In her paper Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism, Martha Nussbaum argues that Nietzsche’s philosophical project can be seen in part as an attempt to ‘bring about a revival of Stoic values of self-command and self-transformation’. She argues that, to his detriment, Nietzsche’s ‘Sovereign Individual’ epitomises a kind of stoic ideal of inner strength and self-sufficiency that ‘goes beyond Stoicism’ in its valorisation of radical self emancipation from the contingencies of life and from our own human vulnerability. Nussbaum thus urges us (...) to question whether the picture of strength in Nietzsche’s Sovereign Individual is really a picture of human strength at which we would be willing to, or at which we ought to, aim. In this paper I take up Nussbaum’s challenge, arguing that Nietzsche’s Sovereign Individual is both less stoical and provides us with a far more attractive picture of personhood than Nussbaum suggests. (shrink)

Mi problema es como reconciliar una fundamentación racional de instituciones democráticas, que en nuestras sociedades tienden a ser de índole liberal, con la creciente complejidad demográfica de las sociedades contemporáneas. Mi punto de vista es que esta fundamentación debería ser deliberativa y discursiva, es decir, debería garantizar una participación reflexiva de todos los ciudadanos en el diseño y sostenimiento de sus instituciones públicas. Ahora bien, ¿cómo alcanzar este ideal en sociedades cuyas complejidades dificultan la coordinación de intereses y la participación (...) discursiva, lo que vuelve a sus ciudadanos dispuestos a sacrificar sus libertades para rendirlas a un poder político despótico y totalitario? Palabras claves: instituciones democráticas y sociedades complejas; democracia deliberativa. The constitution of democratic citizenship and the problem of the foundation of knowledge in complex societiesMy problem is how to reconcile a rational foundation of democratic institutions, which in our societies tend to be of a liberal nature, with the increasing demographic complexity of contemporary societies. My contention is that this rational and liberal foundation ought to be deliberative and discursive, that is to say, it must guarantee a reflective participation of all citizens in the design and maintenance of their public institutions. However, how could this ideal be achieved within societies with such complexities that make coordination of interests and discursive participation difficult, thus making their citizens willing to sacrifice their liberties, in order to surrender them to a despotic or totalitarian political power? Keywords: Democratic institutions and complex societies; Deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists have debated what is meant by free will as well as the nature of human choice. However, only recently have data been gathered to consider common usage of the term; our data support college students' belief in free will as indicating some degree of choice that is not constrained by genetic or environmental factors and as separate from a "soft" determinism perspective. How free will and determinism beliefs relate to other psychological attitudes, such as moral responsibility and (...) tolerance, is also considered. (shrink)

In Chapter 2 of Escape from Leviathan, Jan Lester defends two hypotheses: that instrumental rationality requires agents to maximise the satisfaction of their wants and that all agents actually meet this requirement. In addition, he argues that all agents are self-interested (though not necessarily egoistic) and he offers an account of categorical moral desires which entails that no agent ever does what he genuinely feels to be morally wrong. I show that Lester’s two hypotheses are false because they cannot accommodate (...) weakness of will, because they are inconsistent with agency, which requires free will, because ends, obligations and values cannot be reduced to desires, and because maximisation is often not possible. Further, Lester’s claim that agents are self-interested is vacuous, his attempted reduction of moral behaviour to want-satisfaction fails, and his contention, that agents always do what they genuinely think to be morally required, seems untenable. A defence of freedom that depends on homo economicus is far from promising. (shrink)

There is a growing trend in policy making of holding people responsible for their lifestyle-based diseases. This has sparked a heated debate on whether people are responsible for these illnesses, which has now come to an impasse. In this paper, I present a psychological model that explains why different views on people’s responsibility for their health exist and how we can reach a resolution of the disagreement. My conclusion is that policymakers should not perceive people as responsible while health care (...) personnel should take the opposing view. (shrink)

By ‘Liberalism’ or ‘a liberal-democratic theory of justice’ I understand the thesis that a modern, affluent society is just only if it respects and enforces certain rights. Among these are rights to free speech, the liberty to make one's own self-regarding choices, privacy, due process of law, participation in society's political decision-making, and private property in personal posessions. By a ‘justification’ of these core rights of liberalism I understand a moral theory from which they are derivable. A moral theory which (...) justifies the core rights will, ipso facto, condemn slavery, totalitarianism, and other social arrangements incompatible with a liberal-democratic constitution. What shape that moral theory should have is a matter of some dispute. According to philosophers like Ronald Dworkin it must be ‘rights-based.’ The core rights of liberalism in his view are derivable from the fundamental human right to ‘equal respect and consideration.’ A widely held alternative view is that the core rights are simply social rules the existence of which promotes human welfare. (shrink)

I argue that, contrary to intuition, it would be both possible and permissible to design people - whether artificial or organic - who by their nature desire to do tasks we find unpleasant.

