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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Symbolic protest and calculated silence
Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (1):83-102 (1979)
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How should we think about public rioting for political ends? Might it ever be more than morally excusable behavior? In this essay, I show how political rioting can sometimes be positively morally justified as an intermediate defensive harm in between civilly disobedient protest and political revolution. I do so by reading political rioters as, at the same time, uncivil and ultimately conciliatory with their state. Unlike civilly disobedient protestors, political rioters express a lack of faith in the value or applicability (...) |
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Those of us who enjoy certain products of the global industrial economy but also believe it is wrong to consume them are often so demoralized by the apparent inefficacy of our individual, private choices that we are unable to resist. Although he was a deontologist, Kant was clearly aware of this ‘consequent-dependent’ side of our moral psychology. One version of his ‘moral proof’ is designed to respond to the threat of such demoralization in pursuit of the Highest Good. That version (...) |
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I argue against the idea of basic desert. I claim that the supposed normative force of desert considerations is better understood in terms of dissociation. The starting point is to note that an important strategy in spelling out the apparent normative force of desert considerations appeals to the idea of complicity. I argue that the idea of basic desert cannot give a good explanation of this connection. I propose that it is rather dissociation that is explanatorily basic. I further argue (...) |
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In this essay, I argue that if we assume with free will skeptics that people lack moral responsibility, or at least a central form of it, we may still maintain that people are ‘basically’ deserving of certain treatment in response to their behavior. I characterize basic-desert justifications for treatment negatively, as justifications that do not depend on consequentialist, contractualist, or relational considerations. Appealing to attributionist accounts of responsibility as well as the symbolic value of protest, I identify protest as a (...) |
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What reason does one have to resist oppression? The reasons that most easily come to mind are those having to do with justice—reasons that arise from commitments to human equality and the common good. In this paper, I argue that there are also reasons of love—reasons that arise from personal attachments to specific people, projects, or activities. I defend a distinctive form of resistance that is characteristically undertaken for reasons of love, which I call Quiet Resistance. Contrary to theories that (...) |
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Sometimes, a group of people can produce a morally bad outcome despite each person’s individual act making no difference to whether the outcome is produced. Since each person’s act makes no difference, it seems the effects of the act cannot provide a reason not to perform it. This is problematic, because if each person acts in accordance with their reasons, each will presumably perform the act—and thus, the bad outcome will be brought about. I suggest that the key to solving (...) |
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Resisting oppression evokes images of picket lines and crowds of protestors demanding large-scale reform. But not all resistance is political or publicly broadcast. Some acts of resistance are done solo, in private, aim to achieve personal goals, and may not even be recognizable as resistance by others. I present a taxonomy of resistance to oppression that distinguishes acts of resistance along four dimensions: their subject, target, scope, and tone. The taxonomy brings to light a range of forms of resistance that (...) |
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This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...) |
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Some people feel that they should boycott Israel or their local anti-LGBTQ bakery, despite it being difficult to establish these obligations based on standard consequentialist or deontic considerations. I develop a framework on which such self-reports are accurate: I propose that we see some boycotting as akin to a public mourning practice, such as the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva. Mourning practices are complex and socially recognized ways of honoring the dead, as well as expressing and directing the range of (...) |
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Taken collectively, consumer food choices have a major impact on animal lives, human lives, and the environment. But it is far from clear how to move from facts about the power of collective consumer demand to conclusions about what one ought to do as an individual consumer. In particular, even if a large-scale shift in demand away from a certain product (e.g., factory-farmed meat) would prevent grave harms or injustices, it typically does not seem that it will make a difference (...) |
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It’s natural to think of acts of solidarity as being public acts that aim at good outcomes, particularly at social change. I argue that not all acts of solidarity fit this mold - acts of what I call ‘private solidarity’ are not public and do not aim at producing social change. After describing paradigmatic cases of private solidarity, I defend an account of why such acts are themselves morally virtuous and what role they can have in moral development. |
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Henry Shue has led the charge among moral philosophers in arguing that harms stemming from anthropogenic climate change constitute violations of basic rights and are therefore prohibited by duties of justice. Because frameworks such as Shue’s argue that duties of justice are at stake, one could object that the special urgency of those duties threatens to overrun the normatively protected space in which an agent makes her life her own. We argue that an alternative conception of how moral reasons combine (...) |
