In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

A happiness science has emerged amidst, and spans, the social sciences. This research, despite the long philosophical tradition on happiness, is in its infancy and a robust theory of happiness is called for. I will review parts of the literature and some of the main happiness theories using Ken Wilber’s Integral approach. I will concentrate largely on Aristotle’s eudaimonia, as that has re-emerged into the centre of happiness discussions as a possible contender for the prevailing subjective happiness theories. The Integral (...) approach seems to provide valuable insights into many happiness theories, juxtapose them in a comprehensible way, pinpoint deficiencies, and propose enhancements. Amongst other things, I will propose a new happiness theory combining John Kekes’ happiness theory with ecological ethics and I will conclude that enlightenment proves to be a good candidate for the ultimate good, or summum bonum, I will enlarge on Aristotle’s theory and propose that Wilber’s theory provides an ‘Integral road map towards eudaimonia enhanced – the enlightenment’. I will argue that eudaimonia and enlightenment, though superficially dissimilar, accord in surprising ways, to a great extent. I will discuss whether the discussion of happiness and morality is critically biased, and I will discuss the societal implications that Wilber’s conception of the human might have through its implications for happiness theories. (shrink)

Can any being worthy of worship make others worship it? I think not. By way of an analogy to love, I argue that it is perfectly coherent to think that one could be made to worship. However, forcing someone to worship violates their autonomy, not because worship must be freely given, but because forced worship would be inauthentic—much like love earned through potions. For this reason, I argue that one cannot be made to worship properly; forced worship would be unfitting. (...) My principal claim is that no being worthy of worship could exercise the power to make others worship it, since the act of making another worship would necessarily make one unworthy of worship. (shrink)

This is a critical review of Terence Irwin's The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study. Volume III: From Kant to Rawls. Among other things, the review remarks on the book's treatment of utilitarianism and on its lack of discussion of work in feminist ethics in the twentieth century.

Richard Posner avers in his A Failure of Capitalism that managers bear no moral responsibility for the financial crisis. This view has numerous supporters in economics and philosophy, and I shall call it the ‘exemption view’. In this paper, I criticise four arguments for the exemption view and propose a superior alternative, the ‘participation view’. The participation view claims that managers can be co-responsible for harm, even if their actions were not necessary or sufficient conditions for its occurrence. The paper (...) spells out three conditions for moral responsibility according to the participation view. (shrink)

Recently, some of the leading proponents of the view that there is widespread incommensurability among goods have suggested that the incommensurability of some goods is a constitutive feature of the goods themselves. So, for example, a friendship and a million dollars are incommensurable because it is part of what it is to be a friendship that it be incommensurable with money. According to these ‘constitutive incommensurabilists’ incommensurability follows from the very nature of certain goods. In this paper, I examine this (...) idea and argue that constitutive incommensurabilists have mistaken for constitutive incommensurability a particular emphatic kind of comparability. This examination involves an account of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ goods and an explanation of how goods of different ‘types’ figure in practical conflict. (shrink)

Open Access: What if it doesn’t get better? Against more hopeful and optimistic views that it is not just ideal but possible to put an end to what John Rawls calls “the great evils of human history,” I aver that when it comes to evils caused by human beings, the situation is hopeless. We are better off with the heavy knowledge that evils recur than we are with idealizations of progress, perfection, and completeness; an appropriate ethic for living with such (...) heavy knowledge, which I call an ‘Imperfectionist Ethic,’ could include resisting evils, improving the lives of victims, and even enjoying ourselves. Better conceptions of the objects of hope, and the good life, inform a praxis-centered, nonideal ethic, supportive of sustained moral motivation, resilience, and even cheer. I connect elements of stoic and pessimistic philosophy in order to outline some normative recommendations for living with evils. A praxis-centered ethic would helpfully adjust our expectations from changing an uncontrollable future, to developing better skills for living in a world that exceeds our control. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been overwhelming public health-care systems around the world. With demand exceeding the availability of medical resources in several regions, hospitals have been forced to invoke triage. To ensure that this difficult task proceeds in a fair and organised manner, governments scrambled experts to draft triage guidelines under enormous time pressure. Although there are similarities between the documents, they vary considerably in how much weight their respective authors place on the different criteria that they propose. Since most (...) of the recommendations do not come with ethical justifications, analysing them requires that one traces back these criteria to their underlying theories of distributive justice. In the literature, COVID-19 triage has been portrayed as a value conflict solely between utilitarian and egalitarian elements. While these two accounts are indeed the main antipodes, I shall show that in fact all four classic theories of distributive justice are involved: utilitarianism, egalitarianism, libertarianism, and communitarianism. Detecting these in the documents and classifying the suggested criteria accordingly enables one to understand the balancing between the different approaches to distributive justice—which is crucial for both managing the current pandemic and in preparation for the next global health crisis. (shrink)

