The Covid-19 pandemic raises the need for an ethical framework addressing unique questions of airborne infectious disease. In particular, are you ethically obliged to wear a face mask? If so, why and when? The Respiratory Ethics Framework (REF) herein derives answers from ethical norms. Always covering coughs and sneezes just in case you might be infectious is an ethical norm. But if you are infectious with an airborne illness, you are probably spreading germs even with every breath and vocalization. (...) Therefore, given that respiratory covering should be done to prevent spreading germs, you should wear a mask if you believe you are infectious because it also provides covering while breathing and vocalizing. REF is grounded in the non-harm principle. Why should we avoid spreading infections to others? Because they can cause bodily physical harm and we should act to prevent causing such harm to others without justifiable reason. Under REF, the magnitude of your obligation to mask is proportional to the magnitude of risk you pose to others by way of airborne germs. This functional relationship is logically modeled and visually mapped with a decision matrix in this essay. (shrink)

Moral concern with food intake is as old asmorality itself. In the course of history, however,several ways of critically examining practices of foodproduction and food intake have been developed.Whereas ancient Greek food ethics concentrated on theproblem of temperance, and ancient Jewish ethics onthe distinction between legitimate and illicit foodproducts, early Christian morality simply refused toattach any moral significance to food intake. Yet,during the middle ages food became one of theprinciple objects of monastic programs for moralexercise (askesis). During (...) the seventeenth andeighteenth century, food ethics was transformed interms of the increasing scientific interest in foodintake, while in the nineteenth century the socialdimension of food ethics was discovered, with theresult that more and more attention was given to theproduction and distribution of food products. Becauseof the increasing distance between the production andconsumption of food products ever since, theoutstanding feature of contemporary food ethics is itreliance and dependence on labeling practices. (shrink)

Digital ethics, also known as computer ethics or information ethics, is now a lively field that draws a lot of attention, but how did it come about and what were the developments that lead to its existence? What are the traditions, the concerns, the technological and social developments that pushed digital ethics? How did ethical issues change with digitalisation of human life? How did the traditional discipline of philosophy respond? The article provides an overview, proposing historical (...) epochs: ‘pre-modernity’ prior to digital computation over data, via the ‘modernity’ of digital data processing to our present ‘post-modernity’ when not only the data is digital, but our lives themselves are largely digital. In each section, the situation in technology and society is sketched, and then the developments in digital ethics are explained. Finally, a brief outlook is provided. (shrink)

The chapter traces the history of psychiatric ethics with a focus on the emergence of autonomy and how assumptions and thresholds surrounding informed consent and decision-making capacity have changed over the centuries. Innovators like Philippe PInel and William Tuke are featured in this account of how the 'mad' and the abuses of the 'domestication paradigm' of madness eventually gave way to more humanitarian approaches of treating the 'mad', like moral treatment. The chapter closes with a brief reflection regarding (...) the limits of autonomy and the decline of paternalism in psychiatric ethics. (shrink)

Scholars studying classic political texts face an important decision: Should these texts be read as artifacts of history or as sources for still-valid insights about politics today? Competing historical and “presentist” approaches to political thought do not have a methodological dispute—that is, a disagreement about the most effective scholarly means to an agreed-upon end. They instead have an ethical dispute about the respective value of competing activities that aim at different purposes. This article examines six ethical arguments, drawn primarily (...) from the work of Quentin Skinner, in favor of the historical approach. It concludes that while both intellectual history and presentist theory are ethically justifiable, the best justification of the former enterprise is that it can help us achieve the purposes of the latter. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume connects the philosophy of history to moral philosophy with a unique focus on time. Taking in a range of intellectual traditions, cultural, and geographical contexts, the volume provides a rich tapestry of approaches to time, morality, culture, and history. -/- By extending the philosophical discussion on the ethical importance of temporality, the editors disentangle some of the disciplinary tensions between analytical and hermeneutic philosophy of history, cultural theory, meta-ethical theory, and normative ethics. The (...) ethical and existential character of temporality reveals itself within a collection that resists the methodological underpinnings of any one philosophical school. The book's distinctive cross-cultural approach ensures a wide range of perspectives with contributions on life and death in Japanese philosophy, ethics and time in Maori philosophy, non-traditional temporalities and philosophical anthropology, as well as global approaches to ethics. -/- These new directions of study highlight the importance of the ethical in the temporal, inviting further points of departure in this burgeoning field. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline valuable insights that current theorists working in urban environmental ethics can gain from the analysis of nineteenth century urban contexts. Specifically, I argue that an analysis of urban areas during this time reveals two sets of competing metaphysical commitments that, when accepted, shift both the design of urban environments and our relationship with the natural world in these contexts. While one set of metaphysical commitments could help inform current projects in urban environmental ethics, (...) the second “de-animalized” or “cleansed” commitments that influenced the structure of post-nineteenth century urban areas could potentially harm projects in urban environmental ethics. Thus we need to be particularly careful when choosing a metaphysical base for our current urban environmental ethics, as, depending on your specific project, implicitly accepting certain commitments could inadvertently work against the overall goals of the project. (shrink)

This article brings out ethical aspects arising in Plato’s classical critique of narrative and imitative art in The Republic, especially when it comes to reading stories about the past. Socrates’s and Glaucon’s most important suggestion, I argue, is to cultivate an ethical consciousness where one ought to see the distinctions between how the real and the imaginary in narratives are to be conceived, and what that insight ethically demands of the reader. Taken as an ethical insight for the reader when (...) engaging in narrative understanding, this should be to resist the temptation to think that past suffering and misery as told in a story can be read analogously to narratives having a tragic plot. The article clarifies the meaning of Plato’s critique through the ideas of Simone Weil, Emmanuel Lévinas and Iris Murdoch. These existential moral philosophers work towards having an ethical consciousness in one’s personal relationship with stories of our lifeworld. (shrink)

