Behavioral intervention techniques leveraging reactive responses have gained popularity as tools for promoting ethical behavior. Choice architects, for example, design and present default opt-out options to nudge individuals into accepting preselected choices deemed beneficial to both the decision-maker and society. Such interventions can also employ mild financial incentives or affective triggers including joy, fear, empathy, social pressure, and reputational rewards. We argue, however, that ethical competence is achieved via reflection, and that heavy reliance on reactive behavioral interventions can undermine the (...) development of ethical competence over the long term. Specifically, drawbacks may occur through motivational displacement, dependency, moral crowding out, loss of personal autonomy, and reactance. We introduce complementary cognitive boosting techniques designed to stimulate reflective cognition, as a more promising long-term strategy for instilling ethical behavior. One such approach is the Moral Self-Awareness (MSA) motivational construct, which incrementally leads agents to increasing levels of ethical reflection. We explain why ethical boosting approaches present more edifying and durable alternatives to reactive behavioral interventions and offer suggestions for social and organizational policy. (shrink)

The generative AI boom is unleashing its minions. Enterprise software vendors have rolled out legions of automated assistants that use large language model (LLM) technology, such as ChatGPT, to offer users helpful suggestions or to execute simple tasks. These so-called copilots and chatbots can increase productivity and automate tedious manual work. In this article, we explain how that leads to the risk that users' ethical competence may degrade over time — and what to do about it.

The simulation hypothesis can reinforce a cynical dismissal of human potential. This attitude can allow online platform designers to rationalize employing manipulative neuromarketing techniques to control user decisions. We point to cognitive boosting techniques at both user and designer levels to build critical reflection and mindfulness.

The Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation, which has been endorsed by hundreds of influential academic ethicists, calls for establishing a vegan economy by banning what it refers to as all unnecessary animal suffering, including fishing. It does so by appeal to the moral principle of equal consideration of comparable interests. I argue that this principle is misapplied by discounting morally relevant cognitive capacities of self-conscious and volitional personhood as distinguished from merely sentient non-personhood. I describe it as a kind of (...) anthropomorphizing moralism which I call anthropomoralism, defined as the tendency to project morally relevant characteristics of personhood onto merely sentient non-persons by discounting their existing differences with actual persons. I show that this attitude can lend support to the resurgent attempt to treat fetal pain as equally morally considerable to that of childbearing persons they gestate within. I explain that the only sound way to apply the principle of equal consideration of comparable interests is to compare experiences of actual persons. Therefore, while supporting a vegan economy may be morally praiseworthy, it should not be deemed morally obligatory. (shrink)

This paper describes Wittgenstein's pre-theoretical transcendentalist conception of ethics and the challenge it presents for the kind of global cosmopolitan perspective required of any multinational social responsibility strategy. It is argued that this challenge can be overcome through establishing a sense of solidarity with all stakeholders via a corporate social compact rooted in what Wittgenstein refers to as spontaneous agreement and sympathy. Contemporary examples of successful strategies are provided.

Ask most any cognitive scientist working today if a digital computational system could develop aesthetic sensibility and you will likely receive the optimistic reply that this remains an open empirical question. However, I attempt to show, while drawing upon the later Wittgenstein, that the correct answer is in fact available. And it is a negative a priori. It would seem, for example, that recent computational successes in generative AI and textual attribution, most notably those of Donald Foster (famed finder of (...) Ted Kazinski a.k.a. “the Unibomber”) speak favorably of the connectionist model's capacity to overcome the “aspect blindness” handicap in this domain. I argue however that such results are only achievable when rigid input‐to‐output parameters are given, and that this element is precisely what is absent in standard examples of aesthetic judgment. I thus conclude that while the connectionist model anticipated by Turing may provide the best approach for the AI project, its capacity for meeting its own sufficiency requirements is necessarily crippled by its inability to share in what can be generally referred to as the collective engagements of human solidarity. (shrink)

