Leading virtue epistemologists defend the view that knowledge must proceed from intellectual virtue and they understand virtues either as refned character traits cultivated by the agent over time through deliberate effort, or as reliable cognitive abilities. Philosophical situationists argue that results from empirical psychology should make us doubt that we have either sort of epistemic virtue, thereby discrediting virtue epistemology’s empirical adequacy. I evaluate this situationist challenge and outline a successor to virtue epistemology: abilism . Abilism delivers all the main (...) benefts of virtue epistemology and is as empirically adequate as any theory in philosophy or the social sciences could hope to be. (shrink)

Moderate scientism is the view that empirical science can help answer questions in nonscientific disciplines. In this paper, we evaluate moderate scientism in philosophy. We review several ways that science has contributed to research in epistemology, action theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. We also review several ways that science has contributed to our understanding of how philosophers make judgments and decisions. Based on this research, we conclude that the case for moderate philosophical scientism is strong: scientific (...) practice has promoted significant progress in philosophy and its further development should be welcomed and encouraged. (shrink)

Lacking in the philosophy of sport is discussion of the gendered numbers of sets played in Grand Slam tennis. We argue that the practice is indefensible. It can be upheld only through false beliefs about women or repressive femininity ideals. It treats male tennis players unfairly in forcing them to play more sets because of their sex. Its ideological consequences are pernicious, since it reinforces the respective identifications of the female and male with physical limitation and heroism. Both sexes have (...) compelling reason to reject the practice. (shrink)

When behaviours or character traits match sociocultural expectation, heteronomy is a natural suspicion. A further natural suspicion is that the behaviours or character traits are unhealthy for the agent or for objectives of social justice and liberation. Second Wave feminism therefore includes a robust narrative of unease about female self-sexualisation. Third Wave feminism has more upbeat narratives of the latter, in terms of confidence and empowerment. The preceding tension is refracted through cases such as Ronda Rousey and ‘derby girls’, as (...) well as those of many less ostentatious women. It is argued that such self-sexualisation can be autonomous as opposed to heteronomous. It is argued, furthermore, that it is not a priori unhealthy for the agent and that autonomous female self-sexualisation admits of degrees of self-consciousness and articulacy. At the same time, such self-sexualisation takes place within gendered social structures, with consequences that legitimate the reinvocation of Second Wave motifs such as the commodification of female sexuality and the privileging of precise images of female sexuality. (shrink)

Gilbert Harman argues that the warrant for the lay attribution of character traits is completely undermined by the “fundamental attribution error” (FAE). He takes it to have been established by social psychologists, that the FAE pervades ordinary instances of lay person perception. However, examination of recent work in psychology reveals that there are good reasons to doubt that the effects observed in experimental settings, which ground the case for the FAE, pervade ordinary instances of person perception. Furthermore, it is possible (...) to make sense of these experimental results without invoking the FAE. Harman's argument against lay character trait attribution is unsubstantiated. (shrink)

Gilbert Harman argues that the warrant for the lay attribution of character traits is completely undermined by the “fundamental attribution error” (FAE). He takes it to have been established by social psychologists, that the FAE pervades ordinary instances of lay person perception. However, examination of recent work in psychology reveals that there are good reasons to doubt that the effects observed in experimental settings, which ground the case for the FAE, pervade ordinary instances of person perception. Furthermore, it is possible (...) to make sense of these experimental results without invoking the FAE. Harman's argument against lay character trait attribution is unsubstantiated. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25 (4) 2006: pp. 350-368 “Error of Opinion may be Tolerated When Reason is Left Free to Combat It.” Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address 4 March 1801. (shrink)

The dismissive attitude of intellectuals toward conspiracy theorists is considered and given some justification. It is argued that intellectuals are entitled to an attitude of prima facie skepticism toward the theories propounded by conspiracy theorists, because conspiracy theorists have an irrational tendency to continue to believe in conspiracy theories, even when these take on the appearance of forming the core of degenerating research program. It is further argued that the pervasive effect of the "fundamental attribution error" can explain the behavior (...) of such conspiracy theorists. A rival approach due to Brian Keeley, which involves the criticism of a subclass of conspiracy theories on epistemic grounds, is considered and found to be inadequate. Key Words: conspiracy • conspiracy theories • conspiracy theorizing. (shrink)

