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  1. Virtue, Authenticity and Irony: Themes from Sartre and Williams.Alan Thomas - 2024 - Topoi 43 (2):403-412.
    In the course of criticizing indirect forms of consequentialism Bernard Williams argued that because virtues of character enter into the very content of the self, they cannot be instrumentalised. They must, instead, be viewed as cognitive responses to intrinsic value. This paper investigates this argument and relates it to similar claims in the work of Sartre. The inalienability of the first personal point of view represents a common theme and informs a further argument that an agent can only think of (...)
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  • Moral Reasoning in the Climate Crisis: A Personal Guide.Arthur R. Obst - forthcoming - Moral Philosophy and Politics.
    This article substantiates the common intuition that it is wrong to contribute to dangerous climate change for no significant reason. To advance this claim, I first propose a basic principle that one has the moral obligation to act in accordance with the weight of moral reasons. I further claim that there are significant moral reasons for individuals not to emit greenhouse gases, as many other climate ethicists have already argued. Then, I assert that there are often no significant moral (or (...)
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  • Respect for Nature, Respect for Persons, Respect for Value.Jeffrey Seidman - 2022 - Philosophy 97 (3):361-385.
    I elucidate a frame of mind that David Wiggins callsrespect for nature, which he understands as a special attitude toward asui generisobject, Natureas such. A person with this frame of mind takes nature to impose defeasible limits on her action, so that there are some courses of action that she will refuse even to entertain, except in circumstances of dire exigency. I defend the reasonableness of respect for nature, drawing upon considerations in Wiggins's work. But I argue that the natural (...)
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  • Praise.Daniel Telech - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (10):1-19.
    One way of being responsible for an action is being praiseworthy for it. But what is the “praise” of which the praiseworthy agent is worthy? This paper provides a survey of answers to this question, i.e. a survey of possible accounts of praise’s nature. It then presents an overview of candidate norms governing our responses of praise. By attending to praise’s nature and appropriateness conditions, we stand to acquire a richer conception of what it is to be, and to regard (...)
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  • Ubuntu and Moral Epistemology: The Case of the Rhodes Must Fall Movement.Luis Rodrigues - 2020 - Philosophia Africana 19 (1):40-63.
    One of the key ethical and political issues in South Africa today is the decolonization of education. In 2015, a movement called Rhodes Must Fall was born in South Africa precisely with the purpose of engaging in activism to promote this decolonization. The Rhodes Must Fall movement to further this purpose engaged in some violent protests. The objective of this article is to assess whether South Africans are justified to believe that these protests can or cannot be morally justified from (...)
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  • Moral Criticism and Structural Injustice.Robin Zheng - 2021 - Mind 130 (518):503-535.
    Moral agency is limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained. This is evident in the many ways we all unwittingly participate in widespread injustice through our everyday actions, which I call ‘structural wrongs’. To do justice to these facts, I argue that we should distinguish between summative and formative moral criticism. While summative criticism functions to conclusively assess an agent's performance relative to some benchmark, formative criticism aims only to improve performance in an ongoing way. I show that the negative sanctions associated (...)
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  • Jokes can fail to be funny because they are immoral: The incompatibility of emotions.Dong An & Kaiyuan Chen - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (3):374-396.
    Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson have argued that to evaluate the funniness of a joke based on the consideration of whether it is morally appropriate to feel amused commits the “moralistic fallacy.” We offer a new and empirically informed reply. We argue that there is a way to take morality into consideration without committing this fallacy, that is, it is legitimate to say that for some people, witty but immoral jokes can fail to be funny because they are immoral. In (...)
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  • Taking Our Selves Too Seriously: Commitment, Contestation, and the Dynamic Life of the Self.Christian M. Golden - 2019 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 57 (4):505-538.
    In this article, I distinguish two models of personal integrity. The first, wholeheartedness, regards harmonious unity of the self as psychologically healthy and volitional consistency as ethically ideal. I argue that it does so at the substantial cost of framing ambivalence and conflict as defects of character and action. To avoid these consequences, I propose an alternate ideal of humility that construes the self as multiple and precarious and celebrates experiences of loss and transformation through which learning, growth, innovation, and (...)
