Photo by Karl Raymund Catabas on Unsplash “After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. – And we – we must still defeat his shadow as well!” – Friedrich Nietzsche[1] INTRODUCTION Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead!”[2] but lamented that his contemporaries remained living in the (...) shadow of God. For Nietzsche, the morality of his time was still based in the Christian tradition, even though faith in God was waning. Bioethics lives under a similar shadow: the shadow of Enlightenment Era-rationalism. Bioethics curricula focus on principles derived from Kantian deontology and utilitarianism. The allure of maintaining a moral framework that provides a rational method that can be handily applied to any situation remains strong. The principlist approach advanced by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress is taught to nearly all medical students in the United States,[3] and is essentially the canonical ethical framework of bioethics. In this model, the principle of autonomy is Kantian in nature, and the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence are utilitarian in nature.[4] Moreover, the presented framework is an approach that, when applied rationally to any healthcare scenario, will yield an outcome “considered moral.”[5] This reflects a faulty conception of philosophy that plagues much of bioethics, wherein the only contribution of philosophy pertinent to bioethics is moral philosophy elucidated by European thinkers in the Enlightenment Era. The landscape of moral philosophy has evolved significantly from the 18th century. However, the bioethical world has not kept up with the philosophical world, remaining instead in the shadow of antiquated moral thinking. Also lacking in bioethics are other disciplines of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, existentialism, and aesthetics, which are often given no consideration at all. The inclusion of both modern moral philosophy and other philosophical fields is necessary if bioethics is to survive its transition into modernity. l. The Shadow of Enlightenment Enlightenment Era philosophers such as Immanuel Kant argued that one need only employ reason to obtain knowledge; emotion bore no relevance when determining ethical behavior. Kant’s moral theories thus privileged a duty to act according to moral imperatives over feelings. Other Enlightenment Era philosophers such as John Locke developed systems that attempted to quantify human goods and human ills. This quantification potentially reduces human welfare and suffering to utility. Today, in the world of philosophy, such a “neutral analysis,” as Cora Diamond noted, is “dead or moribund.”[6] Bernard Williams remarked that such moral philosophy is “empty and boring,”[7] and G. E. M. Anscombe stated that it “no longer generally survives.”[8] And yet, just as the atheists in Nietzsche’s world dwelt in the moral code of a dead God, bioethicists still pursue a unified moral system that takes an input, applies some moral rules, and generates a moral outcome, like the four principles approach that Beauchamp and Childress laid out.[9] Some detractors of principlism take issue with their approach for not being unified enough and want to replace it with a procedural framework that is even more systematic and complicated. They argue that the resulting moral framework would be a “comprehensive decision procedure for arriving at answers”[10] that retains the “impartiality that is an essential part of morality.”[11] The shadow of rationalist morality has caused bioethical decision making to become detached and rigid when bioethics should concern itself with the humans whose lives it affects. A rational, divorced-from-emotion way of thinking ultimately fails to yield satisfactory results when decisions are made by and for emotional beings. Dr. Paul Farmer, among others, championed the idea that bioethics should be de-philosophized, as philosophy, cold and calculated, fails to adequately respond to the realities of those worst off.[12] Instead, Dr. Farmer emphasized the inclusion of the social sciences, like sociology and anthropology, in bioethics. Undoubtedly, Dr. Farmer was on the right track; bioethics should certainly engage directly with the people whom its decisions involve. If the narrow band of moral philosophy currently found in bioethics – that of stringent rationalism – were all that philosophy had to offer, I, too, would advocate for a de-philosophization. Ludwig Wittgenstein notes that to attempt to capture the complexity of moral thinking in a manner that employs reason alone and casts aside emotion is a “hopeless task,” like reconstructing a sharp image “from a blurred one.”[13] Unfortunately, bioethics is mired in the remnants of this hopeless task. To Dr. Farmer, the dominant moral framework was too restrictive and was unresponsive to the social and humanitarian needs of those whom bioethics is meant to help. As such, he wished to free bioethics from the shadow of a morality derived from rationalist thinkers. ll. Beyond Rationalism Like Nietzsche, who tried to resolve Europe’s post-religion vacuum by providing his society with a new way to live, Dr. Farmer wanted to replace the rationalist philosophy upon which bioethics was built with a “resocialization” of the field.[14] I agree with Dr. Farmer’s call for resocialization, as well as his denouncement of philosophy as it exists in bioethics. Evaluating risks and benefits along a predetermined array of moral principles is far too rigid and impersonal to guide what are often the most important decisions one will make. For Dr. Farmer, the most needed change was restoring the social element of bioethics. However, in advocating for this resocialization, Dr. Farmer casts philosophy as the antithesis of social science, noting that “few would regard philosophy … as a socializing discipline.”[15] I disagree. Rationalist moral philosophy may be lacking in socializing force, but there are other fields of philosophy that are responsive to our social reality. Rather than de-philosophizing bioethics, it makes more sense to replace the antisocial philosophies predominant in bioethics with prosocial philosophies better suited to it. Of course, the contribution of philosophy to bioethics is more than moral theories from the Enlightenment Era. There are more recent philosophical contributions from outside the field of moral philosophy that have roused bioethical interest. Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, et al., argue for philosophy’s continued place in bioethics, citing Derek Parfit’s “non-identity problem,” which altered the landscape of reproductive ethics, and David Chalmers’ contributions to philosophy of consciousness, which have implications for the moral status of brain organoids.[16] Still, these are narrow applications of philosophy to highly specialized areas of bioethics, which not all bioethicists are inclined to delve into. Philosophy in bioethics should not be confined to niche applications in specialist fields but should influence all bioethical thought. Fortunately, there remains untapped a wealth of philosophical disciplines that pertains to exactly this. Philosophy of language investigates the nature of meaning and understanding in communication, which is a necessary social action. Successfully deciphering and conveying moral values in discourse is a bioethicist’s bread and butter, as is resolving disagreements and reaching agreements. Indeed, it is often the case that miscommunication lies at the root of an impasse between a doctor and a patient. An understanding of the nature of the disagreement would help resolve the conflict, as different types of disagreements require different interventions for resolution. For instance, a “substantive disagreement,”[17] in which two parties use the same terms in the same ways and have a fundamental disagreement on which outcome is more desirable, can be resolved only if one party yields to the other. On the other hand, a “merely verbal dispute,”[18] in which two parties use the same terms to represent entirely different concepts and values, requires standardization of terminological usage for its resolution. As such, no one can overstate the moral importance of successful communication in bioethics, and an exploration of language itself would prove invaluable to a bioethicist’s training. Existentialism is another subset of philosophy that acknowledges the social nature of human existence, noting that one’s being in the universe is concomitant with the existence of others sharing the same universe.[19] Thus, there is the recognition that whatever existence is, it is not complete without the existence of others. With this as a starting point, existentialists examined how to live meaningfully with others in this world. Since ethics crucially involves others, it is no surprise that existentialists pondered how to live moral lives. Existentialist conceptions of morality did not revolve around acting in accordance with a set of rules, but rather, recognized individual freedom in choosing how to act and emphasized acting authentically. In this vein, bioethicists should commit to doing what is right rather than committing to applying a set of principles. Existentialism, while part of the broader bioethics literature, is less common throughout bioethics curricula and deserves more prominence. Martin Heidegger, for instance, emphasized the difference between two types of thinking: “calculative thinking” and “meditative thinking.” Heidegger characterizes calculative thinking as a computation, wherein from some given starting conditions “definite results”[20] are determined, and contrasts this with meditative thinking, which he describes as “thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.”