There has recently been a focus on the question of statue removalism. This concerns what to do with public history statues that honour or otherwise celebrate ethically bad historical figures. The specific wrongs of these statues have been understood in terms of derogatory speech, inapt honours, or supporting bad ideologies. In this paper I understand these bad public history statues as history, and identify a distinctive class of public history-specific wrongs. Specifically, public history plays an (...) important identity-shaping role, and bad public history can commit specifically ontic injustice. Understanding bad public history in terms of ontic injustice helps understand not just to address bad public history statues, but also understand the value of public history more broadly. (shrink)

Should one read T.H. Irwin’s three volume history of Western ethics, or parts of it? Here one might turn to reviews. The journal The Philosophical Forum uses the sensible strategy of getting different specialists to review different parts of the book. There are two chapters on Rawls, each one reviewed by a Rawlsian. I wish to register discontent with Steven Ross’s review.

In order to have an effective and reliable understanding of the basic moral concepts, moral propositions and moral reasoning in Daoist ethical thoughts, it is necessary to use the methods of doing philosophy and doing ethics to engage in research work, and thus draw an intellectual conclusion about Daoist ethics. The methods of Daoist ethics mainly include analysis, explanation and comparison. The method of analysis focuses on logical analysis and language analysis of moral language in the classic (...) texts of Daoist ethics. The method of interpretation focuses on effective translation and understanding of moral language with unclear meaning in Daoist ethics. The method of comparison focuses on critical dialogue between ancient Daoist ethical thoughts and contemporary ethical theories and comparison between Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist ethics. Explaining the method of doing Daoist ethics clearly will promote the dialogue and understanding between Daoist ethics and contemporary ethics. (shrink)

When future historians chronicle the twentieth century, they will see phenomenology as one of the preeminent social and ethical philosophies of its age. The phenomenological movement not only produced systematic reflection on common moral concerns such as distinguishing right from wrong and explaining the status of values; it also called on philosophy to renew European societies facing crisis, an aim that inspired thinkers in interwar Europe as well as later communist bloc dissidents. Despite this legacy, phenomenology continues to be largely (...) discounted as esoteric and solipsistic, the last gasp of a Cartesian dream to base knowledge on the isolated rational mind. Intellectual histories tend to cite Husserl's epistemological influence on philosophies like existentialism and deconstruction without considering his social or ethical imprint. And while a few recent scholars have begun to note phenomenology's wider ethical resonance, especially in French social thought, its image as stubbornly academic continues to hold sway. _The Far Reaches_ challenges that image by tracing the first history of phenomenological ethics and social thought in Central Europe, from its founders Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl through its reception in East Central Europe by dissident thinkers such as Jan Patocka, Karol Wojtyla, and Václav Havel. (shrink)

The history of the regulation of animal research is essentially the history of the emergence of meaningful social ethics for animals in society. Initially, animal ethics concerned itself solely with cruelty, but this was seen as inadequate to late 20th-century concerns about animal use. The new social ethic for animals was quite different, and its conceptual bases are explored in this paper. The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 represented a very minimal and in many ways incoherent (...) attempt to regulate animal research, and is far from morally adequate. The 1985 amendments did much to render coherent the ethic for laboratory animals, but these standards were still inadequate in many ways, as enumerated here. The philosophy underlying these laws is explained, their main provisions are explored, and future directions that could move the ethic forward and further rationalize the laws are sketched. (shrink)

Educated people everywhere now acknowledge that ecological destruction is threatening the future of civilization. While philosophers have concerned themselves with environmental problems, they appear to offer little to deal with this crisis. Despite this, I will argue that philosophy, and ethics, are absolutely crucial to overcoming this crisis. Philosophy has to recover its grand ambitions to achieve a comprehensive understanding of nature and the place of humanity within it, and ethics needs to be centrally concerned with the virtues (...) required to create and then sustain economic, social and political formations that augment the life of ecological communities. Achieving these ends will involve reviving speculative philosophy and its quest to forge a synthesis of natural philosophy, history and art to enable humanity to redefine its place in the world, both collectively and as individuals, in very practical ways. Such a synthesis is required to oppose the corrosion of democracy and to revive the virtues of citizenship and the sense of responsibility citizenship entails, but more fundamentally and intimately related to such citizenship, to oppose managerialism and the proletarianization of the workforce and to revive workmanship and professionalism as the foundations of not only economic life, but social and political life. (shrink)

In this paper, I present and criticize several historical arguments in favour of prohibition and criminalization of illicit psychoactive substances. I consider several versions of Charles Brent’s argument from drug harms and an argument from addiction based on Kantian view on autonomy. My criticism will mainly rely on empirical evidence on drugs, drug use, and addiction. I think that in light of this evidence, all of the arguments lose their cogency or can be refuted altogether. Moreover, the evidence reveals an (...) inconsistency in the international drug law framework. In conclusion, I therefore provide a general argument challenging the legitimacy of the existing distinction between licit and illicit drugs based on the inconsistency. (shrink)

