Papers, Please, by Lucas Pope (2013), explores the story of a customs inspector in the fictional political regime of Arstotzka. In this paper we explore the stories, systems and moral themes of Papers, Please in order to illustrate the systemic approach to designing videogames for moral engagement. Next, drawing on the Four Component model of ethical expertise from moral psychology, we contrast this systemic approach with the more common scripted approach. We conclude by demonstrating the different strengths and weaknesses that (...) these two approaches have when it comes to designing videogames that engage the different aspects of a player’s moral expertise. (shrink)

There has been a recent surge of research interest in videogames of moral engagement for entertainment, advocacy and education. We have seen a wealth of analysis and several theoretical models proposed, but experimental evaluation has been scarce. One of the difficulties lies in the measurement of moral engagement. How do we meaningfully measure whether players are engaging with and affected by the moral choices in the games they play? In this paper, we survey the various standard psychometric instruments from the (...) moral psychology literature and discuss how they might be applied in the evaluation of games. (shrink)

Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved participants playing a custom-built (...) visual novel game (The Great Fire) with different intuitive and counter-intuitive morality meter settings. Overall, we found that players’ attitudes towards the morality meter in this game was complex, context sensitive and variable throughout gameplay and that the intuitiveness of the meter encouraged participants to treat the meter more ‘as a moral guide’ that prompts reflection and less ‘as a score’ to be engaged with reactively. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss the way the videogame The Last of Us: Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020) manages to entice players to question the ethical adequacy of their own gaming behaviour.

Intuitively, many people seem to hold that engaging in acts of virtual murder in videogames is morally permissible, whereas engaging in acts of virtual child molestation is morally impermissible. The Gamer’s Dilemma (Luck in Ethics Inf Technol 11:31–36, 2009) challenges these intuitions by arguing that it is unclear whether there is a morally relevant difference between these two types of virtual actions. There are two main responses in the literature to this dilemma. First, attempts to resolve the dilemma by (...) defending an account of the relevant moral differences between virtual murder and virtual child molestation. Second, attempts to dissolve the dilemma by undermining the intuitions that ground it. In this paper, we argue that a narrow version of the Gamer’s Dilemma seems to survive attempts to resolve or dissolve it away entirely, since neither approach seems to be able to solve the dilemma for all cases. We thus provide a contextually sensitive version of the dilemma that more accurately tracks onto the intuitions of gamers. However, we also argue that the intuitions that ground the narrow version of the Dilemma may not have a moral foundation, and we put forward alternative non-moral normative foundations that seem to better account for the remaining intuitive difference between the two types of virtual actions. We also respond to proposed solutions to the Gamer’s Dilemma in novel ways and set out areas for future empirical work in this area. (shrink)

Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how these skills can be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and describe (...) the design problems raised by each. To conclude, we analyse two recent games, The Walking Dead and Papers, Please, and show how the lenses give us insight into important design differences between these games. (shrink)

Luck (2009) argues that gamers face a dilemma when it comes to performing certain virtual acts. Most gamers regularly commit acts of virtual murder, and take these acts to be morally permissible. They are permissible because unlike real murder, no one is harmed in performing them; their only victims are computer-controlled characters, and such characters are not moral patients. What Luck points out is that this justification equally applies to virtual pedophelia, but gamers intuitively think that such acts are not (...) morally permissible. The result is a dilemma: either gamers must reject the intuition that virtual pedophelic acts are impermissible and so accept partaking in such acts, or they must reject the intuition that virtual murder acts are permissible, and so abstain from many (if not most) extant games. While the prevailing solution to this dilemma has been to try and find a morally relevant feature to distinguish the two cases, I argue that a different route should be pursued. It is neither the case that all acts of virtual murder are morally permissible, nor are all acts of virtual pedophelia impermissible. Our intuitions falter and produce this dilemma because they are not sensitive to the different contexts in which games present virtual acts. (shrink)

Can a videogame tell us something about what it means to be human? Or even further, what is human as such? Yoko Taro's NieR: Automata tries to answer these questions with the astonishing characteristic of the videogames: the immersion. Thanks to a coherent coincidence between playing subjectivity and virtuality given by the joypad, videogames can deeply investigate the subject about moral, ethical and existential questions. My aim in the paper is to explain what is about of the human in (...) Taro's work thanks to Heideggerian's view on technology. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that the videogame Far Cry 2 manages to take advantage of the heroic formula so characteristic of the first-person shooter videogame genre in a way that potentially prompts players to reflect on the ethical adequacy of their own decision to immerse themselves in a fictional scenario in which they take the role of a fictional character whose behaviour primarily, if not exclusively, consists in shooting.