[21] Heidegger was critical of the pervasiveness of calculative thinking, seeing it as the “ground of thoughtlessness,”[22] in which we only relate to the world in a meaningless, mechanical way. This is the emphasized type of thinking in rationalist conceptions of morality popular in bioethics; from a set of starting conditions, a series of rules are applied, and a moral outcome is calculated. Such a technique, however, discounts the personal meaning individuals place on the aspects of their lives relevant to their decision making, as well as the meaning in committing to doing what is right. Under calculative thinking, such a commitment is reduced to rote rule-following. A turn to meditative thinking would ensure that bioethical decisions comport with living meaningful lives. Even aesthetics, a discipline devoted to examining beauty and taste,[23] has a place in bioethics. Just as the viewing of a painting, the listening of a song, or the reading of a book elicits an effective response, hearing a patient’s story leaves an emotional imprint. The recounting of a traumatic moment imparts sadness, and a joyous occasion begets joy in the listener as well. As acknowledged in the field of everyday aesthetics, these aesthetic experiences often spur us to act:[24] The unsightly appearance of a polluted riverbank drives us to remove the trash; the presence of sorrow in one’s life drives us to ameliorate it. To be mindful of aesthetic experiences and allow them to affect us emotionally is paramount to the motivation of a bioethicist to serve the patient, not out of an obligation to a job description, but out of a desire to truly avail the patient of their anguish. For example, the new field of narrative medicine utilizes critical reading and literary techniques to train clinicians and bioethicists in emotional understanding and listening skills that stress the social aspects of medicine beyond rational analysis and decision making. CONCLUSION Dr. Farmer is absolutely correct; bioethics is in dire need of resocialization. It should not be the case that the justification for a moral action is essentially that “the rules say so,” or that simply by teaching such rules to medical students, the very act of making bioethical decisions that diverge from those determined by principles can be seen as an act of “bad faith … hubris or, worse, malpractice.”[25] As bioethicists are coming to realize, the rationalist philosophical traditions that bioethics was founded upon are past their expiry, and the time for change is now. Indeed, as Dr. Farmer urges, “socializing disciplines” like anthropology, history, political economy, and sociology are necessary to humanize the field of bioethics.[26] So too, however, can philosophy be a socializing discipline, if we know where to look. Bioethics should evolve. Its new goal should be to focus on meaningful human relationships, and to phase out rigid, impersonal modes of moral thinking. The limited sampling of unsatisfying moral theories from hundreds of years ago leaves many bioethics students cold, and it is easy to see why bioethicists are ready to part ways with philosophy. I believe this is a move in the wrong direction; there is a place for philosophy in the future of bioethics. Just as bioethics needs a resocialization, it is also needs of a re-philosophization. These enrichments complement one another. There is more to bioethics than mechanically determining the right course of action in a healthcare setting. Bioethics engages with the most ancient of philosophical questions: questions of what makes human existence meaningful, what makes us who we are, how we want to relate to others, how and why we feel, what our place in the world is, how we can communicate what we think, and why our moral intuitions are so compelling. We would be remiss if we did not begin to investigate additional contributions to morality from a wider range of philosophies that try to provide answers to such questions, as they offer a richness to moral thinking that cannot be gleaned from traditional bioethical approaches alone. - [1] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, Josefine Nauckhoff, and Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 109. [2] Nietzsche, 120. [3] Daniel C O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced: Principlism, Narrative Ethics, and the Case of Living Donor Liver Transplantation,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 47, no. 1 : 97, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhab039. [4] K. D. Clouser and B. Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 15, no. 2 : 219–36, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/15.2.219. [5] O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced,” 97. [6] Cora Diamond, “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 : 168, https://doi.org/10.2307/468998. [7] Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Canto ed, xvii. [8] G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 : 1, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100037943. [9] Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 7th ed, 13. [10] Clouser and Gert, 233. [11] Clouser and Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” 235. [12] Paul Farmer and Nicole Gastineau Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics: A View from Below,” Developing World Bioethics 4, no. 1 : 17–41, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-8731.2004.00065.x. [13] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. Joachim Schulte, trans. P. M. S. Hacker, 4th edition, 40. [14] Farmer and Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics,” 20. [15] Farmer and Campos, 20. [16] Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby et al., “The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today,” The American Journal of Bioethics: AJOB, June 30, 2021, 3–5, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1940355. [17] Brendan Balcerak Jackson, “Verbal Disputes and Substantiveness,” Erkenntnis 79, no. S1 : 31–54, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9444-5. [18] C. S. I. Jenkins, “Merely Verbal Disputes,” Erkenntnis 79, no. 1 : 11–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9443-6. [19] Steven Crowell, “Existentialism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/existentialism/; Anita Avramides, “Other Minds,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/other-minds/. [20] Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, Harper Torchbooks, 46. [21] Heidegger, 46. [22] Heidegger, 45. [23] Nick Zangwill, “Aesthetic Judgment,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/aesthetic-judgment/. [24] Yuriko Saito, “Aesthetics of the Everyday,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/aesthetics-of-everyday/. [25] O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced,” 112. [26] Farmer and Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics,” 20. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:85, LEGAL OBLIGATION IN HUME There is one aspect of the thought of David Hume that seems to me to be important and topical, especially if considered in relation to two reductionist and dogmatic tendencies that are still noticeable in the general theory of law. By dogmatic I understand conceptions that are insufficiently founded on experience. The first of these two dogmatic tendencies is the emphasis placed on (...) the notion of sanction which is viewed by some as prevailing over the concept of obligation to the point of absorbing it within itself. Law is that which the superior bodies of the dominant class impose. This doctrine has been affirmed even recently. But the master example is given by Bentham. To say that a man has the obligation to behave in a certain way is equivalent to saying that if he does not behave so, he will experience pain (or the absence of pleasure). Legal sanction is the source from which this pain comes. Thus Bentham goes so far as to say that pain is constitutive of 2 obligation in all its forms. This seems to be contrary to experience and common sense. In fact, one can observe a legal obligation independently of the consideration of the consequences inherent in its violation. For this and other reasons the doctrinal tendency to give prevalence to the notion of sanction over the notion of obligation does not take account of experience and is dogmatic. Against this dogmatism one observes even today that the concept of an obligation that arises from a constriction, the concept 3 of Zwangspflicht, is a contradictio in adjecto. Nevertheless, in order to avoid the contradiction inherent in the prevalence of sanction over obligation and the dependence of law on political power and on the power of those who command, it is easy to fall into a second and opposite dogmatism. This second dogmatism consists in affirming the existence of fundamental legal obligations deducible from a priori principles understood platonically 86. as Ol·(fO- T"*) WVXt\S and as vision of the mind. But demonstrative reason, so understood, is determined exclusively through relations of ideas which, in Hume's opinion, cannot themselves constitute legal obligation. A legal system requires modifications and limitations to the passions and interests of individuals. As is well known, Hume argues that a passion and an interest cannot be modified by selfevident rational principles. No criterion that is deducible from demonstrative reason can function as a guide to human behaviour. Now between the two dogmatisms to which I have referred, Hume represents a third way on the basis of experience and of common sense. The advantage offered by Hume's thought is that of showing both the distinction between and the complementary nature of legal obligation and sanction. In what follows I shall discuss what I consider to be the kernel of Hume's legal theory as contained in his conception of human nature, setting aside secondary elements that do not directly concern the subject proposed. First: A legal system is not conceivable without setting up fundamental legal rules which, in Hume's opinion are the rules of justice. Consequently, the discussion of law implies the discussion of justice. And the discussion of justice is part of legal theory. Here I restrict my consideration to the obligations that are expressed by fundamental legal rules which are: stability of possession transference of possession by consent, and performance of promises. We know that, according to Hume, such rules cannot be derived from demonstrative or a_ priori reason but are revealed to empirical knowledge. Second: Hume distinguishes between the setting up of legal obligation and the moral evaluation of the legal obligation. In order to grasp the peculiarity of legal obligation as compared with moral evaluation, I refer here to the constitution of legal obligation. In order to understand the third book of the Treatise, it is in my 87. opinion absolutely necessary to take into account the distinction between the setting up of the legal obligation and its moral evaluation. Third: The obligations expressed in fundamental legal rules do not arise through a natural inclination but by artifice or by convention. The concept of artifice implies in Hume... (shrink)