This paper develops Wittgenstein’s view of how experiences of ethical value contribute to our understanding of the world. Such experiences occur when we perceive certain intrinsic attributes of a particular being, object, or location as valuable irrespective of any concern for personal gain. It is shown that experiences of ethical value essentially involve a characteristic ‘listening’ to the ongoing transformations and actualizations of a given form of life—literally or metaphorically speaking. Such immediate impressions of spontaneous sympathy and agreement reveal ethics (...) and aesthetics as transcendental. Ultimately, I will attempt to show that from this point of view, forms of life are transcendental determinants of meaning and, as such, the principal objects of ethical value. Descriptive ontological grounding is thereby provided for the ethical value of species, languages, and cultures. (shrink)

Numerous high-profile ethics scandals, rising inequality, and the detrimental effects of climate change dramatically underscore the need for business schools to instill a commitment to social purpose in their students. At the same time, the rising financial burden of education, increasing competition in the education space, and overreliance on graduates’ financial success as the accepted metric of quality have reinforced an instrumentalist climate. These conflicting aims between social and financial purpose have created an existential crisis for business education. To resolve (...) this impasse, we draw on the concept of moral self-awareness to offer a system-theoretical strategy for crowding-in a culture of ethics within business schools. We argue that to do so, business schools will need to (1) reframe the purpose of business, (2) reframe the meaning of professional success, and (3) reframe the ethos of business education itself. (shrink)

There is growing concern that a global economic system fueled predominately by financial incentives may not maximize human flourishing and social welfare externalities. If so, this presents a challenge of how to get economic actors to adopt a more virtuous motivational mindset. Relying on historical, psychological, and philosophical research, we show how such a mindset can be instilled. First, we demonstrate that historically, financial self-interest has never in fact been the only guiding motive behind free markets, but that markets themselves (...) are representations of our individual and collective moral identities. Building on this understanding, we review the research on how economic incentives crowd out virtue-oriented concerns. We then introduce the concept of moral self-awareness (MSA), an evolving mindset informed by reflection on moral identity, namely what one’s actions say about oneself given the impacts on others or society that one’s action may effect. MSA comprises three fundamental aspects of virtue-oriented reasoning: pride, shame, and guilt. Finally, we offer a four-stage model anchored in systems theory, yielding ever more refined motivating strategies for maximizing human flourishing and social welfare externalities. (shrink)

One Rawlsian response to G. A. Cohen’s criticisms of justice as fairness which Cohen canvasses, and then dismisses, is the 'Freedom Objection'. It comes in two versions. The 'First Version' asserts that there is an unresolved trilemma among the three principles of equality, Pareto-optimality, and freedom of occupational choice, while the 'Second Version' imputes to Rawls’s theory a concern to protect occupational freedom over equality of condition. This article is mainly concerned with advancing three claims. First, the 'ethical solution' Cohen (...) advances against the First Version of the Freedom Objection does not grant a fair hearing to the Freedom Objection. Second, the distinction Cohen presses between the legal and moral right of occupational choice in his response to the Second Version cannot save him from worries about Stalinist coercion. Third, Cohen’s response to the First Version of the Freedom Objection is actually in tension with his response to the Second Version of the Freedom Objection. (shrink)

Theories of self-defence tend to invest heavily in ‘liability justifications’: if the Attacker is liable to have defensive violence deployed against him by the Defender, then he will not be wronged by such violence, and selfdefence becomes, as a result, morally unproblematic. This paper contends that liability justifications are overrated. The deeper contribution to an explanation of why defensive permissions exist is made by the Defender’s non-liability. Drawing on both canonical cases of self-defence, featuring Culpable Attackers, and more penumbral cases (...) of self-defence, involving Non-Responsible Threats, a case is assembled for the ‘Non-Liability First Account’ of self-defence. (shrink)