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel back in (...) time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments. (shrink)

The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with (...) the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses. (shrink)

What are the identity and persistence conditions of videogames? This paper surveys the contemporary philosophical literature on this topic. Specifically, I discuss various views which attempt to ground the identity of videogame works in their rules, in their algorithmic structure, in their source code, or in contextual parameters surrounding gameplay. While these proposals all have merits of their own, I argue that none of them are satisfactory. My conclusion is therefore negative: we still lack an adequate theoretical model to (...) account for the identity and persistence conditions of videogames. (shrink)

What is it that one fundamentally rejects when one criticizes a way of thinking as moralistic? Taking my cue from the principal leveller of this charge in philosophy, I argue that the root problem of moralism is the dualism that underlies it. I begin by distinguishing the rejection of moralism from the rejection of the moral/nonmoral distinction: far from being something one should jettison along with moralism, that distinction is something that any human society is bound to develop. But this (...) valuable distinction is transformed into a problematic dualism when it casts the two sides of the distinction as contrasting sharply in nature, value, and structure. In ethics, the resulting dichotomy takes the form of a dualism of morality and prudence. In politics, it takes the form of a dualism of principle and interest. I explain the enduring appeal of such dualisms before laying out the costs of moralism thus conceived: moralism erodes our sensibility to the moral and political costs of value conflicts; it projects an unrealistic conception of agency that sets up scepticism about responsibility; and it limits our ability to appreciate and realize the wider variety of nonmoral values that sustain us, our achievements, and morality itself. (shrink)

In this paper, we take a data-driven approach to analyse intellectual trends over the first five decades of theJournal of Medical Ethics(JME). Our data set, comprising all texts published in theJMEsince 1975, reveals not only the most distinctive topics of theJMEin comparison to other key journals with similar profiles but also diachronic fluctuations in the prominence of certain topics. Overall, the distribution of topics shifted gradually, with each editorial period at theJMEshowing continuity with its immediate predecessor. However, a significant (...) drift in topic distribution is evident over the 50 years, with some editorial periods being more ‘disruptive’ than others. These disruptions were influenced by external events (eg,Public health emergencies), broader trends in bioethics (eg, the recent growth of topics such asRace,PrivacyandVaccination) or editors’ preferences (eg,Ethics education). Additionally, our data provides insights into editorials where editors outlined their visions for the journal or reflected retrospectively on their past editorship. (shrink)

Contractualism and rule consequentialism both hold that whether a moral principle is true depends on what would happen if it were generally adopted as a basis for conduct. This paper argues that theories with this feature face a profound epistemic problem. The question of what would happen if different moral principles were generally adopted is a complex empirical question, comparable in difficulty to the question of what would happen if a nation adopted different laws, or if humanity had evolved different (...) traits. Reflection on the epistemic demands of this question shows that we have no clue what would happen if different moral principles were generally adopted, and thus no clue what moral principles contractualism and rule consequentialism endorse. The only way to avoid cluelessness is to test principles on groups small enough to be epistemically tractable, which requires accepting an implausibly extreme form of moral relativism. I conclude that we must reject contractualism, rule consequentialism, and any other moral theory that entails that the truth of a moral principle depends on what would happen if it were generally adopted. (shrink)

Various philosophers authors have argued—on the basis of powerful examples—that we can have compelling moral or practical reasons to believe, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. This paper explores an alternative story, which still aims to respect widely shared intuitions about the motivating examples. Specifically, the paper proposes that what is at stake in these cases is not belief, but rather acceptance—an attitude classically characterized as taking a proposition as a premise in practical deliberation and action. I suggest that acceptance’s (...) theoretical usefulness in the ethics of belief has been hidden by its psychological obscurity. I thus aim to develop an empirically adequate and mechanistically specific psychological profile of acceptance. I characterize acceptance as centrally involving a cognitive gating function, in which we prevent a target belief state from having its characteristic downstream effects on reasoning, cognition, and action, and restructure those downstream processes. I then argue that there is substantial empirical support for the existence of the cognitive mechanisms needed to instantiate this view, coming from the science of emotion regulation. I argue that acceptance involves deploying the same mechanisms used in emotional response modulation to belief states: acceptance is doxastic response modulation. I then propose that having a better understanding of the psychological profile of acceptance leaves us better positioned to appreciate its potential usefulness for making progress on various puzzles within the ethics of belief. (shrink)