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  • Exiting The Consequentialist Circle: Two Senses of Bringing It About.Paul Edward Hurley - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (2):130-163.
    Consequentialism is a state of affairs centered moral theory that finds support in state of affairs centered views of value, reason, action, and desire/preference. Together these views form a mutually reinforcing circle. I map an exit route out of this circle by distinguishing between two different senses in which actions can be understood as bringing about states of affairs. All actions, reasons, desires, and values involve bringing about in the first, deflationary sense, but only some appear to involve bringing about (...)
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  • How Genealogies Can Affect the Space of Reasons.Matthieu Queloz - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2005-2027.
    Can genealogical explanations affect the space of reasons? Those who think so commonly face two objections. The first objection maintains that attempts to derive reasons from claims about the genesis of something commit the genetic fallacy—they conflate genesis and justification. One way for genealogies to side-step this objection is to focus on the functional origins of practices—to show that, given certain facts about us and our environment, certain conceptual practices are rational because apt responses. But this invites a second objection, (...)
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  • Varieties of Contingent Pacifism in War.Saba Bazargan-Forward - 2014 - In Helen Frowe & Gerald Lang (eds.), How We Fight: Ethics in War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 1-17.
    The destruction wrought by even just wars lends undeniable appeal to radical pacifism, according to which all wars are unjust. Yet radical pacifism is fundamentally flawed. In the past decade, a moderate and more defensible form of pacifism has emerged. According to what has been called ‘contingent pacifism’, it is very unlikely that it is morally permissible to wage any given war. This chapter develops the doctrine of contingent pacifism by distinguishing and developing various versions of it, and by assessing (...)
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  • Cluelessness.Hilary Greaves - 2016 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (3):311-339.
    Decisions, whether moral or prudential, should be guided at least in part by considerations of the consequences that would result from the various available actions. For any given action, however, the majority of its consequences are unpredictable at the time of decision. Many have worried that this leaves us, in some important sense, clueless. In this paper, I distinguish between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ possible sources of cluelessness. In terms of this taxonomy, the majority of the existing literature on cluelessness focusses (...)
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  • Fear and Integrity.Frederick Kroon - 2008 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (1):31-49.
    I'll begin this paper with an autobiographical example — an instance of a common enough kind of case involving agents who are faced with making a choice they strongly care about, but who have tendencies that incline them towards choosing an option they prefer not to choose. Later in the paper, I apply some of the general lessons learned from this case to a philosophically more familiar example of a hard-to-make choice, and to the well-known problem the example generates for (...)
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  • Wouldn't it be Nice? Moral Rules and Distant Worlds.Abelard Podgorski - 2018 - Noûs 52 (2):279-294.
    Traditional rule consequentialism faces a problem sometimes called the ideal world objection—the worry that by looking only at the consequences in worlds where rules are universally adhered to, the theory fails to account for problems that arise because adherence to rules in the real world is inevitably imperfect. In response, recent theorists have defended sophisticated versions of rule consequentialism which are sensitive to the consequences in worlds with less utopian levels of adherence. In this paper, I argue that these attempts (...)
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  • Evolutionary Debunking Arguments in Ethics.Andreas Lech Mogensen - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    I consider whether evolutionary explanations can debunk our moral beliefs. Most contemporary discussion in this area is centred on the question of whether debunking implications follow from our ability to explain elements of human morality in terms of natural selection, given that there has been no selection for true moral beliefs. By considering the most prominent arguments in the literature today, I offer reasons to think that debunking arguments of this kind fail. However, I argue that a successful evolutionary debunking (...)
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  • Two Conceptions of Justice.Justin Klocksiem - 2017 - New Content is Available for Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (5):495-514.
    _ Source: _Page Count 20 What is the relationship between justice and moral permissibility? If an action constitutes an injustice, does that decisively rule it out, morally speaking, or merely count heavily against it? This paper argues that although the injustice of an action counts heavily against performing it, this effect can sometimes be overridden by consequentialist concerns. This suggests that injustice does not conclusively rule out actions that generate it, which in turn suggests that an approach to justice that (...)
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  • A Problem with Societal Desirability as a Component of Responsible Research and Innovation: the “If we don’t somebody else will” Argument.John Weckert, Hector Rodriguez Valdes & Sadjad Soltanzadeh - 2016 - NanoEthics 10 (2):215-225.
