Meta-ethics is the area of philosophy in which thinkers explore the language and nature of moral discourse and its relations to other non-moral areas of life. In this introduction to the discipline written explicitly for novices, Leslie Allan outlines the key questions and areas of analysis in contemporary meta-ethics. In clear, tabular format, he summarizes the core concepts integral to each of the major meta-ethical positions and the strengths of each view. To prompt further thinking and reading, Allan explains briefly (...) the major objections to each theory and lists each view's best known advocates. (shrink)

Traditionally, theories of mindreading have focused on the representation of beliefs and desires. However, decades of social psychology and social neuroscience have shown that, in addition to reasoning about beliefs and desires, human beings also use representations of character traits to predict and interpret behavior. While a few recent accounts have attempted to accommodate these findings, they have not succeeded in explaining the relation between trait attribution and belief-desire reasoning. On my account, character-trait attribution is part of a hierarchical system (...) for action prediction, and serves to inform hypotheses about agents’ beliefs and desires, which are in turn used to predict and interpret behavior. (shrink)

Most work in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics begins by supposing that the virtues are the traits of character that make us good people. Secondary questions, then, include whether, why, and in what ways the virtues are good for the people who have them. This essay is an argument that the neo-Aristotelian approach is upside down. If, instead, we begin by asking what collection of character traits are good for us---that is, what collection of traits are most likely to promote our own (...) well-being---we find a collection of traits a lot like the traditional slate of virtues. This suggests an egoistic theory of the virtues: the virtues just are those traits of character that reliably promote the well-being of their possessor. In addition to making the positive case for character egoism, I defend it from anticipated objections. I argue that character egoism doesn't inherit the problems of ethical egoism, and conclude by offering character-egoist accounts of two virtues traditionally thought to be fundamentally other-regarding: honesty and justice. (shrink)

Leslie Allan defends his thesis that ethics is objective in the sense of requiring moral agents to offer impartial reasons for acting. Radical subjectivists have attacked this requirement for impartiality on a number of grounds. Some critics make the charge that Allan's thesis is simply a version of subjectivism in disguise. He responds by showing how a broadly naturalist view of ethics accommodates objective moral constraints. Allan also counters cases in which impartiality is purportedly not morally required and considers the (...) subjectivists' response to the problem of demarcating moral from non-moral judgements. (shrink)

Estudio y guía didáctica sobre una ética aplicada: Ética para Psicología. -/- Applied Ethics study: Psychoethics .

Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We describe imaginative play in adults via the term “pretensive shared reality;” Shared Pretensive Reality describes the ability of a group of individuals to employ a range of higher-order cognitive functions to explicitly and implicitly share representations of a bounded fictional reality in predictable and coherent ways, such that this constructed reality may be explored and invented/embellished with (...) shared intentionality in anad hocmanner. Pretensive Shared Reality facilitates multiple individual and social outcomes, including generating personal and group-level enjoyment or mirth, the creation or maintenance of social groups, or the safe exploration of individual self-concepts (such as alternative expression of a players sexual or gender identity). Importantly, Pretensive Shared Reality (both within the specific context of table-top role-playing games, and other instances) are primarily co-operative and co-creative. We draw on multiple examples, and focus on Table-Top Role Playing games (TTRPG) – and specifically, the most popular and enduring table-top role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) – as a primary example of such play. Our conception of “pretensive shared reality” links the widespread existence and forms of adult imaginative play to childhood pretense, places it within a developmental and evolutionary context, and argues that pretensive shared realities – which underpin many forms of imaginative culture – are an important topic of study unto themselves, and may be utilized to provide methodological insight into a variety of psychological domains. (shrink)

The ethics of autonomous vehicles has received a great amount of attention in recent years, specifically in regard to their decisional policies in accident situations in which human harm is a likely consequence. Starting from the assumption that human harm is unavoidable, many authors have developed differing accounts of what morality requires in these situations. In this article, a strategy for AV decision-making is proposed, the Ethical Valence Theory, which paints AV decision-making as a type of claim mitigation: different road (...) users hold different moral claims on the vehicle’s behavior, and the vehicle must mitigate these claims as it makes decisions about its environment. Using the context of autonomous vehicles, the harm produced by an action and the uncertainties connected to it are quantified and accounted for through deliberation, resulting in an ethical implementation coherent with reality. The goal of this approach is not to define how moral theory requires vehicles to behave, but rather to provide a computational approach that is flexible enough to accommodate a number of ‘moral positions’ concerning what morality demands and what road users may expect, offering an evaluation tool for the social acceptability of an autonomous vehicle’s ethical decision making. (shrink)

The author contends that classifying theories in the field of meta-ethics along a single dimension misses important nuances in each theory. With the increased sophistication and complexity of meta-ethical analyses in the modern era, the traditional cognitivist–non-cognitivist and realist–anti-realist categories no longer function adequately. The author categorizes the various meta-ethical theories along three dimensions. These dimensions focus on the linguistic analysis offered by each theory, its metaphysical commitments and its degree of normative tolerance.