In their recently published book Nudge (2008) Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein (T&S) defend a position labelled as ‘libertarian paternalism’. Their thinking appeals to both the right and the left of the political spectrum, as evidenced by the bedfellows they keep on either side of the Atlantic. In the US, they have advised Barack Obama, while, in the UK, they were welcomed with open arms by the David Cameron's camp (Chakrabortty 2008). I will consider the following questions. What (...) is Nudge? How is it different from social advertisement? Does Nudge induce genuine preference change? Does Nudge build moral character? Is there a moral difference between the use of Nudge as opposed to subliminal images to reach policy objectives? And what are the moral constraints on Nudge? (shrink)

This paper argues that Quaker business ethics can be understood as a MacIntyrean tradition. To do so, it draws on three key MacIntyrean concepts: community, compartmentalisation, and the critique of management. The emphasis in Quaker business ethics on finding unity, as well as the emphasis that Quaker businesses have placed on serving their local areas, accords with MacIntyre’s claim that small-scale community is essential to human flourishing. The emphasis on integrity in Quaker business ethics means practitioners are (...) well-placed to resist the compartmentalising pressures of contemporary work. Quaker business ethics is also highly critical of the manipulative forms of management that MacIntyre regards as dominant. As such, Quaker business ethics provides evidence that more morally ameliorative forms of running business organisations is possible, even if they remain difficult to achieve. (shrink)

East Asian countries such as South Korea have recently made headlines for experimenting with different methods to incentivise people to have (more) children, in a bid to reverse declining birth rates. Many such incentives—child benefits, cash bonuses, dating events, and so on—appear morally innocuous at first glance. I will demonstrate in this analysis, however, that they amount to stopgap measures which reveal fundamental shortcomings with the way various nation states are approaching the so-called ‘problem’ of fertility decline.

This chapter provides a general overview and introduction to the law and ethics of virtual sexual assault. It offers a definition of the phenomenon and argues that there are six interesting types. It then asks and answers three questions: (i) should we criminalise virtual sexual assault? (ii) can you be held responsible for virtual sexual assault? and (iii) are there issues with 'consent' to virtual sexual activity that might make it difficult to prosecute or punish virtual sexual assault?

Virtue ethics is traditionally a conservative project. It analyses the virtues that humanity has been relying on since antiquity. This conservatism unduly limits the potential of virtue ethics to contribute to moral progress. Instead, we should pay more attention to constructionist virtue ethics with the help of conceptual engineering. I will argue that revising and ameliorating the virtue concepts which a community uses directly and indirectly leads to a change of the virtues that exist in this community. (...) By revising and innovating virtue concepts, we can re-make and improve the virtues that we have. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has been challenged on empirical grounds by philosophical interpreters of situationist social psychology. Challenges are necessarily challenges to something or other, so it’s only possible to understand the situationist challenge to virtue ethics if we have an antecedent grasp on virtue ethics itself. To this end, I first identify the non-negotiable “hard core” of virtue ethics with the conjunction of nine claims, arguing that virtue ethics does make substantive empirical assumptions about human conduct. (...) Next, I rearticulate the situationist challenge in light of these nine claims. I then turn to a discussion of specifications of several responses typically made by defenders of virtue ethics against the situationist challenge, arguing that most of them either are unsound or give up one of the elements in the hard core. A few, however, survive this criticism, and so I conclude by suggesting ways in which the situationist challenge might be not so much resisted as co-opted. Situational influences can be used to help people simulate virtue, a phenomenon I call factitious virtue. (shrink)

Since the advent of computers, humans have pursued automata with superior information-processing capabilities. In the endeavor to create new entities that converge toward intellectual functions, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) that emulate AI surpassing ourselves has become a reality. With the intelligence explosion triggered by AI and the consequent emergence of superintelligence, the improvement of simulation capabilities accelerates. As this surpasses humans’ discriminative perceptual abilities between reality and unreality, a paradox arises wherein, from a modern scientific standpoint, science (...) becomes unscientific. It is thought that as our controllability over the reality we perceive is ultimately enhanced by superintelligence, even whether we ourselves exist, what happiness is, what ethics are, and whether concepts themselves ever existed become matters of uncertainty. -/- Note: In the creation of this paper, we have undertaken all writing ourselves and have not used generative AI for text generation except for translation purposes. (shrink)