    The implementation of Responsible Research and Innovation is not without its challenges, and one of these is raised when societal desirability is included amongst the RRI principles. We will argue that societal desirability is problematic even though it appears to fit well with the overall ideal. This discord occurs partly because the idea of societal desirability is inherently ambiguous, but more importantly because its scope is unclear. This paper asks: is societal desirability in the spirit of RRI? On von Schomberg’s (...)
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  • Intuition Fail: Philosophical Activity and the Limits of Expertise.Wesley Buckwalter - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (2):378-410.
    Experimental philosophers have empirically challenged the connection between intuition and philosophical expertise. This paper reviews these challenges alongside other research findings in cognitive science on expert performance and argues for three claims. First, evidence taken to challenge philosophical expertise may also be explained by the well-researched failures and limitations of genuine expertise. Second, studying the failures and limitations of experts across many fields provides a promising research program upon which to base a new model of philosophical expertise. Third, a model (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Terrorists, Hostages, Victims, and “The Crisis Team”: A “Who's Who” Puzzle.Nancy Potter - 1999 - Hypatia 14 (3):126-156.
    This essay examines the relationship between nonviolence and trustworthiness. I focus on questions of accountability for people in midlevel positions of power, where multiple loyalties and responsibilities create conflicts and where policies can push people into actions that reinstate hegemonic relations. A case study from crisis counseling is presented in which the management of the case exacerbated previous violence done to a biracial female. The importance of resistance to dominant ideology is scrutinized.
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  • A Right to Health Care.Pavlos Eleftheriadis - 2012 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (2):268-285.
    Do we have a legal and moral right to health care against others? There are international conventions and institutions that say emphatically yes, and they summarize this in the expression of “the right to health,” which is an established part of the international human rights canon. The International Covenant on Social and Economic Rights outlines this as “the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health,” but declarations such as this remain tragically (...)
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  • A Communicative Conception of Moral Appraisal.Jules Holroyd - 2007 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (3):267-278.
    I argue that our acts of moral appraisal should be communicative. Praise and blame should communicate, to the appraised, information about their status and competences as moral agents; that they are recognised by the appraiser as a competent moral agent, and thus a legitimate candidate for appraisal. I argue for this thesis by drawing on empirical data about factors that can affect motivation. On the basis of such data, I formulate a constraint, and argue that two prominent models of moral (...)
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  • Risk, rationality and expected utility theory.Richard Pettigrew - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (5-6):798-826.
    There are decision problems where the preferences that seem rational to many people cannot be accommodated within orthodox decision theory in the natural way. In response, a number of alternatives to the orthodoxy have been proposed. In this paper, I offer an argument against those alternatives and in favour of the orthodoxy. I focus on preferences that seem to encode sensitivity to risk. And I focus on the alternative to the orthodoxy proposed by Lara Buchak’s risk-weighted expected utility theory. I (...)
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  • Three Arguments Against the Expertise Defense.Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - Metaphilosophy 46 (1):52-64.
    Experimental philosophers have challenged friends of the expertise defense to show that the intuitive judgments of professional philosophers are different from the intuitive judgments of nonphilosophers, and the intuitive judgments of professional philosophers are better than the intuitive judgments of nonphilosophers, in ways that are relevant to the truth or falsity of such judgments. Friends of the expertise defense have responded by arguing that the burden of proof lies with experimental philosophers. This article sketches three arguments which show that both (...)
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  • Intuitions and the Demands of Consequentialism.Matthew Tedesco - 2011 - Utilitas 23 (1):94-104.
    One response to the demandingness objection is that it begs the question against consequentialism by assuming a moral distinction between what a theory requires and what it permits. According to the consequentialist, this distinction stands in need of defense. However, this response may also beg the question, this time at the methodological level, regarding the credibility of the intuitions underlying the objection. The success of the consequentialist's response thus turns on the role we assign to intuitions in our moral methodology. (...)
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  • Conflictual Moralities, Ethical Torture: Revisiting the Problem of “Dirty Hands”. [REVIEW]Moran Yemini - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (1):163-180.