Pope Francis takes the Big Bang as supplying empirical evidence for God’s existence, going so far as to credit God’s will as the force behind natural selection. So if natural selection is the emanation of divine will, then so too is what Richard Dawkins calls the “selfish gene” underlying it. The trouble is that the natural forces of self-interest may win out over the better angels of our nature, spelling disaster for the human species—and the planet sustaining it. For the (...) drive of individual self-interest is the main fuel of capitalism, which has become the dominant global economic paradigm. And this unbridled self-interest is arguably most responsible for widespread environmental degradation. Therefore, if humanity should ultimately expire as a direct result of its evolutionary adaptations, it won’t exactly be a ringing endorsement of the architect of life, the universe, and everything. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the extent to which economies in the developed and developing world rely on gig workers to perform essential tasks such as health care, personal transport, food and package delivery, and ad hoc tasking services. As a result, workers who provide such services are no longer perceived as mere low-skilled laborers, but as essential workers who fulfill a crucial role in society. The newly elevated moral and economic status of these workers increases consumer demand for corporate (...) social responsibility regarding this stakeholder group – specifically for practices that increase worker freedom and rewards. We provide algorithmic tools for online labor platforms to meet this demand, thereby bolstering their social purpose and ethical branding while better protecting themselves from future reputational crises. To do so, we advance a managerial strategy rooted in moral self-awareness theory in order to leverage customers’ virtuous self-perception and increase gig-worker freedom. (shrink)

Extant research suggests that individuals employ traditional moral heuristics to support their observed altruistic behavior; yet findings have largely been limited to inductive extrapolation and rely on relatively few traditional frames in so doing, namely, deontology in organizational behavior and virtue theory in law and economics. Given that these and competing moral frames such as utilitarianism can manifest as identical behavior, we develop a moral framing instrument—the Philosophical Moral-Framing Measure (PMFM)—to expand and distinguish traditional frames associated and disassociated with observed (...) altruistic behavior. The validation of our instrument based on 1015 subjects in 3 separate real stakes scenarios indicates that heuristic forms of deontology, virtue-theory, and utilitarianism are strongly related to such behavior, and that egoism is an inhibitor. It also suggests that deontic and virtue-theoretical frames may be commonly perceived as intertwined and opens the door for new research on self-abnegation, namely, a perceived moral obligation toward suffering and self-denial. These findings hold the potential to inform ongoing conversations regarding organizational citizenship and moral crowding out, namely, how financial incentives can undermine altruistic behavior. (shrink)

To pursue the cultivation of a compassionate disposition is often perceived as an external demand, constraining one's individual freedom. Some might think of it as a necessary burden for the benefit of society, while others may exercise it only in the most convenient occasions. This most common view is gravely impoverished. Compassion is in fact a cognitive disposition with a certain historical life that actually frees us from our own perceptive constraints.

Several European and North American states encourage or even require, via good Samaritan and duty to rescue laws, that persons assist others in distress. This paper offers a utilitarian and contractualist defense of this view as applied to corporations. It is argued that just as we should sometimes frown on bad Samaritans who fail to aid persons in distress, we should also frown on bad corporate Samaritans who neglect to use their considerable multinational power to undertake disaster relief or to (...) confront widespread social ills such as those currently befalling public health (obesity) and the environment (climate change). As such, the corporate duty to assist approach provides a novel justification for sustainable business practices in such cases. The paper concludes by arguing that traditional stakeholder approaches have not articulated this duty of assistance obligation, though a new utilitarian stakeholder theory by Thomas Jones and Will Felps may be coextensive. (shrink)

Our rapidly increasing reliance on frictionless AI interactions may increase cognitive and emotional distance, thereby letting our adaptive resilience slacken and our ethical virtues atrophy from disuse. Many trends already well underway involve the offloading of cognitive, emotional, and ethical labor to AI software in myriad social, civil, personal, and professional contexts. Gradually, we may lose the inclination and capacity to engage in critically reflective thought, making us more cognitively and emotionally vulnerable and thus more anxious and prone to manipulation (...) from false news, deceptive advertising, and political rhetoric. In this article, I consider the overarching features of this problem and provide a framework to help AI designers tackle it through system enhancements in smartphones and other products and services in the burgeoning internet of things (IoT) marketplace. The framework is informed by two ideas: psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s cognitive dual process theory and moral self-awareness theory, a four-level model of moral identity that I developed with Benjamin M. Cole. (shrink)

