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  1. 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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  • How the Source, Inevitability and Means of Bringing About Harm Interact in Folk-Moral Judgments.Bryce Huebner, Marc D. Hauser & Phillip Pettit - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (2):210-233.
    Means-based harms are frequently seen as forbidden, even when they lead to a greater good. But, are there mitigating factors? Results from five experiments show that judgments about means-based harms are modulated by: 1) Pareto considerations (was the harmed person made worse off?), 2) the directness of physical contact, and 3) the source of the threat (e.g. mechanical, human, or natural). Pareto harms are more permissible than non-Pareto harms, Pareto harms requiring direct physical contact are less permissible than those that (...)
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  • Absolutes and Particulars.Tim Chappell - 2004 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 54:95-117.
    [About the book] Although this collection of articles is not formally a commentary on Elizabeth Anscombe's famous article of the same title, in which she criticised the moral philosophy prevalent in 1958, a number of the contributors do take Anscombe's work as a starting point. Taken together the collection could be seen as a demonstration of the extent to which moral philosophers have since attempted to answer Anscombe's challenge, and to develop an approach to their subject which, while psychologically plausible, (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Subjective rightness.Holly M. Smith - 2010 - Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2):64-110.
    Twentieth century philosophers introduced the distinction between “objective rightness” and “subjective rightness” to achieve two primary goals. The first goal is to reduce the paradoxical tension between our judgments of (i) what is best for an agent to do in light of the actual circumstances in which she acts and (ii) what is wisest for her to do in light of her mistaken or uncertain beliefs about her circumstances. The second goal is to provide moral guidance to an agent who (...)
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  • Side constraints and the structure of commonsense ethics.Theresa Lopez, Jennifer Zamzow, Michael Gill & Shaun Nichols - 2009 - Philosophical Perspectives 23 (1):305-319.
    In our everyday moral deliberations, we attend to two central types of considerations – outcomes and moral rules. How these considerations interrelate is central to the long-standing debate between deontologists and utilitarians. Is the weight we attach to moral rules reducible to their conduciveness to good outcomes (as many utilitarians claim)? Or do we take moral rules to be absolute constraints on action that normatively trump outcomes (as many deontologists claim)? Arguments over these issues characteristically appeal to commonsense intuitions about (...)
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  • Consequentialism and moral psychology.Philip Pettit - 1994 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (1):1 – 17.
    Consequentialism ought not to make an impact, explicit or implicit, on every decision. All it ought generally to enjoy is what I describe as a virtual presence in the deliberation that produces decisions. [...] The argument that we have conducted suggests that the virtuous agent ought in general to remain faithful to his or her instincts and ingrained habits, only occasionally breaking with them in the name of promoting the best consequences.
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  • Moral heuristics.Cass R. Sunstein - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (4):531-542.
    With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics – mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too – moral short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction and sexuality, and the (...)
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  • What are moral intuitions and why should we care about them? A neurobiological perspective.John Allman & Jim Woodward - 2008 - Philosophical Issues 18 (1):164-185.
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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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  • Evaluatively incomplete states of affairs.Michael J. Zimmerman - 1983 - Philosophical Studies 43 (2):211 - 224.
    The main point of this paper has been to show that the concept of evaluative incompleteness deserves consideration. In addition, I have suggested that it is plausible to accept that certain states of affairs in fact are evaluatively incomplete. But I have not sought to prove that this is so; indeed, I do not know how such proof might be given. Just which states of affairs, if any, are evaluatively incomplete is an extremely vexed question, and it is not one (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Protecting reasonable conscientious refusals in health care.Jason T. Eberl - 2019 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (6):565-581.
    Recently, debate over whether health care providers should have a protected right to conscientiously refuse to offer legal health care services—such as abortion, elective sterilization, aid in dying, or treatments for transgender patients—has grown exponentially. I advance a modified compromise view that bases respect for claims of conscientious refusal to provide specific health care services on a publicly defensible rationale. This view requires health care providers who refuse such services to disclose their availability by other providers, as well as to (...)
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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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  • 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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  • The ‘Constitutive Thought’ of Regret.Geoffrey Scarre - 2017 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (5):569-585.
