This article suggests first that the concept of interpersonal recognition be understood in a multidimensional (as opposed to one-dimensional), practical (as opposed to symbolic), and strict (as opposed to broad) way. Second, it is argued that due recognition be seen as a reason-governed response to evaluative features, rather than all normativity and reasons being seen as generated by recognition. This can be called a response-model, or, more precisely, a value-based model of due recognition. A further suggestion is that there is (...) a systematic basis for distinguishing three dimensions of recognition, depending on whether recognition is given to someone qua a person, qua a certain kind of person, or qua a certain person. Finally, it is argued that recognition is a necessary condition of personhood, but whether it is of direct or indirect relevance depends on our theories of personhood (social vs. capacity-theory) and practical identity (dialogical definition model vs. feature-model). Despite the apparent opposition, it is shown that interpersonal recognition is both a response to value and a precondition of personhood. (shrink)

Can someone be reasonable or justified in accepting a specific moral judgment not based on the prior acceptance of a general exceptioness moral principle, where acceptance of a general principle might be tacit or implicit and might not be expressible in language? This issue is an instance of a wider issue about direct or transductive inference. Developments in statistical learning theory show that such an inference can be more effective than alternative methods using inductive generalization and so can be reasonable. (...) This result carries over to moral transduction, although it is a difficult empirical issue whether people actually engage in any sort of transduction, including moral transduction. (shrink)

Contemporary moral philosophy assumes an account of what it means to legitimately change one’s mind in ethics, and I wish to challenge this account by enlarging the category of the legitimate. I am just as eager to avoid illegitimate mind-changing brought on by deceit or brainwashing, but I claim that legitimacy should be defined in terms of transparency of method. A social reformer should not be embarrassed to admit that he acquired many beliefs about justice while reading Dickens. As such, (...) appeals to the heart and the imagination are just as legitimate, within limits, as appeals to the mind; and showing can be as legitimate as telling. To demonstrate this, I consider the example of a vegetarian trying to ‘convert’ a carnivore. I then ask what it means when the carnivore claims to have been previously mistaken. (shrink)

Kenneth Kipnis (2006) presents a normative defense of strict confidentiality, but it follows from an empirical claim that allowing breach would result in all parties being worse off, including, par...

This paper develops three points in response to Habermas's ?The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will.? First, while Habermas nicely characterizes the appearance of freedom, he misconstrues its connections to deliberate agency, responsibility, and our justificatory practice. Second, Habermas's discussion largely overlooks grave conceptual challenges to our idea of freedom, challenges more fundamental than those posed by naturalism. Finally, a physicalist view of ourselves may be able to save as much of the appearance of freedom (...) as can the anti-physicalist naturalism that Habermas recommends. (shrink)

A prominent position about moral responsibility claims that a necessary condition on accountability blame is that, at the time of action, the agent must be sufficiently reasons-responsive so as to be capable of acting differently by following the pertinent moral reasons and thus avoid wrongdoing. Call this the Accountability with Avoidability view (or AWA). In this paper I aim to show that AWA is false by doing three things. First, I argue that it badly contradicts moral commonsense concerning the moral (...) responsibility of a particularly egregious kind of wrongdoer. Second, I show that AWA’s three most prominent rationales—based on the notions of desert, demands, and excuses—all fail to support a robust reasons-responsiveness requirement on accountability. Finally, I sketch an alternative conception of accountability—accountability without avoidability—that dispenses with robust reasons-responsiveness and appeals instead to the capacity of agents to convey moral meaning through their conduct as the key element in the moral psychology of responsible agency. (shrink)

The ethics of blame includes conditions determining whether an instance of blame is permissible. One generally recognised condition is that blame should be proportionate. If it is not proportionate, that speaks against its permissibility. All the same, what exactly amounts to proportionate blame is currently under-theorised. In this paper, we aim to amend this. More precisely, we distinguish between private and overt blame and highlight some of their differences – e.g., that they aggregate differently. Then, we develop an account of (...) proportional blame and draw out some practical implications of our account. (shrink)