Dispositional compatibilists argue that a proper understanding of our abilities vindicates both compatibilism and the principle of Alternate Possibilities (the claim that the ability to do otherwise is required for freedom and moral responsibility). In this paper, I argue that this is mistaken. Both analyses of dispositions and abilities should distinguish between local and global dispositions or abilities. Once this distinction is in place, we see that neither thesis is established by an analysis of abilities.

There is a way of doing moral philosophy which goes something like this: If it can be shown that it is rational for perfectly selfish people to accept the constraints of morality, then it will follow, a fortiori, that it is rational for people capable of affective bonds, and thus less selfish, to do so. On this way of proceeding the real argument – that is, the argument for the actual constraints to be adopted – proceeds with only fully rational (...) individuals who have no other concern than to maximize their nontuistic preferences. Then it is noted that the affective capacities of human beings actually make quite palatable the constraints that the fully rational persons with wholly nontuistic preferences have agreed upon. (shrink)

This review presents the principal themes of Robert Spaemann's Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something.’ To be a person is not to be identical with one's teleological nature, but rather, to have that nature. Personal consciousness is necessarily temporal consciousness. Persons have a range of distinctively personal acts, such as recognizing and respecting one another, understanding their lives as wholes, making judgments of conscience, promising, and forgiving. All members of the human species, whatever their stage of development or limitations, (...) are persons. The present review also briefly considers certain objections that have been raised against Spaemann's position. (shrink)

Our moral responsibility for our actions seems to depend on our possession of a power to determine for ourselves what actions we perform - a power of self-determination. What kind of power is this? The paper discusses what power in general might involve, what differing kinds of power there might be, and the nature of self-determination in particular. A central question is whether this power on which our moral responsibility depends is by its nature a two-way power, involving a power (...) over alternatives or a freedom to do otherwise. Criticism is made of various attempts to understand self-determination in one-way terms, whether as a capacity for rationality (McDowell) or as a form of voluntariness (Frankfurt). It is argued in particular that Frankfurt's arguments to show that moral responsibility does not depend on a freedom to do otherwise beg the question against his opponents. (shrink)

This article analyzes the later work of Michel Foucault on ethics, freedom, and self-governance as it applies to the ethics of consumption and to new ethical consumerist movements such as fair-trade coffee. Foucault's emphasis on practices of the self helps elucidate the virtue ethics involved in consumption choices. Ethical consumption is cast as a set of practices of self-development: through critical activity and the quest for freedom, persons seek to transform themselves to live in reciprocal relationships with other persons and (...) nature. This requires public deliberation and collective action to effect change within ourselves and our practical systems of consumption and production. (shrink)

Dans l’histoire de la philosophie, Descartes est considéré comme un intellectualiste, c’est-à-dire comme un théoricien qui considère que la raison est souveraine dans l’action. Il soutient donc qu’il suffit de bien juger pour bien faire, et il reprend à son compte la thèse socratique selon laquelle nul ne commet le mal volontairement.

The topic of this article is the dependency or, maybe, the interdependency of rationality and self-knowledge. Here two questions may be distinguished, viz. (1) whether being rational is a necessary condition for a creature to have self-knowledge, and (2) whether having self-knowledge is a necessary condition for a creature to be rational. After a brief explication of what I mean by self-knowledge, I deal with the first question. There I defend the Davidsonian position, according to which rationality is, indeed, a (...) necessary condition for self-knowledge. In addition, I distinguish two aspects of rationality which I call basic and local rationality. After that I concentrate on the second question for the remaining larger part of this article. Here I proceed in two stages: first I examine whether self-knowledge is necessary for basic rationality, and then whether it is necessary for local rationality. (shrink)