In Moral philosophy meets social psychology, Gilbert Harman argues that social psychology can educate folk morality to prevent us from committing the ‘fundamental attribution error,’ i.e. ‘the error of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent’s distinctive character traits’ (Harman, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 99, 315–331, 1999). An overview of the literature shows that while situationists unanimously agree with Harman on this point, they disagree on whether we also (...) tend to commit a kind of fundamental attribution error with respect to moral responsibility and blame. Do we also tend to ignore situational factors and overconfidently assume that people are morally responsible and blameworthy for their distinctive patterns of wrongful behaviour? Very few scholars have addressed this issue, and none has ever given a comprehensive account of moral responsibility and blame from a situationist perspective. In this paper, I argue that situationist social psychology impugns subjective theories of responsibility and blame which focus on the agent’s inner states and supports an objective theory—namely, the standard of the reasonable person. I defend this standard as a tool for moral appraisal, and then I refute the common misperception that this approach lets most perpetrators off the hook and poses a threat to society. (shrink)

Dans un célèbre article de 1998, John Doris avance que la psychologie situationniste remet en question l’éthique de la vertu aristotélicienne, laquelle présuppose l’existence de vertus qui sont à la fois fixes et indépendantes d’une situation. Son argument prend la forme d’un dilemme. Le présent article, qui a pour but de répondre à ce dilemme, s’appuie sur des recherches récentes menées dans les domaines de la psychologie et des sciences cognitives afin de démontrer que l’éthique de la vertu, en tant (...) que théorie dispositionnaliste et non-codifiable, constitue une psychologie morale plus adéquate au plan empirique que les autres approches reconnues. (shrink)

I argue for the existence of a ‘ratcheting-up effect’: the behavior of moral saints serves to increase the level of moral obligation the rest of us face. What we are morally obligated to do is constrained by what it would be reasonable for us to believe we are morally obligated to do. Moral saints provide us with a special kind of evidence that bears on what we can reasonably believe about our obligations. They do this by modeling the level of (...) sacrifice a person can realistically bear. Exposure to moral saints thus ‘ratchets-up’ our obligations by combating a type of ignorance that would otherwise defeat those obligations. (shrink)

The situationist literature in psychology claims that conduct is not determined by character and reflects the operation of the agent's situation or environment. For instance, due to situational factors, compassionate behavior is much less common than we might have expected from people we believe to be compassionate. This article focuses on whether situationism should revise our beliefs about moral responsibility. It assesses the implications of situationism against the backdrop of a conception of responsibility that is grounded in norms about the (...) fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing that require that agents to be normatively competent and possess situational control. Despite the low incidence of compassionate behavior revealed in situationist studies, situationism threatens neither situational control nor normative competence. Nonetheless situationism may force revision of our views about responsibility in particular contexts, such as wartime wrongdoing. Whereas a good case can be made that the heat of battle can create situational pressures that significantly impair normative competence and thus sometimes provide a full or partial excuse, there is reason to be skeptical of attempts to generalize this excuse to other contexts of wartime wrongdoing. If so, moral responsibility can take situationism on board without capsizing the boat. (shrink)

Many believe that colleges of business have a role to play in improving the level of marketing ethics practiced in the business world, while others believe that by the time students reach the level of university education, their ethical beliefs are so ingrained as to be virtually unalterable. The purpose of this study is to add to the literature regarding university students’ ethical value judgments. It utilizes scenario studies to assess base line ethical values of junior level undergraduate business administration (...) students, then techniques are employed to influence students’ perceptions of the ethics of various marketing practices, and students’ values are reassessed. A total of 667 junior and senior level students majoring in business administration (52% female; 48% male; 72% 22-years old or younger) participated in the pre-tests and 525 students (47% female; 53% male; 70% 22-years-old or younger) participated in the post-tests. The results of the before/after studies indicate that some experimental techniques are more effective than others in affecting change, but it is difficult to affect long-run change in those predisposed to unethical behavior. (shrink)