In his published texts and lectures on moral philosophy, Kant repeatedly singles out gratitude for discussion. Nevertheless, puzzles about the derivation, content, and nature of this duty remain. This paper seeks to solve some of these puzzles. Centrally, I argue that it is essential to attend to a distinction that Kant makes between well-wishing benevolence (Wohlwollen) and active beneficence (Wohlthun) on the part of a benefactor. On the Kantian account, I argue, a different type of gratitude is owed (...) in response to each. With this distinction in place, I argue further that we can construct what many have thought to be missing from Kant’s discussion of gratitude – an argument explicating the precise contradiction generated by a maxim of ingratitude. (shrink)

Do you persist as the same person over time because you keep the same mind or because you keep the same body? Philosophers have long investigated this question of personal identity with thought experiments. Cognitive scientists have joined this tradition by assessing lay intuitions about those cases. Much of this work has focused on judgments of identity continuity. But identity also has practical significance: obligations are tagged to one's identity over time. Understanding how someone persists as the same person over (...) time could provide insight into how and why moral and legal obligations persist. In this paper, we investigate judgments of obligations in hypothetical cases where a person's mind and body diverge (e.g., brain transplant cases). We find a striking pattern of results: In assigning obligations in these identity test cases, people are divided among three groups: “body‐followers,” “mind‐followers,” and “splitters”—people who say that the obligation is split between the mind and the body. Across studies, responses are predicted by a variety of factors, including mind/body dualism, essentialism, education, and professional training. When we give this task to professional lawyers, accountants, and bankers, we find they are more inclined to rely on bodily continuity in tracking obligations. These findings reveal not only the heterogeneity of intuitions about identity but how these intuitions relate to the legal standing of an individual's obligations. (shrink)

This comparative essay about two kinds of interpersonal-centric humanism is dedicated to the memory of professor Janusz Kuczyński and his conception of dialogical universalism as a metaphilosophy, and shows Immanuel Kant’s thought as a ceaseless source of inspiration for all anti-conservatives and universalists. Kant’s philosophy gave man an unforgettable sense of freedom, because it not only posed the imperative of building a pan-human community of all rational beings, but also revealed the above-natural sense of the human species’ imposition of purposefulness (...) upon itself, and the realisation of this purposefulness in the form of a republican federation of free states dedicated to co-creating eternal peace. Kantian ethics did not reach beyond the obligations people had towards one another, hence it was functionally anthropological and uninfluenced by religion, which re-situated philosophy with regard to scientific cognition and religious experience, giving rise to a metaphysics of anthropological responsibility for the condition of the spiritual freedom this ethic propounded. Kant revealed the existence of a metaphysical difference in the sphere of being—between the determinism of nature and the moral kingdom of freedom—without direct reference to the transcendental source of these two essentially different worlds. Kant was the first to set morality rooted in the autonomy and unanimous will of all rational beings—or true humanity—against legal and religious legalism. Kant laid weight on the processual character of man’s self-education to social life through the sense of commitment to self-improvement for the benefit of the solidary co-existence of all rational beings that he developed in himself as a rational being. Thus created freedom is founded on the selflesness of goodness and represents a new quality of being that only manifests itself and evolves in community, interpersonalcentrically. It is a universalistic approach capable of gradually neutralising the human inclination towards radical evil.My attempt to compare these two interpersonalcentric humanism conceptions aims to add some substance to this very delicate element in Kuczyński’s universalism as a metaphilosophy construct. (shrink)

This study deals with the place and meaning of "legality" in Kant's moral philosophy. Although the return to Kantianism dominates contemporary political and legal thought, the boundaries of the analyses of the relationship between morality and legality in Kant's moral philosophy are confined to the boundaries drawn by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. While Rawls and Habermas consider law and morality as intersecting sets of rules and rights, they mostly consider this relationship in terms of the question of the (...) legitimacy of law. By contrast, this study is an attempt to reconsider the Kantian link between morality and legality beyond the question of the legitimacy of law. Without the deontological filters of the Rawlsian and Habermasian political and legal theory, and therefore without leaving teleological and axiological concerns outside of the field of application, this study is an attempt to analyze the possible ways of understanding the conceptual connection between morality and legality in Kant's moral philosophy. Hence in this study, by paying particular attention to The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysics of Morals, I will analyze the role of legality in Kant's morality. The study first explains the goals of Groundwork and Metaphysics as Kant describes them. The study then turns to the discussion of duty as the central concept of Kant's thought. In the process, the study questions the possible ways of understanding the conceptual relationship between moral and legal obligation in Kant's thought, and mainly emphasizes two possible different conceptualizations of that relationship, The first understanding can be constructed on the claim that the obligation of the moral subject is also to follow the fundamental principles of morality, the Categorical Imperative, in the legal order, which is part of the phenomenal world. The main point of this understanding lies in the idea that Kant's understanding of legal obligation presupposes the will's capacity to abstract from inclinations, The second understanding, in contrast to the first one, can be built on the belief that moral and legal obligations should be conceived as completely distinct and non-intersecting in Kant's moral philosophy. From this perspective, neither moral obligation nor legal obligation can affect each other. The study concludes by focusing on moderate interventionism as a possible third option for linking moral and legal obligations in Kant's moral philosophy. (shrink)

Do we ever have an obligation to choose to hold beliefs, religious or otherwise? The relations between belief, volition and moral responsibility are the subject of William James' widely discussed essay ‘The Will to Believe’. James first takes up the relationship between volition and belief: Does it make sense to speak of choosing to believe a proposition? His answer is that it does, in the sense that we can choose to act in ways which encourage the production (...) of a believing attitude in ourself. For example, we can be selective in attending to evidence, and we can incline ourselves toward belief by acting as though we already believe. By avoiding certain influences and subjecting ourself to others, we can encourage the development of belief. In so doing, we in effect treat ourself as a third person, and our behaviour is analogous to what we might engage in when encouraging others toward favourable evidence. The question of moral responsibility then becomes appropriate in our own case in a way analogous to that in which it does with respect to our belief-producing actions toward others. Just as the deception of others raises moral questions, so does the deception of ourselves. (shrink)

Tamar Schapiro has offered an important new ‘Kantian’ account of inclination and motivation, one that expands and refines Christine Korsgaard’s view. In this article I argue that Kant’s own view differs significantly from Schapiro’s. Above all, Kant thinks of inclinations as dispositions, not occurrent desires; and he does not believe that they stem directly from a non-rational source, as she argues. Schapiro’s ‘Kantian’ view rests on a much sharper distinction between the rational and non-rational parts of (...) the soul. In the process of explaining these differences, I argue that Kant’s own view is in some respects philosophically superior to Schapiro’s. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A RHETORIC OF MOTIVES: THOMAS ON OBLIGATION AS RATIONAL PERSUASION THOMAS s. HIBBS Thomas Aquinas College Santa Paula, California 'TIHE PROMINENCE of moral obligation in modern hies is l'ooted in an early modern claim, which reached uition in Kant, concerning the primacy of the right ov;er the good.1 Although Kant was not the first to make such a claim, his texts have had the most palpable influence (...) on modern moral discourse.2 Many contemporary moral philosophers, however, have!attempted to discredit the Kantian p11oject.3 In so doing, they often advance wlternative views 1 In his highly influential work, John Rawls comments on the importance of the g-0od and the right in contemporary moral philosophy, "The two main concepts of ethics are those of the right and the good.... The structure Df an ethical theory is... largely determined by how it defines and connects these two basic notions," A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 24. 2 There are numerous precursors of Kant, both in the nascent rationalism of early modern science and -0£ late scholasticism and in the project of the "rationalization" of human life characteristic of classical Protestant moral thought. It was Nietzsche, of course, who saw Kant as a most heinous example of secularized Christianity. On the "rationalization" of the moral life in Protestantism, see Max Weber, Die protestantisohe Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, Volume l (TU.bingen: Mohr, 1920), pp. 17-206. Given the convergence of these discursive fields in early modern thought and society, one might be inclined to see Kant as providing the theoretical foundations for the common moral consciousness. a I am thinking -0f Philippa Foot, "Virtues and Vices," and "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives," in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 1-18, 157-173; Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and " Ought and Moral Obligation," in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 293 ~94 THOMAS S. HIBBS characteristic of pre-modern moral philosophy, particularly of rthe 1 writings of Aristotle and Aquill!as. While consensus appears to have exnnerated Aristotle of the taint of Kantianism, the status of Tihomas's moral philosophy is still uncertain in the minds of many.4 Thomas's1 moral iphilosophy is, I believe, pre-modern. Throughout his writings he maintains the primaicy of the good ovier rthe right, the exact inverse of the Kantian position. By modern standards, Thomas's conception of obligation,seems impov;erished, almost naive. He devotes no independent treatise, or.for that matter no single quaestio, to the question of mom1l obligation. Francisco Suarez, one of Thomas's early modern oommenta.tors, found the latter's view to be muddled and unworkable. While Sua11ez criticizes Thomas's view, he fails to note that he 1and Thomas do not sha11e the same universe of discourse. What Suarez is after-a " theory of obligation "--is not extant in Thomas's texts. In fact, Suarez contributes to the deontological turn in the history of ethics. He pp. 114-123; Peter Geach, "Good and Evil," in Theories of Ethics, edited by Philippa Foot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 64-73; Elizabeth Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy" in her Oolleoted Philosophical Papers. Volume 3, l!Jthios, Religion and Politios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 26-42; Alasdair Macintyre, "Hume on 'Is' and 'Ought'," in Against the Self-Images of the Age (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 109·129. While all are critical of Kant, none of these writers advocates a straightforward return to Aristotle or Thomas. Williams, in fact, is sceptical about the viability of Aristotelianism. This litany, moreover, of Kantian critics is not intended to give the impression that there is a consensus on the failure of Kant's project. There are formidable contemporary representatives of the Kantian school. See, for instance, William Frankena, Thinking About Morality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980); Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1970); and Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: The University of Chicago... (shrink)

