, failure. This, I argue, means that there is something deeply misleading in the way that Kant's moral theory, and some of its main rivals, have invited us to conceive of their subject matter.

The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy’s (“x-phi”) early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings to philosophical consequences, which we call the “fourfold route.” We show how this taxonomy can be fruitfully applied even at what one might have taken to be the (...) furthest edges of possible applications of x-phi in metaphysics and formal philosophy. Ultimately, the fourfold route helps us understand a different kind of empirical fact: the development of x-phi itself. (shrink)

To date, film scholars have found the films of Jim Jarmusch to be tantamount to works of postmodern philosophy. For as intriguing and productive as such interpretations of Jarmusch’s films have been, I submit that the postmodern framework occludes a crucial aspect of Jarmusch’s film-philosophy, namely, his investment in the ordinary. From this perspective, I intend to show the availability of Jarmusch’s films to Wittgensteinian interpretation. More specifically, I plan to situate Jarmusch’s arthouse action film Ghost Dog: The Way of (...) the Samurai (1999) between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida in order to demonstrate the profound affinities between Jarmusch’s film-philosophy and Wittgenstein’s conception of ordinary language. Through a consideration of character dialogue, I will demonstrate the extent to which Jarmusch rejects the private language argument – which, by extension, amounts to a rejection of linguistic relativism as an instance, or species, of skepticism – in favor of ordinary conceptions of language, expressiveness, knowledge, and responsibility. (shrink)

Abstract: On standard accounts, actions are caused by reasons (Davidson), and reasons are taken to be neural phenomena. Since neural phenomena are wholly understandable from a third-person perspective, standard views have no room for any ineliminable first-personal elements in an account of the causation of action. This article aims to show that first-person perspectives play essential roles in both human and nonhuman agency. Nonhuman agents have rudimentary first-person perspectives, whereas human agents—at least rational agents and moral agents—have robust first-person perspectives. (...) The author concludes with a view of intentional causation, according to which reasons are constituted by (but not identical to) neural phenomena. The idea of constitution without identity allows for a causal account of action that automatically includes first-personal aspects of agency. (shrink)

This article examines a frequent assumption of sociological accounts of knowledge: the idea that knowledge acts. The performativity of knowledge claims is here analysed through the prism of ‘sociological excuses’: the idea that sociological explanations can act as ‘excuses’ for otherwise unacceptable behaviour. The article builds on Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects to discuss the relationship between sociological explanation, sociological justification and sociological critique. It argues that understanding how (and if) sociological explanations can act requires paying attention to (...) social and political conditions of performativity and their transformation in late liberalism. (shrink)

Moralism is often described as a vice. But what exactly is wrong with moralism that makes it aptly described as a character flaw? This paper will argue that the problem with moralism is that it downgrades the force of legitimate moral criticism. First, I will argue that moralism involves an inflated sense of the extent to which moral criticism is appropriate. Next, I will examine the value of legitimate moral criticism, arguing that its value stems from enabling us to take (...) a stand against immoral behavior. Finally, I will argue that unwarranted moral criticism downgrades the force of legitimate moral criticism and that this is why moralism should be seen as a vice. (shrink)

This paper responds to the four critiques of my book Experiments in Ethics published in this issue. The main theme I take up is how we should understand the relation between psychology and philosophy. Young and Saxe believe that “bottom line” evaluative judgments don’t depend on facts. I argue for a different view, according to which our evaluative and non-evaluative judgments must cohere in a way that makes it rational, sometimes, to abandon even what looks like a basic evaluative judgment (...) because we have changed our minds about the facts. This leads me to qualify Tiberius’s claim that our moral judgments always derive, in part, from fundamental evaluative “justificatory stopping points,” arguing that even these can themselves be adjusted in the light of scientific understanding. Weinberg and Wang object to my use of Kant’s distinction between the perspective of the senses and the perspective of the understanding, because they identify it with a distinction between scientific and philosophical worlds. I argue that a distinction of perspectives isn’t a distinction between worlds and that, in any case, the distinction is not between science and ethics. Finally, in responding to Machery’s objections to a couple of my proposals, I return to the suggestion that a coherentist epistemology is required to deal with the relations between science and ethics. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to argue that justification should not be conceived of in purely objective terms. In arguing for that conclusion I focus in particular on Paul Robinson’s presentation of that position, since it is the most sophisticated defense of the objective account of justification in the literature. My main point will be that the distinction drawn by Robinson between objective and subjective accounts of justification is problematic, and that careful attention to the role played by reasonableness (...) in subjectivist accounts of justification reveals that the apparent puzzles Robinson raises for subjectivism are merely apparent. I will suggest that we ought to be reasonable subjectivists about justification, where “reasonableness” is understood in a particular manner. This has consequences for various other issues, including how we make sense of mistaken justification, and I will have something to say about those issues as they arise along the way. (shrink)

