With the rise of incivility in organizational settings, coupled with an increase in discriminatory behavior around the world, we explain how these concerns have merged to become a pervasive workplace ethical issue. An ethical-decision making model is presented that is designed to help employees address issues of incivility with a moral response action, using Islamophobia and/or anti-Muslimism as an example. By adopting a proactive moral strength-based approach to embrace and address this issue, we hope to promote respect while also mitigating (...) the lack of its presence. We explicate potential cognitive and affective influences that support an organizational member’s desire and decision to respond to incivility in a reverential manner. Given the propensity for employees to turn away, become apathetic, or to simply ignore wrongdoing, scholars need to illustrate how a path to respectful behavior can be achieved. Our model highlights variables like group norms and anticipated emotions, punctuated by different forms of self-regulation. A Kantian view, underscoring the worth of every person, underpins our appeal. (shrink)

Ser eficaz a la hora de tomar los medios pertinentes para nuestros fines se ha considerado como uno de los aspectos paradigmáticos de la racionalidad. Sin embargo, reconocer la normatividad de la racionalidad instrumental parece implicar la problemática tesis de que uno debe tomar los medios apropiados para sus fines por el mero hecho de tener estos fines, con independencia de cuán irracionales o inmorales sean. En estas páginas defiendo una concepción de la racionalidad instrumental que permite a un mismo (...) tiempo reconocerla como normativa y afirmar que hay medios que uno no debería tomar aun cuando se proponga fines para los que son pertinentes. (shrink)

Ovaj rad istražuje mogućnost davanja kompatibilističkog argumenta iz aspekta umjetne inteligencije. Ključna pretpostavka našeg rada jest da je umjetna inteligencija načelno moguća i da se realizira na računalnim arhitekturama u bitnome nalik današnjim. Uz taj je uvjet moguće dati definiciju slobode koja je pomirljiva s determiniranim izračunom, uz pomoć načelne nedokučivosti inteligentnog procesa. Ovo se temeljem funkcionalizma može translatirati u filozofiju uma. Pitanje je li moguće naš argument adaptirati za drugačije teorije filozofije uma ostavljamo otvorenim.

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)

ABSTRACTWhen is sacrifice – and particularly self-sacrifice – called for? This question turns out to be difficult to answer, for it tends to arise when values conflict, and hence the answer to it depends on how conflicts of values are to be resolved. If values are constructed, and if there is no single right way to construct them or prioritize them when they conflict, though there are identifiable ways in which the construction of values can go wrong, we may be (...) left in a position of ambivalence about what should be sacrificed. In cases of conflict in which self-sacrifice is one of the options, ambivalence may be particularly appropriate. In part this is because there may be in such cases special sources of plurality and incommensurability of values, because the conflict is likely to be between something that is valued by a social group, and something that is valued particularly by an individual who has to consider self-sacrificing. And in part it is because individuals may have trouble balancing self-regarding and other-regarding concerns in the process of value construction. This paper elaborates these complications, and presents cases in which we might suspect that someone has self-sacrificed too much or too little. (shrink)

This thesis investigates how children ought to be influenced with respect to religion. To answer this question, I develop a theory of cognitive curriculum content and apply it to the teaching of religious beliefs and beliefs about religions. By ‘a theory of cognitive curriculum content,’ I mean a theory that determines which truth-claims belong on the curriculum, and whether or not teachers ought to promote students’ belief of those claims. I extend this theory to help educators to decide which attitudes (...) address on the curriculum and whether or not to promote them. I then apply this to the case of religious attitudes and attitudes about religions. I argue that where having or failing to have a certain attitude makes a significant difference to students’ lives, it ought to be addressed by curricula. Where failing to have the attitude is irrational, this failure ought to be remedied; where having the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be discouraged; and where neither having nor failing to have the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be introduced and discussed without encouragement or discouragement. In so far as is practicable, educators should aim to acquaint students with arguments for and against having these attitudes and initiate them into the practice of assessing their soundness. The implications of this theory for extra-curricular influence, such as upbringing in the home, are also explored. (shrink)