Is prostitution immoral? In this book, Rob Lovering argues that it is not. Offering a careful and thorough critique of the many―twenty, to be exact―arguments for prostitution's immorality, Lovering leaves no claim unchallenged. Drawing on the relevant literature along with his own creative thinking, Lovering offers a clear and reasoned moral defense of the world's oldest profession. Lovering demonstrates convincingly, on both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist grounds, that there is nothing immoral about prostitution between consenting adults. The legal implications of this (...) view are also brought to bear on the current discourse surrounding this controversial topic. (shrink)

This paper explicates a conception of injury as right-violation, which allows us to distinguish between setbacks to interests that should, and should not, be the concern of theories of justice. It begins by introducing a hybrid theory of rights, grounded in (a) the mobilisation of our moral equality to (b) protect our most important interests, and shows how violations of rights are the concern of justice, while setbacks where one of the twin grounds of rights is defeated are not. It (...) then looks more closely at the substantive moral components of injury, namely harm—damage to one’s interests—and wrong—disrespect for one’s moral equality. It argues that, on the hybrid conception of rights, harm and wrong are individually necessary and jointly sufficient components of injury, and the disvalue of neither is reducible to the other—in particular, it is a mistake to construe the disrespect identified by wrong as another damaged interest. Finally, it distinguishes between the public and private dimensions of harm and wrong, and makes some preliminary suggestions as to whether the remedy for these different dimensions should lie in criminal, distributive, or corrective justice. (shrink)

Aristotle's illustrations of the fallacy of Figure of Speech (or Form of Expression) are none too convincing. They are tied to Aristotle's theory of categories and to peculiarities of Greek grammar that fail to hold appeal for a contemporary readership. Yet, upon closer inspection, Figure of Speech shows many points of contact with views and problems that inhabit 20th-century analytical philosophy. In the paper, some Aristotelian examples will be analyzed to gain a better understanding of this fallacy. The case of (...) the Third Man argument and some modern cases lend plausibility to the claim that Figure of Speech is of more interest as a type of fallacy than has generally been assumed. Finally, a case is made for the view that Figure of Speech, though listed among the fallacies dependent upon language, is not properly classified as a fallacy of ambiguity. More likely, it should be looked upon as a type of non sequitur. This has important consequences for the profile of dialogue associated with this fallacy. (shrink)

What exactly does conceptual analysis consist in? Is it empirical or a priori? How does it support philosophical theses? and What kinds of thesis are these? There is no consensus on these questions in contemporary philosophy. This study aims to defend conceptual analysis by showing that it comprises a number of different methods and by explaining their importance in philosophy. After setting out an initial dilemma for conceptual analysis, the study outlines a minimal ecumenical account of concepts, as well as (...) an account of concept possession and concept employment. On the basis of these accounts, the study then argues that there are both empirical and a priori forms of conceptual analysis, and that each can be defended as legitimate methods. The philosophical interest of conceptual analysis, however, resides in relying on all three types of method in the service of answering philosophical concerns. This is illustrated by three sample cases. (shrink)

The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics interviewed Kagan about his formative years; his work on death, the moral status of animals, and desert; his views on changing one’s mind and convergence in philosophy; and his advice for graduate students in moral philosophy.