A well-known maxim instructs that justice should be seen to be done. When “seen” is understood in the sense of “observed”, the maxim is easily defended: open court proceedings protect against arbitrary and partial decisions. However, when “seen” is understood in the sense of “seem,” the maxim is more puzzling, since it is not obvious why courts should concern themselves with people's perceptions that justice has been done. This article addresses this issue, with a particular focus on the social and (...) other benefits that result when judges observe procedures that are widely regarded as fair, especially in criminal trials. The article draws on empirical studies in social psychology that show that when legal authorities treat people in ways that accord with “lay” procedural expectations, they are more likely to view the authorities as legitimate, to cooperate with them, and to obey the law out of an internalized sense of obligation. The article explores the moral significance of these empirical findings, arguing that it would be superficial to see them as a recipe for social stability. The deeper truth conveyed by the empirical research is that relating to people in ways that are widely perceived to be fair is a way for authorities to engage people's moral sentiments and to enliven their virtuous capacity to put aside considerations of self-interest so as to do what is right. This dynamic provides a sound moral foundation for courts to concern themselves with perceptions of justice. (shrink)

Coordination problems, problems in which each agent's expected utility depends upon what other agents do, pose a problem for act utilitarianism. When the agents are act utilitarians and know of each other that they are so, they seem unable to achieve optimal outcomes in certain coordination problems. I examine various ways the act utilitarian might attempt to solve this problem, where act utilitarianism is interpreted within the framework of subjective expected utility theory. In particular, a new method for computing expected (...) utility,dynamic deliberation, deserves examination as a possible act utilitarian solution to coordination problems. I argue that even dynamic deliberation fails to give the act utilitarian what he needs in coordination problems, and that the failure of act utilitarianism for such problems suggests the need for an alternative theory of moral choice along rule utilitarian lines. (shrink)

Various formally valid counterexamples have been adduced against the Humean dictum that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” There are formal rebuttals—some very sophisticated now (e.g., Charles R. Pigden’s and Gerhard Schurz’s)—to such counterexamples. But what follows is an intuitive and informal argument against them. I maintain that it is better than these sophisticated formal defenses of the Humean dictum and that it also helps us see why it implausible to think that we can be as decisive about (...) the truth or falsity of the dictum as both the formal counterexamples or formal barriers to them purport to be. (shrink)

Many think that evolutionary biology has relevance to ethics, but how far that relevance extends is a matter of debate. It is easy to show that pop sociobiological approaches to ethics all commit some type of naturalistic fallacy. More sophisticated attempts, like Donald Campbell's, or, more recently, Robert Richards', are not so easily refuted, but I will show that they too reason fallaciously from facts to values. What remains is the possibility of an evolutionary search for human nature. Unfortunately, evolutionary (...) theory itself seems to imply that the quest for human nature will not be very promising. As far as there is such a thing as human nature, we will have to know it before we can meaningfully talk about its evolution. Anthropological data suggest that we differ widely in our normative judgments. And even where we seem to agree, there is good reason to doubt that we really do so. (shrink)

Moral discourse allows for speakers to disagree in many ways: about right and wrong acts, about moral theory, about the rational and conative significance of moral failings. Yet speakers’ eccentricities do not prevent them from engaging in moral conversation or from having (genuine, not equivocal) moral disagreement. Thus differences between speakers are compatible with possession of moral concepts. This paper examines various kinds of moral disagreements and argues that they provide evidence against conceptual-role and informational atomist approaches to understanding our (...) moral concepts. Conceptual role approaches fail because they cannot account for shared concepts among speakers with different commitments to the practical and conative ramifications of moral judgments. Informational atomist views fail because speakers need not be locked on to the same moral properties to share moral concepts. (shrink)

The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. I contend that the distinction has never been properly drawn. My main task is to formulate the distinction in a way that avoids the problems of the traditional formulations. ;After defending the traditional Moorean conception of intrinsic value against John Mackie's arguments from relativity and "queerness," and against recent attacks by Elizabeth Anderson and Shelly Kagan, I attempt to define two important types of extrinsic value (...) in terms of intrinsic value. First, I define instrumental value. The main problem with traditional definitions of instrumental value is that they fail to account for the fact that preventing something intrinsically evil from occurring seems to be just as worthwhile as bringing about something intrinsically good. I attempt to account for this fact by introducing a "contextualist" analysis of instrumental value. Next, I present and defend an analysis of contributory value. I compare contributory value with conditional intrinsic value, and present an argument to show that the notion of conditional intrinsic value faces problems that can be avoided by admitting the existence of contributory value. I then expand on the contextualist analysis of instrumental value, and provide an analysis of extrinsic value that explains what is common to instrumental and contributory value. I contend that my analysis can also account for other types of extrinsic value---for example, signatory value---and I defend my analysis against recent objections by Alastair Norcross involving the extrinsic values of actions. ;Finally, I argue that contributory value can help to solve a current problem in environmental ethics. The problem is this: how can it be that the last member of a species is more valuable than a similar member of a flourishing species ? I argue that diversity of goods increases the value of a whole; therefore, the last member of an endangered species has contributory value in virtue of its contribution to the world's biological diversity. (shrink)