Algorithms influence every facet of modern life: criminal justice, education, housing, entertainment, elections, social media, news feeds, work… the list goes on. Delegating important decisions to machines, however, gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, freedom, fairness, and democracy. Algorithms and Autonomy connects these concerns to the core human value of autonomy in the contexts of algorithmic teacher evaluation, risk assessment in criminal sentencing, predictive policing, background checks, news feeds, ride-sharing platforms, social media, and election interference. Using these (...) case studies, the authors provide a better understanding of machine fairness and algorithmic transparency. They explain why interventions in algorithmic systems are necessary to ensure that algorithms are not used to control citizens' participation in politics and undercut democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

Though many ethicists have the intuition that we should leave nature alone, Kyle Johannsen argues that we have a duty to research safe ways of providing large-scale assistance to wild animals. Using concepts from moral and political philosophy to analyze the issue of wild animal suffering (WAS), Johannsen explores how a collective, institutional obligation to assist wild animals should be understood. He claims that with enough research, genetic editing may one day give us the power to safely intervene without perpetually (...) interfering with wild animals’ liberties.---------------Questions addressed include: In what way is nature valuable and is interference compatible with that value? Is interference a requirement of justice? What are the implications of WAS for animal rights advocacy? What types of intervention are promising?---------------Expertly moving the debate about human relations with wild animals beyond its traditional confines, Wild Animal Ethics is essential reading for students and scholars of political philosophy and political theory studying animal ethics, environmental ethics, and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

Business ethics is often understood as a variety of professional ethics, and thus distinct from ordinary morality in an important way. This article seeks to challenge two ways of defending this claim: first, from the nature of business practice, and second, from the contribution of business. The former argument fails because it undermines our ability to rule out a professional-ethics approach to a number of disreputable practices. The latter argument fails because the contribution of business is extrinsic (...) to business in a way that distinguishes from the established professions. The article ultimately suggests we adopt a more aspirational approach to business ethics, which retains an appeal even in the face of charges of anti-capitalist irrelevance. (shrink)

What is wrong with government whistleblowing and when can it be justified? In my view, ‘government whistleblowing’, i.e., the unauthorized acquisition and disclosure of classified information about the state or government, is a form of ‘political vigilantism’, which involves transgressing the boundaries around state secrets, for the purpose of challenging the allocation or use of power. It may nonetheless be justified when it is suitably constrained and exposes some information that the public ought to know and deliberate about. Government whistleblowing (...) should then be viewed, along the lines of civil disobedience, as a collective cognition- and legitimacy-enhancing device. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the challenges of implementing reflective thinking in engineering ethics education (EEE). It examines existing methods for teaching ethical reflection in EEE and argues that pedagogical activities aiming to foster ethical reflection need to be infused with dialogical interactions and, at a deeper level, informed by dialogism. Dialogism is understood as a relational approach to inquiry in which interactions between moral agents enable them to develop their own understandings through the process of finding shared meanings with the (...) others in activities such as sharing reasons and deliberation. Drawing on pragmatism and phenomenology, the authors conceptualize reflection as a mode of thinking that enables us to monitor and question our assumptions and values – and to synthesize experiences and situations continuously and iteratively. Classroom reflection is a nuanced practice that can be captured through experiential, first-person accounts. Given the centrality of the dialogical experiences in reflection, the assessment methods should focus on evaluating the process rather than the learning outcomes, by emphasizing self-awareness, transformation, and spontaneity in class interactions. In creating opportunities for reflection, instructors need to purposefully consider their choice of specific cases and scenarios used in instruction. Students should be guided to recognize and engage in ethical situations by considering their full, diverse, and complex contextual reality, their own assumptions, values, and experiences, and by promoting dialogical practices in the classroom. (shrink)