In the following I take issue with the allegation that liberalism must inevitably be guilty of ‘abstract individualism’. I treat Michael Sandel’s well-known claim that there are ‘loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are’ as representative of this widely held view. Specifically, I argue: (i) that Sandel’s account of the manner in which ‘constitutive’ loyalties function as reasons for action presupposes the (...) possibility of there being (what I call) ‘underivable particular obligations’, but that such obligations are, in fact, a logical impossibility; and (ii) that Sandel’s account of the self as necessarily ‘encumbered’ presupposes an account of personal identity which confuses identification with definition, and which is, therefore, fundamentally flawed. (shrink)

In this response paper I defend an alternative position to both Jennifer McMahon’s neo-Kantian view on the aesthetics of perceptual experience, and the sense-data theory that she rightly repudiates. McMahon argues that sense perception is informed by concepts “all the way out,” and that the empiricist notion of unmediated sensuous access to entities in the world is untenable. She further claims that art is demanding inasmuch as it compels one to engage in an open-ended, cognitive interpretive process with sensuous phenomena, (...) and that it is this very process that opens up a space for critique of the entrenched representational concepts by which we navigate the world. In contrast, I argue that the sensuous itself is a source of demand. Perceptual objects, in virtue of their material constitution, are inexhaustible plexuses of meaning that demand a kind of sensuous, interpretive response on the part of our bodily posture and orientation. Works of art offer opportunities for critique insofar as they reveal dimensions of sensuous reality hitherto covered over by status quo conceptual distributions. McMahon is right that sensuous objects are never simply given. But, I claim, she is wrong to suggest that it is only by way of conceptual mediation that we make contact with the world. On the contrary, the sensuous self-presentation of things is always at the same time a demand on our sensory apparatus that resists encapsulation by concepts. (shrink)

Many of its students are first drawn to Kant's practical philosophy because it seems to promise a theory of morality both objective and practicable. Moral theory, as Kant conceives of it, must abst...

The practice-dependent approach to justice has received a lot of attention in post-millennium political philosophy. It has been developed in different directions and its normative implications have been criticized, but little attention has been directed to the very distinction between practice-dependence and practice-independence and the question of what theoretically differentiates a practice-dependent account from mainstream practice-independent accounts. The core premises of the practice-dependent approach, proponents argue, are meta-normative and methodological. A key feature is the presumption that a concept of justice (...) is dependent on the function or aim of the social practices to which it is supposed to be applied. Closely related to this meta-normative thesis is an interpretive methodology for deriving principles of justice from facts about existing practices, in particular regarding their point and purpose. These two premises, practice-dependent theorists claim, differentiate their account since they are not accepted by practice-independent accounts and they justify different principles of justice than practice-independent accounts. Our aim in this article is to refute both and, demonstrating that practice-independent accounts may indeed accept the meta-normative and methodological premises of the practice-dependent accounts, and that we are given no theoretical reason to think that practice-dependent accounts justify other principles of justice for a practice than do practice-independent accounts. In other words, practice-dependent theorists have not substantiated their claim that practice-dependence is theoretically differentiated from mainstream accounts. When practice-dependent proponents argue for other principles of justice than mainstream theorists, it will be for the usual reason in normative theory: their first-order normative arguments differ. (shrink)

Whatever the finer details, Francis Hutcheson is clearly some form of proto-, quasi-, pseudo-utilitarian. But for any utilitarian, the full picture of their moral theory will only emerge once we understand their theory of the good. What, according to said utilitarian, is the nature of happiness? How do we aggregate happiness across persons? In this paper, I discuss two important aspects of Hutcheson's utilitarian axiology each with their own puzzles of interpretation. The first involves Hutcheson's theory of happiness or the (...) ‘natural good’. Hutcheson appears to vacillate between a quantitative hedonism and a qualitative hedonism. The second concerns Hutcheson's aggregative axiology. Hutcheson appears to offer three inconsistent approaches to understanding the overall good. Bringing these puzzles to light, I think, brings forward a number of challenges in understanding the normative ethics of a key figure in the development of utilitarian moral thought. (shrink)

A number of philosophers from Hobbes to Mill to Parfit have held some combination of the following views about the Golden Rule: (a) It is the cornerstone of morality across many if not all cultures. (b) It affirms the value of moral impartiality, and potentially the core idea of utilitarianism. (c) It is immune from evolutionary debunking, that is, there is no good naturalistic explanation for widespread acceptance of the Golden Rule, ergo the best explanation for its appearance in different (...) traditions is that people have perceived the same non-natural moral truth. De Lazari-Radek and Singer employ all three of these claims in an argument meant to vindicate Sidgwick's ‘principle of universal benevolence’. I argue that the Golden Rule is the cornerstone of morality only in Christianity, it does not advocate moral impartiality, and there is a naturalistic explanation for why versions of the Golden Rule appear in different traditions. (shrink)