In Ecological Thinking, Lorraine Code argues that advocacy “often makes knowledge possible” and without it “certain kinds of knowing are impossible.” By acknowledging the value of subjectivity and testimony in knowledge creation, I argue that ecological thinking serves as an appropriate framework for engagement with individuals who are living with mental illnesses. Contrasted with the dominant Anglo-American epistemologies that involve excessive degrees of mastery and control (with the tendency to silence the voices of Others), I argue that ecological thinking facilitates (...) healthy advocacy practices precisely because of its inclusivity and receptivity towards different perspectives in knowledge creation. (shrink)

It is no news that you and I are agents as well as persons. Agency and personhood are surely connected, but it is not obvious just how they are connected. I believe that being a person and being an agent are intimately linked by what I call a ‘first-person perspective’: All persons and all agents have first-person perspectives. Even so, the connection between personhood and agency is not altogether straightforward. There are different kinds of agents, and there are different kinds (...) of first-person perspectives. On the one hand, all persons are agents, but not all agents are persons; on the other hand, all moral agents are persons, but not all persons are moral agents. (shrink)

With the waves of reform occurring in mental health legislation in England and other jurisdictions, mental capacity is set to become a key medico-legal concept. The concept is central to the law of informed consent and is closely aligned to the philosophical concept of autonomy. It is also closely related to mental disorder. This paper explores the interdisciplinary terrain where mental capacity is located. Our aim is to identify core dilemmas and to suggest pathways for future interdisciplinary research. The terrain (...) can be separated into three types of discussion: philosophical, legal and psychiatric. Each discussion approaches mental capacity and judgmental autonomy from a different perspective yet each discussion struggles over two key dilemmas: whether mental capacity and autonomy is/should be a moral or a psychological notion and whether rationality is the key constitutive factor. We suggest that further theoretical work will have to be interdisciplinary and that this work offers an opportunity for the law to enrich its interpretation of mental capacity, for psychiatry to clarify the normative elements latent in its concepts and for philosophy to advance understanding of autonomy through the study of decisional dysfunction. The new pressures on medical and legal practice to be more explicit about mental capacity make this work a priority. (shrink)

Any satisfactory account of freedom must capture, or at least permit, the mysteriousness of freedom—a “sweet” mystery involving a certain kind of ignorance rather than a “sour” mystery of unintelligibility, incoherence, or unjustifiedness. I argue that compatibilism can capture the sweet mystery of freedom. I argue first that an action is free if and only if a certain “rationality constraint” is satisfied, and that nothing in standard libertarian accounts of freedom entails its satisfaction. Satisfaction of this constraint is consistent with (...) the universal causal predetermination of action (UCP). If UCP is true and the rationality constraint satisfied, there’s a sense in which our actions are explanatorily (though not necessarily causally) overdetermined. While it seems plausible (given UCP) that our actions are so overdetermined, it seems utterly mysterious why they should be so overdetermined. Compatibilism’s capacity to accommodate this mystery is a mark in its favor. (shrink)

Nothing can kill a promising research program in ethics more quickly than a plausible argument to the effect that it is committed to a morally repellent consequence. It is especially troubling when a theory one favors is jeopardized in this way. I have this worry about Harry Frankfurt's theory of free will, autonomous agency and moral responsibility, for there is a very plausible argument to the effect that aspects of his view commit him to a version of the late Stoic (...) thesis that acting freely is a matter of ‘making do,’ that is, of bringing oneself to be motivated to act in accordance with the feasible, so that personal liberation can be achieved by resigning and adapting oneself to necessity. In this paper I try to determine whether the theory does in fact commit Frankfurt (and adherents like me) to this result and, if so, what can be done to prevent it. (shrink)

Kantian constructivists locate the source of normativity in the rational nature of valuing agents. Some further argue that accepting this premise thereby commits one to accepting the intrinsic or unconditioned value of rational nature itself. Whereas much of the critical literature on this “regress on conditions” argument has focused either on the cogency of the inference from the value-conferring capacity of the will to the unconditional value of that capacity itself or on the plausibility of the initial constructivist premise, my (...) aim is to press the argument from a different direction by asking just how Kantian the constructivist needs to be in order to support a regress on conditions argument. Specifically, I maintain that the argument succeeds only given a full-fledged Kantian moral psychology, including a presupposition of transcendental freedom. If correct, this could have implications regarding the compatibility of Kantian ethics and philosophic naturalism. (shrink)