This paper critically examines moral contractarianism, a moral theory centred on rational agreements among self-interested individuals to establish moral rules and social norms. It explores the challenges faced by moral contractarianism while also highlighting its strengths. Major issues, such as accommodating justice and fairness within the contractarian framework, are discussed, along with other challenges. Additionally, the paper provides a brief discussion of moral contractualism (a theory similar to moral contractarianism in certain aspects), highlighting its strengths in addressing some of the (...) challenges faced by moral contractarianism while also discussing its limitations. The paper concludes by offering a revised framework of moral contractarianism that provides solutions to the major problems of injustice and partiality that the theory faces. (shrink)

We sometimes face personal choices that are so momentous they appear to give rise to an intrapersonal analogue to the non-identity problem. Where the non-identity problem presents as a problem for morality, the intrapersonal analogue presents as a problem for prudence. The analogy has been explored recently by Das and Paul, and although, as this paper argues, their analysis fails—there is no intrapersonal analogue for the non-identity problem—it functions to highlight a persistent and perplexing puzzle for prudential rationality. This paper (...) offers its own explanation: namely, that the phenomena that motivate the purported intrapersonal problem are better accounted for by conceiving prudence as disjunctive. To this end, I sketch a theory of two varieties of prudence. (shrink)

“Basic equality” is the thesis that all (or nearly all) human beings are equal in moral status. Widespread interpersonal differences among humans make the task of justifying basic equality notoriously difficult. One strategy for circumventing this difficulty is to identify some morally significant binary (“all-or-nothing”) property that all humans have. This strategy seems promising: if the basis of equality is binary, then those who have it have it equally. However, skeptics have argued against this strategy on the grounds that a (...) proper defense of basic equality requires that we identify a morally significant property that can vary among humans but does not in fact vary. This paper examines various ways in which this skeptical argument can be motivated and concludes that they all fail. (shrink)

This paper is about the common thought that anger is “not worth it” because of the bad effects that it has on the angry person. It contends that this common thought is sometimes deeply puzzling, because although it looks to be a thought about anger’s unfittingness, it is hard to see what such bad effects have to do with fittingness. The paper gives an account of the elusive connection between bad effects and fit. In brief, it argues that the thought (...) that anger is “not worth it” has to do with the sense of “importance” that the anger manifests. That anger portrays its object as more important than it actually is shows it to be unfitting, but also shows why seemingly instrumental considerations like bad effects bear on fittingness, insofar as they bear on importance. The paper then shows how this account illuminates a kind of emotional dilemma often faced by oppressed people and closes with a brief discussion of some broader implications. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement among philosophers about the Mens Rea Asymmetry (MRA), according to which praise requires intent, whereas blame does not. However, there is evidence showing that MRA is descriptively inadequate. We hypothesize that the violations of MRA found in the experimental literature are due to what we call “moral compositionality,” by which we mean that people evaluate the component parts of a moral problem separately and then reach an overall verdict by aggregating the verdicts on the component parts. (...) We have subjected this hypothesis to the test and here report the results of our experiment. We explore several explanations of the experimental findings and conclude that they present a puzzle to moral theory. (shrink)

Greater public awareness of the occurrence of sexual assault has led to the creation of mobile phone apps designed to facilitate consent between sexual partners. These apps exhibit serious practical shortcomings in realistic contexts; however, in this paper I consider the hypothetical case in which these practical shortcomings are absent. The prospect of this viable consent app creates an interesting challenge for consequentialism – one that is comparable to the objection that the theory justifies killing innocent persons to prevent large (...) numbers of less serious harms like experiencing brief, painful headaches. I outline and reject the most straightforward way for consequentialists to address this challenge, and I argue that the empirical calculations at stake reveal something rarely appreciated: consequentialists ought to sometimes favour reinforcing deontological constraints in common-sense morality rather than seeking to undermine them. (shrink)

Normative theory aims to understand the commonalities between ethics, prudence, epistemology, aesthetics and political philosophy (among others). One central question in normative theory is what is fundamental to the normative. The reasons-first approach holds that normative reasons are fundamental to the normative domain. This view has been challenged by proponents of alternative X-first views such as value, fittingness and ought. This paper examines the debate about the analysis of normative reasons and argues for a new form of reductive naturalism that (...) analyses normative reasons in terms of fittingness, ought and value. I argue that this view is compatible with Reasons First because fittingness and the type of ought and value appealed to are not robustly normative notions. It is also extensionally and explanatorily plausible, and thus has much to recommend it on both first-order and second-order grounds. (shrink)

Sedlakova and Traschel (2023) propose limiting the scope and capabilities of psychotherapy-delivering conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), as (1) they deceive some users into thinking they...