This review provides an overview of the ethics of extinctions with a focus on the Western analytical environmental ethics literature. It thereby gives special attention to the possible philosophical grounds for Michael Soulé’s assertion that the untimely ‘extinction of populations and species is bad’. Illustrating such debates in environmental ethics, the guiding question for this review concerns why – or when – anthropogenic extinctions are bad or wrong, which also includes the question of when that might not (...) be the case (i.e. which extinctions are even desirable). After providing an explanation of the disciplinary perspective taken (section “Introduction”), the concept of extinction and its history within that literature are introduced (section “Understanding extinction”). Then, in section “Why (or when) might anthropogenic extinctions be morally problematic?”, different reasons for why anthropogenic extinctions might be morally problematic are presented based on the loss of species’ value, harm to nonhuman individuals, the loss of valuable biological variety and duties to future generations. This section concludes by also considering cases where anthropogenic extinctions might be justified. Section “How to respond to extinctions?” then addresses a selection of topics concerning risks and de-extinction technologies. Finally, the section on “Extinction studies” introduces other viewpoints on the ethics of extinction from the extinction studies literature, followed by the “Conclusion”. (shrink)

In medical ethics, business ethics, and some branches of political philosophy (multi-culturalism, issues of just allocation, and equitable distribution) the literature increasingly combines insights from ethics and the social sciences. Some authors in medical ethics even speak of a new phase in the history of ethics, hailing "empirical ethics" as a logical next step in the development of practical ethics after the turn to "applied ethics." The name empirical ethics is (...) ill-chosen because of its associations with "descriptive ethics." Unlike descriptive ethics, however, empirical ethics aims to be both descriptive and normative. The first question on which I focus is what kind of empirical research is used by empirical ethics and for which purposes. I argue that the ultimate aim of all empirical ethics is to improve the context-sensitivity of ethics. The second question is whether empirical ethics is essentially connected with specific positions in meta-ethics. I show that in some kinds of meta-ethical theories, which I categorize as broad contextualist theories, there is an intrinsic need for connecting normative ethics with empirical social research. But context-sensitivity is a goal that can be aimed for from any meta-ethical position. (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)

Ethical extensionism is a common argument pattern in environmental and animal ethics, which takes a morally valuable trait already recognized in us and argues that we should recognize that value in other entities such as nonhuman animals. I exposit ethical extensionism’s core argument, argue for its validity and soundness, and trace its history to 18th century progressivist calls to expand the moral community and legal franchise. However, ethical extensionism has its critics. The bulk of the paper responds to (...) recent criticisms, including (1) environmental ethicists’ objection against its austere conception of moral value (2), feminist ethicists’ claim that extensionism fails to account for the moral significance of difference, (3) disability theorists’ concern that ethical extensionist arguments are offensive, and (4) animal rights theorists’ lament that extensionism is a practical failure. While something is to be gained from each criticism, I argue that they ultimately fail and that extensionism remains compelling. (shrink)