Ju¨rgen Habermas has a familiar style of compatibilism to offer, according to which a person has free will insofar as that person responds appropriately to her reasons. But because of the ways in which Habermas understands reasons and causes, he sees a special objection to his style of compatibilism: it is not clear that our reasons can suitably cause our responses. This objection, however, takes us out of the realm of free will and into the realm of mental causation. In (...) this response to Habermas, I focus on the details of his style of compatibilism. I suggest that, while the basic picture is appealing, three key details of it are problematic. (shrink)

The relevance of personal history to questions of moral responsibility is a challenging topic all around, but especially for those who deny that deterministic histories preclude morally responsible...

The problem of freedom of the will and determinism is one of the most intriguing and difficult in the whole area of philosophy. It constüutes a paradox. If we look at ourselves, at our ability to deliberate and make moral choices, it seems obvious that we are free. On the other hand, if we look at what we believe about causality (i.e., that every event and thing must have a cause), then it appears that we do not have free wills (...) but are determined. Thus we seem to have inconsistent beliefs. In this paper I set forth and analyze the major contemporary arguments for free will and determinism as well as for compatibilism, the position that tries to combine insights from both theories. I end with a brief conclusion regarding my assessment of the status of the arguments. (shrink)

In this paper the view is presented that self?knowledge has no special status; its varieties constitute distinctive classes, differing from one another more sharply than each does from analogous knowledge of others. Most cases of self?knowledge are best understood contextually, subsumed under such other activities as decision?making and socializing. First person, present tense ?reports? of sensations, intentions, and thoughts are primarily adaptively expressive, only secondarily truth?functional. The last section sketches some of the disadvantages, as well as some of the advantages, (...) of being the sort of animal that is capable of treating itself as an object, to be known as others are known. (shrink)

The central focus of this essay is Isaiah Berlin’s arguments about the concepts of negative freedom and positive freedom, developed in his philosophical work Two Concepts of Liberty. By adopting a philosophical standpoint, this essay explores the application of Berlin’s notions of freedom at the organizational level, within the workplace, and in the management field. This essay presents three philosophical arguments that provide some clarifications about the potential challenges associated with autonomy in organizations. These arguments incorporate Berlin’s ideas of freedom (...) with philosophical insights from Heidegger, Sartre, Frankfurt, and Confucius to highlight the missing elements of autonomy in management literature and its implementation in organizations, explaining the challenges of autonomy and the reasons for some unexpected results. Recommendations for future studies and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

Many creatures exhibit desires of various strengths competing with one another for the prize of interacting with beliefs to cause behaviour. Harry Frankfurt famously analyzes persons in terms of the ability to form second-order desires; desires that intervene in this economy of first-order desires in ways that sometimes award the prize to weaker competitors. This paper augments Frankfurt’s analysis with Kendall Walton’s understanding of pretence behaviour and then interprets the central metaphors in several films by Terrence Malick in terms of (...) this augmented analysis. The result is an understanding of those films as investigations into personhood and factors that inhibit attempts to manifest it. Along the way, the discussion touches on the relation between linguistic and visual metaphor, the potentially ethical character of art, and the question of whether a valid interpretation must be congruent with the actual communicative intentions of the artist. (shrink)

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that undermines a target’s confidence in their own cognitive faculties. Different forms of gaslighting can be distinguished according to whether they undermine a target’s confidence in their emotional reactions, perceptions, memory, or reasoning abilities. I focus on ‘emotional gaslighting’, which undermines a target’s confidence in their emotional reactions and corresponding evaluative judgments. While emotional gaslighting rarely occurs in isolation, it is often an important part of an overall gaslighting strategy. This is because emotions can (...) help us to understand the evaluative aspects of our situation and thus put us in a position to protest wrongs, which is a context in which gaslighting frequently occurs. I argue that affective empathy constitutes an important antidote to emotional gaslighting. Affective empathy can lead to endorsement of a target’s emotional reaction as appropriate to their situation and agreement with the corresponding evaluative judgment. When it leads to endorsement, affective empathy can counteract the effects of emotional gaslighting because it reassures a target in their ability to make evaluative judgments based on their emotional reactions. Because of its opposing effects, affective empathy with the victim thus constitutes an important intervention to emotional gaslighting on the part of third parties. (shrink)