Ethical theories and theories of the person constrain each other, in that a proposition about the person may be a reason for or against an ethical proposition, and conversely. An important class of such propositions about the person concern the boundaries of the person. These boundaries enclose a person 's defining properties, which constitute his identity. A person 's identity may partly determine and partly be determined by his ethical judgments. An equilibrium between one's identity and one's ethical judgments is (...) the counterpart, at the personal level, of the philosophical ideal of reflective equilibrium between a theory of the person and an ethical theory. (shrink)

When we can’t live up to the ultimate standards of morality, how can moral theory give us guidance? We can distinguish between ideal and non-ideal theory to see that there are different versions of the voluntarist constraint, ‘ought implies can.’ Ideal moral theory identifies the best standard, so its demands are constrained by one version. Non-ideal theory tells us what to do given our psychological and motivational shortcomings and so is constrained by others. Moral theory can now both provide an (...) ultimate standard and give us guidance; this view also gives us new insights into demandingness and blame. (shrink)

I compare and assess two significant and opposing approaches to the self with respect to what they have to say about death: the anti-narrativist, as articulated by Galen Strawson, and the narrativist, as pieced together from a variety of accounts. Neither party fares particularly well on the matter of death. Both are unable to point towards a view of death that is clearly consistent with their views on the self. In the narrativist’s case this inconsistency is perhaps not as explicit (...) but is in the end more entrenched. (shrink)

Contrary to the common view, this paper suggests that the Hippocratic oath does not directly refer to the controversial subjects of euthanasia and abortion. We interpret the oath in the context of establishing trust in medicine through departure from Pantagruelism. Pantagruelism is coined after Rabelais' classic novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. His satire about a wonder herb, Pantagruelion, is actually a sophisticated model of anti-medicine in which absence of independent moral values and of properly conducted research fashion a flagrant over-medicalization of (...) human problems. Ultimately this undermines the therapeutic core of medicine itself. We contend that PAS is a case of such over-medicalization and that its institution creates medicophobia. This article does not express an opinion about euthanasia in general. Rather, we claim that physicians should learn from the oath and from Rabelais that they should keep their practice to medical care and not to exploit their expertise and social privileges for the sake of ulterior motives, even when their patients desire those goals. (shrink)

The Aristotelian view that the moral virtues–the virtues of character informed by practical wisdom–are essential to an individual's happiness, and are thus in an individual's self-interest, has been little discussed outside of purely scholarly contexts. With a few exceptions, contemporary philosophers have tended to be suspicious of Aristotle's claims about human nature and the nature of rationality and happiness. But recent scholarship has offered an interpretation of the basic elements of Aristotle's views of human nature and happiness, and of reason (...) and virtue, that brings them more into line with common-sense thinking and with contemporary philosophical and empirical psychology. This makes it fruitful to reexamine the question of the role of virtue in self-interest. (shrink)

A relatively new and exciting area of collaboration has begun between philosophy of mind and ethics. This paper attempts to explore aspects of this collaboration and how they bear upon traditional ethics. It is the author's contention that much of Western moral philosophy has been guided by largely unrecognized assumptions regarding reason, knowledge and conceptualization, and that when examined against empirical research in cognitive science, these assumptions turn out to be false -- or at the very least, unrealistic for creatures (...) with our cognitive structures. The fundamental tension between the Western idea of morality (as basically rule-following) and the way in which people actually confront and experience moral dilemmas is a result of our failure to take the insights of cognitive psychology seriously. This failure has had a dramatic impact on not only how we teach ethics, but how we attempt to live out lives. (shrink)