In Rousseau’s Social Contract, political laws are rationally binding because they satisfy the interests that motivate individuals to obey such laws. The later books of Emile justify morality by showing that it is continuous with the natural dispositions of a well-brought-up subject and is thus conducive to genuine happiness. In both the moral and political cases, Rousseau argues for an internal connection between the rational ground of an obligation and the broader aspects of human psychology that are satisfied (...) and expressed by acting from that obligation. Yet, inspired by Kantian philosophy, the recent and influential Social Autonomy interpretation has disjoined rationality and psychology. Criticising this interpretation, I argue that for Rousseau, obligations are justified because they satisfy the demands made by our moral psychology, most notably amour-propre, i.e. the desire to have one’s worth recognised by others. (shrink)

Prominent Kantian scholars, such as Korsgaard and Waldron, claim that the very existence of juridical-political institutions is sufficient to render laws authoritative. Critics argue that this view is unpersuasive as it requires subjects to obey grossly unjust laws. Here, I identify two problems facing scholars who reject the absolutist view of political authority proffered by Korsgaard and Waldron. First, when there is reasonable disagreement regarding a law’s legitimacy the Principle of Right generates contradictory obligations as it commands both disobedience (...) and compliance. In clarifying this problem, I argue that individuals must disobey illegitimate laws where this requirement is co-extensive with the duty to leave the state of nature. However, disobedience amounts to domination when individuals are subjected to private judgments regarding the conditions of freedom. The Principle of Right cannot overcome this impasse as it does not offer reasons in favor of compliance that are distinct from those reasons legitimating the law. To address this issue, I supplement Kant’s account with Joseph Raz’s ‘service conception’ of authority to show that compliance can be rendered compatible with the Principle of Right. A second problem emerges when laws are blatantly illegitimate such that obedience cannot be justified. In these cases, the Principle of Right cannot guide legislative reform in an intuitively appealing way as it fails to address considerations of proportionality. Though this latter problem is not resolved here, identifying it helps to further clarify the relationship between Kant’s moral and political principles. (shrink)

This article develops an Aristotelian account of moral obligation, and defends the account in the face of certain standard Kantian criticisms.Specifically, Aristotelian obligations may be interpreted as being dependent on virtue in such a way that they do not apply to non-virtuous agents, and therefore lack universality. The article draws on various aspects of Aristotle’s own work to set out an initial account, and then on recent discussions within the analytic tradition on this subject.An Aristotelian position is developed (...) which focuses on the distinction between the subjective and objective senses in which virtues of character need to be understood. At the objective level, the virtues are the dispositions required for any human being to live the best life.At the subjective level, the virtues are the dispositions of character which are present in certain persons, but absent in others. It is at the objective level that we can locate an Aristotelian account of how the demands of practical reason ground universal moral obligations. (shrink)

This account of the good will has struck many readers as counterintuitive. Whereas Kant seems to think that the person in whom a sense of duty must overcome indifference or contrary inclination can and does display a good will, our intuitions about human goodness suggest that there is something deficient or lacking in the grudging agent. Aristotle, for example, would think that the grudging moralist displays continence, rather than virtue, because he thinks it is the mark of the virtuous (...) person that he does not experience a conflict between the rational and nonrational parts of the soul and that his emotions and appetites harmonize with rational judgments. (shrink)

Hegel attacks Kantian morality most often without stating an opposing moral theory, tending to subsequently take up discussion of religion or the state. Commentators have variously suggested the logical consequence of Hegel's position is "the dissolution of ethics in sociology" without "room for personal morality of any kind" or that Hegel's argument is against Kantian <i>Moralitat</i>, which allows the private individual to appeal beyond social mores to universal moral standards, with Hegel insisting that concrete values come instead from (...) <i>Sittlichkeit</i>, the social order. If thinking of morality as a purely private matter of the individual's conscience seems too abstract, the Hegelian criticisms should show that moral reflections are vacuous unless they take account of the social world in which they will be realized as concrete actions. From the Hegelian's perspective on morality as seen from the more inclusive context of <i>Sittlichkeit</i>, social action that is also moral will not need to be analyzed in terms of Kant's metaphysical dualisms between reason and inclination, intentions and consequences, or the sensible and the intelligible realms. Whereas Kant thinks moral theory leads directly to religious and metaphysical postulates, Hegel deliberately leads it in another direction. He can be understood historically as going beyond Kant's effort to secularize moral philosophy. Kant begins this process by grounding moral philosophy in reason alone, not in religion. Religious postulates may follow from moral beliefs, says Kant, but morality is not derived from religious premisses. In going from private moral conscience not to religious beliefs but to social, political, and historical considerations (which could include religion seen as a social institution), Hegel extends the process of secularizing moral philosophy." Marcuse and Knox could thus both be right, since Hegel's goal is not to replace Kant's moral philosophy with another, competing moral philosophy, but to accept it, while recognizing its limitations, as a special case of a larger theory of social action. In the Hegelian jargon, from a standpoint recognizing Sittlichkeit, Moralitdt is thus <i>aufgehoben</i>, that is, Kant's formal procedures will be both "negated" (criticized for their limitations) and "preserved" (embedded in a more inclusive philosophy). (shrink)

In On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that we need to make a significant reassessment of the relationship between some central positions in moral philosophy, because, contrary to received opinion, Kantians, contractualists and consequentialists are all 'climbing the same mountain on different sides'. In Parfit's view Kant's own attempt to outline an account of moral obligation fails, but when it is modified in ways entirely congenial to his thinking, a defensible Kantian contractualism can be produced, which survives (...) the objections which are fatal for Kant's own theory. This form of contractualism would then lead rational agents to choose consequentialist moral principles. I argue that Parfit significantly misrepresents Kant's project in moral philosophy, and that no genuinely Kantian moral theory could issue in a form of consequentialism. (shrink)

The paper lays the foundations for a duty of sustainable property use based on Kant’s Doctrine of Right. In doing so, it contributes to the project of extending the application of Kant’s philosophy to environmental issues so as to include his legal-political philosophy. After providing some context, focusing in particular on Kant’s property argument, I present and critically evaluate a recent argument for a duty of sustainable property use, put forward by Attila Ataner. Then, I draw on Reinhard Brandt’s and (...) Katrin Flikschuh’s interpretation of Kant’s permissive law in order to develop my own argument. According to my account, the duty of sustainable property use is rooted in Kant’s property argument, it is best construed in terms of interpersonal freedom, and it has a structure resembling that of duties of distributive justice. Unlike Ataner’s, my argument proceeds entirely within the domain of interpersonal freedom; it focuses clearly on the normative sense of usability; it does not overgenerate obligations; and it categorises the duty of sustainable property use within Kant’s taxonomy of duties. It thus constitutes a promising starting point to further investigate the connection between sustainability, Kant’s property argument and its use of a permissive law, and the Universal Principle of Right. (shrink)