Recently, most of the discussions in Confucian political theory have concentrated on whether Confucianism is compatible with local political practices, such as liberal democracy. The question of how Confucians view global distributive justice has not yet received critical attention. This essay aims to fill this gap. I will first describe a contractualist methodology, which aims at deriving substantial political principles from a formal conception of the person. Then I will discuss what conception of the person Confucianism assumes. Finally, I will (...) use the contractualist methodology to derive three principles of global distributive justice. These three principles form a distinctive conception based on ideas that are usually ignored in the current discussions of global justice, such as virtues, community, and rituals. (shrink)

Democratic alternation in power involves uncontrolled policy experiments. One party is elected on one policy platform that it then implements. Things may go well or badly. When another party is elected in its place, it implements a different policy. In imposing policies on the whole community, parties in effect conduct non-randomized trials without control groups. In this paper, we endorse the general idea of policy experimentation but we also argue that it can be done better by deploying in policymaking randomized (...) controlled trials. We focus primarily on the democratic benefits of using randomized trials in policymaking and on how they can enhance the democratic legitimacy of policy. We argue that randomized trials resonate well with three key democratic principles: non-arbitrariness, revisability and public justification. Randomized trials’ contribution to non-arbitrariness and revisability is not unique; other types of evidence can advance these democratic principles as well. But through their peculiar democratic scrutability, randomized trials are well-equipped to contribute to the public justifiability of policy. (shrink)

According to the popular fitting attitude analysis of value, to be good is to be the object of a proattitude that it is fitting, in some sense, to have. One version of this analysis can be traced back to Franz Brentano, according to which “good” means “worthy of love.” In a review in Ethics of Brentano's The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, G. E. Moore accuses Brentano of committing a fallacious inference, which I will call “Brentano's fallacy.” (...) I shall show that Moore's accusation, properly formulated, hits the target and that his argument can be generalized so that it undermines other Brentano-like versions of the fitting attitude analysis. (shrink)

This article enriches discussions about the metaphysics of normative facts with conceptual resources from social ontology that metaethics has neglected so far: the resources of Haslanger’s critical realism as social constructionism. By pointing out the viability of understanding reasons as socially constructed facts, the article shows how normative facts can be understood as features of mind-independent reality that are, however, not features of the universe independently of social practices. The move into social ontology allows us to understand normative facts as (...) mind-independent in a more substantial sense than deflationists do, by stressing individual mind-independence, while denying collective mind-independence – the subsistence independently of established human cultures. The new position can fruitfully mediate between realism, error theory and constructivism. Finally, the metaphysical nuances provided by social ontology pave the way for novel approaches to normative change and progress – thereby indicating pathways to normative theorising that many traditional metaethical positions lack. (shrink)

This paper argues that close personal relationships play an important role in our judgments about what is fair. I start with an explanation of leading theories of fairness, highlighting the potential for further work on the grounds of fairness. Next, I offer an account of close personal relationships as having the ability to generate legitimate and reasonable expectations of one or other party to a judgment about fairness, or both. I show how and when close personal relationships can ground fairness.

Intento criticar en el presente trabajo el enfoque sobre el poder del consentimiento defendido por David Owens. Según este enfoque, la capacidad de consentir responde a un interés normativo característico, el cual consistiría en permitir que ciertas obligaciones personales sean incumplidas, sin importar lo que materialmente se siga de ello, como la transgresión de nuestros intereses no normativos. Aquí sostendré que el enfoque de Owens confundiría dos planos de consideraciones: el plano relativo a la capacidad general de consentir y el (...) plano relativo al ejercicio de dicha capacidad en casos concretos. Para comprender el primer plano, el enfoque puede ser provechoso. No obstante, para comprender el segundo, lo más razonable sería apelar a la idea de razones personales para actuar, una idea que no parece haber recibido suficiente atención en la literatura habitual sobre el consentimiento. (shrink)

