While the empirical evidence pointing to a gender gap in professional, academic philosophy in the English-speaking world is widely accepted, explanations of this gap are less so. In this paper, we aim to make a modest contribution to the literature on the gender gap in academic philosophy by taking a quantitative, corpus-based empirical approach. Since some philosophers have suggested that it may be the argumentative, “logic-chopping,” and “paradox-mongering” nature of academic philosophy that explains the underrepresentation of women in the discipline, (...) our research questions are the following: Do men and women philosophers make different types of arguments in their published works? If so, which ones and with what frequency? Using data mining and text analysis methods, we study a large corpus of philosophical texts mined from the JSTOR database in order to answer these questions empirically. Using indicator words to classify arguments by type, we search through our corpus to find patterns of argumentation. Overall, the results of our empirical study suggest that women philosophers make deductive, inductive, and abductive arguments in their published works just as much as male philosophers do, with no statistically significant differences in the proportions of those arguments relative to each philosopher’s body of work. (shrink)

I argue for the existence of a ‘ratcheting-up effect’: the behavior of moral saints serves to increase the level of moral obligation the rest of us face. What we are morally obligated to do is constrained by what it would be reasonable for us to believe we are morally obligated to do. Moral saints provide us with a special kind of evidence that bears on what we can reasonably believe about our obligations. They do this by modeling the level of (...) sacrifice a person can realistically bear. Exposure to moral saints thus ‘ratchets-up’ our obligations by combating a type of ignorance that would otherwise defeat those obligations. (shrink)

How should we respond to moral theories that put excessive demands on individual agents? Intramoral strategies concern the content of morality and set limits on how exacting moral demands may be. Extramoral strategies concern the normative status of morality and set limits on how significant moral demands may be. While both strategies are often discussed separately, I focus on a specific aspect of how they relate to each other: Do intramoral approaches assume that extramoral approaches fail, and if so, does (...) that render them implausible? This challenge becomes apparent when the two strategies are considered together, and my goal is to show how it can be dealt with. In particular, I argue that intramoral strategies do not depend on the failure of extramoral strategies: Even if morality has limited practical significance (which I also doubt), moral theories can be criticised for being too demanding in terms of content. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that maximizing act-consequentialism (MAC)—the theory that holds that agents ought always to act so as to produce the best available state of affairs—can accommodate both agent-centered options and supererogatory acts. Thus I will show that MAC can accommodate the view that agents often have the moral option of either pursuing their own personal interests or sacrificing those interests for the sake of the impersonal good. And I will show that MAC can accommodate the idea that (...) certain acts are supererogatory in the sense of not being morally required even though they are what the agent has most moral reason to do. These two theses are surprising in themselves, but even more surprising is how I arrive at them. I argue that anyone generally concerned to accommodate, in some coherent fashion, our pre-theoretical moral intuitions at both the normative and meta-ethical levels will have to give a certain account of agent-centered options and supererogatory acts and that this account is the very one that allows for the maximizing act-consequentialist to accommodate both. So my paper will not only be of interest to those concerned with the tenability of consequentialism, but also to anyone interested in giving a coherent account of our pre-theoretical moral intuitions. (shrink)

Abstract:Our critics confuse the role normative ethical theory can take in business ethics. We argue that as a practical discipline, business ethics must focus on norms, not the theories from which the norms derive. It is true that our original work is defective, but not in its form, but in its neglect of contemporary advances in feminist ethics.