    In this paper I defend and develop Bernard Williams’ claim that the ‘constitutive thought’ of regret is ‘something like “how much better if it had been otherwise”’. An introductory section on cognitivist theories of emotion is followed by a detailed investigation of the concept of ‘agent-regret’ and of the ways in which the ‘constitutive thought’ might be articulated in different situations in which agents acknowledge casual responsibility for bringing about undesirable outcomes. Among problematic cases discussed are those in which agents (...)
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  • Bovine Tuberculosis and Badger Culling in England: A Utilitarian Analysis of Policy Options.Steven P. McCulloch & Michael J. Reiss - 2017 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 30 (4):511-533.
    Bovine tuberculosis is an important animal health policy issue in Britain, which impacts farmers, the public, domestic farmed cattle and the wild badger population. The Westminster government’s badger culling policy in England, which began in 2013, has caused considerable controversy. This is in part because the Independent Scientific Group advised against culling, based on the Randomised Badger Culling Trial. Those opposed to badger culling support more stringent cattle-based measures and the vaccination of badgers. This paper argues for ethical analysis of (...)
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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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  • 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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  • I—Gideon Rosen: Culpability and Duress: A Case Study.Gideon Rosen - 2014 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 88 (1):69-90.
    The paper examines the conditions under which we are responsible for actions performed under duress, focusing on a real case in which a soldier was compelled at gunpoint to participate in the massacre of civilian prisoners. The case stands for a class of cases in which the compelled act is neither clearly justified nor clearly excused on grounds of temporary incapacity, but in which it is nonetheless plausible that the agent is not morally blameworthy. The theoretical challenge is to identify (...)
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  • Individual Moral Development and Moral Progress.Anders Schinkel & Doret J. de Ruyter - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (1):121-136.
    At first glance, one of the most obvious places to look for moral progress is in individuals, in particular in moral development from childhood to adulthood. In fact, that moral progress is possible is a foundational assumption of moral education. Beyond the general agreement that moral progress is not only possible but even a common feature of human development things become blurry, however. For what do we mean by ‘progress’? And what constitutes moral progress? Does the idea of individual moral (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Monism and Pluralism about Value.Chris Heathwood - 2015 - In Iwao Hirose & Jonas Olson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory. New York NY: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 136-157.
    This essay discusses monism and pluralism about two related evaluative notions: welfare, or what makes people better off, and value simpliciter, or what makes the world better. These are stipulatively referred to as 'axiological value'. Axiological value property monists hold that one of these notions is reducible to the other (or else eliminable), while axiological value property pluralists deny this. Substantive monists about axiological value hold that there is just one basic kind of thing that makes our lives or the (...)
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  • Hard Moral Choices in the Military.Mark N. Jensen - 2013 - Journal of Military Ethics 12 (4):341-356.
    Integrating and building on the constitutional ethics paradigm proposed by Paul Roush and the neo-intuitionist moral decision-making scheme proposed by Robert Audi, I defend a novel decisionmaking procedure for hard moral choices in the military. The key to Roush’s model of justifiable disobedience is a soldier’s ability to recognize when an ostensibly legal order constitutes a ‘fundamental violation of justice’. However, the nature and structure of this act of moral recognition requires more elucidation than Roush has provided. In order to (...)
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  • The Imprudence of the Vulnerable.Steve Matthews - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4):791-805.
    Significant numbers of people believe that victims of violent crime are blameworthy in so far as they imprudently place themselves in dangerous situations. This belief is maintained and fuelled by ongoing social commentary. In this paper I describe a recent violent criminal case, as a foil against which I attempt to extract and refine the argument based on prudence that seems to support this belief. I then offer a moral critique of what goes wrong when this argument, continually repeated as (...)
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  • Transcendental institutionalism and global justice.Darrel Moellendorf - 2013 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 16 (2):162-178.
    In The Idea of Justice (2009), Amartya Sen distinguishes between ?transcendental institutional? approaches to justice and ?realization-focused comparisons,? rejecting the former and recommending the latter as a normative approach to global justice. I argue that Sen?s project fails for three principal reasons. First, he misdiagnoses the problem with accounts that he refers to as transcendental-institutionalist. The problem is not with these kinds of accounts per se, but with particular features of prominent approaches. Second, Sen?s realization-focus does not account well for (...)
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  • Coping with Climate Change: What Justice Demands of Surfers, Mormons, and the Rest of us.Kyle Fruh & Marcus Hedahl - 2013 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 16 (3):273-296.