After nearly sixty years, the influence of Peter Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ remains strong in discussions of moral responsibility. However, as the paper has become more remote in time and in intellectual climate, some of those influences have turned into amplifications of ideas and claims that are misinterpretations or distortions of the paper, while other notions have been projected onto it. I try to make the case for this charge specifically in relation to what has become accepted as Strawson’s ‘response-dependent’ (...) theory of moral responsibility and to an allegedly problematic conception of blame said to be at the centre of that theory. Against that background, I comment on the current philosophical project to ‘civilize’ blame. (shrink)

Dainton and Robinson’s Companion traces lines of descent of analytic philosophy from ancestors. They characterize analytic philosophy as a movement, a tradition, a style, and a commitment to the va...

Philosophers wanted commonsense to fight skepticism. They hypostasized and destroyed it. Commonsense is skeptical--Bound by a sense of proportion and of limitation. A scarce commodity, At times supported, At times transcended by science, Commonsense has to be taken account of by the critical-Realistic theory of science. James clerk maxwell's view of today's science as tomorrow's commonsense is the point of departure. It is wonderful but overlooks the value of the sense of proportion.

In the past few years, we have become increasingly focused on technology use that is impulsive, unthinking, and distractive. There has been a strong push to understand such technology use in terms of dopamine addiction. The present article demonstrates the limitations of this so-called neurobehaviorist approach: Not only is it inconsistent in regard to how it understands humans, technologies, and their mutual relationship, it also pathologizes everyday human behaviors. The article proceeds to discuss dual-systems theory, which helpfully discusses impulsive technology (...) use in terms of habit instead of addiction, but can be criticized for its mentalist celebration of conscious control. Finally, the article introduces a phenomenological approach whose conceptualization of habit manifests many of the experiential qualities that we try to capture with addiction, but remains non-pathologizing and opens a space for learning: While tech addiction is bad and must be eliminated, good tech habits can be trained and cultivated. (shrink)

Ricoeur’s theory of productive imagination in previously unpublished lectures. The eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur was devoted to the imagination. These previously unpublished lectures offer Ricoeur’s most significant and sustained reflections on creativity as he builds a new theory of imagination through close examination, moving from Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant to Ryle, Price, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Sartre. These thinkers, he contends, underestimate humanity’s creative capacity. While the Western tradition generally views imagination as derived from the reproductive example of the (...) image, Ricoeur develops a theory about the mind’s power to produce new realities. Modeled most clearly in fiction, this productive imagination, Ricoeur argues, is available across conceptual domains. His theory provocatively suggests that we are not constrained by existing political, social, and scientific structures. Rather, our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world. (shrink)

Strawson argues that we should understand moral responsibility in terms of our practices of holding responsible and taking responsibility. The former covers what is commonly referred to as backward-looking responsibility , while the latter covers what is commonly referred to as forward-looking responsibility . We consider new technologies and interventions that facilitate assignment of responsibility. Assigning responsibility is best understood as the second- or third-personal analogue of taking responsibility. It establishes forward-looking responsibility. But unlike taking responsibility, it establishes forward-looking responsibility (...) in someone else. When such assignments are accepted, they function in such a way that those to whom responsibility has been assigned face the same obligations and are susceptible to the same reactive attitudes as someone who takes responsibility. One family of interventions interests us in particular: nudges. We contend that many instances of nudging tacitly assign responsibility to nudgees for actions, values, and relationships that they might not otherwise have taken responsibility for. To the extent that nudgees tacitly accept such assignments, they become responsible for upholding norms that would otherwise have fallen under the purview of other actors. While this may be empowering in some cases, it can also function in such a way that it burdens people with more responsibility that they can (reasonably be expected to) manage. (shrink)