This paper challenges the assumption that to consider the subjective interests of others is to take on a burden that constrains our personal freedom. The nature of compassion will be examined as a disposition to have a certain subjective insight into a given social atmosphere. The inquiry will develop by showing the role that this emotive quality plays in freeing the will from perceptive constraints. The discussion will take place within the context of both Analytic and Buddhist philosophies of moral (...) psychology in order to show that together they provide a coherent groundwork in support of the thesis at hand. (shrink)

Agency is an amazing thing: it transduces cognitivity into causality, it makes thought real. How it does so has been a matter of considerable dispute, the resolution of which has been hampered by moral complications. The supposition of a rational basis for morality can play an essential role in clarifying agency by providing a ground for legitimizing the objects of desire and the motivation they provide. The four-stage model of agency presented here – deliberation, calculation, intention, and enactment – emerges (...) when the moral concerns regarding desire have been detoxified. A crucial distinction is between the cognitive and causal aspects of desire, between the estimation of desirability (preference) and the actual motivation it may initiate (desire). Failure to recognize desire’s cognitive aspect preemptively disables its participation in practical reasoning. (shrink)

We argue that attempts to extrapolate moral motives for non-egoistic behavior in organizational behavior often interpret results empathically or deontically, while leaving other moral motivational frames, such as the utilitarian and virtue ethical, under-examined. We encourage the creation of experimental measures to distinguish various philosophical frames.

The intellectual culture of scientism clouds our understanding of science itself. What’s more, it eclipses alternative ways of knowing — chiefly the philosophical — that can actually yield greater certainty than the scientific. While science and philosophy do at times overlap, they are fundamentally different approaches to understanding. So philosophers should not add to the conceptual confusion that subsumes all knowledge into science. Rather, we should underscore the fact that various disciplines we ordinarily treat as science are at least as (...) — if not more —philosophical than scientific. (shrink)

Like any social science, management and organization sits astride two literary and epistemic disciplines; the empirical and the conceptual. I argue that emphasizing the former to the detriment of the latter, as is often the case in management and organization research, creates a conceptual blindness that compromises progress in the field. I show how adopting a more philosophically attuned methodology buttresses the conceptual tools of management and organization research via deduction, induction, normative grounding, and overcoming the illusion of unanimity.

This case takes place in the context of a small to medium-sized retail clothing firm. It examines the latest trends in social media marketing technology and the potential ethical issues regarding privacy infringement and behavioral control of teenagers and young adults that such technology presents. The scenario invites students to consider how much, if at all, such marketing practices should be resisted going forward.

This essay responds to the thoughtful essays on the Order of Public Reason (OPR) by Elvio Baccarini, Giulia Bistagnino and Nenad Miscevic. All three essays interrogate OPR’s understanding of moral theory - “meta” matters about the nature of morality, reasons and modeling within moral theories. I first turn to the general understanding of the moral enterprise underlying OPR, explaining why it takes a view at odds with the contemporary mainstream in moral philosophy. I then explain the idea of moral truth (...) in OPR: when it comes to social morality, moral truth is necessarily a function of what can be endorsed by some collectivity. Th is leads to a fundamental worry about theories of public reason: why is the endorsement of the public so important? And if some sort of public endorsement is really so terribly important, how can a theory of public reason withstand the fact that it advances its own controversial claims that cannot be publicly endorsed? After considering when public endorsement is necessary, and when public reason theories can make controversial claims, I close by considering in what way OPR does, and in what way it does not, employ a thought experiment, and the complexities of that. (shrink)