This book is an anthology with the following themes. Non-European Tradition: Bussanich interprets main themes of Hindu ethics, including its roots in ritual sacrifice, its relationship to religious duty, society, individual human well-being, and psychic liberation. To best assess the truth of Hindu ethics, he argues for dialogue with premodern Western thought. Pfister takes up the question of human nature as a case study in Chinese ethics. Is our nature inherently good (as Mengzi argued) or bad (Xunzi’s (...) view)? Pfister ob- serves their underlying agreement, that human beings are capable of becoming good, and makes precise the disagreement: whether we achieve goodness by cultivating autonomous feelings or by accepting external precepts. There are political consequences: whether government should aim to respect and em- power individual choices or to be a controlling authority. Early Greek Thinking: Collobert examines the bases of Homeric ethics in fame, prudence, and shame, and how these guide the deliberations of heroes. She observes how, by depending upon the poet’s words, the hero gains a quasi- immortality, although in truth there is no consolation for each person’s inevi- table death. Plato: Santas examines Socratic Method and ethics in Republic 1. There Socrates examines definitions of justice and tests them by comparison to the arts and sciences. Santas shows the similarities of Socrates’ method to John Rawls’ method of considered judgments in reflective equilibrium. McPherran interprets Plato’s religious dimension as like that of his teacher Socrates. McPherran shows how Plato appropriates, reshapes, and extends the religious conventions of his own time in the service of establishing the new enterprise of philosophy. Ac- cording to Taylor, Socrates believes that humans in general have the task of helping the gods by making their own souls as good as possible, and Socrates’ unique ability to cross-examine imposes on him the special task of helping others to become as good as possible. This conception of Socrates’ mission is Plato’s own, consisting in an extension of the traditional conception of piety as helping the gods. Brickhouse and Smith propose a new understanding of Socratic moral psychology—one that retains the standard view of Socrates as an intellectualist, but also recognizes roles in human agency for appetites and passions. They compare and contrast the Socratic view to the picture of moral psychology we get in other dialogues of Plato. Hardy also proposes a new, non-reductive understanding of Socratic eudaimonism—he argues that Socrates invokes a very rich and complex notion of the “Knowledge of the Good and Bad”, which is associated with the motivating forces of the virtues. Rudebusch defends Socrates’ argument that knowledge can never be impotent in the face of psychic passions. He considers the standard objections: that knowledge cannot weigh incom- mensurable human values, and that brute desire, all by itself, is capable of moving the soul to action. Aristotle: Anagnostopoulos interprets Aristotle on the nature and acquisition of virtue. Though virtue of character, aiming at human happiness, requires a complex awareness of multiple dimensions of one’s experience, it is not properly a cognitive capacity. Thus it requires habituation, not education, according to Aristotle, in order to align the unruly elements of the soul with reason’s knowledge of what promotes happiness. Shields explains Aristotle’s doctrine that goodness is meant in many ways as the doctrine that there are different analyses of goodness for different types of circumstance, just as for being. He finds Aristotle to argue for this conclusion, against Plato’s doctrine of the unity of the Good, by applying the tests for homonymy and as an immediate cons- equence of the doctrine of categories. Shields evaluates the issue as unresolved at present. Russell discusses Aristotle’s account of practical deliberation and its virtue, intelligence (phronesis). He relates the account to contemporary philo- sophical controversies surrounding Aristotle’s view that intelligence is neces- sary for moral virtue, including the objections that in some cases it is unnecessary or even impedes human goodness. Frede examines the advantages and disadvantages of Aristotle’s virtue ethics. She explains the general Greek con- ceptions of happiness and virtue, Aristotle’s conception of phronesis and compares the Aristotle’s ethics with modern accounts. Liske discusses the question of whether the Aristotelian account of virtue entails an ethical-psy- chological determinism. He argues that Aristotle’s understanding of hexis allows for free action and ethical responsibility : By making decisions for good actions we are able to stabilize our character (hexis). Hellenistic and Roman: Annas defends an account of stoic ethics, according to which the three parts of Stoicism—logic, physics, and ethics—are integrated as the parts of an egg, not as the parts of a building. Since by this analogy no one part is a foundation for the rest, pedagogical decisions may govern the choice of numerous, equally valid, presentations of Stoic ethics. Piering interprets the Cynic way of life as a distinctive philosophy. In their ethics, Cynics value neither pleasure nor tradition but personal liberty, which they achieve by self-suffi- ciency and display in speech that is frank to the point of insult. Plotinus and Neoplatonism: Gerson outlines the place of ordinary civic virtue as well as philosophically contemplative excellence in Neoplatonism. In doing so he attempts to show how one and the same good can be both action-guiding in human life and be the absolute simple One that grounds the explanation of everything in the universe. Delcomminette follows Plotinus’s path to the Good as the foundation of free will, first in the freedom of Intellect and then in the “more than freedom” of the One. Plotinus postulates these divinities as not outside but within each self, saving him from the contradiction of an external foundation for a truly free will. General Topics: Halbig discusses the thesis on the unity of virtues. He dis- tinguishes the thesis of the identity of virtues and the thesis of a reciprocity of virtues and argues that the various virtues form a unity (in terms of reciprocity) since virtues cannot bring about any bad action. Detel examines Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of normativity : Plato and Aristotle (i) entertained hybrid theories of normativity by distinguishing functional, semantic and ethical normativity, (ii) located the ultimate source of normativity in standards of a good life, and thus (iii) took semantic normativity to be a derived form of normativity. Detel argues that hybrid theories of normativity are—from a mo- dern point of view—still promising. Ho ̈ffe defends the Ancient conception of an art of living against Modern objections. Whereas many Modern philosophers think that we have to replace Ancient eudaimonism by the idea of moral obligation (Pflicht), Ho ̈ffe argues that Eudaimonism and autonomy-based ethics can be reconciled and integrated into a comprehensive and promising theory of a good life, if we enrich the idea of autonomy by the central elements of Ancient eudaimonism. Some common themes: The topics in Chinese and Hindu ethics are perhaps more familiar to modern western sensibilities than Homeric and even Socratic. Anagnostopoulos, Brickhouse and Smith, Frede, Liske, Rudebusch, and Russell all consider in contrasting ways the role of moral character, apart from intellect, in ethics. Brickhouse / Smith, Hardy, and Rudebusch discuss the Socratic con- ception of moral knowledge. Brickhouse / Smith and Hardy retain the standard view of the so called Socratic Intellectualism. Shields and Gerson both consider the question whether there is a single genus of goodness, or if the term is a homonym. Bussanich, McPherran, Taylor, and Delcomminette all consider the relation between religion and ethics. Pfister, Piering, Delcomminette, and Liske all consider what sort of freedom is appropriate to human well-being. Halbig, Detel, and Ho ̈ffe propose interpretations of main themes of Ancient ethics. (shrink)

Neo‐Aristotelian ethical naturalism purports to show that moral evaluation of human action and character is an evaluation of natural goodness—a kind of evaluation that applies to living things in virtue of their nature and based on their form of life. The standard neo‐Aristotelian view defines natural goodness by way of generic statements describing the natural history, or the ‘characteristic’ life, of a species. In this paper, I argue that this conception of natural goodness commits the neo‐Aristotelian view to a (...) problematic anti‐individualism that results in the wrong assessment of individuals with uniquely adaptive adjustments. I then offer an alternative account of natural goodness that avoids this problem. Instead of relying on generic statements about a species, my account defines natural goodness based on counterfactual conditionals describing the modal properties of a single individual. I argue that this modal‐explanatory account gives a conception of natural goodness that is more intuitively plausible and better suited to capture the diversity and plasticity distinctive of life. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and explore what I shall call the Common Subject Problem for ethics. The problem is that there seems to be no good answer to what property everyone who makes moral claims could be talking and thinking about. The Common Subject Problem is not a new problem; on the contrary, I will argue that it is one of the central animating concerns in the history of both metaethics and normative theory. But (...) despite its importance, the Common Subject Problem is essentially invisible on many contemporary ways of carving up the problems of metaethics and normative ethical theory. My aim, therefore, is to make progress – in part by naming the problem, but also by beginning to sketch out the contours of what gives the problem its force, by distinguishing between different paths of response to the problem and assessing some of their chief merits, and finally, by distinguishing the Common Subject Problem from another problem with which it has come to be conflated. This nearby problem is the Moral Twin Earth Problem. Whereas the Common Subject Problem is a problem about what property ‘wrong’ could refer to, the Moral Twin Earth Problem is a problem about how ‘wrong’ could refer to it. The upshot of the paper, therefore, is to rescue one of the historically significant problems in normative ethics and metaethics – a problem that is essentially about normative semantics – from the illusion that has persisted over the last twenty years that it is really, somehow, a problem about metasemantics. Once we have reclaimed this problem, we can see that it could still be a problem even if there are no distinctively metasemantic problems in metaethics at all, that it is a problem faced by a wider variety of views, and that the space of possible solutions is much wider and more interesting for normative theory, moral psychology, and moral epistemology. (shrink)