    Henry Shue has led the charge among moral philosophers in arguing that harms stemming from anthropogenic climate change constitute violations of basic rights and are therefore prohibited by duties of justice. Because frameworks such as Shue’s argue that duties of justice are at stake, one could object that the special urgency of those duties threatens to overrun the normatively protected space in which an agent makes her life her own. We argue that an alternative conception of how moral reasons combine (...)
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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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  • Hypocrisy and Consequentialism.Eldon Soifer & Béla Szabados - 1998 - Utilitas 10 (2):168.
    Consequentialism has trouble explaining why hypocrisy is a term of moral condem-nation, largely because hypocrites often try to deceive others about their own selfishness through the useof words or deeds which themselves have good consequences. We argue that consequentialist attempts to deal with the problem by separating the evaluation of agent and action, or by the directevaluation of dispositions, or by focusing on long-term consequences such as reliability and erosion of trust, all prove inadequate to the challenge. We go on (...)
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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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  • (1 other version)Consequentializing.Douglas Portmore - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (2):329-347.
    A growing trend of thought has it that any plausible nonconsequentialist theory can be consequentialized, which is to say that it can be given a consequentialist representation. In this essay, I explore both whether this claim is true and what its implications are. I also explain the procedure for consequentializing a nonconsequentialist theory and give an account of the motivation for doing so.
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  • Response to open Peer commentaries on “performance-enhancing technologies and moral responsibility in the military”.Jessica Wolfendale - 2008 - American Journal of Bioethics 8 (2):W4 – W6.
    New scientific advances have created previously unheard of possibilities for enhancing combatants' performance. Future war fighters may be smarter, stronger, and braver than ever before. If these technologies are safe, is there any reason to reject their use? In this article, I argue that the use of enhancements is constrained by the importance of maintaining the moral responsibility of military personnel. This is crucial for two reasons: the military's ethical commitments require military personnel to be morally responsible agents, and moral (...)
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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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  • Evolutionary anthropology and the non-cognitive foundation of moral validity.Gebhard Geiger - 1993 - Biology and Philosophy 8 (2):133-151.
    This paper makes an attempt at the conceptual foundation of descriptive ethical theories in terms of evolutionary anthropology. It suggests, first, that what human social actors tend to accept to be morally valid and legitimate ultimately rests upon empirical authority relations and, second, that this acceptance follows an evolved pattern of hierarchical behaviour control in the social animal species. The analysis starts with a brief review of Thomas Hobbes'' moral philosophy, with special emphasis on Hobbes'' authoritarian view of moral validity (...)
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  • Moral justifications for privacy and intimacy.Samuel P. Winch - 1996 - Journal of Mass Media Ethics 11 (4):197 – 209.
    The right to privacy is a moral concept that has been debated for centuries. This article traces the histo y of the concept and examines how the existence of a right to privacy has been defended by philosophers through the years. This article examines the strategies behind those arguments, showing how some of them are more convincing than others. Following this analysis is a practical argument for recognizing a universal right to privacy over intimate relationships and information. Intimacy is a (...)
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  • Ethical behavior of marketing managers.David J. Fritzsche & Helmut Becker - 1983 - Journal of Business Ethics 2 (4):291 - 299.
    The ethical behavior of marketing managers was examined by analyzing their responses to a series of different types of ethical dilemmas presented in vignette form. The ethical dilemmas addressed dealt with the issues of (1) coercion and control, (2) conflict of interest, (3) the physical environment, (4) paternalism, and (5) personal integrity. Responses were analyzed to discover whether managers' behavior varied by type of issue faced or whether there is some continuity to ethical behavior which transcends the type of ethical (...)
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  • Six theses about pleasure.Stuart Rachels - 2004 - Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1):247-267.
    I defend these claims: (1) 'Pleasure' has exactly one English antonym: 'unpleasure.' (2) Pleasure is the most convincing example of an organic unity. (3) The hedonic calculus is a joke. (4) An important type of pleasure is background pleasure. (5) Pleasures in bad company are still good. (6) Higher pleasures aren't pleasures (and if they were, they wouldn't be higher). Thesis (1) merely concerns terminology, but theses (2)-(6) are substantive, evaluative claims.
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  • 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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