Research into the proper mission of business falls within the context of theoretical and applied ethics. And ethics is fast becoming a part of required business school curricula. However, while business ethics research occasionally appears in high‐profile venues, it does not yet enjoy a regular place within any top management journal. I offer a partial explanation of this paradox and suggestions for resolving it. I begin by discussing the standard conception of human nature given by neoclassical economics as disseminated in (...) business schools; showing it is a significant obstacle to an accurate conception of ethics and how this limits consideration of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. I then examine the scope of the top management journals, showing how their empirical and descriptive focus leaves little room for ethics, which is an essentially conceptual and prescriptive discipline. Finally, I suggest avenues for research into the ethical mission of business, generally—and sustainability and CSR, in particular—by appeal to the precepts of Harvard Business School’s Master’s in Business Administration ethics oath modeled on the medical and legal professions. (shrink)

A popular positivistic line of thinking seems to be cropping up again, declaring that the sciences are on the verge of a paradigmatic shift. One that will merge science and philosophy to finally answer all the great big questions once and for all. Questions such as What is life? What is consciousness? What makes individuals who they are? Why does our universe seem fine-tuned for our existence? How did it all begin? While such questions are undoubtedly important, the truth is, (...) they are essentially philosophical. That is to say, they escape the kind of exactness required of the hard sciences. The upshot is that they are at best only answerable to a limited extent, if they are even answerable at all. (shrink)

Michael Goldhaber, who popularized the term the attention economy, said of the US Capitol insurrection: “It felt like an expression of a world in which everyone is desperately seeking their own audience and fracturing reality in the process. I only see that accelerating.” If we don’t do something about this, American democracy may not survive. For when there is no longer any common ground of evidence and reason, history shows that misinformation will eventually overwhelm public discourse and authoritarianism can take (...) over. That is precisely what dictators across the world gleefully anticipate will happen in the US. The Biden administration could combat this by establishing a digital fairness doctrine for the twenty-first century. This would not mean setting up a government agency as the arbiter of truth. The purpose of such a doctrine is simply to preserve the possibility of a functioning national discourse on critical issues of public interest. It would not run afoul of First Amendment free speech guarantees, given that it would do nothing to block speech itself. In fact, it would expand and enrich national conversations, by preventing echo chambers prone to systematic bias. (shrink)

Today, dramatically increasing economic inequality, imminent climatological calamity, and a global pandemic now place the timeless debate over capitalism into stark relief. Though many seek to pin the blame on capitalism’s excesses, they would do well to recall the historical record of socialism’s deficiencies, namely, stifling innovation, lumbering inefficiency, and stagnation. Fortunately, our moral psychology affords a middle way between these two extremes. For while economic incentives have a tendency to let our civic and prosocial impulses atrophy from disuse, these (...) can also be rekindled when we are faced with highly compelling reasons to think and act for the greater good of all concerned. The coronavirus pandemic now unfolding might well offer us an opportunity to instill a culture of heightened moral self-awareness spurring a more virtuous form of capitalism. (shrink)

Benatar’s central argument for antinatalism develops an asymmetry between the pain and pleasure in a potential life. I am going to present an alternative route to the antinatalist conclusion. I argue that duties require victims and that as a result there is no duty to create the pleasures contained within a prospective life but a duty not to create any of its sufferings. My argument can supplement Benatar’s, but it also enjoys some advantages: it achieves a better fit with our (...) intuitions; it does not require us to acknowledge that life is a harm, or that a world devoid of life is a good thing; and it is easy to see why it does not have any pro-mortalist implications. (shrink)

This paper presents a moral argument in support of the view that the mind is a nonphysical object. It is intuitively obvious that we, the bearers of conscious experiences, have an inherent value that is not reducible to the value of our conscious experiences. It remains intuitively obvious that we have inherent value even when we represent ourselves to have no physical bodies whatsoever. Given certain assumptions about morality and moral intuitions, this implies that the bearers of conscious experiences—the objects (...) possessing inherent value—are not physical objects. This moral evidence is corroborated by introspective evidence. (shrink)