Organ transplantation centers set criteria for candidate qualification, which has led to disparate healthcare resource allocation practices affecting those with a substance use history. These individuals are denied organ transplants by committees and healthcare providers who assign them lower priority status. The lower priority argument claims that healthcare resources should not be provided equally to individuals who fail to share responsibility for not doing enough to address the diseases associated with substance use. The purpose of this paper is to (...) explore the interrelatedness between the ethics of a merit-based system of moral responsibility and the lower priority setting involved in healthcare resource allocation pertaining to those with substance use histories. An interdisciplinaryapproach to the argument against the lower prioritists is taken with a focus on the relationship between different organ allocation practices affecting substance users and the justification for resource allocation practices of healthcare and transplant committees. Lower priority setting is challenged, and an argument is offered in which substance users are assigned higher priority when relying on "doing enough" in a merit-based system of moral responsibility. It is determined that one cannot substantiate assigning a lower priority status since a lack of success in rehab does not imply a lack of effort. Additionally, neither to confirmatory behavior nor to non-conforming behavior may freedom be justifiably ascribed in a merit-based system of responsibility because freedom to choose can neither be established a priori nor a posteriori concerning meritorious behavior. (shrink)

This essay concerns what it means to historicize evil in an ethically responsible way: that is, what it means to think and narrate perpetrators and victims of evil through what is testified to and told about them. I show that a responsible gaze can only be recognized by allowing ourselves to be addressed by the dead victims. The argument consists in an existential critique of a set of common ideas in the human sciences, which suggest that we must attempt to (...) empathize with the perpetrators in order to understand their deeds in human terms. This empathetic thought, I suggest, easily leads us either to aestheticize the victims or to think that the evils in our history should be addressed as a metaphysical susceptibility to evil internal to being human. By critically discussing these ideas, I show that empathy for the perpetrators in several respects does injustice to the dead victims, which marks that we as their afterlife continue to have an irresponsible relationship with the dead. (shrink)

I explore, explain, and expound the history of the debates about virtue and virtue ethics in twentieth-century anglophone philosophy.

This book aims at six important conceptual tools developed by philosophers. The author develops each particular view in a chapter, hoping to constitute at the end a concise, interesting and easily readable whole. These concepts are: 1. Ethics and realism: elucidation of the distinction between understanding and explanation – the lighthouse type of normativity. 2. Leadership, antirealism and moral psychology – the lightning rod type of normativity. 3. Bright light on self-identity and positive reciprocity – the reciprocity type of (...) normativity. 4. The virtue of generosity and its importance for inclusive education – the divine will type of normativity. 5. Ethical education as normative philosophical perspective. The normativity of self-transformation in education. 6. Aesthetics as expression of human freedom and concern for the whole world in which we live. (shrink)

An introduction to how heteronomous views address the topic of moral autonomy. In the first section I provide a short history of the rise of the autonomy stance in meta ethics. Then I sketch the relationship between Kant and mainstream contemporary Kantians. I finally outline a summary of the papers in the special issue of Dialegesthai.

In this paper we delineate the conditions and features of what we call an existential philosophy of history in relation to customary trends in the field of the philosophy of history. We do this by circumscribing what a transgenerational temporality and what our entanglement in ethical relations with temporal others ask of us as existential and responsive selves and by explicating what attitude we need to have when trying to responsibly respond to other vulnerable beings in our historical (...) world of life. (shrink)

This paper focuses on invasive therapeutic procedures, defined as procedures requiring the introduction of hands, instruments, or devices into the body via incisions or punctures of the skin or mucous membranes performed with the intent of changing the natural history of a human disease or condition for the better. Ethical and methodological concerns have been expressed about studies designed to evaluate the effects of invasive therapeutic procedures. Can such studies meet the same standards demanded of those, for example, evaluating (...) pharmaceutical agents? This paper describes a research project aimed at examining the interplay and sometimes apparent conflict between ethical standards for human research and standards for methodological rigor in trials of invasive procedures. The paper discusses how the authors plan to develop a set of consensus standards that, if met, would result in substantial and much-needed improvements in the methodological and ethical quality of such trials. (shrink)

This bibliographical guide gives a comprehensive overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language through an extensive and thematically organized collection of relevant literature. Comprising over one thousand entries, the bibliography shows not only how extensive and complex the Japanese tradition of philosophical and intellectual historiography is, but also how it might be structured and analyzed to make it accessible to a comparative and intercultural approach to the historiography of philosophy worldwide. The literature is categorized and (...) organized according to thematic focus areas such as geographical regions and continents, nations or peoples, religious traditions and philosophical teachings such as Buddhism, Islam, Shintō, and Confucianism, as well as disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, and political thought. The bibliography is accompanied by an introduction outlining the research method as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyzing the material, followed by a chronological overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language and of the Japanese tradition of writing “world histories of philosophy.” As a first step towards a “history of the historiography of philosophy” in non-European languages, we hope that this guide will provide a useful tool for interculturally oriented scholarship aimed at a non-Eurocentric and diversified historiography of philosophy in a global perspective. (Open access, see link below.). (shrink)