In Fact, value and philosophy education I tried to show how philosophy can help to overcome the fact-value divide that continues to plague education. In attempting this, I applied John Dewey’s suggestion that philosophy may help to integrate beliefs about matters of fact with values in society at large, to the curricular division between subjects that deal with knowledge of matters of fact and those that are largely devoted to subjective understanding and personal expression. The paper centres on the claim (...) that philosophical dialogue about what we should believe and value can help to effect a mutual adjustment between our reason and our sentiments and bring us to think as whole human beings. It argues the case by first looking at the use of reflective practical reason to effect a change in our desires and conduct when we deem them to be undesirable. The use of reason to provide us with courses of action and other practical remedies to deal with what we see as defects in our character suggests that our cognitive and affective powers are capable of working together through mutual adjustment. By extension, I argue that reason can help us to examine the moral dimension of problems and issues in various areas of study, while making our understanding of them responsive to our feelings. The introduction of an educational means to give effect to this mutual adjustment brings us back to the role of philosophy. Philosophy provides the opportunity for reasoned dialogue that brings the factual material that students encounter into connection with what they are learning to value. It brings a normative cast to the study of history, society, literature, art, science and technology and enables the knowledge that students gain through their studies to be applied to matters of value. In general, it brings moral sensitivity to all kinds of subject matter and enables students to apply their knowledge and intelligence to the formation of values. In the years since I wrote this piece, I had the privilege to assist with the initial draft of documents on ethical understanding as a general competence in the Australian national curriculum and of constructing and implementing a pilot program for ethical inquiry in New South Wales primary schools, which led to ethics becoming an option for students who do not attend religious instruction. In different ways, both experiences brought home to me the importance of incorporating considerations of value throughout the curriculum and the value of philosophical inquiry as a means of doing so. Reflection on these experiences resulted in my book Teaching Ethics in Schools. (shrink)

Se expone cr.ticamente una interpretación reciente del hedonismo epic.reo, según la cual este podr.a comprenderse como hedonismo actitudinal. Esta lectura conlleva ciertas tensiones internas y descuida el sentido fundamental del epicure.smo, esto es, que se trata de una teor.a del bienestar prudencial. Al examinar solo este aspecto, se omiten ciertos problemas secundarios, como la legitimidad de interpretar de manera actitudinal una doctrina asentada en el atomismo.

In this paper I provide a critique of a set of assumptions relating to agency, choice and the legitimacy of actions impacting health that can be seen in some approaches to health promotion. After a brief discussion about the definition of health promotion, I outline two contrasting approaches to this area of health care practice. The first is focused on the provision of information and the second is concerned with seeking to change people’s preferences in a particular way. It has (...) been argued by a number of critics of health promotion that only the first approach is ethical, as it is for individuals to make their own lifestyle choices and adopt their own conception of the good life. I argue against this ‘information’ approach to health promotion on two grounds. First, I suggest that given the aims of health promotion, the provision of information is, as a matter of fact, of limited effectiveness in achieving these aims. Second, I argue that we have good reasons to question the appropriateness of respecting many of the preferences that individuals happen to have, given the origins and quality of such preferences. I then go on to argue, that by contrast we have good reasons to focus on changing at least some of the preferences that people have related to their lifestyle choices. This involves a commitment to both paternalism and a defence of a certain conception of the good life, but both can be defended. I use the example of potential responses to the growing problem of obesity to illustrate my argument, arguing that only policy that, at least sometimes, aims at preference change will be both effective and ethical. (shrink)

Moving beyond the retributive system requires clearing away some of the basic assumptions that form the foundation of that system: most importantly, the assumption of moral responsibility, which is held in place by deep and destructive belief in a just world. Efforts to justify moral responsibility typically appeal to some version of self-making, and that appeal is only plausible through limits on inquiry. Eliminating moral responsibility removes a major impediment to deeper inquiry and understanding of the biological, social, and environmental (...) causes of both vicious and virtuous behavior. The resources for moving beyond the moral responsibility are already being developed in social democratic corporatist cultures as well as in workplace management models that nurture commitment and reject blame and shame. Without moral responsibility we must face the unpleasant fact that although punishment is sometimes unavoidable it is always unjust. That unpleasant fact motivates difficult but beneficial changes that minimize both the extent and the severity of punitive measures. (shrink)

Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000) describes the striving mechanism as a mode of routine change driven by successful organizational routines. Striving describes a process by which organization members gain a better understanding of the ideals undergirding their actions. In turn, this insight drives changes within routines. In this paper, I argue that the rational actor model, especially as articulated in Donald Davidson’s (1963) theory of action, is unable to account for the striving mechanism of endogenous routine change identified by (...) Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000). Drawing upon Brewer’s (2011) criticisms of propositional theories of desire, the account of meta-language intentional attitudes developed by List and Pettit (2011), and MacIntyre’s (2007) theory of social practices, I introduce an expanded framework for conceptualizing agency at the individual level, and aggregation at the organization level, that better accounts for the striving mechanism as a process of endogenous routine change. (shrink)

Co-creating knowledge takes a new approach to human phenotypic morality as a biologically based, human lineage specific trait. Authors from very different backgrounds first review research on the nature and origins of morality using the social brain network, and studies of individuals who cannot “know good” or think morally because of brain dysfunction. They find these models helpful but insufficient, and turn to paleoanthropology, cognitive science, and neuroscience to understand human moral capacity and its origins long ago, in the genus (...) Homo. An unusual narrative capturing “morality in action” takes the reader back 900,000 years, and then the authors analyze the essential features of moral thinking and behavior as expressed by early and later species on our lineage. In what has primarily been the province of philosophers to date, the authors’ morality model is presented for further scientific testing. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the distinction between moral responsibility and autonomy can illuminate various debates about the Zygote Argument. Having made this distinction, one can see how these manipulation arguments are unsuccessful. Building on previous work, I also argue that this distinction can provide a framework for understanding other important work in agency theory, including that of Harry Frankfurt and Gary Watson.

This article proposes a way to disambiguate the evaluative states currently identified as “adaptive preferences” in development literature. It provides a brief analysis of Serene Khader's Deliberative Perfectionist Approach, and demonstrates that distinguishing between adaptive states has important implications for the theory and practice of development intervention. Although I support Khader's general approach and consider my project to be complementary, I argue that the term preferences be replaced with four distinct terms: beliefs, choices, desires, and values. Distinguishing among adaptive states (...) can serve to prevent inappropriate intervention and appreciate the costs of transforming inappropriate adaptations. I argue that adaptive values are especially problematic, given how central a person's values are to their sense of meaning and self. Attempts to transform adaptive values are likely to produce internal conflict, resulting in psychological distress and diminished agency. Furthermore, some values preclude deliberation and comparison given their communal status as infinitely valuable. To deliberate about sacred values is to violate them. The emotional and psychological damage that may result from value transformation is thus likely to be extensive, and must be taken into account when determining whether, and what type of, intervention is justified. (shrink)

Is freedom a plausible political value for animals? If so, does this imply that animals are owed legal personhood rights or can animals be free but remain human property? Drawing on different conceptions of freedom, I will argue that while positive freedom, libertarian self-ownership, and republican freedom are not plausible political values for animals, liberal ‘option-freedom’ is. However, because such option-freedom is in principle compatible with different legal statuses, animal freedom does not conceptually imply a right to legal self-ownership. Nonetheless, (...) a concern for animal option-freedom means that humans do have a pro tanto duty of non-interference. Arguments familiar from the liberal tradition moreover imply that such a duty speaks for drastic reforms of existing animal law. But it does not imply wholesale abolitionism: it neither rules out positive duties towards animals nor means that we should abandon all interactions with animals. (shrink)

Not everything that it's ‘possible’ FOR you to do is something it's ‘possible’ THAT you will do. The compatibilist freedom formula ‘absence of impediments’ must embrace external and internal – including psychological – impediments. Desires are impediments only when they impede, owing to motivational conflict. But other impediments, external or internal, require merely the potential to impede.

Consider how your consumption would change if you were stranded on a deserted island. Isolation would eliminate all social influences on your consumption decisions, even for the same choice set. You might decide not to consume cosmetics, curtains, or neckties, and pay less attention to the style or color of your clothes, car, or furniture. These choices might not matter as much to you anymore, for you would not have to consider the reactions of other individuals to your consumption. Similarly, (...) isolation would also eliminate social influences on your speech. Absent an audience, your choice of words would not be subject to the judgments of others. (shrink)

In the January 6, 1991, issue of theWashington Post Magazine, reporter Walt Harrington wrote a profile of Bryan Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson is a 31-year-old working-class African-American from Delaware who graduated from Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government. Like the typical graduate of Harvard Law School, Mr. Stevenson had the opportunity to join the worlds of six-figure corporate law or high-visibility politics. Rather than follow his colleagues, however, Mr. Stevenson works seven-day, eighty-hour weeks as director of the Alabama (...) Capital Representation Center. He appeals death sentences, handling twenty-four death-row cases himself, supervises five other lawyers who cover about thirty cases, and raises federal government and foundation funding. He does this living a Spartan existence on a salary of $24,000, refusing even the $50,000 directorship salary offered to him. (shrink)