One objection to conventional AI ethics is that it slows innovation. This presentation responds by reconfiguring ethics as an innovation accelerator. The critical elements develop from a contrast between Stability AI’s Diffusion and OpenAI’s Dall-E. By analyzing the divergent values underlying their opposed strategies for development and deployment, five conceptions are identified as common to acceleration ethics. Uncertainty is understood as positive and encouraging, rather than discouraging. Innovation is conceived as intrinsically valuable, instead of worthwhile only as (...) mediated by social effects. AI problems are solved by more AI, not less. Permissions and restrictions governing AI emerge from a decentralized process, instead of a unified authority. The work of ethics is embedded in AI development and application, instead of functioning from outside. Together, these attitudes and practices remake ethics as provoking rather than restraining artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Looking at responsibility within a Lévinasian sense, human beings are firstly seen not in the philosophically traditional sense, of being egocentric, but rather seen as ethical subjects based on “the other” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989). The purpose of this paper is to examine the notion of responsibility as Lévinas conceptualized in the idea that human beings are responsible for not only themselves but for others. Lévinas within “Ethics as First Philosophy” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989) states that before all other (...) forms of being in the world there must be responsibility to the Other (Lévinas & Hand, 1989). Lévinas defines this to mean that before freedom of the subject, and their subjectivity, before self-consciousness, before the consciousness of consciousness, before being, and before relativity there is “responsibility for the Other pre-exists any self-consciousness” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989, p.75). Perhaps, Lévinas is saying that a human beings obligation comes before all of what follows from our being in this world, our obligation to the Other beginning with the “face to face” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989, p.75), interaction, which is our first and foremost responsibility, the responsibility to the Other. And to be ethical beings who begin with responsibility we rely on the fundamental relationship of others. This notion of responsibility appears when we encounter, in the face-to-face interaction, the unknowable other. However, does this responsibility extend to more than two individuals and to those outside our immediate proximity? For example, Lévinas states that it is the “face to face” notion of seeing one in distress, yet what if it is a group of people, and what if they are not in close proximity but on the other side of the world? What if they are on the other side of a screen that can also be artificial intelligence in our modern era. Are we still responsible? And if we are responsible, how does Lévinas’s concept of responsibility fit into that situation or is it limited? I want to examine responsibility in terms of proximity through a Lévinasian ethical lens and plurality, defined as more than two individuals, by questioning responsibility in terms of relationality, and vulnerability. I will be looking mainly at five authors Emmanuel Lévinas, Ernst Van Alphen, Judith Butler, Kevin Quashi, and Lisa Guenther, to answer the question of whether Lévinas’s definition of responsibility includes proximity, and plurality. (shrink)

In biomedical ethics, there is widespread acceptance of moral realism, the view that moral claims express a proposition and that at least some of these propositions are true. Biomedical ethics is also in the business of attributing moral obligations, such as “S should do X.” The problem, as we argue, is that against the background of moral realism, most of these attributions are erroneous or inaccurate. The typical obligation attribution issued by a biomedical ethicist fails to truly capture (...) the person's actual obligations. We offer a novel argument for rife error in obligation attribution. The argument starts with the idea of an epistemic burden. Epistemic burdens are all of those epistemic obstacles one must surmount in order to achieve some aim. Epistemic burdens shape decision-making such that given two otherwise equal options, a person will choose the option that has the lesser of epistemic burdens. Epistemic burdens determine one's potential obligations and, conversely, their non-obligations. The problem for biomedical ethics is that ethicists have little to no access to others' epistemic burdens. Given this lack of access and the fact that epistemic burdens determine potential obligations, biomedical ethicists often can only attribute accurate obligations out of luck. This suggests that the practice of attributing obligations in biomedical ethics is rife with error. To resolve this widespread error, we argue that this practice should be abolished from the discourse of biomedical ethics. (shrink)