Jean Porter’s natural law theory and my divine command theory differ less than one might expect. Two differences that remain are that, with respect to deductivism, the view that we can deduce our moral obligations from human nature, we agree that human nature is insufficiently specific, but she does not acknowledge the place of revealed divine law in later scholasticism or the role for what Scotus calls ‘dispensations’. With respect to eudaimonism, the view that our choices are for the sake (...) of happiness, I do not agree that life presents itself to us integrated under the conception of a single way of life. Even in Aquinas there is a tension between his eudaimonism and his view that the love of God for God’s own sake is the distinctive mark of charity, and that charity toward the neighbor requires us to promote the neighbor’s good for the neighbor’s sake and not our own. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the relation of Kant’s theory of free will to that of K.L. Reinhold. I argue that Reinhold’s theory addresses several problems raised in the reception of Kant’s practical philosophy, particularly the problem of accounting for free immoral acts. Focusing on Reinhold’s account of free will as a condition for the conceivability of the moral law shows that the historical focus on Reinhold’s break from Kant’s own account and his alleged reliance on facts of consciousness obscures Reinhold’s decidedly (...) ‘Kantian’ argument. This approach provides a new foundation for free will and demonstrates the significance of Reinhold’s practical philosophy as an attempted corrective to Kant. Chapter 1 examines the influence of Rehberg, Ulrich, and Schmid on Kant’s and Reinhold’s respective theories of free will. Chapter 2 investigates the epistemic foundation of Reinhold’s theory of free will and, contrary to the dominant view in scholarship, argues that his account is not based merely on facts of consciousness. Chapter 3 illuminates a tension between the phenomenology of moral agency and Kant’s account of free agency. It is argued that while Kant talks about overcoming inclinations and adopting maxims by virtue of their lawful form, which would seemingly have to take place at the phenomenal level and be available to consciousness, Kant’s account of free agency is restricted to the noumenal, which precludes availability to consciousness. Reinhold’s theory of free will avoids this tension by positing consciousness of possible courses of action as a necessary condition for self-determination to one such action. Chapter 4 discusses the relation of Reinhold’s theory of free will to Kant’s Religion, a text that Reinhold uses as a basis for his charge that Kant’s theory is either “unintelligible” or “untenable.” I argue that although Reinhold fundamentally misunderstands Kant’s doctrine of supreme maxim adoption, Reinhold is correct in his assertion that Kant is committed to the thesis that the free spontaneity of the power of choice is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Chapter 5 explicates the Kant-Reinhold Controversy to argue that given Kant’s own commitment to the conditions for moral responsibility, Reinhold was ultimately correct that free will ought to be defined as choosing for or against the moral law. (shrink)

In this article I take up the image of inclination developed by Adriana Cavarero in her book, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude as a mode of developing an account of history informed by an ontology of heterogeneous ethics. Clarifying the potential of inclination contra the Kantian figure of “uprightness,” the principle task of this article is to reimagine the implications of inclination with regard to Walter Benjamin’s theses on history. Ultimately, I show that by pushing at (...) the relationality inherent to an inclined ontology of the self a meaningful exchange can be generated between plural historical temporalities, a move that reveals the inclined figure’s potential to redeem narratives of the historically dispossessed. (shrink)

As one would expect, Kant believes that there is a tension, and even a conflict, between our bodily humanity and its ethical counterpart: ‘Inclination to pleasurable living and inclination to virtue are in conflict with each other’ (Anthropology, 185-86 [7:277]). What is more unexpected, however, is that he further claims that this tension can be resolved in what he calls an example of ‘civilised bliss’, namely dinner parties. Dinner parties are, for Kant, part of the ‘highest ethicophysical (...) good’, the ultimate resolution of the conflict between our physical body and our moral powers, which consists in finding the right proportions for the ‘mixture’ between our partly ‘sensuous’ and partly ‘ethicointellectual’ nature. The aim of this paper is not only to explain Kant’s account of the ideal proportions of ethicophysical good in dinner parties, but also, and more importantly, to argue that dinner parties are in fact the ultimate experience for us, human beings. (shrink)

We argue that Tomasello's account overlooks important psychological distinctions between how humans judge different types of moral obligations, such as prescriptive obligations (i.e., what oneshoulddo) and proscriptive obligations (i.e., what oneshould notdo). Specifically, evaluating these different types of obligations rests on different psychological inputs and has distinct downstream consequences for judgments of moral character.

William Whewell’s 19th-century views are seldom given a prominent place in the history of the philosophy of science. There is, however, a key feature of his account that is, upon historical analysis, prescient of later developments, notably in pragmatism. Whewell calls this the “fundamental antithesis of philosophy”, which centres around the idea that there is no clear demarcation between subject and object (between mind and world or theory and fact). In this paper, I trace this notion’s genealogy. (...) It originated with Kant, who influenced Whewell. Whewell then developed it into a detailed thesis, one that influenced Peirce. It is identifiable in Quine, then (middle) Putnam, and now Cheryl Misak and Steven Levine (aka the new pragmatists). The purpose is to identify a previously overlooked lineage of influence running through the history of philosophy. Whewell’s antithesis might also offer a way to resist both the relativism that tends to accompany post-modern styles of pragmatism and the pretensions to a God’s-eye view latent in analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

Political debate is a distinctive domain in argumentation, characterized by these features: it is about proposals for action, not about propositions that may have a truth value; there may be good arguments on both sides; neither the proposal nor its rejection follows by necessity or inference; the pros and the cons generally cannot, being multidimensional and hence incommen- surable, be aggregated in an objective way; each audience member must subjectively compare and balance arguments on the two sides; eventual consensus (...) class='Hi'>between the debaters is not a reasonable requirement. From all this follows a view of the rhetor’s special obligation in democratic, deliberative rhetoric on which it becomes crucial, in the interest of the audience, that political debaters acknowledge good arguments on the opposite side and explain why, on balance, they deem the arguments favoring their own side to be stronger. (shrink)

Do facts about what an agent would freely do in certain circumstances at least partly determine any of her moral obligations? Actualists answer ‘yes’, while possibilists answer ‘no’. We defend two novel hybrid accounts that are alternatives to actualism and possibilism: Dual Obligations Hybridism and Single Obligation Hybridism. By positing two moral ‘oughts’, each account retains the benefits of actualism and possibilism, yet is immune from the prima facie problems that face actualism and possibilism. We conclude by highlighting one (...) substantive difference between our two hybrid accounts. (shrink)

"Under what conditions are obedience and disobedience required or justified? To what or whom is obedience or disobedience owed? What are the differences between authority and power and between legitimate and illegitimate government? What is the relationship between having an obligation and having freedom to act? What are the similarities and differences among political, legal, and moral obligations?..." Originally published in 1972, Professor Flathman discusses these crucial issues in political theory in a lucid and stimulating argument. (...) Though mainly concerned to develop his own modified utilitarian standing point he also reviews both the classical and modern literature from Plato and Hobbes to Hare and Rawls. The treatment is philosophical but it is frequently related to practical issues of civil obedience and disobedience and in particular focuses on the relation between law, obligation and social change. (shrink)

This paper explains that there are two kinds of beneficiaries of international efforts to tackle climate change, only one of whom (unfair beneficiaries) is argued to come under an obligation to join such efforts and do a fair share according to the principle of fairness. For this argument, it is discussed that the problem of climate obligation is such that a theory of climate obligation, in addition to a theory of climate justice, is required for an actual (...) imposition of the obligation mentioned earlier. Having briefly introduced the principle of fairness with the focus on its basic idea, this paper makes a distinction between fair and unfair beneficiaries, the latter of which is argued to be identified as the right climate obligation bearers. Furthermore, four advantages of identifying climate obligation bearers in terms of unfair beneficiariesare pointed out. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