Francis Hutcheson's An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, published in 1725, arguably contains the first broadly utilitarian theory of rights ever formulated. In this essay, I argue that, despite its subtlety, there are crucial lacunae in Hutcheson's theory. One of the most important, which Mill seeks to repair, is that his theory of rights lacks a conceptually necessary companion, namely, a corollary account of obligation. Hutcheson has no theory of fully deontic obligations, much less (...) an account of the relational obligations that, as Hohfeld famously argued, are the conceptually necessary correlates of claim rights of the kind Hutcheson wishes to theorise. Like Hume, Hutcheson subversively redefines ‘obligation’ as a motive of self-interest or the approval of morally good motives by moral sense. This leaves Hutcheson without any account of the obligations that are the necessary correlates of claim rights. Mill does significantly better on this score but ends up giving a pragmatic ‘reason of the wrong kind’ for rights and obligations. Hutcheson thus begins a line of thought shown by him to have been powerless to ground rights without independent deontic premises from the start. (shrink)

Directed duties are those duties whose violation would wrong someone in particular. Under what conditions, and in virtue of what, is a duty directed to someone? This is the Question of Direction. In this article, I explore the possibility of providing a Contractualist answer to the Question of Direction—one where the directedness of a directed duty is explained by the way in which that duty is derived in Contractualist moral reasoning. After presenting and rejecting three attempts at such an answer, (...) I arrive at a satisfactory one: An agent has a duty to an individual to perform some action just in case and because, were the agent not to perform that action, the agent would make the individual occupy the standpoint relative to which any principle that permits the agent not to perform that action is unacceptable. (shrink)

This article aims to argue in favour of two different kinds of responsibility: moral and organizational. I present the notion of moral responsibility and, specifically, moral accountability, which stands at the centre of the later discussion. I address Coleen Macnamara’s view of accountability, a model of enforcement involved in setting demands and sanctions. Then I account for some cases of morally impaired persons’ failure to respond adequately to moral demands, in contrast to their capacity to respond effectively to organizational demands. (...) I take the latter findings to show that there are two distinct kinds of accountability, moral and organizational. While moral accountability is connected to the arousal of emotions, I claim that organizational accountability is related to inner-organizational reactive procedures associated with employment benefits or sanctions. However, this can be distant from emotions. (shrink)

This paper focuses on consent and third-party coercion, viz. cases in which a person consents to another person performing a certain act because a third party coerced her into doing so. I argue that, in these cases, the validity of consent depends on the behavior of the recipient of consent rather than the third party’s coercion taken separately, and I will specify the conditions under which consent is invalid. My view, which is a novel version of what I call a (...) Recipient-Focus-View, holds that coercion invalidates consent only if consent was ‘obtained by’ coercion, but not if consent was ‘merely motivated by’ coercion. I explain and support my view on the basis that it best reconciles an unnoticed tension between two fundamental principles in the debate on consent and that it can deal with cases that undermine other Recipient-Focus-Views. (shrink)

The idea that business firms qualify as group moral agents offers an attractive basis for understanding corporate moral responsibility. However, that idea gives rise to the “corporate autonomy problem” (CAP): if firms are moral agents, then it seems we must accept the implausible conclusion that firms have basic moral rights, such as the rights to life and liberty. The question, then, is how one might retain the fruitful idea of firms as moral agents, yet avoid CAP. A common approach to (...) avoiding CAP appeals to specific features of human embodiment, such as vulnerability to pain, as the basis for attributing moral rights to human persons but not to firms. But that response has less purchase in a Kantian framework, which does not ground moral status in such particularities of human embodiment, but rather in the rational nature that humans share with other rational beings. To avoid CAP while retaining a (broadly) Kantian framework, one does better to rely on features of firms as cooperative, compositionally derivative moral agents, created for the pursuit of specific ends. As derivative agents, firms do not qualify as Kantian ends in themselves, and thus are not appropriate bearers of basic moral rights. To further clarify the level of consideration we owe to firms, I draw on Darwall’s distinction between recognition respect and moral esteem, arguing that we should not respect firms as unconditional ends in themselves, but rather esteem morally autonomous firms as collective achievements of their human members. (shrink)

Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 25-37, January 2022.