In this Introduction, we aim to introduce the reader to the basic topic of this book. As part of this, we explain why we are using two different expressions (‘conceptual engineering’ and ‘conceptual ethics’) to describe the topics in the book. We then turn to some of the central foundational issues that arise for conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, and finally we outline various views one might have about their role in philosophy and inquiry more generally.

The typical epistemology course begins with a discussion of the distinction between justification and knowledge and ends without any discussion of the distinction between justification and excuse. This is unfortunate. If we had a better understanding of the justification-excuse distinction, we would have a better understanding of the intuitions that shape the internalism-externalism debate. My aims in this paper are these. First, I will explain how the kinds of excuses that should interest epistemologists exculpate. Second, I will explain why the (...) intuitions that underwrite the new evil demon argument don't provide support for the internalist claim that justification is just in the head. The positive response that Cohen's example elicits is an indication that the subject should be excused if she violates an epistemic norm, not an indication that no norm has been violated. For just about any conceivable norm we can think of we can imagine situations in which someone violates that norm because they're moved by evidence that misleadingly suggests that they'd conform to it. When that happens, we'll respond positively in just the way we do when we consider Cohen's deceived subjects. When that happens, we cannot say that the subjects' responses were justified because we've stipulated that the subjects' responses contravene the relevant norms. Regardless of whether you think of norms along internalist or externalist lines, you should see that the intuitions that underwrite the new evil demon objection tell us nothing at all about whether a subject conforms to a norm. They tell us nothing about justification. (shrink)

Many people are drawn towards virtue ethics because of the central place it gives to emotions in the good life. Yet it may seem odd to evaluate emotions as virtuous or non-virtuous, for how can we be held responsible for those powerful feelings that simply engulf us? And how can education help us to manage our emotional lives? The aim of this book is to offer readers a new Aristotelian analysis and moral justification of a number of emotions that Aristotle (...) did not mention, or relegated, at best, to the level of the semi-virtuous, or made disparaging remarks about, or rejected explicitly. Kristjan Kristjansson argues that there are good Aristotelian reasons for understanding those emotions either as virtuous or as indirectly conducive to virtue. Virtuous Emotions begins with an overview of Aristotle's ideas on the nature of emotions and of emotional value, and concludes with an account of Aristotelian emotion education. (shrink)

Gibt es überzeugende Überforderungseinwände gegen anspruchsvolle moralische Auffassungen? In diesem Buch werden Überforderungseinwände präzise charakterisiert, systematisch eingeordnet und argumentativ verteidigt. Unter Berücksichtigung der wichtigsten philosophischen Beiträge zum Thema wird gezeigt, weshalb gewisse Moraltheorien und -prinzipien dafür kritisiert werden können, dass sie zu viel von einzelnen Personen verlangen.

Unlike other subjects of philosophy, violence is a familiar part of our everyday life, even if we usually encounter it primarily in the news. But does this mean that we already know what “violence” really is? So it would seem. Yet on second, philosophically mindful thoughts it becomes apparent that this seemingly trivial question is anything but easy to answer. This book offers a critical enquiry of the concept of violence, including detailed discussions of the concepts of collective and institutionalized (...) violence. It shows that these concepts, while remaining “essentially contested”, can be defined sufficiently precise to expose and criticize the strategically motivated abuse of the concept of violence that we encounter all too often. (shrink)

Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. (shrink)

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński.

When regimented in a certain natural way, the concepts of explanation and justification manifest a pattern of interrelations connected more or less systematically to their object. Besides its intrinsic interest, this pattern may give us some insight into the nature, source, and limits of the concept of argument.

The aim of this article is to argue for a conception of critical social science based on the model of constitutive rules. The author argues that this model is pragmatically superior to those models that employ notions like "illusion" and " ideology," as it does not demand a specification of the "real (but hidden) interests" of social actors. Key Words: constitutive rules • critical theory • ideology • recommendations • social facts.