This paper considers three sorts of account of the quality of life. These are capability views, due to Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, desire accounts and the prudential value list theory of James Griffin. Each approach is evaluated in the context of a tale of cannibalism and moral decay: the story of Count Ugolino in Dante's The Divine Comedy. It is argued that the example causes difficulties for Sen's version of the capability approach, as well as for desire accounts. Nussbaum's (...) version of the capability approach deals withthe example better than Sen's. However, it fails adequately to accommodate pluralism. I suggest that James Griffin's account of well-being deals well with this example and accommodates pluralism. I suggest that, of the views considered, Griffin's is the best account of the quality of life. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen contends that nonresponsibility transfers across deterministic relations. Suppose it does. If the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every truth about what one does, and no one is even in part morally responsible for the past and the laws, then no one is even in part morally responsible for what one does. This argument, the Direct Argument, has drawn various critics, who have attempted to produce counterexamples to its core inference principle. This article (...) considers two notable efforts, one by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza and another by David Widerker. It shows that neither is sufficient to reject the Direct Argument. The article then proceeds to challenge the argument in a novel fashion. Van Inwagen has not given us good reason to think that the principle in question has an adequate anchor in our inferential practices, especially in light of the dialectical context with the compatibilist. Hence, it is not the compatibilists' burden to produce counterexamples to it. Rather, it is van Inwagen's burden to produce relevant confirming instances of it. (shrink)

A person enters the moral realm when she affirms that other persons matter in the same way that she does. This, of course, is just the beginning, for she must then determine what follows from this affirmation. One way in which we treat other persons as mattering is by respecting them. And one way in which we respect persons is by respecting their wishes, desires, decisions, choices, ends, and goals. I will call all of these things ‘aims.’ Sometimes we respect (...) another person's aims simply byrefrainingfrom doing certain things, such as treating her in ways that thwart her aims, or interfering with her attempt to pursue them. Other times we respect a person's aims by taking positive action to help her pursue them.But how exactly does respect forpersonstranslate into respect for theiraims?And which aims merit respect? One answer comes from Kant. (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)

Recent discussions of the nature of mind, emotion, and self have often intersected with renewed interest in the sources of morals and morality. In this article I examine proposals on these matters by Charles Taylor and two of his interlocutors, Thomas Wren and Justin Oakley. I describe and compare the “holistic” epistemological approaches of these three in their searches for the “moral self,” and then evaluate the adequacy of their correlative ontological proposals. Finally, I discuss the meta-ethical implications of these (...) emotive views of selfhood in terms of the objective or subjective status of moral values to determine whether these views meet the philosophers' own criteria for moral plausibility. (shrink)

Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities guarantees persons with disabilities ‘the right to legal capacity on an equal basis with others in all aspects of life.’ In its General Comment on Article 12, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities claims that this guarantee necessitates the abolition of the world's dominant approach to mental capacity law. According to this approach, when a person lacks the mental capacity to make a particular legal (...) decision at the material time, the state authorises a third-party to make it on her behalf. The Committee declares such substituted decision-making a violation of the Convention's guarantee of legal capacity on an equal basis, and therefore demands it be replaced by an allegedly non-discriminatory alternative called supported decision-making. This article argues that we should reject the Committee's demand in its current form, because the most influential version of the new approach to supported decision-making suffers from serious conceptual flaws that make it inferior to the mental capacity approach. However, I then argue that the Committee's demand stems from a legitimate ethical concern with respect and equality that ought to inform the CRPD's implementation process. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Schaefer et al. proposed to enhance autonomy via improving reasoning abilities through cognitive enhancement [1]. While initially their idea additionally seems to elegantly avoid objections against genetic enhancements based on the value of autonomy, we want to draw attention to several problems their approach poses. First, we will show that it is not at all clear that safe and meaningful methods to genetically or pharmaceutically enhance cognition will be feasible any time soon. Second, we want to (...) provide a deeper discussion of the role of cognition and reasoning abilities in philosophical concepts of autonomy, as discussed in the mentioned paper. In doing so, we wish to demonstrate that using reasoning abilities as the common denominator in different accounts of autonomy in the context of enhancement does not do justice to the highly complex interrelations between cognition, reasoning abilities and autonomy. Neither should this way of arguing be accepted as a basis to call for practical outcomes, such as funding research into e. g. genetic cognitive enhancements, if the examined concepts of autonomy are taken seriously. (shrink)