The paper examines the justification of warfare. The main thesis is that war is very difficult to justify, and justification by invoking “justice” is not the way to succeed it. Justification and justness are very different venues: while the first attempts to explain the nature of war and offer possible schemes of resolution, the second aims to endorse a specific type of warfare as correct and hence allowed – which is the crucial part of “just war theory.” However, “just war (...) theory,” somewhat Manichean in its nature, has very deep flaws. Its final result is criminalization of war, which reduces warfare to police action, and finally implies a very strange proviso that one side has a right to win. All that endangers the distinction between ius ad bellum and ius in bello, and destroys the collective character of warfare. Justification of war is actually quite different – it starts from the definition of war as a kind of conflict which cannot be solved peacefully, but for which there is mutual understanding that it cannot remain unresolved. The aim of war is not justice, but peace, i.e. either a new articulation of peace, or a restoration of the status quo ante. Additionally, unlike police actions, the result of war cannot be known or assumed in advance, giving war its main feature: the lack of control over the future. Control over the future, predictability, is a feature of peace. This might imply that war is a consequence of failed peace, or inability to maintain peace. The explanation of this inability forms the justification of war. Justice is always an important part of it, but justification cannot be reduced to it. The logic contained here refers to ius ad bellum, while ius in bello is relative to various parameters of sensitivity prevalent in a particular time, with the purpose to make warfare more humane and less expensive. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This is a short companion piece to my ‘Found in Translation – Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics III.5 1113b7-8 and its Reception’ in which I examine in close textual analysis the philosophical question whether these two lines from the Nicomachean Ethics provide any evidence that Aristotle discussed free choice – as is not infrequently assumed. The result is that they do not, and that the claim that they do tends to be based on a mistranslation of the Greek. (There (...) is some inevitable overlap with Part 1 of the 'Found in Translation' paper.). (shrink)

Ideal carbon tax policy is internationally coordinated, fully internalizes externalities, redistributes revenues to those harmed, and is politically acceptable, generating predictable market signals. Since nonideal circumstances rarely allow all these conditions to be met, moral issues arise. This paper surveys some of the work in moral philosophy responding to several of these issues. First, it discusses the moral drivers for estimates of the social cost of carbon. Second, it explains how national self-interest can block climate action and suggests international policies—carbon (...) border tax adjustments and carbon clubs—that can help address these concerns. Third, it introduces some of the social science literature about the political acceptability of carbon taxes before addressing a couple common public concerns about carbon taxes. Finally, it introduces four carbon revenue usage options, arguing that redistributive and climate compensation measures are most morally justified. [Open access]. (shrink)

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. (...) Finally, we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources. (shrink)

this paper advances a novel account of part of what justifies killing in war, grounded in the duties we owe to our loved ones to protect them from the severe harms with which war threatens them. It discusses the foundations of associative duties, then identifies the sorts of relationships, and the specific duties that they ground, which can be relevant to the ethics of war. It explains how those associa- tive duties can justify killing in theory—in particular how they (...) can justify overrid- ing the rights to life of some of those who must be killed to win a war. It then shows how these duties can be operationalised in practice: first, showing how soldiers who fight on behalf of their community can act on reasons that apply to the members of that community; second, showing that the argument from associative duties does not prove too much—in particular, that it does not license the intentional killing of noncombatants in war. (shrink)

In the Eudemian Ethics II 1, 1219a34–b8, Aristotle defines happiness as ‘the activity of a complete life in accordance with complete virtue’. Most scholars interpret a complete life as a whole lifetime, which means that happiness involves virtuous activity over an entire life. This article argues against this common reading by using Aristotle’s notion of ‘activity’ (energeia) as a touchstone. It argues that happiness, according to the Eudemian Ethics, must be a complete activity that reaches its end at (...) any and every moment. The upshot of this reading is that life reaches completeness within a lifetime and that death cannot be the requirement for making life complete. (shrink)

This chapter explores the possibility of an alliance between Deleuze’s philosophy and feminist philosophy with respect to ethics. I begin by specifying some of the general points of convergence between Deleuzian ethics and feminist ethics. In the second section, I turn away from feminist ethics in particular to consider feminist engagement with Deleuze’s (and Deleuze and Guattari’s) work; in this section of the paper, I describe the central criticisms of Deleuze offered by feminist philosophers and point (...) out the aspects of his thought that have been valuable for feminist theorizing. In order to respond to what I take to be the overarching concern feminists have about Deleuze’s philosophy, the third section develops a proposal for a Deleuzian conception of ethics that is able to do (much of) what feminists require of an ethical theory. (shrink)

In “Correspondence to Reality in Ethics”, Mario Brandhorst examines the view of ethics that Wittgenstein took in his later years. According to Brandhorst, Wittgenstein leaves room for truth and falsity, facts, correspondence and reality in ethics. Wittgenstein's target, argues Brandhorst, is objectivity. I argue that Brandhorst's arguments in favour of truth, facts, reality and correspondence in ethics invite similar arguments in favour of objectivity, that Brandhorst does not recognise this because his conception of objectivity is distorted (...) by a Platonist picture and that he misinterprets the passage which he takes to support a Wittgensteinian case against objectivity. (shrink)