Operational definitions of biological altruism in terms of actual fitness exchanges will not work because they include accidental acts as altruistic and exclude altruistic acts that have gone awry. I argue that the definition of biological altruism should contain an analogue of the role intention plays in psychological altruism. I consider two possibilities for this analogue, selected effect functions and the proximate causes and effects of behavior. I argue that the selected-effect function account will not work because it confuses the (...) explanation of some altruistic behavior with the definition of all of it and the information needed to justify a selected effect account of function is too often inaccessible. Close attention to the proximate explanations of a behavior is all that is needed to determine if an act is biologically altruistic, returning biological altruism to descriptive ethology, where it belongs. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we conduct a discourse analysis of the testimony of the leaders of British banks during a UK public inquiry into the financial crisis. We examine the discursive devices that were used to handle the accountability of banking leaders, particularly their role in the events leading up to the collapse and subsequent state bail-out of the banks. Our analysis identifies two competing interpretative repertoires: an agentic repertoire and a structural repertoire. These repertoires are significant, we suggest, because they (...) inform understanding of what went wrong with the banking system and what should be done to reform and regulate the sector. We conclude by calling for the notions of agency and structure to be treated as an object of study within discourse analysis rather than a form of social scientific explanation. (shrink)

Moral responsibility invariantism is the view that there is a single set of conditions for being morally responsible for an action (or omission or consequence of an act or omission) that applies in all cases. I defend this view against some recent arguments by Joshua Knobe and John Doris.

In ‘Brentano’s Methodology as a Path through the Divide’, Röck makes two related claims. Röck argues that there exists a philosophical dilemma between description and logical analysis, and that the current divide between continental phenomenology and analytic philosophy may be seen as a consequence of the dilemma. Röck further argues that Brentano’s work integrates description and logical analysis in a way which ‘can provide a suitable starting point for an equally successful integration of these methods in contemporary philosophy’. Without disputing (...) Röck’s claim about the suitability of Brentano’s work for such an integration, this paper questions by examining the influence of Brentano and his school on early analytic philosophy. As recent scholarship in the history of analytic philosophy demonstrates, contrary to Röck’s contention, many prominent analytic philosophers conversed with Brentano and his school’s conceptions of phenomenological description. (shrink)

A familiar move that philosophers of sport make in the debate on the doping-issue is to reject from the start the argument that doping comes down to cheating. The claim that doping is cheating is often rebutted with the argument that doping is only cheating when one accepts that the use of doping is unjustified in itself. In this paper I want to argue that putting aside the cheating-argument in this way comes, first, too easy, because essential complexities of what (...) cheating is, are neglected. And, second, it comes too soon, because spelling the cheating argument out throws new light on the debate about matters of justifying the rules and criteria concerning doping. I will confine myself in this paper to the claim that it is in any case the institutional authorities that professional athletes cheat on. The relations with other parties that apparently can be claimed to be cheated upon also, such as other athletes in competition, are left out. The argument from cheating takes its starting point from a principle of fidelity, taken from Scanlon. By this principle the morally acceptable conduct of those taking part in a practice is grounded in the way reciprocal expectations are raised between parties to the practice. I apply this principle to the relation between athletes and institutional authorities in sport practices. This argument can take the cheating argument to a new level of seriousness, especially in the sense that the arguments treated here support a plea for democratization of the procedures and a larger role of the sportsmen and sportswomen themselves, or so I will defend. (shrink)

This paper argues that the categorical authority of love’s imperatives is derived from a sentimental contract. The problem is defined and the paper argues against two recent attempts to explain the authority of love’s demands by Velleman and Frankfurt. An argument is then set out in which it is shown that a constructivist approach to the problem explains the sources of love’s justifications. The paper distinguishes between the moral and the romantic case but argues that the sources of authority are (...) paralleled in each. The paper ends by asking what we are to say when the demands of morality and the demands of love conflict. (shrink)