Many of Søren Kierkegaard's most controversial and influential ideas are more relevant than ever to contemporary debates on ethics, philosophy of religion and selfhood. Kierkegaard develops an original argument according to which wholeheartedness requires both moral and religious commitment. In this book, Roe Fremstedal provides a compelling reconstruction of how Kierkegaard develops wholeheartedness in the context of his views on moral psychology, meta-ethics and the ethics of religious belief. He shows that Kierkegaard's influential account of despair, selfhood, (...) ethics and religion belongs to a larger intellectual context in which German philosophers such as Kant and Fichte play crucial roles. Moreover, Fremstedal makes a solid case for the controversial claim that religion supports ethics, instead of contradicting it. His book offers a novel and comprehensive reading of Kierkegaard, drawing on important sources that are little known. (shrink)

In 2014, questionable police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice sparked mass protests and put policing at the center of national debate. Mass protests erupted again in 2020 after the brutal police killing of George Floyd. These and other incidents have put a spotlight on a host of issues that threaten the legitimacy of policing—excessive force, racial bias, over-policing of marginalized communities, historic injustices that remain unaddressed, and new technology that increases police powers. This introduction gives an (...) overview of these ethical challenges facing police today and the democratic institutions that oversee them. It then outlines the various interdisciplinary perspectives—from Black studies, criminology, history, law, philosophy, political science, and sociology—collected in the volume. Together, these contributions aim to clarify the question of which ethical principles should guide police, where current practices fall short, and what strategies hold the most promise for addressing these failures. (shrink)

There are three obstacles to any discussion of the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and ethics. First, Heidegger’s views and preoccupations alter considerably over the course of his work. There is no consensus over the exact degree of change or continuity, but it is clear that a number of these shifts, for example over the status of human agency, have considerable ethical implications. Second, Heidegger rarely engages directly with the familiar ethical or moral debates of the philosophical canon. For example, (...) both Sein und Zeit (SZ) and the works that would have completed its missing third Division, works such as his monograph on Kant (Ga3), and the 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Ga24), place enormous emphasis on the flaws present in earlier metaphysics or philosophies of language or of the self. But there is no discussion of what one might think of as staple ethical questions: for example, the choice between rationalist or empiricist meta-ethics, or between consequentialist or deontological theories. The fundamental reason for this is Heidegger’s belief that his own concerns are explanatorily prior to such debates (Ga26:236–7). By extension, he regards the key works of ethical and moral philosophy as either of secondary importance, or as not really about ethics or morals at all: for example, Ga24, when discussing Kant, states bluntly that “‘Metaphysics of Morals’ means the ontology of human existence” (Ga24:195). Essentially his view is that, before one can address ethics, construed as the question of how we ought to live, one needs to get clear on ontology, on the question of what we are. However, as I will show, the relationship between Heideggerian ontology and ethics is more complex than that simple gloss suggests. Third, the very phrase “Heidegger’s ethics” raises a twofold problem in a way that does not similarly occur with any other figure in this volume. The reason for this is his links, personal and institutional, to both National Socialism and to anti-Semitism. The recent publication of the Schwarze Hefte exemplifies this issue: these notebooks interweave rambling metaphysical ruminations with a clearly anti-Semitic rhetoric no less repulsive for the fact that it avoids the biological racism of the Nazis (see, for example, Ga95:97 or Ga96:243). In this short chapter, I will take what will doubtless be a controversial approach to this third issue. It seems to me unsurprising, although no less disgusting for that, that Heidegger himself was anti-Semitic, or that he shared many of the anti-modernist prejudices often found with such anti-Semitism Sacha Golob ([email protected]) Forthcoming in the Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press: 2016). 2 among his demographic group. The interesting question is rather: what are the connections between his philosophy and such views? To what degree do aspects of his work support them or perhaps, most extremely, even follow from them? Yet to answer this question, one needs to begin by understanding what exactly his philosophical commitments were, specifically his ‘ethical’ commitments. The purpose of this chapter is address that question. (shrink)

The idea that humans might one day form persistent and dynamic relationships in professional, social, and even romantic contexts is a longstanding one. However, developments in machine learning and especially natural language processing over the last five years have led to this possibility becoming actualised at a previously unseen scale. Apps like Replika, Xiaoice, and CharacterAI boast many millions of active long-term users, and give rise to emotionally complex experiences. In this paper, I provide an overview of these developments, beginning (...) in Section 1 with historical and technical context. In Section 2, I lay out a basic theoretical framework for classifying human-AI relationships and their specific dynamics. Section 3 turns to ethical issues, with a focus on the core philosophical question of whether human-AI relationships can have similar intrinsic value to that possessed by human-human relationships. Section 4 extends to the discussion of ethical issues to the more empirical matter of harms and benefits of human-AI relationships. The paper concludes by noting potentially instructive parallels between the nascent field of ‘Social AI’ and the recent history of social media. (shrink)

Environmental ethics has been compared to a bicycle brake on an international jet airliner; it is ineffective. Here I show how and why an ecological ethics based on process philosophy could be effective against the forces driving global environmental destruction. However, this will involve a radical transformation in what are taken to be the problems of ethics and how ethical philosophy is understood. Ethics needs to be centrally concerned with the virtues required to develop and sustain (...) desirable social forms. To address global environmental problems ecological ethics must concern itself with the virtues required to develop and sustain democracy. Developing these virtues, it is argued, will involve reversing the growing fragmentation of work to revive a feeling of responsibility for creating a better world. Such an ethics must not only provide guidance for action, but also provide people with a sense of their place in and role in history and nature and an inspiring vision to motivate them to work for a better world. Process philosophy can provide such an ecological ethics not only because it can justify respect for all living beings, but also because it is a revolt against the fragmentation of intellectual, cultural, and social life which led to the trivialization of philosophy in the first place. (shrink)