Much recent discussion of love concerns ‘the reasons for love’: whether we love for reasons and, if so, what sorts of things those reasons are. This chapter seeks to call into question some of the assumptions that have shaped this debate, in particular the assumption that love might be ‘responsive’ to reasons in something like the way that actions, beliefs, intentions and ordinary emotions are. I begin by drawing out some tensions in the existing literature on reasons for love, suggesting (...) that these arise in part because different interests expressed in the language of ‘reasons’ – the interests of explanation, justification and interpersonal understanding – pull us towards different kinds of account of reasons for love. This seems to count in favor of treating these interests separately, with different conceptions of the reasons that answer to them. This suggestion, as I explain, runs up against a certain conception of ‘responsiveness to reasons’, which I argue is implicitly assumed in many discussions of reasons for love. However, I argue that we should be skeptical about the application of this conception to love in light of the ontological differences between love and paradigm ‘reasons-responsive’ phenomena, potentially making room for the suggested methodological separation. (shrink)

It is undeniable that people have beliefs about what actions are morally right. These beliefs play an important role in guiding moral action. Is it possible however to justify beliefs about what actions are morally right? How can beliefs of this sort be justified? Sinnott-Armstrong has advanced an epistemic regress argument against the justification of moral beliefs with the consequence that moral beliefs cannot be justified. This essay addresses the issue of the justification of moral beliefs to answer the question (...) about how moral beliefs can be justified in response to Sinnott-Armstrong’s epistemic regress argument. It argues for the plausibility of Rawls’ reflective equilibrium as an adequate method of justification of moral beliefs. Three problems arise in the attempt to show that reflective equilibrium can adequately respond to Sinnott-Armstrong’s regress argument. These are vicious circularity, arbitrariness and epistemic moral disagreement. It is shown in this essay that these problems can be satisfactorily dealt with. (shrink)

Once relegated to the margins of the responsibility debate, moral influence theories have recently been rehabilitated. This paper offers a moral influence theory with two parts: a theory of responsibility as influenceability and an act-consequentialist justification of blame. I defend this account against six concerns commonly raised both by opponents and by advocates of similar views. Some concerns target act consequentialism, claiming that it 1) permits blaming innocents; 2) permits coercion, manipulation, and other objectionable forms of influence; and 3) fails (...) to capture intuitions about desert. Other concerns target responsibility as influenceability, claiming that influenceability accounts are 4) unsophisticated, 5) make ascriptions of responsibility dependent on assessments of permissible blame, and 6) have various counterintuitive implications. (shrink)

Offering the first developed account of political liberal education, this book combines a thorough analysis of the theoretical groundwork of political liberal education with application-oriented approaches to contemporary educational challenges. Following in depth engagement with the shortcomings of Rawls’ theory and addressing some key objections to neutrality-based restrictions in education, the volume moves on to provide an insightful discussion of topics such as same-sex relations in sex-education, the position of migrant children and the rights of religious parents to determine the (...) education of their children. This book outlines a political liberal account of education which provides a useful contribution to the current debates about liberalism and education in a way unprecedented in the literature on political liberalism so far. It is of interest to anyone working at the intersection of political philosophy and philosophy of education as well as for scholars with a broader interest in how liberalism can respond to the challenges of value pluralism. (shrink)

I argue that if there are nondisabled reasons to believep, then there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something incompatible withp. I first defend a restricted version of the view, which applies only to situations where the relevant agent has complete evidence. Then, I argue for a generalized version of the view, which holds regardless of the agent's evidence. As a related result, I show that, given plausible assumptions, there cannot be nondisabled reasons to believe something false.

Most philosophical accounts of human rights accept that all persons have human rights. Typically, ‘personhood’ is understood as unitary and binary. It is unitary because there is generally supposed to be a single threshold property required for personhood. It is binary because it is all-or-nothing: you are either a person or you are not. A difficulty with binary views is that there will typically be subjects, like children and those with dementia, who do not meet the threshold, and so who (...) are not persons with human rights, on these accounts. It is consequently unclear how we ought to treat these subjects. This is the problem of marginal cases. I argue that we cannot resolve the problem of marginal cases if we accept a unitary, binary view of personhood. Instead, I develop a new non-binary personhood account of human rights, and defend two main claims. First, there are many, scalar properties, the having of which are conducive to personhood. Second, different subjects have different human rights depending on which of these properties they have, and what threats apply to them. On my view, and contra most existing accounts, most marginal cases have some degree of personhood and are entitled to some human rights. (shrink)