Many of us assume that all the free editing and sorting of online content we ordinarily rely on is carried out by AI algorithms — not human persons. Yet in fact, that is often not the case. This is because human workers remain cheaper, quicker, and more reliable than AI for performing myriad tasks where the right answer turns on ineffable contextual criteria too subtle for algorithms to yet decode. The output of this work is then used for machine learning (...) purposes to generate algorithms constructed from large data sets containing thousands of correctly coded observations. The fact that ghost workers are treated as consumers distorts the basic logic of the employment relationship, effectively placing the worker-as-consumer in the worst of both worlds, in which they hold the legal rights of neither group. This puts them in a regulatory limbo position in which they have little or no protection, control, or guarantee of return on investment. This is because the platforms that facilitate ghost work have orchestrated a three-way virtual relationship that absolves all parties of responsibility, while placing nearly all the risks and opportunity costs squarely on the shoulders of the workers. As a result, we believe such a work arrangement as it stands, does not uphold basic standards of Rawlsian justice as fairness. (shrink)

This case study takes place in the context of a small urban supermarket chain. It examines the extent to which such firms should work to lower food waste on sustainability and human rights grounds. The scenario examines structural inefficiencies along the supply chain from food production to consumption, asking students to consider what power supermarkets have to correct these inefficiencies, and what ethical responsibility this may create for them to do so. Government regulations written to encourage or require food purveyors (...) to gift their excess supply to the needy are discussed. (shrink)

Most prominent arguments favoring the widespread discretionary business practice of sending jobs overseas, known as ‘offshoring,’ attempt to justify the trend by appeal to utilitarian principles. It is argued that when business can be performed more cost-effectively offshore, doing so tends, over the longterm, to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. This claim is supported by evidence that exporting jobs actively promotes economic development overseas while simultaneously increasing the revenue of the exporting country. After showing that offshoring might (...) indeed be justified on utilitarian grounds, I argue that according to Rawlsian social-contract theory, the practice is nevertheless irrational and unjust. For it unfairly expects the people of a given society to accept job-gain benefits to peoples of other societies as outweighing job-loss hardships it imposes on itself. Finally, I conclude that contrary to socialism, which relies much more on government control, capitalism constitutes a social contract that places a particularly strong moral obligation on corporations themselves to refrain from offshoring. (shrink)

Prominent non-speciesist attempts to determine the amount of moral standing properly attributable to conscious beings argue that certain non-human animals should be granted the highest consideration as self-conscious persons. Most of these theories also include a lesser moral standing for the sentient, or merely conscious, non-person. Thus, the standard approach has been to advocate a two-tiered theory—'sentience' or 'consciousness' and 'self-consciousness' or 'personhood'. While the first level seems to present little interpretative difficulty, the second has recently been criticized as a (...) rather obscurantist label. For it would seem, both on empirical and conceptual grounds, that self-consciousness/personhood comes in degrees. If these observations are at all revealing, they indicate that the two-tiered model is inadequate. This is the view I will support here, replacing the standard dichotomy with a more accurate seven-tiered account of cognitive moral standing adaptable to all three major perspectives of moral reasoning, namely, utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics. (shrink)

This case study takes place in the context of a large corporate technology services firm. It explores the question of what constitutes sexual harassment as well as how best to draft a no-tolerance policy. The scenario examines behaviors that may or may not be considered illegal, the responsibility of all employees to foster a harassment-free environment, and what an effective no-tolerance policy might look like that minimizes possible conflicts of interest. Students are given an opportunity to reflect on several issues, (...) including how the agents should act situationally, and how the policy might best be (re)designed and implemented going forward. (shrink)

Use of the word “worry” is on the rise. Does that reflect our anxious time — or make it worse?