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The contrast typically made between utilitarianism and virtue theory is overdrawn. Utilitarianism is a universal emulator: it implies that we should lie, cheat, steal, even appropriate Aristotle, when that is what brings about the best outcomes. In some cases and in some worlds it is best for us to focus as precisely as possible on individual acts. In other cases and worlds it is best for us to be concerned with character traits. Global environmental change leads to concerns about character (...) |
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Many philosophers have argued that large language models (LLMs) subvert the traditional undergraduate philosophy paper. For the enthusiastic, LLMs merely subvert the traditional idea that students ought to write philosophy papers “entirely on their own.” For the more pessimistic, LLMs merely facilitate plagiarism. We believe that these controversies neglect a more basic crisis. We argue that, because one can, with minimal philosophical effort, use LLMs to produce outputs that at least “look like” good papers, many students will complete paper assignments (...) |
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Acts of futile resistance—harms against an aggressor which could not reasonably hope to avert the threat the aggressor poses—give rise to a puzzle: on the one hand, many such acts are intuitively permissible, yet on the other, these acts fail to meet the justificatory standards of defensive action. The most widely accepted solution to this puzzle is that victims in such cases permissibly defend against a secondary threat to their honour, dignity, or moral standing. I argue that this solution fails, (...) |
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Some consequentialists argue that ordinary individuals are obligated to act in specific, concrete ways to address large-scale harms. For example, they argue that we should each refrain from meat-eating and avoid buying sweatshop-made clothing. The case they advance for such prescriptions can seem intuitive and compelling: by acting in those ways, a person might help prevent serious harms from being produced at little or no personal cost, and so one should act in those ways. But I argue that such reasoning (...) |
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It is sometimes—but not always—permissible to let others do wrong. This paper is about why that is so. |
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Environmental ethicists have not reached a consensus about whether or not individuals who contribute to climate change have a moral obligation to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I side with those who think that such individuals do have such an obligation by appealing to the concept of integrity. I argue that adopting a political commitment to work toward a collective solution to climate change—a commitment we all ought to share—requires also adopting a personal commitment to reduce (...) |
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This paper aims to explore the feasibility of a restorative justice service in the context of work‐related deaths, specifically in Victoria. Section 1 provides a brief summary of restorative justice and the kind of processes that are most likely to be used in the context of work‐related death. Section 2 discusses an issue for the use of restorative justice in this context that is similar to the problem of whether it is fair or reasonable to assign personal criminal liability for (...) |
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Moral philosophy is often said to be about what we owe to each other. Do we owe anything to ourselves? |
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: A distinctive nonconsequentialist argument for criminalisation and punishment claims that the citizens of a state that did not criminalise serious mala in se perpetrated in its jurisdiction would be complicit in their commission. However, one objection to such an argument is that such citizens cannot be complicit because they play no causal role in the commission of the offence. Against this objection, I argue that causal contribution is unnecessary, and that one way in which a secondary agent can become (...) |
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In recent years, philosophers have developed a novel conception of blame as a kind of moral protest. This Protest View of Blame faces doubts about its intelligibility: can we make sense of inner ‘protest’ in cases of unexpressed blame? It also faces doubts about its descriptive adequacy: does ‘protest’ capture what is distinctive in reactions of blame? I argue that the Protest View can successfully answer the first kind of doubt, but not the second. Cases of contemptful blame and unexpressed (...) |
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IntroductionStrawsonian theories of moral responsibility, which aim to ground the phenomenon of moral responsibility in our practices of holding one another accountable for our actions, lead us to think more carefully about the content of those practices. Strawson and his followers have done much to explore the significance of the deontic reactive attitudes (resentment, indignation and guilt), which we tend to aim at wrongdoers.P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 48 (1962). See also, R. Jay (...) |
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The question of the morality of war is something of an embarrassment to liberal political thinkers. A philosophical tradition which aspires to found its preferred institutions in respect for individual autonomy, contract, and voluntary association, is naturally confronted by a phenomenon that is almost exclusively explained and justified in the language of States, force and territory. But the apparent difficulties involved in providing a convincing account of nature and ethics of war in terms of relations between individuals has not prevented (...) |
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