    The problem of “dirty hands” has become an important term, indeed one of the most important terms of reference, in contemporary academic scholarship on the issue of torture. The aim of this essay is to offer a better understanding of this problem. Firstly, it is argued that the problem of “dirty hands” can play neither within rule-utilitarianism nor within absolutism. Still, however, the problem of “dirty hands” represents an acute, seemingly irresolvable, conflict within morality, with the moral agent understood, following (...)
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  • Consent Under Pressure: The Puzzle of Third Party Coercion.Joseph Millum - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (1):113-127.
    Coercion by the recipient of consent renders that consent invalid. But what about when the coercive force comes from a third party, not from the person to whom consent would be proffered? In this paper I analyze how threats from a third party affect consent. I argue that, as with other cases of coercion, we should distinguish threats that render consent invalid from threats whose force is too weak to invalidate consent and threats that are legitimate. Illegitimate controlling third party (...)
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  • Utilitarianism and Children.D. S. Hutchinson - 1982 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (1):61 - 73.
    It has long been argued, and often admitted, that utilitarianism cannot account for distributive Justice. The purpose of this paper is to show that utilitarianism cannot make sense of the moral issues involved in having children. In particular, it cannot take account of the differences between infanticide, abortion, contraception and chastity. Importantly, the two difficulties stem from a common feature of utilitarianism, that since it is a sum-ranking decision procedure, it is structurally indifferent to who experiences utility. Children and Justice (...)
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  • Rights Based Paretianism.Peter Vallentyne - 1988 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (3):527 - 544.
    An ethical theory is axiological just in case it makes the permissibility of actions depend solely on considerations of goodness. Act utilitarianism is the paradigm axiological theory. An ethical theory is a pure rights theory just in case it judges an action permissible if and only if it violates no one’s rights. Libertarianism is a paradigm pure rights theory. I shall formulate and defend a type of axiological theory that, unlike act utilitarianism, is sensitive in a new and interesting way (...)
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  • Hypocrisy After Aristotle.Béla Szabados & Eldon Soifer - 1998 - Dialogue 37 (3):545-.
    RésuméCet article examine diverses façons d'exploiter l'éthique aristotélicienne pour rendre compte philosophiquement de l'hypocrisie. Aristote lui-même n'apas dit grand chose d'explicite à ce sujet, mais nous nous employons à identifier et à scruter les passages qui sont les plus pertinents pour un traitement distinctif de l'hypocrisie, élucidant en cours de route un certain nombre de confusions à propos d'Aristote. Nous envisageons divers domaines d'émotion et d'action qui pourraient fournir un lieu propre au vice de l'hypocrisie, ceux en particulier de l'engagement (...)
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  • Dworkin and His Critics: The Relevance of Ethical Theory in Philosophy of Law.Stephen W. Ball - 1990 - Ratio Juris 3 (3):340-384.
    Two deficiencies characterize the vast critical literature that has accumulated around Dworkin's theory of law. On the one hand, the main lines of the debate tend to get lost in the crossfire of objections by critics and rejoinders by Dworkin — with little dialogue between the critics, or any systematic interrelation or resolution of these largely isolated disputes. On the other hand, such arguments on various points of Dworkin's Jurisprudence tend to neglect or obscure underlying issues in philosophical ethics. The (...)
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  • (1 other version)Partial Utilitarianism as a suggested ethical framework for evaluating corporate mergers and acquisitions.Nick Collett - 2010 - Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility 19 (4):363-378.
    Prior literature on ethical concerns in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) has often concluded that many stakeholders, such as workers and communities, have unjustly suffered as a result of takeovers and associated defences and that their rights as stakeholders have been violated. However, very few papers provide any guidance on how to evaluate a merger or acquisition from an ethical standpoint. This study looks at how ethical frameworks could be used to assess the ethical impact of a merger or acquisition and (...)
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  • Moral particularity.Margaret Urban Walker - 1987 - Metaphilosophy 18 (3-4):171-185.
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  • The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and Speculations.Susan Dwyer, Bryce Huebner & Marc D. Hauser - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (3):486-510.
    Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus requires a rich description of the computational structures that underlie mature moral judgments, an account of the acquisition and development of these structures, and an (...)
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  • Liberal Lustration.Yvonne Chiu - 2010 - Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (4):440-464.