In political philosophy, the concept of autonomy is often associated with liberalism: it serves as a justification for the liberal values of state neutrality and value pluralism, and seems coherent with the liberal definition of freedom as the absence of interference. Neo-republicans have pointed out that freedom as non-interference fails to acknowledge the fact that one may be unfree while non-interfered with, while on the other hand, not all forms of interference are freedom-limiting. They have proposed to replace the concept (...) by freedom as non-domination, which they define as the absence of actual or possible arbitrary interference. Although their definition is promising, neo-republicans tend to neglect the concept of self-government and therefore, are vulnerable to the same accusations of incompleteness faced by liberals. By focusing on the negative part of freedom as non-domination, they have omitted two aspects: first, that there are other ways to be unfree than to be the subject of mere arbitrary interference, and second, that the real value of non-domination is the capacity to act as a non-dominated being, which requires a level of self-mastery. To fix this problem, I propose an extension of the concept of non-domination and argue that the theory would benefit from including autonomy in the list of its conditions for freedom. Following the republican idea that one is only free in a free state, I propose a definition of republican autonomy that is political in nature, and depends on globalized nondomination. (shrink)

Kirjoituksessa argumentoin, että metafysiikka on ollut valistusta, vaikka se edelleen kaipaa lisää valistumista, kun valistus ymmärretään avoimena prosessina, joka ei ole ajasta ja paikasta riippuvaista. Käsittelen ensin sitä, mitä metafysiikka ja valistus ovat. Sitten lausun länsimaisen metafysiikan historiasta hyvin lyhyesti. Päätän esseen argumentoimalla, että metafysiikka on valistunutta siinä mielessä, että klassisen substanssi-ominaisuus-skeeman sokeasta seuraamisesta on pitkälti päästy eroon. Metafysiikka kaipaa kuitenkin lisää valistusta ja kriittistä tarkastelua, jotta vapaudumme täysin kyseisen skeeman ja modernin predikaatti-logiikan johdatuksen aiheuttamasta kolmesta ongelmallisesta suositusta (tausta)oletuksesta: (1) (...) perustavat partikulaariset yksilöoliot ovat (periaatteessa) laskettavia, (2) ne eivät ole relationaalisia ja (3) ominaisuudet ovat ontologisesti riippuvaisia kantajistaan. (shrink)

Tämä artikkeli esittelee ekspressivististä itsetuntemuksen teoriaa erityyppisten itsetuntemuksen teorioiden kontekstissa. Artikkelin viimekätinen tavoite on arvioida erityisesti ekspressivistisen teorian suhdetta Wittgensteinin mielenfilosofiaan, joka usein mainitaan teorian lähteenä, ja tarkastella teorian kehitystarpeita ja -mahdollisuuksia muiden itsetuntemuksen teorioiden valossa. Osassa 1 esitetään eräitä käsitteellisiä selvennyksiä. Osa 2 käsittelee itsetuntemuksen oletettuja filosofisesti kiinnostavia erityispiirteitä, joiden ymmärtäminen on itsetuntemuksen teorioiden arvioimisen kannalta olennaista. Osa 3 esittää itsetuntemuksen teorioiden karkean tyypittelyn sen mukaan, pitävätkö ne itseilmaisuja empiirisesti muodostettuina väittäminä, rationaaliseen toimijuuteen olennaisesti liittyvinä sitoutumina vai ekspressiivisinä lausumina. (...) Ekspressivistisen vaihtoehdon yhteydessä arvioidaan sen suhdetta Wittgensteinin ajatteluun. Osassa 4 tarkastellaan Dorit Bar-Onin muotoilemaa neo-ekspressivististä itsetuntemuksen teoriaa ja esitetään, että ansioistaan huolimatta se ei ota tyydyttävästi huomioon rationaalisen toimijan kykyä konstituoida aktiivisesti ja reflektiivisesti ajatuksiaan ja asenteitaan. Lopuksi osassa 5 esitetään ajatuksia neo-ekspressivismin jatkokehittelyä varten ja kehotetaan tarkastelemaan itseilmaisuja sosiaalisessa kontekstissa Wittgensteinin kielipeliajatuksen mukaisesti. (shrink)

