Self-effacing ethical theories are those that recommend their own erasure. Such theories are a controversial topic in contemporary moral philosophy. In this thesis, I shed light on what is and is not wrong with this type of theory. I examine two kinds of self-effacing ethical theories, a radical version of sophisticated consequentialism and developmental virtue ethics. I defend them against three common objections to self-effacing theories. I raise and develop two novel objections to self-effacing theories: a self-erasure objection and an (...) incompleteness objection. I conclude by arguing that these two objections pose fewer challenges for developmental virtue ethics than radical sophisticated consequentialism. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Wittgenstein’s approach to the problem of freedom of the will, primarily as expounded in his “Lectures on Freedom of the Will”. My overall aim is to show how Wittgenstein works to reconfigure the debates about freedom of the will so that it can be confronted as the kind of problem he thinks it ultimately is: an ethical and existential problem. Not published until 1989, the LFW have received scant critical attention. I (...) argue that Wittgenstein’s approach is highly distinctive in a way that makes it significantly less vulnerable than its closest cousins to certain powerful lines of critical attack. Chapter One brings out the distinctiveness of the LFW, especially vis-à-vis a putatively Wittgensteinian form of compatibilism, exemplified by Kai Nielsen. Albeit in different ways, Wittgenstein and Nielsen are both concerned to show why being caused to act, e.g. by the laws of nature, does not equate to being compelled to act, e.g. against one’s will. Unlike Nielsen, however, Wittgenstein further recognises that showing the compatibility of freedom and natural laws establishes no more than the logical consistency of holding people responsible, given determinism, and so cannot itself constitute a defence of our practices. Chapter Two introduces, as a still closer comparison with Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson’s practice-based defence of interpersonal, ‘reactive’ attitudes. I argue that the same correlation between a belief in freedom of the will and the primitive expression of ‘reactive’ attitudes/feelings is central also to the LFW. However, I further argue that certain major lines of criticism of Strawson’s practice-based defence of our current practices, familiar in the critical literature, do not in the same way threaten Wittgenstein’s defence of a broader practice-based approach, one that encompasses both reactive and non-reactive attitudes. Chapters Three and Four deal with the difficulties arising from the recognition that our most entrenched and ‘natural’ attitudes are non-reactive rather than reactive, including attitudes that are properly called ‘fatalistic’. Chapter Three develops a response to Galen Strawson’s criticism that if reactive and non-reactive attitudes are both equally expressive of human nature, then any merely descriptive approach to these attitudes will be incapable of resolving the fundamental question of which of these sorts of attitude we ought to adopt. Finally, Chapter Four examines Wittgenstein’s sustained interest in forms of life, especially religious forms of life, which appear to give equal weight to both reactive and non-reactive attitudes. (shrink)

In this article we explore the underpinnings of what we view as a recent" backlash" in English law, a judicial reaction against considering children's and young people's expressions of their own feelings about treatment as their" true" wishes. We use this case law as a springboard to conceptual discussion, rooted in (a) empirical psychological work on child development and (b) three key philosophical ideas: rationality, autonomy and identity.

In his seminal essay, 'Two Concepts of Rules', John Rawls draws a central distinction between justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it. In this review, Leslie Allan walks through Rawls's essay, highlighting his key arguments for a strengthened version of rule utilitarianism and reflecting on the lasting influence of his analysis.

It is rather natural to suppose that what we mean when we say that an institutional organization has a moral duty is parallel to whatever it is that we mean when we say that an individual has a duty. I challenge this interpretation on the grounds that it assumes that institutional organizations possess those characteristics or abilities requisite for moral agency—an assumption which I argue is highly suspicious. Against such an interpretation, I argue that we have very good reasons to (...) suppose that the term 'has a duty' is used equivocally across individual and institutional contexts. In other words, the meaning of an institutional duty-claim is quite different than that of an individual duty-claim, so much so that we ought to recognize that institutional duty-claims are not really duty-claims at all. (shrink)

In the United States, convicted offenders frequently lose the right to vote, at least temporarily. Drawing on the common observation that citizens of color lose democratic rights at disproportionately high rates, this chapter argues that this punishment is problematic in non-ideal societies because of the way in which it diminishes the political power of marginalized groups and threatens to reproduce patterns of domination and subordination, when they occur. This chapter then uses the case of penal disenfranchisement to illustrate how idealized (...) discussions of deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution often ignore the relationship between punishment and social/political power, and thus systematically obscure morally significant aspects of our broader penal practices. (shrink)

This chapter offers a concise discussion of classic utilitarianism which is the prototypical moral doctrine of the utilitarian family. It starts with an analysis of the classic utilitarian criterion of rightness, gives an overview over its virtues and vices, and suggests an overall assessment of its adequacy as a theory of morality. Furthermore, it briefly discusses whether classic utilitarianism holds promise as a philosophy for doing business.