Very often when the vast majority of experts agree on some scientific issue, laypeople nonetheless regularly consume articles, videos, lectures, etc., the principal claims of which are inconsistent with the expert consensus. Moreover, it is standardly assumed that it is entirely appropriate, and perhaps even obligatory, for laypeople to consume such anti-consensus material. I maintain that this standard assumption gets things backwards. Each of us is particularly vulnerable to false claims when we are not experts on some topic – such (...) falsehoods have systematic negative impacts on our doxastic attitudes that we can neither prevent nor correct. So, when there is clear expert consensus on a given scientific issue, while it is permissible for experts to consume anti-consensus material, laypeople have an epistemic obligation to avoid such material. This argument has important consequences for philosophical discussions of our epistemic obligations to perform or omit belief-influencing actions. Such discussions typically abstract away from the important differences between experts and laypeople. Accordingly, we should reject this typical practice as problematic, and insist instead that laypeople and experts have fundamentally different epistemic obligations. (shrink)

A continuing need for care for elderly, combined with looser family structures prompt the question what filial obligations are. Do adult children of elderly have a duty to care? Several theories of filial obligation are reviewed. The reciprocity argument is not sensitive to the parent–child relationship after childhood. A theory of friendship does not offer a correct parallel for the relationship between adult child and elderly parent. Arguments based on need or vulnerability run the risk of being unjust (...) to those on whom a needs-based claim is laid. To compare filial obligations with promises makes too much of parents’ expectations, however reasonable they may be. The good of being in an unchosen relationship seems the best basis for filial obligations, with an according duty to maintain the relationship when possible. We suggest this relationship should be maintained even if one of the parties is no longer capable of consciously contributing to it. We argue that this entails a duty to care about one’s parents, not for one’s parents. This implies that care for the elderly is not in the first place a task for adult children. (shrink)

What drives bodies together? What inclines them towards one another? What keeps these bodies inclined towards each other as the world around them continues to fall apart? In this article, I argue that the circulation of grief and anger produces a choral inclination, a relationality forged through our emotional responses to loss. Coming together through this choral inclination allows us to acknowledge loss, confront its conditions, and enact a collective response to it. I engage with feminist philosopher Adriana (...) Cavarero’s concept of inclination and its further development by political theorist Bonnie Honig to theorize the posture and politics of togetherness. Both thinkers turn to prefabricated relationships – between mother and child or sisters – and in proposing an alternative, I offer choral inclination to help theorize the dynamics that bring people together when neither these prefigured relationships nor access to care is readily available. I turn to grief and anger as emotions that circulate in the context of loss, and pluralize the affective responses through which our bodies incline and thus politicize one another. I develop these claims through a novel reading of Euripides’ Hecuba. In the final section, I briefly explore the motivations and leadership structure found within the Movement for Black Lives to link develop the implications for choral inclination for feminist and democratic politics. In contrast to commonplace frameworks that consider tragedy in primarily its historical context, I mobilize ancient tragedy to help theorize and enact feminist responses to the contemporary context. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out a new Kantian approach to resolving conflicts between moral obligations for highly autonomous machine agents. First, I argue that efforts to build explicitly moral autonomous machine agents should focus on what Kant refers to as duties of right, which are duties that everyone could accept, rather than on duties of virtue (or “ethics”), which are subject to dispute in particular cases. “Moral” machines must first be rightful machines, I argue. I then show (...) how this shift in focus from ethics to a standard of public right resolves the conflicts in what is known as the "trolley problem" for autonomous ma-chine agents. Finally, I consider how a deontic logic suitable for capturing duties of right might meet Kant’s requirement that rightfully enforceable obligations be consistent in a system of equal freedom under universal law. (shrink)

Political obligation is concerned with the clash between the individual’s claim to self-governance and the right of the state to claim obedience. It is a central and ancient problem in political philosophy. In this authoritative introduction, Dudley Knowles frames the problem of obligation in terms of the duties citizens have to the state and each other. Drawing on a wide range of key works in political philosophy, from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume and G. W. F. (...) Hegel to John Rawls, A. John Simmons, Joseph Raz and Ronald Dworkin, Political Obligation: A Critical Introduction is an ideal starting point for those coming to the topic for the first time, as well as being an original and distinctive contribution to the literature. Knowles distinguishes the philosophical problem of obligation - which types of argument may successfully ground the legitimacy of the state and the duties of citizens - from the political problem of obligation - whether successful arguments apply to the actual citizens of particular states. Against the anarchist and modern skeptics, Knowles claims that a plurality of arguments promise success when carefully formulated and defended, and discusses in turn ancient and modern theories of social contract and consent, fairness and gratitude, utilitarianism, justice and a Samaritan duty of care for others. Against modern communitarians, he defends a distinctive liberalism: ‘the state proposes, the citizen disposes’. (shrink)

I motivate a dilemma to show that nothing can be obligatory for anyone regardless of whether determinism or indeterminism is true. The deterministic horn, to which prime attention is directed, exploits the thesis that obligation requires freedom to do otherwise. Since determinism precludes such freedom, it precludes obligation too. The indeterministic horn allows for freedom to do otherwise but assumes the burden of addressing whether indeterministically caused choices or actions are too much of a matter of luck to (...) be obligatory for anyone. I critically discuss a response to the deterministic horn that invokes the distinction between alternatives compatible with determinism and those incompatible with determinism. (shrink)

I argue for adopting a conception of obligation that is broader than the conception commonly adopted by moral philosophers. According to this broader conception, the crucial marks of an obligatory action are, first, that the reasons for the obliged party to perform the action include an exclusionary reason and, second, that the obliged party is the appropriate target of blaming reactive attitudes, if they inexcusably fail to perform the obligatory action. An obligation is directed if the exclusionary reason (...) depends on the relationship between the obliged person and the person to whom they owe the obligatory action, and the latter person is positioned to personally blame the obligated person for inexcusably failing to perform the obligatory action. Some direc- ted obligations are not owed as a matter of right, and the person to whom the obligatory action is owed is the only person positioned to blame nonperformance. Other directed obligations are owed as a matter of right, and people who are not part of the relationship grounding the obligation nevertheless are also positioned to (impersonally) blame non-performance. Only the rights-based form of directed obligation has received signifi- cant attention from moral philosophers, yet the former—which is at the heart of what I call “personal bonds”—is a pervasive and significant theme of our ordinary interpersonal lives. (shrink)