A discussion concerning whether to conceive Artificial Intelligence systems as responsible moral entities, also known as “artificial moral agents”, has been going on for some time. In this regard, we argue that the notion of “moral agency” is to be attributed only to humans based on their autonomy and sentience, which AI systems lack. We analyze human responsibility in the presence of AI systems in terms of meaningful control and due diligence and argue against fully automated systems in medicine. With (...) this perspective in mind, we focus on the use of AI-based diagnostic systems and shed light on the complex networks of persons, organizations and artifacts that come to be when AI systems are designed, developed, and used in medicine. We then discuss relational criteria of judgment in support of the attribution of responsibility to humans when adverse events are caused or induced by errors in AI systems. (shrink)

This article starts with the idea that the task of social philosophy can be defined as the diagnosis and therapy of social pathologies. It discusses four conceptions of social pathology. The first two conceptions are ‘normativist’ and hold that something is a social pathology if it is socially wrong. On the first view, there is no encompassing characterization of social pathologies available: it is a cluster concept of family resemblances. On the second view, social pathologies share a structure (e.g. second-order (...) disorder). The last two conceptions are ‘naturalist’ and hold that something is wrong because it is pathological. The third view takes it that society is the kind of substance that can fall ill – an organism. The fourth view operates with the notion of a social life that can degenerate. The four conceptions are compared along six criteria: (1) is the view plausible?; (2) is it informative (if true)?; (3) does it help define the task of social philosophy?; (4) does it take naturalistic vocabulary seriously?; (5) does it hold that pathologies share a structure?; and (6) how does it see the primacy of being wrong and being pathological? (shrink)

The necessity of origin suggests that a person’s identity is determined by the particular pair of gametes from which the person originated. An implication is that speculative scenarios concerning how we might otherwise have been had our gametic origins been different are dismissed as being metaphysically impossible. Given, however, that many of these speculations are intelligible and commonplace in the discourses of competent speakers, it is overhasty to dismiss them as mistakes. This paper offers a way of understanding these speculations (...) that does not commit them to incoherence but aims to make the best sense of what they are expressing. Using the philosophical framework of two‐dimensional semantics, it proposes that the speculative scenarios are best analysed as epistemic possibilities, rather than as metaphysical possibilities. It then explores some implications of this analysis for the ethical challenges associated with the non‐identity problem. (shrink)

According to the noncausal libertarian view of free will, in order for a person’s action to be free, it must be uncaused. A standard criticism of this view—the control objection—is that a person cannot have control over whether an uncaused action occurs and, so, such an action cannot be free. The background to this criticism is the claim that control over action is plausibly a causal rather than noncausal matter. In this paper, I defend noncausal libertarianism against the control objection (...) by developing a new noncausal theory of control. What emerges is not simply a defense of noncausal libertarianism against the control objection but a new theory of control more generally. (shrink)

In this article, we sketch how theoretical neuroethics can clarify the concept of autonomy. We hope that this can both serve as a model for the conceptual clarification of other components of PIAAAS and contribute to the development of the empirical measures that Gilbert and colleagues [1] propose.

:I argue that none of the main accounts of autonomy in the literature can explain the fact that people who undergo a certain subtle but powerful kind of indoctrination are not autonomous or self-governing in reflectively acquiring and endorsing the views, values, goals, and practical commitments that they are successfully indoctrinated to adopt. I suggest that, assuming there are historical conditions on autonomous reasoning and reflective endorsement, there is a condition that specifically concerns emotions: the person’s emotional state and dispositions, (...) and her web of emotional dependencies. I explain what we know so far about the kind of indoctrination on which I focus, and I motivate the claim that people who are successfully indoctrinated in this way are not self-governed in reflectively acquiring and endorsing even the first views and values that they adopt as a result of indoctrination. I argue that this heteronomy is not explained by any of the accounts that postulate historical conditions on autonomy: neither by classical accounts such as Rousseau’s and Piaget’s, nor by so-called historical accounts in the contemporary literature, nor by relational accounts. I argue that an accurate account of autonomy must include an emotional condition on autonomous reasoning and reflective endorsement that goes beyond the emotional conditions postulated or implied by historical accounts, and I offer a tentative sketch of this condition. (shrink)