In this paper we offer an argument against supererogation and in favour of moral perfectionism. We argue three primary points: 1) That the putative moral category is not generated by any of the main normative ethical systems, and it is difficult to find space for it in these systems at all; 2) That the primary support for supererogation is based on intuitions, which can be undercut by various other pieces of evidence; and 3) That there are better reasons to favour (...) perfectionism, including competing intuitions about the good-ought tie-up, and the epistemic preference for theoretical simplicity. (shrink)

In this thesis, I discuss the aggregation problem for T. M. Scanlon’s “contractualism”. I argue that Scanlonian contractualists have the following two options when it comes to the aggregation problem. First, they can choose to limit aggregation directly via a specific version of the Relevance View, “Sequential Claims-Matching”. Second, Scanlonian contractualists can adopt a so-called “mixed solution” of which I propose a specific version. My mixed solution does not limit aggregation. Rather, it either avoids some of the counterintuitive results in (...) certain cases, or at least makes these same results look a lot less counterintuitive by putting them into perspective thanks to a plausible plurality of precisely specified values. The stakes between these two options are as follows. The first option justifies Scanlon’s intuition in one vs. many cases of which his “World Cup Case” is one example, but it comes at the cost of a seemingly quite limited range of application: any version of the Relevance View only works in cases in which we have no more than two groups of competing claimants. The second option has the exact opposite implications: my mixed solution cannot justify Scanlon’s intuition in one vs. many cases, but it could be applied to any case with any number of groups of competing claimants. In this choice between pre-theoretical intuition and feasibility, I would urge Scanlonian contractualists to choose feasibility. (shrink)

This chapter first introduces naturalistic approaches to ethics more generally and distinguishes methodological ethical naturalism (the focus of this chapter), from metaphysical ethical naturalism. The second part then discusses evolutionary ethics as a specific variant of methodological ethical naturalism. After introducing the concepts of evolutionary theory that are relevant for evolutionary ethics, I will sketch the history of evolutionary ethics, which offers an interesting lesson about why it became a controversial topic, and then focus on four central questions about ethics (...) that can be approached from within the framework of evolutionary ethics: 1. What should we do? 2. Why are we moral? 3. Are there moral facts? 4. Can we have justified moral beliefs and moral knowledge? (shrink)

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and (...) subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)

A venerable idea in the history of moral philosophy is that central among the normative notions is the notion of goodness or value. This idea, which can be found at least as early as 1903 in G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, claims that goodness is central in that all other normative notions can be explained in terms of it. Moore’s approach and the dominant approach to the project of explaining the normative notions of rightness and what we have reason to do (...) is the consequentialist program. While the most famous element of this program is the consequentialist moral theory that says an act is right just in case the outcome of that act is at least as good as the outcome of any alternative act, the consequentialist program in general hopes to similarly explain the notion of a reason in terms of goodness. So the consequentialist theory of practical reason says that an agent has more reason to do some act a than to do some act b just in case the outcome of doing a is better than the outcome of doing b. (shrink)

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

A large portion of philosophy done in the Western analytic tradition attempts to provide conceptual analyses which are tested by examples that elicit intuitions. These intuitions are, in turn, used as evidence either for or against a given analysis. In recent years, there has been much discussion of the uses of intuitions from empirically minded philosophers and psychologists. The basic strategy is to discover empirically how “normal” folks think about certain topics in philosophy. This application of folk intuitions to philosophy (...) branches into roughly two basic approaches. The first is an attempt to show that in given domains, folk intuitions are not very reliable sources of evidence; hence, we have good reason to think that philosophers' intuitions are also not reliable sources of evidence in that domain. The second approach attempts to determine what folk concepts are. Once folk concepts are analyzed, they are then argued to be relevant to philosophical debates. My guiding question for this dissertation is the following one: Why should philosophers care about folk intuitions? One answer is that we should want some philosophical analyses to be grounded in everyday concepts. I argue that there are presently no adequate a priori arguments for the reliability of philosophical intuitions in some philosophically relevant areas. Whether intuitions are reliable enough to ground philosophical analyses is an empirical question. I review four domains where ordinary concepts have been argued to ground philosophical theorizing: (1) epistemology, (2) ethics, (3) free will, and (4) action theory. I argue that the available evidence suggests that we should be skeptical of intuitions in philosophy—but that skepticism does not entail radical skepticism. That is, the empirical studies reveal a wide variety of results which on the surface indicate that intuitions are not reliable (e.g., order effects or framing effects). However, I argue that these seeming instabilities are actually the results of stable differences in different groups of people. Hence, I argue that intuitions are stable in a surprising way—that different groups of people have stable intuitions. This intuition stability, while not the kind of monolithic stability many philosophers might desire, is argued to be sufficient to ground philosophical analyses in these domains. (shrink)