One of the most controversial issues to emerge in recent studies of Fichte concerns the status of his normative ethics, i.e., his theory of what makes actions morally good or bad. Scholars are divided over Fichte’s view regarding the ‘final end’ of moral striving, since it appears this end can be either a specific goal permitting maximizing calculations (the consequentialist reading defended by Kosch 2015), or an indeterminate goal permitting only duty-based decisions (the deontological reading defended by Wood 2016). (...) While I think each interpretive position contains an element of truth, my aim in this paper is to defend a third alternative, according to which Fichte’s normative ethics presents us with a unique form of social perfectionism. (shrink)

Aristotle’s dialogue Protrepticus is not only his earliest work of ethics but also the root of all his subsequent investigations into ethics. Here we explore the various ways Aristotle retained in memory the contents of the Protrepticus and redeployed them in the Eudemian Ethics, including the common books. Since Aristotle himself does not explicitly acknowledge the foundational significance of the Protrepticus to his later works, our exploration must proceed on the basis of our knowledge of the earlier (...) work, which can then related to comparable passages in the treatises. But the Protrepticus is a lost work, unlike the EE and the EN, in the sense that no medieval manuscripts of it have survived. And so it first needs to be reconstructed on the basis of the streams of reception that deposited information in surviving works by later ancient authors. We begin in part 1 by reviewing the surviving evidence of the Protrepticus before presenting our wider reconstruction and conception of the work as a dialogue in part 2. In part 3, we discuss ideas and arguments in the reconstructed dialogue that are retained and redeployed in the Eudemian Ethics, focussing on the account of intellectual virtues in EE v and the introduction and methodological framework in EE i-ii.1. (shrink)

We live in a world in which ‘smart’ algorithmic tools are regularly used to structure and control our choice environments. They do so by affecting the options with which we are presented and the choices that we are encouraged or able to make. Many of us make use of these tools in our daily lives, using them to solve personal problems and fulfill goals and ambitions. What consequences does this have for individual autonomy and how should our legal and regulatory (...) systems respond? This chapter defends three claims by way of response. First, it argues that autonomy is indeed under threat in some new and interesting ways. Second, it evaluates and disputes the claim that we shouldn’t overestimate these new threats because the technology is just an old wolf in a new sheep’s clothing. Third, and finally, it looks at responses to these threats at both the individual and societal level and argues that although we shouldn’t encourage an attitude of ‘helplessness’ among the users of algorithmic tools there is an important role for legal and regulatory responses to these threats that go beyond what are currently on offer. (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)

This chapter addresses the growing problem of unwanted sexual interactions in virtual environments. It reviews the available evidence regarding the prevalence and severity of this problem. It then argues that due to the potential harms of such interactions, as well as their nonconsensual nature, there is a good prima facie argument for viewing them as serious moral wrongs. Does this prima facie argument hold up to scrutiny? After considering three major objections – the ‘it’s not real’ objection; the ‘it’s just (...) a game’ objection; and the ‘unrestricted consent’ objection – this chapter argues that it does. The chapter closes by reviewing some of the policy options available to us in addressing the problem of virtual sexual assault. (shrink)

A risk-based reinterpretation ofWeber’s ethic of responsibility can resolve core problems of professional ethics (the role of values, the multilevel problem, etc.) and address current issues—such as the social responsibility of professions or the accountability of professionals. From this perspective, professions as organizations and professionals as their individual members share and distribute responsibility (and risk) in that the primary responsibility of a profession is to provide domain-specific quality standards, while that of individual professionals is to be able to justify (...) service against those standards on a case-by-case basis. In this way, as argued in the paper, professionalism translates (sometimes conflicting) values into a case-specific quality. (shrink)

Schopenhauer bases morality on the concept of compassion, which he assumes to be the “great mystery of ethics”. He sees it and as a spontaneous action that can neither be taught or planned. However, some elements of his theory of human action allow us to conceive of an ethical-moral action (the compassionate act) as something less mysterious or immediate, rather a mediated and planned action in its social or sociability dimension, or even as one which is suggested. In this (...) paper I propose what may be called a “valorization of the empirical apparatus” of Schopenhauerian thinking on human action (vís-a-vis the metaphysical apparatus) by distinguishing between what I call great ethics and small ethics, a differentiation that I believe can be inferred from some of the philosopher’s elaborations. (shrink)