The concept of identification is often appealed to in explanations of how it is that some actions are authored by an agent, and so autonomous, or free. Over the last several decades, different conceptions of identification have been advanced and refined, and the term is now commonplace in moral psychology and metaethics. In this paper I argue that two dominant accounts of identification implicated in self-unity fail to acknowledge the significance of a related form of self-unifying activity, self-recognition. Self-recognition is (...) self-authoring because it involves identification with a new description of oneself, but it is excluded by standard accounts of identification which over-emphasize action and volition in autonomous agency. Although self-recognition is unlikely to produce immediate action, it accords with the activity of self-unity that is said to be constitutive of identification. (shrink)

The first aim of the paper is to proffer a series of objections to the God machine thought experiment, as presented by Savulescu and Persson, The Monist, 95, 399-421,. The second aim is to show that these objections must be overcome by any form of direct moral intervention by technological means, not just the God machine. The objections raised against the god machine involve questioning its intelligibility in light of established views on the relationship between beliefs, desires, intention and intentional (...) action, pointing out the seeming inability of individuals to attribute warranted moral praise to others or themselves in the case of abstentions from grossly immoral acts identifying a problematic ‘slippery slope’ argument, and questioning the rationale underlying the Freedom Lover’s intention to enrol on a moral enhancement course, as well as arguing that that Savulescu and Persson’s notion of ‘complete freedom’ is too stringent. (shrink)

In recent years, bariatric surgery has become an increasingly popular treatment of obesity. The amount of resources spent on this kind of surgery has led to a heated debate among health care professionals and the general public, as each procedure costs at minimum $14,500 and thousands of patients undergo surgery every year. So far, no substantial argument for or against giving this treatment a high priority has, however, been presented. In this article, I argue that regardless which moral perspective we (...) consider—greatest need, utility or personal responsibility—the conclusion is that we should give bariatric surgery a high priority when allocating scarce resources in health care. (shrink)

Obtaining informed consent from patients is a moral and legal duty and, thus, a key legitimation for medical treatment. The pivotal prerequisite for valid informed consent is decision-making capacity of the patient. Related to the question of whether and when consent should be morally and legally valid, there has been a long-lasting philosophical debate about freedom of will and the connection of freedom and responsibility. The scholarly discussion on decision-making capacity and its clinical evaluation does not sufficiently take into account (...) this fundamental debate. It is contended that the notion of free will must be reflected when evaluating decision-making capacity. Namely, it should be included as a part of the appreciation-criterion for decision-making capacity. The argumentation is mainly drawn on the compatibilism of Harry Frankfurt. A solution is proposed which at the same time takes the notion of free will seriously and enriches the traditional understanding of decision-making capacity, strengthening its justificatory force while remaining clinically applicable. (shrink)

The existence of a plurality of communities, a diversity of norms, and the ultimate contingency of all decisions in modern societies complicates the task of academics and practitioners who wish to be ethical. In this paper, we envisage and articulate a dialogical, communitarian approach to embedding business ethics that requires business ethicists to more reflexively engage with practitioners in working on and representing the normative criteria that people in organisations use to deal with moral dilemmas in business. We promote the (...) idea that business ethicists should not only cross the divide between normative ethics and empirical research, but also take a step beyond the empirical to become more active change agents. As potential exemplars of this approach in practice, we explore how self-critique and cross-disciplinary collaboration in education and teaching might be used by academics to engage current and future business ethicists, as well as managers, in dialogic partnership. In an organisational context, we also propose a three-part approach to embedding reflexive ethics in practice, through dialogic research, debate, and re-presentation of ideas. We contend that our approach has more efficacy than the traditional grand theories of ethics or more focused theories of business ethics, such as Integrated Social Contract Theory; it has the potential to provide more grounded, and therefore more practical, advice to academics, current and future business ethicists, and business practitioners. (shrink)

This paper argues that human agency is not simply a function of intrinsic properties about the agent, but that agency instead depends on the ecology that the agent is in. In particular, the paper examines ways that disabilities affect agency and shows how, by paying deliberate attention to structuring the social environment around people with disabilities, we can mitigate some of the agential impact of those disabilities. The paper then argues that the impact of one’s social environment on agency isn’t (...) restricted only to those agents that have disabilities, but also characterizes all human agency. All of our agency is environmentally dependent. (shrink)