Predicting terrorist attacks with prediction markets has been accused of being immoral. While some of these concerns are about the likely effectiveness of prediction markets on terrorism (PMsoT), this paper discusses the three main reasons why even effective prediction markets on terrorism might be considered immoral. We argue that these three reasons establish only that PMsoT cause offense and/or fleeting mild harm, and that, even taken together, they do not constitute serious harm. The moral issues considered are that PMsoT: 1) (...) create character-affecting perverse incentives, 2) desensitise society to tragic events, and 3) disrespect important ideals. In addition to arguing against the force of these three potential moral problems, it is also argued that societies and governments already endorse intelligence-gathering methods that are clearly more immoral than PMsoT in the relevant respects. We also argue that some circumstances require governments to cause non-serious harm to some people in order to protect and promote the rights and welfare of its citizens. We conclude that a government’s obligation to protect and promote the rights and welfare of its citizens outweighs the non-serious harm that could be caused by effective PMsoT. As a result, we recommend that the likelihood of PMsoT being effective is investigated more closely. (shrink)

Theories of identification explain which elements in our mental economy determine our authoritative standpoint and which elements are external. My evaluative theory explains this special authority by considering the holistic pattern of emotional evaluations and evaluative judgments without excluding Jaworska's so-called "marginal cases".

This dissertation develops and defends a conception of sexualized violence that is rooted in philosophical theories of violence, and at the same time helps us understand the way that violence is connected to various kinds of oppression, namely, the oppression of women. It argues that sexualized violence, which is typically theorized through related notions of physical violation and psychological trauma, is best understood in terms of its moral quality. Sexualized violence against women is fundamentally a moral problem insofar as it (...) disrupts victims' ability to grow and develop in relationships with others, to conceive and meet responsibilities to and emerging from those relationships, and well as the ability to challenge unjust social norms, practices and institutions that in part constitute who we are. This moral quality of violence is investigated through an engagement with the concept of moral integrity, arguing that integrity is grounded in authenticity, understood through the existential-phenomenological tradition. Integrity-as-authenticity paves the way for understanding sexualized violence as a form of moral disintegration, where the dynamism and flexibility required of authentic selfhood is frustrated. Understanding violence and victimization in this way, I argue for a robust notion of advocacy as part of our response to victims. Advocacy--giving voice--will require the development of new concepts and language adequate to the experiences of victims, it will also require the cultivation of spaces and relationships where victims can speak, and it may require that we lend our voices to and for victims. (shrink)

At the heart of my pragmatic theory of truth and ontology is a view of the relation between language and reality which I term internal justification: a way of explaining how sentences may have truth-values which we cannot discover without invoking the need for the mystery of a correspondence relation. The epistemology upon which the theory depend~ is fallibilist and holistic ; places heavy reliance on modal idioms ; and leads to the conclusion that current versions of realism and anti-realism (...) are deficient. Just as my theory avoids the need for an epistemic 'given', it avoids the need for a metaphysical 'given' or 'joints'. I offer a view of the nature of philosophy and what it can properly achieve with respect to ontological questions ; since those views lead me to believe that philosophical discussion about what exists should be restricted to 'entities' discussed in non-philosophical contexts, my views on how we should understand claims made about the existence of middle-sized physical objects, theoretical entities in science, and abstract entities in mathematics, give the thesis a schematic completeness. My theory leads me to a conception of inquiry which defends the cognitive status of moral statements whilst being critical of Kantian and utilitarian approaches to morality. Chapter 1 explores the views of my closest philosophical allies: William James and Nelson Goodman. (shrink)

Integrity is one of the leading normative concepts employed in our society. We frequently talk about the degree of integrity of community leaders and famous historical figures, and we highly value integrity in our elected public officials. But philosophers have had a difficult time arriving at consensus about what integrity consists in. Some claim that it is a purely formal relation of consistency, others that it has to do primarily with one‟s identity, and still others that it involves subjective or (...) objective moral requirements. The primarily goal here is to outline the leading facets of integrity in the contemporary philosophical literature. (shrink)