It is argued that certain individuals can and should be considered 'morally exemplary' with respect to the environment. This can be so even where there is no universally applicable ethical principle they employ, and no canonical set of virtues they exhibit. The author identifies Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey as potential 'environmental exemplars,' focusing for the purposes of the essay on individuals who have written compelling autobiographical works in defense of a way of life that (...) is both attuned to the values of a particular place and attentive to the humanistic concerns that have more traditionally been the locus of ethical thought. (shrink)

This article addresses the question whether we can know on the basis of folk intuitions that we have character traits. I answer in the negative, arguing that on any of the primary theories of knowledge, our intuitions about traits do not amount to knowledge. For instance, because we would attribute traits to one another regardless of whether we actually possessed such metaphysically robust dispositions, Nozickian sensitivity theory disqualifies our intuitions about traits from being knowledge. Yet we do think we know (...) that we have traits, so I am advancing an error theory, which means that I owe an account of why we fall into error. Why do we feel so comfortable navigating the language of traits if we lack knowledge of them? To answer this question, I refer to a slew of heuristics and biases. Some, like the fundamental attribution error, the false consensus effect, and the power of construal, pertain directly to trait attributions. Others are more general cognitive heuristics and biases whose relevance to trait attributions requires explanation and can be classed under the headings of input heuristics and biases and processing heuristics and biases. Input heuristics and biases include selection bias, availability bias, availability cascade, and anchoring. Processing heuristics and biases include disregard of base rates, disregard of regression to the mean, and confirmation bias. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that moral principles are not sufficient to guide moral thought and action: they need to be supplemented by a capacity for judgement. However, why can we not rely on this capacity for moral judgement alone? Why do moral principles need to be supplemented, but are not supplanted, by judgement? So-called moral particularists argue that we can, and should, make moral decisions on a case-by-case basis without any principles. According to particularists, the person of moral judgement is (...) a person of empathy, sensibility and virtue, rather than a person of principle. In this paper I argue that this is a false dichotomy. The person of good moral judgement is a person of principle. I propose that we think of moral principles as internalised long-term commitments that form our moral character and sensitivity, and, as such, are constitutive of moral judgement. (shrink)

Does the self exist? If so, what is its nature? How long do selves last? Galen Strawson draws on literature and psychology as well as philosophy to discuss various ways we experience having or being a self. He argues that it is legitimate to say that there is such a thing as the self, distinct from the human being.

Some philosophers – notably Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Ruth Barcan Marcus – argue that agents in moral dilemmas are blameworthy whatever they do. I begin by uncovering the connection these philosophers are presupposing between the agent’s judgement of wrongdoing and her tendency to self-blame. Next, I argue that while dilemmatic choosers cannot help but see themselves as wrongdoers, they both can and should divorce this judgement from an ascription of self-blame. As I argue, dilemmatic choosers are morally sui generis (...) in that their actions result in a diminishment of their personal integrity with no corresponding failure of character. It is this that makes them non-blameworthy wrongdoers. This way of seeing the problem should provide dilemmatic choosers with a novel conception of their own moral psychology, one that allows them to view their actions in a manner that is given neither to moral insensitivity nor to pathological self-accusation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the contemporary philosophical literature, ideal virtue is often accused of setting a standard more appropriate for saints or gods than for human beings. In this paper, I undermine divinity-infused depictions of the fully virtuous, and argue that ideal virtue is, indeed, human. I focus on the virtuous person’s imperviousness to temptation, and contend that this imperviousness is not as psychologically implausible as it might seem. I argue that it is a virtuous person’s subjective construal of a situation that (...) silences reasons in favour of acting contrary to virtue. That silencing, however, is not the whole story when it comes to their practical reasoning. Practical reasoning can, and often does, continue beyond silencing, particularly in the search for what Bernard Williams calls ‘constitutive solutions’. The upshot is a view of the virtuous as less god-like and more human—who will sometimes have to figure out what the virtuous response to a situation is, and who can still care deeply about the central concerns of human existence, including their life, health, loved ones, and life projects, even if those things will never provide them with a reason to act contrary to virtue. (shrink)

The essay examines the impartialist view of justice as the first virtue of all relationships. I argue that in close associations where duties, obligations, and rights of persons are situationally contingent, abstract principles of justice fail to yield a unified moral perspective about what is fair. Solidarity and trust as moral emotions develop more complex moral competencies that go beyond what principles of justice alone require.