The inevitable global marketplace creates a need for freer movement of labor. The question is not whether this movement will occur but how it will be implemented. This paper discusses the idea of selling citizenship rights as an alternative approach for allocating immigration and permanent residency. First presented is the rationale for using the market approach to selling citizenship. Next the political, country image, economic, and ethical implementation issues of the proposal are discussed. And last, selling citizenship is discussed in (...) terms of ethical theory and frameworks. (shrink)

In this article I explore various facets of Nozick’s famous thought experiment involving the experience machine. Nozick’s original target is hedonism—the view that the only intrinsic prudential value is pleasure. But the argument, if successful, undermines any experientialist theory, i.e. any theory that limits intrinsic prudential value to mental states. I first highlight problems arising from the way Nozick sets up the thought experiment. He asks us to imagine choosing whether or not to enter the machine and uses our choice (...) (or rather the choice he assumes most people will have) as evidence against experientialist theories. But for this strategy to succeed it must be possible to distinguish between self-interested and non-self-interested reasons for declining to enter the machine, and there is no obvious way to do this without begging the question against the hedonist. In successive sections I then (a) consider a common misconception of Nozick’s conclusion (that he thinks machine life is the worst life), (b) consider different intuitions about what is important to well-being but missing from machine life, and finally (c) explain what “the experience requirement” is, and describe its relationship to debates about experientialist theories. (shrink)

Aristotle, though not the first Greek virtue ethicist, was the first to establish virtue ethics as a distinct philosophical discipline. His exposition of the subject in his Nicomachean Ethics set the terms of subsequent debate in the European and Arabic traditions by proposing a set of plausible assumptions from which virtue ethics should proceed. His conception of human well-being and virtue as well as his brand of ethical naturalism were influential from antiquity through the Middle Ages and continue to be (...) influential today. (shrink)

This volume collects selected papers delivered at the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, which was held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in July 2018. It includes papers dealing with the past, present, and future of utilitarianism – the theory that human happiness is the fundamental moral value – as well as on its applications to animal ethics, population ethics, and the future of humanity, among other topics.

When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn't engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn't engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as what people working in informal logic tend to say about argumentation. (...) -/- Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what's wrong with it. Still, even if you can't figure out what's wrong with an argument, you can know that it's misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence-types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn't engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn't engage with it at all. You shouldn't engage open-mindedly because you shouldn't be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn't engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. -/- In making this case, Jeremy Fantl discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers. (shrink)

This chapter presents arguments for two slightly different versions of the thesis that the value of persons is incomparable. Both arguments allege an incompatibility between the demands of a certain kind of practical reasoning and the presuppositions of value comparisons. The significance of these claims is assessed in the context of the “Numbers problem”—the question of whether one morally ought to benefit one group of potential aid recipients rather than another simply because they are greater in number. It is argued (...) that many of the popular approaches to this problem—even ones that avoid the aggregation of personal value—are imperiled by the incomparability theses. -/- . (shrink)

This research is about altruism. In our first chapter, our quest to find whether we are essentially altruistic starts with questioning particular ways of inquiry and proposes a philosophy of unbracketing. In our second chapter, we realise that our proposal starts with an imperative – a prescription. We begin by meditating on the phenomenon of prescription which seems to precede all ways of inquiry. Our analysis of prescription reveals that altruism is to prescribe oneself towards an Other. This type of (...) prescription is to promise a future for an Other. To promise is to give one’s word and to undertake to realising it. In our third chapter, we explore the act of “giving one’s word.” To give one’s word is beyond a speech act. In fact, it is to give one’s logos. An altruistic attempt is carried out in this chapter to liberate ‘logos’ from particular conceptions and allow for its universal meaning to emerge. Logos is traced back to its inceptual conception as existence or will to power – a will to future. This philosophical excavation leads us to our fourth chapter where we re-encounter our original paradox. That is, while human reality starts with a promise of helping someone to make sense – to understand – we have been trying to understand understanding, or how we make sense, by removing the Other and by focusing only on subjective conditions. In this chapter, we reveal how to understand an Other is an altruistic act. In our final chapter, we carefully observe that human existence is a gift from the Other. We describe this gift as a metaphysical passage from being to existence – an altruistic act. A passage which is created by an Other who promises to give us the means to be able to create meaning, that is to say, to exist. (shrink)