    After a regime-changing war, a state often engages in lustration—condemnation and punishment of dangerous, corrupt, or culpable remnants of the previous system—e.g., de-Nazification or the more recent de-Ba’athification in Iraq. This common practice poses an important moral dilemma for liberals because even thoughtful and nuanced lustration involves condemning groups of people, instead of treating each case individually. It also raises important questions about collective agency, group treatment, and rectifying historical injustices. Liberals often oppose lustration because it denies moral individualism and (...)
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  • The place of self-interest and the role of power in deliberative democracy.Jane Mansbridge, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, David Estlund, Andreas Føllesdal, Archon Fung, Cristina Lafont, Bernard Manin & José Luis Martí - 2009 - Journal of Political Philosophy 18 (1):64-100.
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  • Research on well-being: Some advice from Jeremy Bentham.David Collard - 2006 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (3):330-354.
    Jeremy Bentham provided a comprehensive list of the sources of pleasure and pain, rather in the manner of modern researchers into human well-being. He explicitly used the term well-being and made both qualitative and quantitative proposals for its measurement. Bentham insisted that the measurement of well-being should be firmly based on the concerns and subjective valuations of those directly concerned, in the context of a liberal society. Those who wished to superimpose other judgements were dismissed as "ipsedixitists." He also addressed, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Happiness, the self and human flourishing.Daniel M. Haybron - 2008 - Utilitas 20 (1):21-49.
    It may even be held that [the intellect] is the true self of each, inasmuch as it is the dominant and better part; and therefore it would be a strange thing if a man should choose to live not his own life but the life of some other than himself. Moreover . . . that which is best and most pleasant for each creature is that which is proper to the nature of each; accordingly the life of the intellect is (...)
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  • Actual–Consequence Act Utilitarianism and the Best Possible Humans.Dale E. Miller - 2003 - Ratio 16 (1):49–62.
    After critiquing some earlier attempts (including those of Marcus Singer and Frances Howard–Snyder) to ground objections to actual–consequence act utilitarianism (ACAU) on human cognitive limitations, I present two new objections with this same foundation. Both start with the observation that, because human cognitive abilities are not up to the task of reliably recognizing utility–maximizing actions, any agents who are recognizably human – including the best possible humans, morally speaking – are certain to perform many actions every day that ACAU says (...)
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  • Getting our options clear: A closer look at agent-centered options.Paul Hurley - 1995 - Philosophical Studies 78 (2):163 - 188.
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  • Rule utilitarianism and decision theory.JohnC Harsanyi - 1977 - Erkenntnis 11 (1):25 - 53.
    The purpose of this paper is to show how some of the controversial questions concerning utilitarianism can be clarified by the modelling techniques and the other analytical tools of decision theory (and, sometimes, of game theory). It is suggested that the moral rules of utilitarian ethics have a logical status similar to that of the normative rules (theorems) of such formal normative disciplines as decision theory and game theory.The paper argues that social utility should be defined, not in hedonistic or (...)
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  • Ethics and Health Security in the Australian COVID-19 Context: A Critical Interpretive Literature Review.Anson Fehross, Kari Pahlman & Diego S. Silva - 2024 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 21 (1):131-150.
    Background The concept of “health security” is often used to motivate public health responses, yet the ethical values that underpin this concept remain largely unexamined. The recent Australian responses to COVID-19 serve as an important case study by which we can analyse the pre-existing literature to see what ethical values shaped, and continue to shape, Australia’s response. Methods We conducted a critical interpretive literature review of academic and grey literatures within key databases, resulting in 2,220 sources. After screening for duplicates (...)
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  • The Indispensability Argument for the Doing/Allowing Asymmetry.Stefan Fischer - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-24.
    In this paper, I propose a solution to a challenge formulated by Judith Jarvis Thomson: We have to explain why the moral asymmetry between doing and allowing harm is a deep feature of our moral thinking. In a nutshell, my solution is this: It could not be otherwise. Accepting the asymmetry is indispensable for the construction and maintenance of stable moral communities. -/- My argument centrally involves mental resource management. Moral communities depend on their members’ commitment to moral norms. And, (...)
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  • Bernard Williams as a Philosopher of Ethical Freedom.Miranda Fricker - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (8):919-933.