The question “What is the relationship between the self and mental disorder?” is especially important for mental health professionals interested in understanding and treating patients, as most mental disorders are intimately tied to self‐related concerns, such as loss of self‐esteem and self‐control, or diminished agency and autonomy. Philosophy, along with the cognitive and behavioral sciences, offers a wealth of conceptual and empirical resources to answer this question, as the concepts of the self and psychopathology have occupied a central place in (...) these fields since their inception. Interestingly, and unfortunately, however, scientific psychiatry, in its approach to mental disorder as primarily a cluster of signs and symptoms has been slow in acknowledging the advances in conceptualizing and investigating mental disorders in relation to the self. The article addresses this problem and offers solutions for better cross‐fertilization between empirical and philosophical inquiry into the self and psychiatric research on mental disorders. The first part evaluates what empirically informed philosophical inquiry and philosophically informed empirical inquiry offer to the examination of the relationship between the self and mental disorders. The second part argues that scientific psychiatry has missed opportunities to find effective treatments for mental disorders because of its insularity from debates in naturalistic philosophy and cognitive and behavioral sciences. Psychiatry has much to gain from the conceptual, scientific, and clinical resourcefulness of philosophy's collaboration with the cognitive and behavioral sciences. (shrink)

In this short article I will review Galen Strawson’s most recent book, “Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, etc.“ As it is impossible to do justice to the full collection in a review,...

I guess I wont send that note now, for the mind is such a new place, last night feels obsolete.

I guess I wont send that note now, for the mind is such a new place, last night feels obsolete.

I guess I wont send that note now, for the mind is such a new place, last night feels obsolete.

This paper continues a debate among philosophers concerning the implications of situationist experiments in social psychology for the theory of virtue. In a previous paper (2002), I argued among other things that the sort of character trait problematized by Hartshorne and May's (1928) famous study of honesty is not the right sort to trouble the theory of virtue. Webber (2006) criticizes my argument, alleging that it founders on an ambiguity in "cross-situational consistency" and that Milgram's (1974) obedience experiment is immune (...) to the objections I levelled against Hartshorne and May. Here I respond to his criticisms. The most important error in Webber's argument is that it overlooks a distinction between "one time performance" experiments and "iterated trial" experiments. I explain why the former cannot begin to trouble the theory of virtue. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This paper examines the implications of certain social psychological experiments for moral theory—specifically, for virtue theory. Gilbert Harman and John Doris have recently argued that the empirical evidence offered by ‘situationism’ demonstrates that there is no such thing as a character trait. I dispute this conclusion. My discussion focuses on the proper interpretation of the experimental data—the data themselves I grant for the sake of argument. I develop three criticisms of the anti-trait position. Of these, the central criticism concerns three (...) respects in which the experimental situations employed to test someone's character trait are inadequate to the task. First, they do not take account of the subject's own construal of the situation. Second, they include behaviour that is only marginally relevant to the trait in question. Third, they disregard the normative character of the responses in which virtue theory is interested. Given these inadequacies in situationism's operationalized conception of a ‘character trait’, I argue that situationism does not really address the proposition that people have ‘character traits’, properly understood. A fortiori, the social psychological evidence does not refute that proposition. I also adduce some limited experimental evidence in favour of character traits and distil two lessons we can nevertheless learn from situationism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn philosophical analyses of the value of sport, a relatively unheralded feature is the opportunity that sport offers for admiration. While we readily salute many of the things that people...