In this dissertation I examine the topics of ethics, religion, and their relationship in the work of Charles Taylor. I take Taylor's attempt to confront modern disenchantment by seeking a kind of re-enchantment as my guiding thread. Seeking re-enchantment means, first of all, defending an `engaged realist' account of strong evaluation, i.e., qualitative distinctions of value that are seen as normative for our desires. Secondly, it means overcoming self-enclosure and achieving self-transcendence, which I argue should be understood in terms of (...) transcending a `lower' mode of selfhood for a `higher' one in concern for `strong goods'. One of the main issues that Taylor raises is whether re-enchantment requires theism for its full adequacy. He advances - often as `hunches' - controversial claims regarding the significance of theism (1) for defending strong evaluative realism and (2) for motivating an ethic of universal human concern. I seek to fill out his hunches in terms of a theistic teleological perspective that is centered on the `telos of communion'. I argue that such a view is important for overcoming the problem of what Bernard Williams calls the `radical contingency' of ethical beliefs, which seems to undermine their normative authority. However, I argue that if a non-theistic view of cosmic purpose (e.g., Thomas Nagel's view) can be regarded as a viable option, then it could also help to address this problem and support a kind of re-enchantment. Taylor also advances the controversial view that (3) there is an ineradicable draw to `transcendence' in human life in connection to the quest for the meaning of life. Here he opposes certain mainstream theories of secularization that see it as a process involving the ineluctable fading away of the relevance of religion. I seek to fill out and defend Taylor's view in this matter. Besides providing a reading of Taylor's work as a whole and advancing further some of the issues he raises, I also examine his general evaluative framework based on his account of strong evaluation. In doing so I show how he provides a distinct and important perspective among contemporary moral philosophers. (shrink)

In this chapter I explore what painful art can tell us about the nature and importance of human welfare. My goal is not so much to defend a new solution to the paradox of tragedy, as it is to explore the implications of the kinds of solutions that I find attractive. Both nonhedonic compensatory theories and constitutive theories explain why people seek out painful art, but they have troublesome implications. On some narrow theories of well-being, they imply that painful art (...) is bad for us. Accordingly, we may rightly wonder if it rational for people to watch melodramas or to listen to love songs. One might think that we should generally avoid unpleasant works of art. This implication flirts with absurdity. I show how it can be avoided by making a distinction between well-being and worth. (shrink)

Humans face wide ranging and global challenges in the Anthropocene, the most prominent of which is anthropogenic climate change. One initial pivot towards sustainability, particularly in my home country of the United States, has been to rely heavily on technological innovation powered most obviously by engineers. Using the climate activist Greta Thunberg's speech at the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference as my inspiration, I try to show how some of the technology based solutions only entrench what I call the (...) “Bestance” mentality, that is, the fundamental stance or orientation toward the natural world in the Anthropocene wherein all entities show up as mere resources. Upon showing the various ways in which traditional ethical approaches and environmental philosophical approaches have proved unhelpful in navigating the challenges of the Anthropocene, I try to demonstrate and how a Heideggerian ecophenomenological approach can help us not only understand how the world appears to many of us in the Anthropocene, but also what a more graceful way of being might look like in Heidegger's concept of “dwelling.” Using specific examples of current technologies pervasively normalized in the United States, including hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, desalination, and artificial nitrogen based fertilization, I use Heidegger's philosophical concepts to show how the land, sea, and air can show up as Bestand in the Anthropocene, that is, merely materials on hand to be manipulated in order to serve human interests. (shrink)

Many think that love would be a casualty of free will skepticism. I disagree. I argue that love would be largely unaffected if we came to deny free will, not simply because we cannot shake the attitude, but because love is not chosen, nor do we want it to be. Here, I am not alone; others have reached similar conclusions. But a few important distinctions have been overlooked. Even if hard incompatibilism is true, not all love is equal. Although we (...) have only minimal control over love, it can be more or less authentic. I develop my position by considering the fictional trope of love potions and the implications of a futuristic psychotropic, Lovezac—Viagra for the heart. But I am not as optimistic as some. Even though free will skepticism would not jeopardize love-the-feeling, there are reasons to think that loving relationships might not be immune. (shrink)