Metaethical constitutivists explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. In Velleman’s paradigmatic constitutivist theory, that is the aim of self-understanding. The best-known objection to constitutivism is Enoch’s shmagency objection: constitutivism cannot explain normativity because a constitutive aim of agency lacks normative significance unless one has reason to be an agent rather than a “shmagent”. In response, Velleman argues that the constitutive aim is self-validating. I argue that this claim is false. If the constitutive aim of (...) self-understanding structures an agent’s practical deliberation as Velleman describes, then some correctly deliberating agents will regard that aim as normatively arbitrary or unjustified. Moreover, I argue that the self-invalidation of the constitutive aim undermines or significantly qualifies Velleman’s claim that his constitutivism reconciles internalism with a kind of objectivity about reasons. Internalists typically hold that motives from which an agent is alienated do not generate reasons, but in cases of self-invalidation, agents are alienated from the aim of self-understanding in just this way. Thus, the larger cost of the constitutive aim’s possible self-invalidation is that Velleman’s constitutivism does not satisfy a plausible and widely accepted constraint on an internalist account of reasons. (shrink)

This paper is part of a book symposium on my Judgment and Agency. Here I reply to the comments of three commentators: Jason Baehr, Imogen Dickie, and Hilary Kornblith.

Ernest Sosa’s Judgment and Agency marks an important change from his earlier work in epistemology. While belief was at the center of his earlier approach to epistemological issues, a far more sophisticated mental state, judgment, plays the central role here. This paper examines the significance of this change in focus, and argues that there is reason to favor the earlier belief-centered approach over this new judgment-centered account.

According to reductionists about agency, an agent’s bringing something about is reducible to states and events involving the agent bringing something about. Many have worried that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self-determination. One common reductionist answer to this worry contends that self-determining agents are identified with certain states and events, and so these states and events causing a decision counts as the agent’s self-determining the decision. In this paper I discuss J. David Velleman’s identification reductionist theory, (...) according to which an agent is identified with his desire to make most sense of himself. I develop two constraints that an adequate identification reductionist theory must satisfy and show that Velleman’s theory cannot satisfy both. In particular, I argue that Velleman’s account founders on cases of self-determined self-transformation. (shrink)

Both legal and moral theorists have offered broadly “communicative” theories of criminal and moral responsibility. According to such accounts, we can understand the nature of responsibility by appealing to the idea that responsibility practices are in some fundamental sense expressive, discursive, or communicative. In this essay, I consider a variety of issues in connections with this family of views, including its relationship to free will, the theory of exemptions, and potential alternatives to the communicative model. Focusing on Michael McKenna’s Conversation (...) and Responsibility, I argue that communicative accounts, and the conversational model in particular, direct our attention to important and under-appreciated elements of our responsibility practices. However, rather than focusing on a model of conversation-as-address, as McKenna does, we do better to regard gossip as the paradigmatic conversational form that captures the main features of moral responsibility. (shrink)

_Examines the implications of Aristotle’s political thought for contemporary political theory._.

Many arguments have been advanced in favor of employee participation in firm decision-making. Two of the most influential are the "interest protection argument" and the "autonomy argument." I argue that the case for granting participation rights to some other stakeholders, such as suppliers and community members, is at least as strong, according to the reasons given in these arguments, as the case for granting them to certain employees. I then consider how proponents of these arguments might modify their arguments, or (...) views, in response to this conclusion. (shrink)

O principal objetivo desse artigo é responder a questão sobre o que constitui a responsabilidade moral. Tentaremos demonstrar que a responsabilidade moral tem duas características centrais, a saber, exigências internalistas e autoridade social. Para tal propósito, faremos uso de estratégias compatibilistas. O próximo passo será tentar descrever a concepção de responsabilidade substancial de Thomas Scanlon e, no final desse artigo, estipularemos um argumento sobre um tipo de responsabilidade moral razoável que pode estar contida na teoria da justiça como equidade de (...) John Rawls. (shrink)