To be self-compassionate is to show compassion not (only) for others but for yourself. Research in psychology suggests that self-compassion leads to improved well-being and functioning. With the psychological research in the background, we give a philosophical account of self-compassion and its ethical significance. We build a definition of self-compassion, suggesting that self-compassion is different from but closely analogous to compassion for others. Our definition departs from the most prominent definition in the psychological literature but is well-equipped to guide ongoing (...) empirical research. We then argue that self-compassion is a virtue. Self-compassion makes ordinary people happier and more likely to act well, and the self-compassionate person understands and values herself correctly; she sees herself accurately as a needy, vulnerable, limited human whose interests matter. If we are right, then the ethical relationship with self is more complicated than philosophical treatments have so far acknowledged. The virtuous person does not only meet moral duties to herself or exercise permissions to favor her own interests. She also has an emotional relationship with herself, which incorporates enlightened self-understanding and self-care. (shrink)

This paper offers a defense against the primary objection to the view that goodness and other value properties give normative reasons, which is T. M. Scanlon’s influential redundancy argument. Scanlon reasons that value properties cannot add anything over and above what non-evaluative properties contribute. I suggest this line of reasoning is analogous to Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion argument against non-reductive physicalism, and adapt Ned Block’s objection to exclusion—a generalization and regress argument—into a reason for rejecting Scanlon’s argument. Differences between reasons (...) and causes make Scanlon’s task more difficult than Kim’s. (shrink)

When it comes to the metaethical task of explaining and making sense of what it is that we are doing while doing ethics, the subject of moral objectivity occupies an important and special place within that task. Thus, it is often agreed that being able to explain and justify the objective features of common moral practice is one of if not the most important task for any metaethical theory to undertake. In this dissertation, I tackle the issue of ethical objectivity (...) on behalf of metaethical constructivism. To be more precise, my aim is to make plausible, strengthen, and defend the constructivist original contribution to contemporary metaethics by developing a novel constructivist account on the objectivity of ethics. While the account that I develop herein presents a novel and independent approach to the subject of moral objectivity on behalf of constructivism, it also places itself between the two other positions within the constructivist camp that openly strive to secure ethical objectivity – namely Kantianism on the one hand, and the more recently developed Humean objectivist view on the other. It is for the latter reason that I call my own view the hybrid view. (shrink)