Many questions concerning health involve values. How well is a health system performing? How should resources be allocated between the health system and other uses or among competing healthrelated uses? How should the costs of health services be distributed among members of a population? Who among those in need of transplants should receive scarce organs? What is the best way to treat particular patients? Although many kinds of expertise bear on these questions, values play a large role in answering them. (...) These values are of many kinds – judgments about how health states contribute to the well-being of individuals depend on views about what is good for a person, whereas judgments about how to share the costs of health care or about how to distribute scarce organs among those in need of transplants depend on theories of fairness. The value judgments that need to be made are not only multifaceted and heterogeneous; they are also controversial. Both the understanding of the questions and the substance of the answers may vary widely from individual to individual and among different groups within countries and across national boundaries. How are these many complicated, difficult and controversial evaluative questions to be answered? This could be a question about who should answer them as well as a question about how they should be answered. There are various possible mechanisms, and there is no reason why the same method should be employed to answer every question. Among the possible methods are (1) moral argument, (2) political deliberation and (3) eliciting preferences or judgments from some group. Included in the third method lie many different techniques of elicitation. For example, one could study attitudes by the use of deliberative (focus) groups, by permitting individual choice in some sort of market or quasi-market, by polling or by voting. These methods of answering evaluative questions are not always incompatible with one another. Moral argument can play a role within political deliberation, deliberation by focus groups, individual market choice, or voting.. (shrink)

This thesis concerns our moral and epistemic responsibilities regarding our concepts. I argue that certain concepts can be morally, epistemically, or socially problematic. This is particularly concerning with regard to our concepts of social kinds, which may have both descriptive and evaluative aspects. Being ignorant of certain concepts, or possessing mistaken conceptions, can be problematic for similar reasons, and contributes to various forms of epistemic injustice. I defend an expanded view of a type of epistemic injustice known as ‘hermeneutical injustice’, (...) where widespread conceptual ignorance puts members of marginalized groups at risk of their distinctive and important experiences lacking intelligible interpretations. Together, I call the use of problematic concepts or the ignorance of appropriate concepts ‘conceptual incapacities’. I discuss the conditions under which we may be responsible for our conceptual incapacities on several major theories of responsibility, developing my own account of responsibility in the process, according to which we are responsible for something just in case it was caused by one of our reasons-responsive constitutive psychological traits. However, I argue that regardless of whether we are responsible for something, we may still be required to take responsibility for it. Whether or not we are responsible for our conceptual incapacities, we are required to reflect critically upon them in a variety of scenarios that throw our use of those concepts into question. I consider the method of conceptual engineering — the philosophical critique and revision of concepts — as one way we might take responsibility for our concepts, or at least, defer that duty to experts. But, this top-down model of conceptual revision is insufficient. Using a pragmatist model of the social epistemology of morality, I argue that conceptual inquiry is a social endeavour in which we are all required to participate, to some degree. (shrink)

I present and defend (1) an account of ethical judgments as judgments about our reasons to feel specific motivationally laden attitudes, (2) an account of what an agent should do in terms of what would achieve ends that she has reason to be motivated to pursue, and (3) an account of an agent’s reasons for motivation (and thus action) in terms of the prescriptions of the most fundamental principles that guide her deliberations. Using these accounts, I explain the connection between (...) ethics and reasons for action, how ethical judgments are both descriptive and intrinsically motivating, and how ethical facts arise from facts about agents’ deliberations. (shrink)

This thesis defends John Rawls’s constructivist theory of justice against three distinct challenges. -/- Part one addresses G. A. Cohen’s claim that Rawls’s constructivism is committed to a mistaken thesis about the relationship between facts and principles. It argues that Rawls’s constructivist procedure embodies substantial moral commitments, and offers an intra-normative reduction rather than a metaethical account. Rawls’s claims about the role of facts in moral theorizing in A Theory of Justice should be interpreted as suggesting that some of our (...) moral beliefs, which we are inclined to hold without reference to facts, are, in fact, true, because certain facts obtain. This thesis and the acknowledgement of the moral assumptions of Rawls’s constructivism help to show that Rawls does not, and does not need to, deny Cohen’s thesis. -/- Part two defends the characterization of the decision problem in Rawls’s original position as a decision problem under uncertainty. Rawls stipulates that the denizens of the original position lack information that they could use to arrive at estimates of the likelihood of ending up in any given social position. It has been argued that Rawls does not have good grounds for this stipulation. I argue that given the nature of the value function we should attribute to the denizens of the original position and our cognitive limitations, which also apply to the denizens of the original position, their decision problem can be characterized as one under uncertainty even if we stipulate that they know that they have an equal chance of being in any individual’s place. -/- Part three assesses the claim that a true commitment to Rawls’s difference principle requires a further commitment to an egalitarian ethos. This egalitarian ethos is offered as a means to bring about equality and Pareto-optimality. Accordingly, I try to undermine the case for an egalitarian ethos by challenging the desirability of the ends it is supposed to further or by showing that it is redundant. I argue that if primary goods are the metric of justice, then Pareto optimality in the space of the metric of justice is undesirable. I then argue that if the metric of justice is welfare, depending on the theory of welfare we adopt, an egalitarian ethos will either be redundant or will have objectionably paternalistic consequences. (shrink)