Most people have a sense of obligation to family members that is more powerful than the law in compelling compliance with its demands. When families dissolve, however, the power of such nonlegal norms often dissolves as well. The question then becomes what the law should require in their stead. This Article is part of a larger series of studies that have examined this question by asking what citizens believe the law should demand, using surveys of persons called to jury (...) service in Tucson, Arizona. Respondents are asked to imagine they are the judge charged with deciding a series of cases in which the facts are systematically varied so as to reveal the implicit principles that survey respondents employ in deciding them. Previously reported results in this project have examined studies of the amount of child support that people believe appropriate, and how they believe child custody disputes should be resolved. This study examines lay views about alimony. It finds considerable divergence between American law in practice and the views of American citizens as to what the law should be. Survey respondents were willing to award alimony considerably more often than the law now does. More clearly, in deciding whether to allow an alimony award, they care most of all about the claimant’s responsibility as primary caretaker of the couple’s minor children, to some extent about the partners’ marital status and their relational duration, and very little at all about the claimant’s history of having cared for the couple’s now-grown children. Moreover, the way these factors affect our respondents’ judgments about alimony are not very dependent on who they are. Our respondents did vary among themselves, of course, in the frequency with which they allowed alimony, but they varied relatively little in how factors such as marriage, relational duration, the presence of minor children or the history of care for now-grown children affected their judgments. The citizen consensus reflected by these patterns differs, however, from the prevailing legal rules, the views of many scholars, and the recommendations of the American Law Institute. This striking discrepancy is interesting although not always surprising. Our respondents’ willingness to award alimony to non-marital partners, for example, is consistent with the law of some other Western countries, even if not with American law, suggesting perhaps that it is American law, not our respondents, that is peculiar. Perhaps it is also understandable that our respondents seem more concerned with the welfare of the couple’s current minor children than with addressing perceived inequities in the current economic circumstances of the adult partners. In any event, the views of our respondents pose a challenge to policymakers. Given the dearth of theoretical justification for current American practice, its rejection by American citizens seems all the more telling. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Microscope of Experience: Christian Garve’s Translation of Cicero’s De Officiis (1783)Johan van der ZandeDuring the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Teschen of 1779, ending the phony War of Bavarian Succession, Frederick II and his court stayed in Breslau, the capital of Silesia. There, in conversation with Christian Garve, the city’s most famous son, the king strongly recommended a new German translation of Cicero’s On Moral Duties (De (...) Officiis), one of the classical texts of humanist philosophy and his favorite book. Frederick’s faithful subject dutifully obliged his sovereign. Four years later, in the subservient language of a dedication to a royal patron, Garve offered in due obedience to Frederick a result that, “perhaps flawed,” was “vindicated by the efforts directed toward the execution of the command.” 1Yet Garve’s interest in Cicero differed markedly from that of Frederick. After all, as Garve wrote in the preface to the philosophical commentary on his translation, Cicero’s book was written for “persons of the higher classes who participated in the affairs of state” and for whom “moral prescription often transformed into political instruction.” Clearly that was not the world in which Garve lived. The son of an artisan, Garve, after a brief stint as a professor of philosophy in Leipzig in the early 1770s, was forced by his illness to spend the rest of his life as a reclusive private scholar in his hometown. He admitted that Cicero sometimes “condescended to deal with those classes who occupy themselves as educators and scholars.” The producing classes, however, “this vast, indispensable, and valuable part of humankind,” could only find prescriptions [End Page 75] for the virtuous life in Cicero’s work insofar as they were human beings, not in relation to their station in life. In general terms Garve thought that Cicero had neglected to deal sufficiently with domestic duties, a reproach which he also leveled against another intellectual pedigree, Adam Ferguson. This did not mean, however, that Garve reduced the citizen’s actions to the private sphere, where they could be productive economically and concerned only with their own Bildung. On the contrary, for Garve useful citizens were those who committed themselves to sociability and to political engagement. Moral actions were not only to be judged according to their motivation (as Kant asserted) but also on their effects on society at large.This different emphasis, I suggest, was typical of the German popular philosophers, who in the time span between Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant formulated a philosophy of life and among whom Garve emerged as the foremost representative. As a group they constituted a philosophical movement in their own right and were not merely, as they are usually described, the popularizers of Wolff’s philosophy. Rather, popular philosophy was a characteristic compound of Wolffian rationalism and British empiricism. Some popular philosophers, mostly the older generation, were more inclined to the rationalist and others, among them Garve, to the empirical end of this spectrum. Little concerned with epistemological problems or with the irrational cult of life as were the life philosophies of the nineteenth century, the popular philosophers were primarily interested in the virtuous life, in a philosophical theory of moral and aesthetic action. Theirs was a “science of man,” that is, a combination of practical philosophy and literary skills with the goal of morally educating a literate but non-specialized public to be useful citizens of the absolute state. They wanted to speak with propriety on all themes of human existence rather than pursue those philosophical questions not directly related to human life. 2 I entirely agree with a recent commentator who describes Garve’s concerns as non-bourgeois, or better, pre-bourgeois and deeply rooted in humanist values. 3This approach shows in Garve’s Cicero translation and commentary. In Leipzig he had attended the lectures of the classical philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Reiz, who trained his students in precise, critical scholarship. When Garve became a professor himself, he and Reiz anonymously published a Latin edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Later, Garve wrote that his own philosophy was indebted to Reiz who had pointed out to him the close relationship between linguistic and... (shrink)

Local government is not free from dilemmas arising from ethical but illegal actions as well as legal, however, unethical ones. This breeds situations in which officials must decide whether to be loyal to the government authorities or citizens, whom they are obliged to serve. For instance, they must decide whether to accept the policy imposed by the district council making them change their clerical rules of conduct which, in their opinion, will be less favourably inclined to citizens. Consequently, they will (...) be obliged either to take or refrain from taking certain actions, which stems from the inner imperative. At the root of this dilemma frequently lies a discord between law and ethics. The choice to be made leads to a moral dilemma. What is associated with this matter indeed is the question of revealing the truth about unethical, illegal, immoral or unlawful behaviour in the government that occurs with the employer’s silent approval. The so-called whistleblowing is the means to achieve it. The process is based on informing people or organizations who have the power to influence actions of the criticized individuals or organizations. This creates situations in which officials can no longer take advantage of two values and are made to choose only one of them. (shrink)

What do normative terms like “obligation” mean in legal contexts? On one view, which H.L.A. Hart may have endorsed, “obligation” is ambiguous in moral and legal contexts. On another, which is dominant in jurisprudence, “obligation” has a distinctively moralized meaning in legal contexts. On a third view, which is often endorsed in philosophy of language, “obligation” has a generic meaning in moral and legal con- texts. After making the nature of and disagreements between these views (...) precise, I show how linguistic data militates against both rivals to the generic meaning view, and argue that this has significant implications for jurisprudence. (shrink)

In the concrete exercise of practical reason, certain pieces of knowledge are required: they relate to the obligations to which the agent is committed (according to the deontological orientation in practical philosophy), to the actions themselves, as well as to the situations in which the agent operates. It appears that these pieces of knowledge are themselves required by what may be called here “second-order obligations”. The purpose of the article is to identify the place of these obligations and to show (...) the link that they establish between practical and theoretical reason. (shrink)

Many roles are situated within organizations. The occupants of these roles often confront a dilemma between (i) the occupancy conditions, performance conditions, and functions of the role, as bestowed upon the role by the organization’s decision-making procedures, and (ii) the occupancy conditions, performance conditions, and function that the role should ideally have. This chapter argues that this dilemma should be resolved in favour of (ii). Yet this does not require forgoing role-based considerations in favour of extra-role considerations. Instead, we (...) should conceptualize organizationally specified roles as being one token of an underlying role-type. The underlying role-type provides the organizational role-token with its fundamental occupancy conditions, performance conditions, and function. When the token is a poor instance of its type, organizational role-occupants have obligations—grounded in the fundamental aspects of the role—to challenge this. These are role obligations that call upon one to alter one’s role obligations. (shrink)

A continuing need for care for elderly, combined with looser family structures prompt the question what filial obligations are. Do adult children of elderly have a duty to care? Several theories of filial obligation are reviewed. The reciprocity argument is not sensitive to the parent–child relationship after childhood. A theory of friendship does not offer a correct parallel for the relationship between adult child and elderly parent. Arguments based on need or vulnerability run the risk of being unjust (...) to those on whom a needs-based claim is laid. To compare filial obligations with promises makes too much of parents’ expectations, however reasonable they may be. The good of being in an unchosen relationship seems the best basis for filial obligations, with an according duty to maintain the relationship when possible. We suggest this relationship should be maintained even if one of the parties is no longer capable of consciously contributing to it. We argue that this entails a duty to care about one’s parents, not for one’s parents. This implies that care for the elderly is not in the first place a task for adult children. (shrink)