Extremism about Demands is the view that morality is significantly more demanding than prevailing common-sense morality acknowledges. This view is not widely held, despite the powerful advocacy on its behalf by philosophers such as Peter Singer, Shelly Kagan, Peter Unger, and G.A. Cohen. Most philosophers have remained attracted to some version of Moderation about Demands, which holds that the behavior of typical well-off people is permissible, including the ways that such people tend to employ their economic and other resources. It (...) is difficult to resist the conclusion that proponents of Extremism have not taken sufficiently seriously the central convictions that motivate the Moderate view. -/- This dissertation offers an improved defense of Extremism about Demands. At its center is an argument that appeals dialectically to requirements of justice that Moderates themselves already implicitly accept. Specifically, I claim that any plausible set of Moderate moral principles will, when applied to a world like ours, yield demands on typical well-off people that far exceed the demands of common-sense morality. -/- My argument has two cruxes. The first is the idea that our concern for justice is at least partially grounded in a concern for individuals’ interests, broadly construed. The other is a principle that I call Injustice entails Obligations, which says that we are collectively subject to requirements of justice that, if fully complied with, would ensure the transition from current injustice to a just state of affairs. Any view that is compatible with both the interest-based view of (part of) our concern for justice and Injustice entails Obligations will, I argue, require sacrifices from typical well-off people that substantially exceed what prevailing common-sense morality requires of them. -/- Moderates typically emphasize the idea that each person has an important interest in pursuing the projects, plans, relationships, and commitments that are most important to her. But they also believe that acceptable Moderate principles will properly balance this idea with the idea that from a properly impartial perspective everyone, and everyone's interests, are equally morally important. Because Moderates accept the latter idea, they are already committed to thinking that in a just world, everyone would have a sufficient minimum share of society’s resources. I argue that even if we limit our focus to distributive justice in a single society such as the United States, and even if we assume that distributive justice requires only a sufficient minimum, the extent to which the status quo must be transformed in order for justice to be achieved is still too great to be compatible with Moderate demands on typical well-off people. -/- There are a number of ways to try to argue that Moderate principles and Injustice entails Obligations are compatible with Moderation about Demands. For instance, it might be argued that all or nearly all of the demands to sacrifice in order to promote justice can be assigned to the super-rich, rather than to typical well-off people. Or it might be argued that the sacrifices of a single well-off person cannot be required because they amount to a mere “drop in the bucket” relative to what needs to be done in order to fully achieve justice. I show that such arguments fail. -/- The argument that I consider in greatest detail derives from John Rawls’s view that the principles of justice apply to the institutions of the “basic structure of society,” and do not apply directly to the conduct of individuals. If this “Institutionalism” is right, then it cannot be the case that individuals are obligated to promote justice directly in the way that I suggest they are. Furthermore, it might seem that a view that assigns all of the burdens of promoting justice to the basic structure satisfies the imperative to transition from injustice to justice, since if the relevant institutions were to begin doing everything that the Rawlsian view says they ought to be doing, the requirements of justice would be met. I argue, however, that there is no understanding of Institutionalism on which it is itself consistent with the following desiderata: Moderate principles, and the associated interest-based view of (part of) the ground of our concern for justice; Injustice entails Obligations; and Moderate demands. So, Institutionalism cannot make Moderate principles and Injustice entails Obligations compatible with Moderate demands. -/- Moderate principles and Injustice entails Obligations, then, remain incompatible with Moderation about Demands. Since there are compelling reasons to accept both Moderate principles and In justice entails Obligations, I conclude that we must reject Moderation about Demands. The obligations that justice places on typical well-off people are substantially more extensive than is acknowledged by prevailing common-sense morality. (shrink)

This thesis will utilise the literature on the distinction between doing harm and allowing harm to develop a novel system of moral sequencing that can be applied to general moral problems to decide if, when, and how an agent should intervene to prevent harm from occurring to another agent. Off the back of this discussion, this thesis will offer a way of determining the responsibility of certain agents for their actions within a moral sequence. These motivations will be at the (...) centre of the discussions in this thesis and will be accomplished by ultimately updating the system of moral sequencing so that it makes sense of practical cases of inner-agent change, which itself provides a justification for intervening earlier, and potentially diminishing the responsibility for agents who have experienced an inner-agent change, in a moral sequence. (shrink)

How should a philosophical inquiry into the moral status of (nonhuman) animals proceed? Many philosophers maintain that by examining the “morally relevant” psychological or physiological capacities possessed by the members of different species, and comparing them with similar capacities possessed by human beings, the moral status of the animals in question can be established. Others contend that such an approach runs into serious moral and conceptual problems, a crucial one being that of how to give a coherent account of the (...) natural sense of concern for profoundly cognitively impaired human beings if moral status is assumed to depend on features that centrally include cognitive capacities. The present article discusses this debate with reference to Wittgenstein-influenced philosophers whose respective approaches, on the face of it, diverge dramatically. With a primary focus on Hans-Johann Glock and Cora Diamond, and a secondary focus on recent work by Alice Crary, I argue that, despite an overt disavowal of the kind of approach favoured by Diamond and Crary, Glock’s affirmation that we simply do “value human life” brings him closer to that approach than he acknowledges. (shrink)