The author studies the role of Christianity in two forms of 9th century political ethics in the history of Great Moravia, represented by the Great Moravian rulers Rastislav and Svatopluk. Rastislav’s conception predominantly uses the pre-Erasmian model of political ethics based on the pursuit of welfare for the country and its inhabitants by achieving the clerical-political independence of Great Moravia from the Frankish kingdom and, moreover, by utilising Christianity for the advancement of culture, education, literature, law and (...) legality, as well as by spreading Christian ethics and morality in the form of the Christian code of ethics expressed in ethicallegal documents. Svatopluk’s political conception was a prototype of Machiavellian political ethics, according to which one is, in the interest of the country and its power and fame, allowed to be a lion and/or a fox. Svatopluk abused Christianity in the name of achieving his power-oriented goals. Great Moravia outlived Rastislav; it did not, however, outlive Svatopluk, as, shortly after his death, it broke up and ceased to exist. The author came to the conclusion that Rastislav’s conception was more viable, as its cultural heritage lives on in the form of works by Constantine and Methodius. (shrink)

Whether and to what extent Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture contains a normative element for the proper evaluation of symbolic forms is a central question in Cassirer interpretation. In this paper, my aim is to specify the nature of this normative element. I not only assert the existence of a real normative dimension in the philosophy of culture, but also specify the nature of its main element: the concept of freedom. The concept of freedom in Cassirer is by no means (...) an explicit facet of his systematic thought. However, this does not indicate that this is not an important part of his system. Rather, it might mean that Cassirer either thought it so basic he didn’t need to explicate it or he thought that it would be made clear through his exposition of symbolic forms. I will proceed by arguing for a “normative space” in Cassirer’s philosophy of culture. By “normative space” I mean a certain limitation to the philosophy of culture that makes room for the free act of the cultural agent for which she is responsible. In other words, by “normative space” I mean to suggest that Cassirer meant to leave room, and a prominent seat, for the normative element in the philosophy of culture. After establishing this, I will suggest that this normative task in the philosophy of culture is, from a first-person perspective, inevitably connected to the descriptive task, but from a third-person perspective, conceptually distinct. I will then move to better define what I take to be the main value of the normative task: freedom. The freedom that Cassirer defends is an ethical conception understood as both a constitutive norm for cultural action and a regulative ideal for the evaluation of cultural objects. Understanding freedom in this way allows us to conceive of it both as a fundamental phenomenon and an evaluative standard. (shrink)

Kant’s dualism in anthropology and morality is said to be bridged only by means of a teleology that seems to betray the historical constitution of its subjectivity. And yet the Kantianarticulation of problems of theoretical and practical reason can be explored only insofar as they help us understand the correlated issues of the unity of reason, the relation of aesthetics and ethics in the light of the three Critiques, and the teleological conception of history. In this paper, I (...) argue for a teleological reading of the systematic architectonic so as to make sense of the concept of purposiveness as the a priori principle of judgment in its logical, aesthetic, and teleological reflection and of the unifying, a priori principles of each faculty–namely, conformity to law, final purpose, and conformity to purpose or purposiveness – respectively dealt with in the three Critiques. (shrink)

How might a society wrong people by the way in which it remembers its past? In recent years, philosophers have articulated serval ways in which people may be wronged by dominant historical narratives. My focus will be on a way in which we may wrong people which has yet to feature in this discussion: the consigning of people to history. This paper investigates the wrongs involved in collective narratives that consign certain identities to a country’s past but not its (...) present or future. I will argue that these narratives can wrong people by exiling them from the imagined community, which in turn leads to several other significant harms. I will begin by examining this phenomenon before going on to articulate the distinctive wrongs and harms involved in consigning to history. I then argue that people have a prima facie duty not to develop or employ national narratives that consign people to history and a responsibility to challenge and resist the use of such narratives. This responsibility will be especially strong for powerful and privileged people, for people with a special interest in resisting such narratives and for those able to draw on the resources of existing collectives. (shrink)

This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft’s approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach developed at TU Delft is deeply informed by the research of the Section, which is centered around Responsible Research and Innovation, Design for Values, and Risk (...) Ethics. These theoretical approaches are premised on the notion that technologies are inherently value-laden, and as such contain the possibility of fostering or hindering moral values. Each of these approaches encourages students to take a proactive attitude with respect to their projects and profession, thinking creatively about – and taking responsibility for – how to both prevent harm and do good via the technologies they help develop. To explain how this is put into practice, this paper sketches a brief history of ethics teaching at TU Delft, outlines current activities, and presents future plans for Bachelor and Master’s level engineering ethics education at TU Delft. (shrink)

Democritus of Abdera, best known as a cosmologist and the founder of atomism, wrote more on ethics than anyone before Plato. His work Peri euthumiês (On Contentment) was extremely influential on the later development of teleological and intellectualist ethics, eudaimonism, hedonism, therapeutic ethics, and positive psychology. The loss of his works, however, and the transmission of his fragments in collections of maxims (gnomai), has obscured the extent his contribution to the history of systematic ethics and (...) influence on later philosophy, especially in the Hellenistic age. In this essay I review the evidence basis for Democritus’ ethics, discuss the rhetorical and logical aspects of his maxims, attempt to synthesize the fragments into an overall interpretation, and offer a summary some of the more influential aspects of his ethics. (shrink)