    Interpreting Bernard Williams’s ethical philosophy is not easy. His style is deceptively conversational; apparently direct, yet argumentatively inexplicit and allusive. He is moreover committed to evading ready-made philosophical “-isms.” All this reinforces the already distinct impression that the structure of his philosophy is a web of interrelated commitments where none has unique priority. Against this impression, however, I will venture that the contours of his philosophy become clearest if one considers that there is a single, unchanging root conviction from which (...)
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  • Punishing Them All: How Criminal Justice Should Account for Mass Incarceration.Ekow N. Yankah - 2020 - Res Philosophica 97 (2):185-218.
    The piece returns to my earlier challenges of retributivism as the basis of contemporary criminal law, advancing my work on republican political justifications that make central the effect of punishment on citizenship. In short, the justification of punishment should eschew individual retributivist “desert” and focus primarily on the effects of punishment on the entire polity. In particular, this would mean that the effects of mass incarceration would be explicitly a part of justification of punishment. Concretized, members of communities where widespread (...)
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  • Groundwork for the Mechanics of Morals.Avery Kolers - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (5):636-651.
    Ethics is a skill set. But what skill set is it? An answer to this question would help make progress for both theory and moral agency. I argue that moral performance may best be understood on the model of athletic performance; both moral and athletic performance are rule-structured unions of efficiency and inefficiency, enabling us to engage in the wholehearted and autonomous pursuit of goals subject to constraints. By understanding how athletics demands embodied performance, we better understand moral demand and (...)
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  • Wittgenstein and the unity of good.Oskari Kuusela - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (2):428-444.
    This paper discusses the problem of the unity of moral good, concerning the kind of unity that moral good or the concept thereof constitutes. In particular, I am concerned with how Wittgenstein’s identification of various complex modes of conceptual unity, and his introduction of a methodology of clarification for dealing with such complex concepts, can help with the problem of unity, as it rises from the moral philosophical tradition. Relating to this I also address the disputed question, whether Wittgenstein regards (...)
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  • Empirical ignorance as defeating moral intuitions? A puzzle for rule consequentialists.Caleb Perl - 2019 - Analysis 79 (1):62-72.
    This paper develops an argument that, if rule consequentialism is true, it’s not possible to defend it as the outcome of reflective equilibrium. Ordinary agents like you and me are ignorant of too many empirical facts. Our ignorance is a defeater for our moral intuitions. Even worse, there aren’t enough undefeated intuitions left to defend rule consequentialism. The problem I’ll describe won’t be specific to rule consequentialists, but it will be especially sharp for them.
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  • Beyond sacrificial harm: A two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology.Guy Kahane, Jim A. C. Everett, Brian D. Earp, Lucius Caviola, Nadira S. Faber, Molly J. Crockett & Julian Savulescu - 2018 - Psychological Review 125 (2):131-164.
    Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutili- tarian modes of moral decision-making. This research has generated important insights into people’s attitudes toward instrumental harm—that is, the sacrifice of an individual to save a greater number. But this approach also has serious limitations. Most notably, it ignores the positive, altruistic core of utilitarianism, which is characterized by impartial concern for the well-being of everyone, whether near or far. Here, we develop, refine, and validate a (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Many Moral Particularisms.Sean McKeever & Michael Ridge - 2005 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (1):83-106.
    What place, if any, moral principles should or do have in moral life has been a longstanding question f or moral philosophy. For some, the proposition that moral philosophy should strive to articulate moral principles has been an article of faith. At least since Aristotle, however, there has been a rieh counter-tradition that questions the possibility or value of trying to capture morality in principled terms. In recent years, philosophers who question principled approaches to morality have argued under the banner (...)
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  • Love in the Time of Consequentialism.Barry Maguire - 2017 - Noûs 51 (4):686-712.
    There are several powerful motivations for neutral value‐based deontic theories such as Act Consequentialism. Traditionally, such theories have had great difficulty accounting for partiality towards one's personal relationships and projects. This paper presents a neutral value‐based theory that preserves the motivations for Act Consequentialism while vindicating some crucial intuitions about reasons to be partial. There are two central ideas. The first is that when it comes to working out what you ought to do, your friends’ interests, the needs of your (...)
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