We defend a scalar theory of the relationship between material scarcity and justice. As scarcity increases beyond a specified threshold, we argue that deontological egalitarian constraints should be gradually relaxed and consequentialist considerations should increasingly determine distributions. We construct this theory by taking a bottom-up approach that is guided by principles of medical triage. Armed with this theory, we consider the range of conditions under which justice applies. We argue that there are compelling reasons for thinking that justice applies under (...) a far broader range of conditions than is standardly supposed, including those that could sensibly be labelled as conditions of extreme rather than moderate scarcity. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉEn réponse à Paul Hurley, je soutiens que l'argument de la triangulation de Donald Davidson ne peut s'appliquer aux croyances normatives que si ces croyances correspondent à des propriétés à la fois normatives et causales. L'argument engage donc Davidson à une forme de naturalisme non-réductif et étonnamment non-révisionniste. En réponse à Kirk Ludwig, je soutiens que Davidson avait de bonnes raisons d'abandonner les théories humiennes des pro-attitudes, parce qu'il avait de bonnes raisons d'accepter la forme de naturalisme non-réductive et non-révisionniste (...) qui émerge une fois que l'argument de la triangulation est appliqué aux croyances normatives. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that selective abortion for disability often involves inadequate counselling on the part of reproductive medicine professionals who advise prospective parents. I claim that prenatal disability clinicians often fail in intellectual duty—they are culpably ignorant about intellectual disability. First, I explain why a standard motivation for selective abortion is flawed. Second, I summarize recent research on parent experience with prenatal professionals. Third, I outline the notions of epistemic excellence and deficiency. Fourth, I defend culpable ignorance as (...) the best explanation of inadequate disability counselling. Fifth, I rebut alternative explanations. My focus is pregnancies diagnosed with mild or moderate intellectual disability. (shrink)

In response to the companions in guilt arguments, some error theorists have tried to defend a nihilist thesis that there truly are no normative epistemic reasons to believe, and further no normative reasons whatsoever, making them global normative error theorists. In his recent paper, Patrick Clipsham tries to adjudicate on this debate. Dubbing this nihilist response a “bullet-biting” one, he argues that sophisticated forms of this response are viable and immune from the frequently leveled charges. However, he further argues that (...) despite its success of avoiding these charges, the nihilist response is bound to face a dialectical disadvantage, that is, it impairs the error theorist’s ability to criticize the opponents. In this paper, I argue for two propositions. First, while there are viable nihilist responses, they are not or at least should not be as how Clipsham has represented them. Second, the new charge from dialectical disadvantage also fails, along with the older charges. (shrink)

Motivational internalism and externalism – that is, theories about moral motivation – have played central roles in meta‐ethical debate mainly because they have been thought to have implications for the constitutive nature of moral judgements. Thus, internalism and externalism have been adduced in favour of and against various versions of cognitivism and non‐cognitivism. This article aims to question a fundamental presupposition behind such arguments. It has standardly been assumed (i) that if motivational internalism is true then moral judgements must consist (...) of attitudes that cannot be had without the relevant motivation, and (ii) that if motivational externalism is true, then moral judgements must consist of attitudes that one can have without being motivated. Against the background of a recent argument to the effect that the first of these assumptions is false, this article develops a parallel argument against the second. If this argument is correct, then motivational externalism is consistent with moral judgements being attitudes that one cannot have without being motivated. Together with the parallel argument concerning internalism, this means that the meta‐ethical significance of internalism and externalism must be reconsidered. (shrink)

How should we understand the relationship between binary belief and degree of belief? To answer this question, we should look to desire. Whatever relationship we think holds between desire and degree of desire should be used as our model for the relationship we think holds between belief and degree of belief. This parity pushes us towards an account that treats the binary attitudes as primary. But if we take binary beliefs as primary, we seem to face a serious problem. Binary (...) beliefs are insufficiently discriminating. If we treat them as primary, we will lack the resources needed for fruitful theorizing. This problem can, I argue, be solved if we think of an agent’s degree of belief that p as reducible to her binary believing that p and the change in the apparent reasons that would be needed to get her to withhold. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a novel defense of moderate pessimism about moral deference, i.e., the view that we have pro tanto reason to avoid moral deference. I argue that moral deference fails to give us the epistemic credentials to satisfy plausible norms of moral assertion. I then argue that moral assertions made solely on the basis of deferential moral beliefs violate a plausible epistemic and moral norm against withholding information that one knows, has evidence, or ought to believe will (...) importantly affect another person’s deliberation. Finally, I argue that not only does moral deference fail to put the audience in a good epistemic position it also puts the audience in a bad epistemic and moral position. First, there is a tight connection between outright believing something and being disposed to assert it and so deferential moral beliefs often motivate people to assert something that they don’t have the epistemic credentials to properly assertion. Second, there will often be moral reasons to make assertions—even based on deferential moral beliefs. These assertions, while all-things-considered permissible, will be epistemic impermissible and involve violating a moral norm. (shrink)