The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā -- which were used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for re-reading hiṃsā as “maleficence” and ahiṃsā as “beneficence.” These two more mind-referring English words – associated with religiously contextualized discourse of the past -- capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi’s core principles, better than “violence” and “nonviolence” do. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable (...) through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word “violence” have expanded dramatically. The expanded scope of “violence” reflects greater consciousness of the various forms that serious harm can take, but also makes it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as “nonviolent.” New translations could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and thereby prevent some misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi’s psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: detachment from the ego, learning to love universally, and seeking truth by experiment. (shrink)

Social scientists and research ethicists have begun, somewhat belatedly, to confront and address the ethical challenges raised by public policy experiments. In doing so however, they have not fully availed themselves of the large and sophisticated literature on the ethics of clinical research which has developed over the past 40 years. While clinical and public policy research are different, I argue that the clinical research ethics literature yields valuable insights for discussions of the ethics of policy experiments. (...) Focusing on seven ethical issues which have received a good deal of attention in public and scholarly discussions of the ethics of policy experiments, I make use of the history of reflection on the ethics of clinical research to provide guidance to researchers planning and conducting policy experiments. (shrink)

It is often assumed that there is a necessary relationship between historical value and irreplaceability, and that this is an essential feature of historical value’s distinctive character. Contrary to this assumption, I argue that it is a merely contingent fact that some historically valuable things are irreplaceable, and that irreplaceability is not a distinctive feature of historical value at all. Rather, historically significant objects, from heirlooms to artifacts, offer us an otherwise impossible connection with the past, a value that persists (...) even in the face of suitable replacements. (shrink)

This work examines Michel Foucault’s critique of the present, through his analysis of our hidden but still active historical legacies. His works from the Eighties are the beginning of what he called a “genealogy of the desiring subject,” in which he shows that practices such as confession—in its juridical, psychological, and religious forms—have largely dictated how we think about our ethical selves. This constrains our notions of ethics to legalistic forbidden/required dichotomies, and requires that we engage in a hermeneutics (...) of the self which consistently fails to discover its imagined authentic self, or to find the happiness and freedom promised by contemporary ethics. In order to think the modern self in different terms, Foucault’s later works analyzed Classical and Hellenistic ethical sources, emphasizing their distance from today. He hoped doing so would allow us to rethink our current assumptions about ethical matters, the truth of oneself, and the relation to others. While Foucault’s genealogical descriptions critically diagnosed contemporary ills such as these, he did not prescribe a cure, preferring to let his readers experiment with new practices of their own design. This work attempts such an experiment, supplying concrete solutions to our ethical ills, in order to help us improve, as well as understand, our ethical selves. To that end, this work demonstrates that a form of subjectivity based on Benedict Spinoza’s ethical and political works avoids the pitfalls of modern ethics as diagnosed by Foucault. Additionally, the practices of the self found in Spinoza can be used to directly counter and displace each central element of “desiring subjectivity,” and thus supplies the kind of effective positive move which should follow after genealogical critique. (shrink)

This essay discusses how our traditional ethics may harbor assumptions that place humans in a position in which overt violence towards animals is an almost inevitable outcome since their formulation involves violence towards ourselves and our animal fellows in our cutting our embodied ties with them. The essay explores Derrida’s Animal that Therefore, I Am, in its detailing of the two discourses within European intellectual history of those who felt they were “above” animals and were not addressed by (...) them versus those who could acknowledge that animals do address us. Derrida also cites the “lyconomy” of this tradition that brandishes the image of the “wolf” within us as a streak of rapacious violence that we can only fight with violence, thus projecting onto the wolf a false identity to justify our own demons of violence. Merleau-Ponty’s notions of embodiment further this idea that we are enmeshed with animals in a basic affective, perceptual and visceral way and that to ignore this interweaving of lives is to do violence to ourselves as well as violence towards them. I then cite ethologists for evidence that wolves are one of the most social, non-violent animals on the planet and detail how two million were slaughtered in the name of eradicating an “evil” being. Such behavior on our part I call “speciocide,” as heinous as genocide. Finally, phenomenology, as one particular philosophical approach, may have a critical edge in helping us to see our animal fellows more clearly, to understand them better, and discern our truer moral obligations to them. (shrink)

The history of humankind is full of examples that indicate a constant desire to make human beings more moral. Nowadays, technological breakthroughs might have a significant impact on our moral character and abilities. This is the case of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. The aim of this paper is to consider the ethical aspects of the use of VR in enhancing empathy. First, we will offer an introduction to VR, explaining its fundamental features, devices and concepts. Then, we will approach (...) the characterization of VR as an “empathy machine,” showing why this medium has aroused so much interest and why, nevertheless, we do not believe it is the ideal way to enhance empathy. As an alternative, we will consider fostering empathy-related abilities through virtual embodiment in avatars. In the conclusion, however, we will, we will examine some of the serious concerns related to the ethical relevance of empathy and will defend the philosophical case for a reason-guided empathy, also suggesting specific guidelines for possible future developments of empathy enhancement projects through VR embodied experiences. (shrink)

The concept of antinatalism is now becoming popular on the Internet. Many online newspaper articles deal with this topic, and numerous academic papers on antinatalism have been published over the past ten years in the fields of philosophy and ethics. The word “antinatalism” was first used in the current meaning in 2006, when the two books that justify the universal negation of procreation were published: one by David Benatar and the other by Théophile de Giraud. However, we can find (...) various prototypes of antinatalistic thoughts in ancient Greece, ancient India, and modern Europe. You might recall the name Schopenhauer. In this paper, I briefly summarize the history of antinatalistic thoughts and propose a set of categories on antinatalism and related thoughts. (shrink)