We argue that there is significant evidence for reconsidering the possibility that moral judgment constitutes a distinctive category of judgment. We begin by reviewing evidence and arguments from neuroscience and philosophy that seem to indicate that a diversity of brain processes result in verdicts that we ordinarily consider “moral judgments”. We argue that if these findings are correct, this is plausible reason for doubting that all moral judgments necessarily share common features: if diverse brain processes give rise to what we (...) refer to as “moral judgments”, then we have reason to suspect that these judgments may have different features. After advancing this argument, we show that giving up the unity of moral judgment seems to effectively dissolve the internalism/externalism debate concerning motivation within the field of metaethics. (shrink)

Utilitarianism has frequently been criticized for lacking psychological realism, but what this means and why it is thought to matter varies. This article distinguishes and examines three main relevant kinds of appeals to psychological realism: (a) A minimalist, self-avowedly metaethically neutral and empirically based ‘ought implies can’ approach, exemplified by Owen Flanagan. (b) Arguments from psychological costs and flourishing, exemplified by Michael Stocker and Bernard Williams. (c) ‘Thick’ psychological realism, exemplified by Elizabeth Anscombe, where a conception of human nature does (...) not simply provide constraints on value theory, but forms the substantive basis on which it builds. The main challenge raised for utilitarianism turns out to be metaethical, not a matter of empirical psychology. The question is not so much whether utilitarianism can accommodate (putative) descriptive facts of human psychology as such, but what normative weight these facts should be given and why. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] Copyright of Utilitas is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to alls.). (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. In this paper, we want to highlight one aspect that to date has been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgment over time. After explaining why philosophers and psychologists should consider stability and then surveying previous research, we will present the results of an original three-wave longitudinal study. We asked participants to make judgments about the same acts in a series of sacrificial dilemmas three times, (...) 6–8 days apart. In addition to investigating the stability of our participants’ ratings over time, we also explored some potential explanations for instability. To end, we will discuss these and other potential psychological sources of moral stability (or instability) and highlight possible philosophical implications of our findings. (shrink)

Situationists argue that virtue ethics is empirically untenable, since traditional virtue ethicists postulate broad, efficacious character traits, and social psychology suggests that such traits do not exist. I argue that prominent philosophical replies to this challenge do not succeed. But cross-cultural research gives reason to postulate character traits, and this undermines the situationist critique. There is, however, another empirical challenge to virtue ethics that is harder to escape. Character traits are culturally informed, as are our ideals of what traits are (...) virtuous, and our ideals of what qualifies as well-being. If virtues and well-being are culturally constructed ideals, then the standard strategy for grounding the normativity of virtue ethics in human nature is undermined. (shrink)

Many contemporary ethicists use case-based reasoning to reach consistent beliefs about ethical matters. The idea is that particular cases elicit moral intuitions, which provide defeasible reasons to believe in their content. However, most proponents of case-based moral reasoning are not very explicit about how they resolve inconsistencies and how they abstract principles from judgments about particular cases. The aim of this article is to outline a methodology—called Consistency Reasoning Casuistry—for case-based reasoning in ethics. This methodology draws on Richmond Campbell and (...) Victor Kumar’s naturalistic model for the resolution of inconsistencies between the content of intuitions about particular cases. I argue that reasons similar to those that motivate their model also support a more abstract form of moral reasoning that goes beyond mere resolutions of inconsistencies between case judgments and demands the formulation of more abstract moral norms. Consistency Reasoning Casuistry, it is argued, is a good candidate for a methodology for case-based moral reasoning that is in harmony with paradigms of contemporary moral psychology and that can accommodate the methodology implicit in the work of many contemporary ethicists. (shrink)

Promoting honesty is considered a key endeavor in the betterment of our societies. However, our understanding of this phenomenon, and of its evil twin, dishonesty, is still lacking. In this text, we analyze the main tenets assumed by empirical models of vigilance and sanctions. We approach our analysis in three sections. Initially, we investigate the concept of honesty as assumed by commonly used methodologies in studying honesty. This then leads us to identify the previously overlooked but essential element of epistemic (...) privilege in characterizing honesty. In the third part, we delve into how current explanatory models of honesty lack sufficient consideration of epistemic privilege, resulting in incomplete narratives about honesty. Our analysis of the extant literature suggests that both internal (including the self-concept maintenance theory) and external vigilance models fall short of explaining honesty and dishonesty because of both conceptual problems and empirical inadequacy. Identifying these shortcomings allows us to suggest some possible directions of research. (shrink)