In some situations in which undesirable collective effects occur, it is very hard, if not impossible, to hold any individual reasonably responsible. Such a situation may be referred to as the problem of many hands. In this paper we investigate how the problem of many hands can best be understood and why, and when, it exactly constitutes a problem. After analyzing climate change as an example, we propose to define the problem of many hands as the occurrence of a gap (...) in the distribution of responsibility that may be considered morally problematic. Whether a gap is morally problematic, we suggest, depends on the reasons why responsibility is distributed. This, in turn, depends, at least in part, on the sense of responsibility employed, a main distinction being that between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility. (shrink)

In recent years limitations in the biomedical conceptualisation of health and illness have been well documented and a variety of alternative explanations produced to replace or supplement it. One such is Fredrik Svenaeus’s philosophy of medical practice, which is a development of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heideggers’ phenomenological and hermeneutical writings. This paper explores two texts, a short story by H. G. Wells, The Country of the Blind, and a poem by William Carlos Williams, Danse Russe to add further insight (...) into the ideas proposed by Svenaeus. Both texts were written before either Gadamer or Heidegger published their work. Analysis of the texts reveal examples of Heidegger’s understanding of ‘da-sein’, human-being, as the fundamental of human existence—how we relate to our ‘life-world’—together with its conditions including the tools we use to engage with and the moods that interpret the world. Emerging from this core relationship of being are the phenomena of health and illness, which are conceptualised as home-like (Heimischkeit) and un-home-like (Unheimlichkeit) being-in-the-world. In the texts the sense of home-like (and un-home-like) being is an ontological ‘web of significance’, to use Heidegger’s phrase, that creates, rather than results from a person’s psychological state. One factor that is not fully explicated in the philosophical accounts is the role that behaviour (as the physical-relating of a person) plays as a pre-requisite for agency, the ability to act in taken-for-granted ways. A person’s sense of authenticity, the extent to which someone makes their own choices rather than being led by what ‘others’ say, is linked with their ability to physically engage with and relate to their ‘life-world’. Finally, similarities between the ontological wholeness of poetry—the meaning structure of poetry—and of Dasein are noted. (shrink)

Nurses and other medical practitioners often experience moral distress: they feel an anguished sense of responsibility for what they take to be their own moral failures, even when those failures were unavoidable. However, in such cases other people do not tend to think it is right to hold them responsible. This is an interesting mismatch of reactions. It might seem that the mismatch should be remedied by assuring the practitioner that they are not responsible, but I argue that this denies (...) something important that the phenomenon of moral distress tells us. In fact, both the practitioners’ tendencies to hold themselves responsible and other people’s reluctance to hold the practitioners responsible get something right. The practitioners may be right that they are responsible in the sense of having failed to meet a binding moral requirement, even when the requirement was impossible to meet. This makes moral distress a fitting response because it correctly represents their own action as a wrongdoing. However, others may meanwhile be right that the practitioners are not responsible in the sense of being culpable and blameworthy. To blame others, or oneself, for certain failures, including those that are unavoidable, would be unfair. My claim depends on distinguishing between the fittingness and the fairness of holding someone (including oneself) responsible for moral failure. Having drawn the distinction, I suggest that moral distress should be addressed in a way that both recognizes it as a fitting response and avoids the unfairness of blame. (shrink)

It is undeniable that human agents sometimes act badly, and it seems that they sometimes pursue bad things simply because they are bad. This latter phenomenon has often been taken to provide counterexamples to views according to which we always act under the guise of the good. This paper identifies several distinct arguments in favour of the possibility that one can act under the guise of the bad. GG seems to face more serious difficulties when trying to answer three different, (...) but related, arguments for the possibility of acting under the guise of the bad. The main strategies available to answer these objections end up either undermining the motivation for GG or failing to do full justice to the nature of perverse motivation. However, these difficulties turn out to be generated by focusing on a particular version of GG, what I call the “content version”. But we have independent reasons to prefer a different version of GG; namely, the “attitude version”. The attitude version allows for a much richer understanding of the possibility of acting on what we conceive to be bad. Drawing on an analogy with theoretical akrasia and theoretical perversion, I try to show how the attitude version can provide a compelling account of perverse actions. (shrink)