This paper provides a critique of the contemporary notion of intellectual property based on the consequences of Wittgenstein's “private language argument”. The reticence commonly felt toward recent applications of patent law, e.g., sports moves, is held to expose erroneous metaphysical assumptions inherent in the spirit of current IP legislation. It is argued that the modern conception of intellectual property as a kind of natural right, stems from the mistaken internalist or Augustinian picture of language that Wittgenstein attempted to diffuse. This (...) view becomes persuasive once it is shown that a complete understanding of the argument against private language must include Wittgenstein's investigation of the role of the will in the creative process. It is argued that original thought is not born by decree of the will, but engendered by a public context of meaning and value. What marks a person as a genius is, therefore, according to Wittgenstein, not some sovereign capacity of conceptual world-making, but merely a propitious dose of intellectual courage. (shrink)

There is currently debate between deflationists and anti-deflationists about the ontology of persisting objects. Some deflationists think that disputes between, for example, four-dimensionalists (e.g. Ted Sider and David Lewis) and quasi-nihilists (e.g. Peter Van Inwagen and Trenton Merricks) are merely verbal disputes. Anti-deflationists deny this. Eli Hirsch is a deflationist who maintains that many ontological disputes are merely verbal. Theodore Sider maintains that the disputes are not merely verbal. Hirsch and Sider are thus engaged in a metaontological dispute. In this (...) paper, I argue that Hirsch's metaontological dispute with Sider is, by Hirsch's own lights, itself merely verbal. I conclude that the mere verbalness of his metaontological dispute with Sider suggests that Hirsch's account of what makes a dispute merely verbal may be problematic. (shrink)

The question “Why should I be moral?” has long haunted normative ethics. How one answers it depends critically upon one’s understanding of morality, self-interest, and the relation between them. Stephen Finlay, in “Too Much Morality”, challenges the conventional interpretation of morality in terms of mutual fellowship, offering instead the “radical” view that it demands complete altruistic self-abnegation: the abandonment of one’s own interests in favor of those of any “anonymous” other. He ameliorates this with the proviso that there is no (...) rational basis for morality’s presumption of precedence, leaving it up to each person to decide when and whether they prefer self-interested concerns to more stringent moral requirements. I counter Finlay’s radical altruism with fair egalitarianism, a more congenial interpretation of moral normativity that repudiates self-abnegation and holds instead that ceteris paribus everybody’s interests are equal. As a result, supererogation and moral sainthood become more intelligible, and the choice between self-interest and morality becomes one between different decision procedures, the particular advantage of morality being others compatible results. (shrink)

There are Humeans and unHumeans, disagreeing as to the validity of the Treatise’s ideas regarding practical reason, but not as to their importance. The basic argument here is that the enduring irresolution of their Hume centric debates has been fostered by what can be called the fallacy of normative monism, i.e. a failure to distinguish between two different kinds of normativity: empirical vs. rational. Humeans take the empirical normativity of personal desire to constitute the only real kind, while unHumeans insist (...) that only the objective rationality associated with categorical morality can provide reliable normative guidance. In turn, the failure to recognize the dual nature of normativity has helped engender motivational obscurantism: as essentially causal notions, motive and motivation obscure the rational processes that lie at the heart of deliberation and choice. Once it is realized that normativity takes two different forms, each with its own distinctive role, it becomes possible to mediate if not mitigate the differences between Humeans and unHumeans. Choice will be the key to understanding practical reasoning, and its analysis will provide the basis for a belief/desire model that upends conventional wisdom regarding motivation and desire. (shrink)

Sharon Street’s 2006 article “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” challenges the epistemological pretensions of the moral realist, of the nonnaturalist in particular. Given that “Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes” – why should one suppose such attitudes and concomitant beliefs would track an independent moral reality? Especially since, on a nonnaturalist view, moral truth is causally inert. I abstract a logical skeleton of Street’s argument and, with its aid, (...) focus on problematic assumptions regarding the (a)causality of moral truth. It emerges that there are acquired causal powers that compensate for the intrinsic impotence of moral truth, as well as two distinct levels at which truth-tracking might occur. I argue that while evolution’s selective forces do not track moral truth, that does not imply individual organisms could not have evolved that capability. -/- . (shrink)