The situationist movement in psychology and, more recently, in philosophy has been associated with a number of striking claims, including that most people do not have the moral virtues and vices, that any ethical theory which is wedded to such character traits is empirically inadequate, and that much of our behavior is causally influenced, to significant degrees, by psychological influences about which we are often unaware. Yet Christian philosophers have had virtually nothing to say about situationist claims. The goal of (...) this paper is to consider whether Christians should start to be worried about them. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of Schadenfreude - the pleasure felt at another’s misfortune - and to argue that feeling it in the course of health care work, as elsewhere, is evidence of a deficient character. In order to show that Schadenfreude is an objectionable emotion in health care work, I first offer some conceptual remarks about emotions generally and their differential treatment in Kantian and Aristotelian thought. Second, I argue that an appreciation of the (...) rationality of the emotions is crucial to our self-understanding as persons in general and nurses in particular. Third, I present a critique of Portmann’s (2000, When Bad Things Happen to Other People. London: Routledge) defence of Schadenfreude with examples from both nursing and medical scenarios. Specifically, I show how his exculpation of the emotion in terms of low self-esteem and a commitment to justice are not compelling. I argue that we are active in the construction of our emotional experiences of Schadenfreude, how we may indeed ‘nurse’ the emotion, and thus become culpable for them in ethical terms. (shrink)

This article briefly outlines some of the key problems with the way in which the moral realm has traditionally been understood and analysed. I propose two alternative views of what is morally interesting and applicable to nursing practice and I indicate that instability has its upsides. I begin with a moral tale – a 'Good Samaritan' story – which raises fairly usual questions about the nature of morality but also the more philosophically fundamental question about the relationship between subjectivity and (...) moral agency. I then consider this relationship from the perspectives of two twentieth century philosophers: Emmanuel Levinas and Michel Foucault. Levinas' basic point is that the experience of ethical subjectivity is made possible through others: the demand to respond to the existence of others is the basic social structure that precedes individual freedom. If Levinas posits intersubjectivity as a fundamental or primitive feature of the moral realm, Foucault poses an even more basic question: how have moral subjects and relations of obligation been constituted? The aim of ethical inquiry, for Foucault, is to describe the network of discourses, institutions, relations, and practices through which certain kinds of subjects are constituted and constitute themselves, e.g. as a kind of person who can act morally. Finally, I consider some recent research in philosophy of nursing which illustrates how Levinasian and/or Foucauldian perspectives can deepen understanding of nurses' moral practices, specifically, the work of Norwegian public health nurses, Canadian pediatric nurses, and Irish midwives. I suggest that in spite of the instability of morality in general and the particular ethical challenges that face nurses, there are grounds for hope and possible strategies for living in unstable times. (shrink)

There is a tendency in the business ethics literature to think of ethics in restrictive terms: what one should not do, and how to control this. Drawing on Lawrence Kohlberg''s theory of moral development, the paper focuses on, and draws attention to, another more positive aspect of ethics: the capacity of ethics to inspire and empower individuals, as well as groups. To understand and facilitate such empowerment, it is argued that it is necessary to move beyond Kohlberg''s justice reasoning so (...) as to appreciate the value and importance of feeling and care. Accordingly, we draw upon case study material to review the meaning of Kohlberg''s higher stages — 5, 6 and 7 — to question the meaning of ethical reasoning. With such deeper understanding of particular ethical codes or practices, it is thought that members of organisations may come closer to thespirit, as opposed to the letter, of ethical conduct in organisations. This, we argue, is consistent with the degree of trust and integrity demanded by leaner, post-bureaucratic ways of organizing and conducting business as well as being personally beneficial to the people involved. (shrink)