Formalising deontic concepts, such as obligation, prohibition and permission, is normally carried out in a modal logic with a possible world semantics, in which some worlds are better than others. The main focus in these logics is on inferring logical consequences, for example inferring that the obligation O q is a logical consequence of the obligations O p and O. In this paper we propose a non-modal approach in which obligations are preferred ways of satisfying goals expressed in (...) first-order logic. To say that p is obligatory, but may be violated, resulting in a less than ideal situation s, means that the task is to satisfy the goal p ∨ s, and that models in which p is true are preferred to models in which s is true. Whereas, in modal logic, the preference relation between possible worlds is part of the semantics of the logic, in this non-modal approach, the preference relation between first-order models is external to the logic. Although our main focus is on satisfying goals, we also formulate a notion of logical consequence, which is comparable to the notion of logical consequence in modal deontic logic. In this formalisation, an obligation O p is a logical consequence of goals G, when p is true in all best models of G. We show how this non-modal approach to the treatment of deontic concepts deals with problems of contrary-to-duty obligations and normative conflicts, and argue that the approach is useful for many other applications, including abductive explanations, defeasible reasoning, combinatorial optimisation, and reactive systems of the production system variety. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE RECTITUDE OF INCLINATION NICHOLAS INGHAM, 0.P. Provincial Archives Providence, Rhode Island 0 F THE MOST plausible mainline treatments of the relation of inclination to action and of their combination to moral estimation-Kantian, Classical Utilitarian, and Aristotelian-Thomist--only the third, remarkably enough, provides for the possibility of intrinsic rectitude as regards inclination. For Kant, of course, inclination is not only indifferent to morality but censurable (...) as a criterion for action; indeed, any act done from inclination is, for Kant, pre-moral at best and immoral at worst. Classical Utilitarianism would appear to hold that the desire for pleasure, since it is correct by nature, must also be indefectibly and intrinsically correct. But this is not so, since in any choice situation an inclination toward a given pleasure, right by nature, may be counterbalanced by competing claims, whether these claims themselves arise from other inclinations within the one moral subject or from distinct subjects with differing claims. Hence, Classical Utilitarianism must accept a doctrine of extrinsic correctness as regards the evaluation of any inclination unless the version in question can establish a universally valid overriding principle of right-in which case it is Utilitarianism no longer but some form of deontological ethics. Only in the moral thought of Aristotle and Aquinas do we actually find a plausible case for the rectitude of inclination. And it is therefore surprising that so little attention has been paid this and that so many doctrinal Aristotelian-Thomists seem unaware of it. For many scholars, otherwise well acquainted with the basic philosophical views defended by St. Thomas Aquinas in his 417 418 NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P. Aristotelian commentaries, remain surprisingly unfamiliar with one of the most interesting parts of his metaphysics of morals: right appetite, inclination, or emotion as an integral part of moral science, moral activity, and reflexive knowledge of the morality of conduct and of disposition.' I should like to set out what seem to me to be the general Aristotelian-Thomist views, as expressed in the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, and to develop from them a full account of intrinsic, extrinsic, stable, and per se rectitude as regards inclination or appetite. The first step in this development requires us to consider whether a moral science is possible and, if so, of what kind it must be. I Initially both St. Thomas and Aristotle appear to neglect altogether the problem whether there can be moral science as such. In listing the five intellectual virtues (understanding, science, wisdom, prudence, and art) neither mentions a science of right action. Would such a discipline be theoretical? Ordinarily the theoretical sciences in Aristotle and Aquinas perfect only theoretical powers. Does right action fall only under prudence? Prudence ordinarily is taken to be a practical virtue, not one specifically pertaining to the sciences. Three solutions to the difficulty offer themselves at once: first, moral science belongs essentially among ·the theoretical disciplines, even where allowance is made for the inclusion of practical elements in some methodologically defensible way; second, it is science but only in a highly derivative and improper sense and, in fact, is more correctly treated as providing something like a schema for the exercise of the cardinal virtues, especially prudence; third, it is thoroughly scientific in the strict and unqualified sense of the term, yet essentially not a theoretical but a practical discipline. 1 It is surprising how little serious attention seems to have been paid to Aristotle's remark in Ethics VII, 3, 1147a26-28, that, while the immediate conclusion of theoretical reasoning is affirmation, the immediate result of practical reasoning is action. THE RECTITUDE OF INCLINATION 419 The first solution, as one might easily imagine, has been championed by many of the most illustrious commentators. John of St. Thomas appears to hold that moral science is, as such, purely theoretical, even though it has practical application in prudential application.2 Maritain seems to believe that it is the theoretical treatment of a subject matter intrinsically practical in nature.3 Lottin holds that it is speculatively practical-a mixture 2 "Scientia moralis potest dupliciter considerari; uno modo, ut etiam includit prudentiam, alio modo, ut earn excludit et solum versatur circa cognitionem virtutum... (shrink)

Leonard Peikoff’s “DIM Hypothesis” demonstrates that man’s cognitive need for integration is important historically. It reflects the motive power of philosophy, of man’s need to understand the world. But Peikoff’s theory lacks predictive power for America’s future. Today’s knowledge-based economy enables the average person to enjoy enhanced cognitive control over his life. Technology has transformed the American work experience in ways that teach one crucial connection: between the productive use of the mind (i.e., thinking, judgment) and human survival. This (...) emerging cognitive self-confidence mitigates the philosophical void left by cultural nihilism and creates an intellectual barrier to authoritarianism. (shrink)

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant makes a distinction between duties of virtue and the obligation to be virtuous. For a number of reasons, it may seem as if the latter does not actually require any actions of us not already required by the former. This essay argues that Kant does succeed in describing obligations that we have to prepare for virtuous conduct that are different from simply fulfilling specific duties of virtue, and that in so doing he (...) describes an important element of the moral life. (shrink)

What is the significance of that loose collective enterprise, sprung up in the aftermath of the sixties, known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing? To answer this question I will be taking, initially, a somewhat oblique route. And I shall assume an agreement on several important social and political matters: first, that the United States, following the Second World War, assumed definitive leadership of a capitalist empire; second, that its position of leadership generated a network of internal social contradictions which persist to this (...) day ; third, that this postwar period has been characterized, at the international level, by an extended cold war shadowed by the threat of a global catastrophe, whether deliberate or accidental. Whatever one’s political allegiances, these truths, surely, we hold as self-evident.Postwar American poetry is deployed within that general arena, and to the degree that it is “political” at all, it reflects and responds to that set of overriding circumstances.1 In my view the period ought to be seen as falling into two phases. The first phase stretches from about 1946 to 1973 . This period is dominated by a conflict between various lines of traditional poetry, on one hand, and the countering urgencies of the “New American Poetry” on the other. In the diversity of this last group Donald Allen argued for a unifying “characteristic”: “a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse.”2Of course, this representation of the conflict between “tradition” and “innovation” obscures nearly as much as it clarifies. The New American poets were, in general, must moe inclined to experimentalism than were writers like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Louis Simpson, or Donald Justice. But Allen’s declaration can easily conceal the academic and literary characteristics of the innovators. Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, for example, key figures in the New American Poetry, can hardly not be called “literary” or even “academic” poets. If they opened certain new areas in the field of poetic style, no less could and has been said of Lowell, even in his early work. And if Frank O’Hara seems the antithesis of academic work, John Ashbery is, in his own way, its epitome. Yet both appear in Allen’s New American Poetry anthology. Moreover, who can say, between O’Hara and Ashbery, which is the more innovative of the two—so different are their styles of experimentation? 1. Black and feminist writing in the United States often confines the focus of the political engagement to a more restricted national theater. Nevertheless, even in these cases engagement is necessarily carried out within the global framework I have sketched above.2. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, ed. Donald M. Allen , p. xi. Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University of Virginia. His most recent critical work, Buildings of Loss: The Knowledge of Imaginative Texts, will appear in 1987. “Some Forms of Critics Discourse” and “The Religious Poetry of Christina Rosetti” are among his previous contributions to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I argue, counter‐intuitively, that under certain conditions many people are under some moral requirement to attempt to bring children into being . There is only rarely a strict obligation to have children, but more moderate, inclining moral considerations in favour of having children, have a place in our moral world. I begin by considering a large number of arguments in favour and against the possibility of an obligation to have children. Then I examine when the weight of (...) one set of arguments is greater. And I conclude by pointing out some general lessons from the discussion. (shrink)

In this article I investigate the nature and extent of filial obligations. The question what (adult) children owe their parents is not only philosophically interesting, but also of increasing relevance in ageing societies. Its answer matters to elderly people and their adult children, and is relevant to social policy issues in various ways. I present the strongest arguments for and against three models of filial obligations: the ‘past parental sacrifices’ model, the ‘special relationship’ model, and the conventionalist model. There is (...) something to be said—and after consideration of objections something remains to be said—for all three models. In other words: filial obligations have more than one source, and an adequate model of filial obligations should reflect this. On its own, each of the above models is one-sided. They also fail to show the connections between the question of filial obligations and various other issues, such as issues of gender justice, the extent of institutionalization of eldercare, and social conventions regarding filial responsibility. Therefore, I integrate what I think we should keep from the aforementioned models into a contextual, pluralist model, which places filial obligations in a broader social and cultural context and relates them to issues of social justice. The model also highlights the difference between general and specific filial obligations, and the factors that determine their nature and extent, thus enabling a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of filial obligations. (shrink)