The argument that follows has a certain air of prestidigitation about it. I attempt to show that, given a couple of innocent-seeming suppositions, it is possible to derive a positive and complete theory of normative ethics from the Humean maxim "You can't get ought from is." This seems, of course, absurd. If the reasoning isn't completely unhinged, you may be sure, the trick has to lie in those "innocent-seeming" props. And, in fact, you are right. But every argument has to (...) begin somewhere, and, however questionable, those suppositions just don't seem to harbor serious normative import. (shrink)

It is natural to oppose morality and self-interest; it is customary also to oppose morality to interests as such, an inclination encouraged by Kantian tradition. However, if “interest” is understood simply as what moves a person to do this rather than that, then – if persons ever actually are good and do what is right – there must be moral interests. Bradley, in posing the “Why should I be moral?” question, raises Kant-inspired objections to the possibility of moral interests qua (...) particular, conditional causes. The paper argues that these objections can be met if (a) one distinguishes between what makes something right and what makes something right happen, and (b) doing what is right is intrinsic to a person’s interests and not merely a means to ulterior ends. The requisite completeness of rational morality is shown to exclude pluralistic approaches. Given rational monism, people can find intrinsic advantage in morality’s justifiability, cooperativeness and communality. (shrink)

It is generally supposed that borderline cases account for the tolerance of vague terms, yet cannot themselves be sharply bounded, leading to infinite levels of higher order vagueness. This higher order vagueness subverts any formal effort to make language precise. However, it is possible to show that tolerance must diminish at higher orders. The attempt to derive it from indiscriminability founders on a simple empirical test, and we learn instead that there is no limit to how small higher order tolerance (...) may become. That means there is no limit to how precisely we may draw the boundaries of borderline cases, thus forestalling any requirement for higher order vagueness. (shrink)

The realist belief in robustly attitude-independent evaluative truths – more specifically, moral truths – is challenged by Sharon Street’s essay “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”. We know the content of human normative beliefs and attitudes has been profoundly influenced by a Darwinian natural selection process that favors adaptivity. But if simple adaptivity can explain the content of our evaluative beliefs, any connection they might have with abstract moral truth would seem to be purely coincidental. She continues the (...) skeptical attack in “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Rethink It”, concentrating on the intuitionist realism of Ronald Dworkin. The latter sees the issue fundamentally as a holistic choice between moral objectivity and the genocide-countenancing consequences of abandoning objective standards. Street counters that, because of realism’s skeptical difficulties, Dworkin’s Choice (as I call it) actually works in favor of her Euthyphronic antirealism. I will argue that she misrepresents the realist’s skeptical challenge, and that clarifying the character of that challenge renders the case for normative realism much more appealing. Indeed, I claim that Street fails to exclude the genuine possibility of a rational basis for moral truth. (shrink)

These reflections are an attempt to get to the heart of the "reason is the slave of the passions" debate. The whole point of deliberation is to arrive at a choice. What factors persons find to be choice-relevant is a purely empirical matter. This has significant consequences for the views of Hume, Williams, Nagel, Parfit and Korsgaard regarding practical reason.

Contemporary discussions do not always clearly distinguish two different forms of vagueness. Sometimes focus is on the imprecision of predicates, and sometimes the indefiniteness of statements. The two are intimately related, of course. A predicate is imprecise if there are instances to which it neither definitely applies nor definitely does not apply, instances of which it is neither definitely true nor definitely false. However, indefinite statements will occur in everyday discourse only if speakers in fact apply imprecise predicates to such (...) indefinite instances. (What makes an instance indefinite is, it should be clear, predicate-relative.) The basic issue in the present inquiry is whether this indefiniteness ever really occurs; the basic question is, Why should it ever occur? (shrink)