Traditional philosophy has been under attack from several quarters in recent years. The traditional philosopher views philosophy as an armchair discipline relying, for the most part, on reason and reflection. Some philosophers doubt the legitimacy of this type of inquiry. Their arguments usually occur along two dimensions. Some argue that the primary data source for the armchair philosopher--intuition--does not provide evidence for philosophical theories. Others argue that conceptual analysis, which is the preferred method of inquiry for armchair philosophers, can't yield (...) the results the philosopher is looking for, since concepts like 'knowledge' or 'free-will' vary from culture to culture or even between persons within a culture. Finally, some philosophers argue that we should abandon the armchair program because philosophy should be an empirical enterprise continuous with the sciences. I argue that attempts to undermine intuition fail and that one can justify the evidential status of intuition in a non-question begging way. I then argue that attacks on the belief in shared concepts do not succeed because they often conflate the nature of scientific objects with those of interest to the philosopher. However, if concepts do vary from culture to culture, I show that the philosopher need not abandon the armchair. She can still do conceptual analysis but it will be only the entry point into the philosophical dialogue. I apply this approach to epistemology arguing that the central epistemic questions ought to be the existential and the normative. This approach helps to vindicate epistemic internalism. (shrink)

Deliberation issues in decision, and so might be taken as a paradigmatic volitional activity. Character, on the other hand, may appear pre-volitional: the dispositions that constitute it provide the background against which decisions are made. Bernard Williams offers an intriguing picture of how the two may be connected via the concept of practical necessities, which are at once constitutive of character and deliverances of deliberation. Necessities are thus the glue binding character and the will, allowing us to take responsibility for (...) our characters. Intriguing though the picture may be, it did not receive a thorough elaboration in Williams’s work. My aim here is to work out and defend what I take to be the most valuable aspect of Williams’s view of agency: its model of the way character and the will can jointly determine agency through mutual constitution. However, I argue that Williams’s attempt to use this model to ground his attack on Kantian morality does not succeed, because the primacy Williams accords to character over the will cannot yield the appropriate kind of normative authority, even from the perspective of the agent. I urge that we retain Williams’s model of the interaction between character and the will, modified to allow the will an authority that is not derived from the necessity of character. (shrink)

Absolutist systems of ethics have come in for harsh criticism on a number of fronts. The Principle of Double Effect was formulated by Catholic ethicists to overcome such objections. In this essay, Leslie Allan addresses four of the most prominent problems faced by an absolutist ethic and evaluates the extent to which the Principle of Double Effect is successful in avoiding or mitigating these criticisms.

The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer eds., Oxford University Press, 2015. (An open-access version of this article is available at the link below.) -/- Vegans who do not eat roadkill are immoral. Consider that the most common rationale for veganism is avoiding unnecessary harm to animals. It is a well-known fact that animals are killed in the cultivation of plant foods such as wheat, corn and soybeans. Mice, rabbits and other field creatures are routinely run (...) over by tractors or cut in two by harvesters. To buy commercial plant food therefore is to sustain the system responsible for these deaths. Road-killed animals, by contrast, are already dead, so the decision to consume them does not perpetuate a lethal process. A diet that consists entirely of plant food therefore will be responsible for a greater number of animal fatalities than a mostly-plant diet that also includes roadkill but no other meat. -/- So goes the argument of Donald Bruckner’s cheeky paper, “Strict Vegetarianism is Immoral,” a standout chapter of The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat. Anyone who follows the animal ethics literature will be familiar with defences of meat eating premised on a rejection of animal rights. Bruckner’s ingenious argument by contrast is premised on animals having rights. This captures something of the collection in general, which offers original moves and thought-provoking conclusions with impressive frequency. (shrink)

This essay explores the moral reasoning underpinning the common view that it is worse to kill a human compared with killing an animal. After examining the serious deficiencies of traditional approaches, the author develops an alternative utilitarian-based framework that proportions the seriousness of killing to levels of sentience. He demonstrates how this new approach avoids the problems faced by the application of standard utilitarian formulae in weighing the seriousness of killing many low-sentience animals vis-á-vis killing a single human. The author (...) concludes with a discussion of how this new approach overcomes the difficulties faced by Peter Singer’s dualist form of utilitarianism. (shrink)

Conservative and liberal approaches to the problem of abortion are oversimplified and deeply flawed. Accepting that the moral status of the conceptus changes during gestation, the author advances a more nuanced perspective. Through applying a form of rules in practice utilitarianism within the context of overall population policy, he provides a compelling ethical and legal framework for regulating contraception and abortion practices.