Moral nihilism maintains that value judgments cannot be justified. In this paper I argue against two prominent nihilistic theories: error theory and expressivism. First I present a meta-valuation thesis, which holds that it would be more valuable if at least some value judgments were justified. Second I argue for a value-justification thesis, which holds that the greater value of value-justifying theories warrants a rejection of nihilistic theories. This latter thesis requires a pragmatist premise: justified beliefs are the most valuable of (...) possible beliefs. With this premise and a critique of meta-ethical theory choice, I argue that meta-ethical justification proceeds via an atypical form of the method of reflective equilibrium. Since this particular method cannot produce a justification for error theory or expressivism, I conclude that these two forms of moral nihilism should be rejected in favor of more valuable meta-ethical theories. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the question of what role Mill regards rules as playing in the determination of morally permissible action by drawing on his remarks about instrumentally rational action. First, overviews are provided of consequentialist theories and of the rule-worship or incoherence objection to rule-consequentialist theories. Then a summary is offered of the considerable textual evidence suggesting that Mill’s moral theory is, in fact, a rule-consequentialist one. It is argued, however, that passages in the final chapter of A System of (...) Logic suggest that Mill anticipates and endorses the ruleworship or incoherence objection to rule-consequentialist theories. The chapter concludes by exploring some ways in which this tension in Mill’s thought might be resolved. (shrink)

The subject-matter of this essay is the moral status of nature. This subject is dealt with in terms of normative reasons. The main question is if there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in addition to the numerous indirect normative reasons that there are for doing so. Roughly, if there is some such reason, and that reason applies to any moral agent, then nature has direct moral status as I use the phrase. I develop the notions of direct (...) normative reason and direct moral status in detail and identify and discuss the two main types of theory according to which nature has direct moral status: analogy-based nature-considerism and non-analogy-based nature-considerism. I argue for the plausibility of a particular version of the latter, but against the plausibility of any version of the former. The theory that is representative of AN claims that nature has direct moral status in virtue of possessing interests. Proponents of this theory fail to show that nature has interests of the kind that they reasonably want to ascribe to it, and that interests of this kind are morally significant. In contrast to AN, NN comes in a variety of different forms. I elaborate a version of NN according to which there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in virtue of its unique complexity, and its indispensability. I argue that even if these reasons should turn out not to apply to any moral agent, they are still genuine direct normative reasons: there is nothing irrational or misdirected about them. Finally, I show how the question of whether there are direct normative reasons to care for nature is relevant to private and political decision-making concerning nature. This is exemplified with a case from the Swedish mountain region. (shrink)

In this paper, the famous Bikolano folk way of healing called Santigwar is reconstructed as a procedure of social critique which was ideationally made possible by Kristian Cordero’s metaphorical configuration of its practice from healing a sick body to a poetics of social diagnosis. The legitimacy of this effortis grounded on the normative significance of the practice of santigwar toBikolanos in the present and its historical background of conversion andresistance in Bikol. It is argued that while santigwar, in Cordero, is (...) a literarypiece for social healing, it could likewise serve as a local concept for socialcritique refurbished with the conceptual tools borrowed from the recognitivetheory of Axel Honneth. Santigwar captures in literary imagination the brand ofsocial criticism called immanent critique geared for freedom yet grounded innormativity. Hence pagsantigwar sa banwaan becomes a philosophical praxis ofsocial healing performed for social emancipation —using Fenella Cannell’s terminology of the ethnographic value of santigwar to Bikolanos —for a “peoplewho have nothing.” . (shrink)