In this essay I will argue that, preconceptions notwithstanding, Immanuel Kant does have an environmental ethics which uniquely contributes to two current debates in the field. First, he transcends the controversy between individualistic and holistic approaches to nature with a theory that considers humanity in terms of the autonomy of moral individuals and nature in terms of the integrity of functional wholes. Second, he diminishes the gulf between Conservationism and Preservationism. He does this by constructing an ideal-regarding conception of (...) the former that values nature not as "merely" a thing to be used by human preferences and translated by markets, but as an essential component and prerequisite to the intrinsic autonomy of human beings. Simultaneously, he argues for a definition of preservation which places responsibility on humanity to harmonize moral agency with the functional integrity of natural systems. Here humanity and nature become the two unique and equally important components of what we might call the greater " Kantian ecosystem." In addition to the theoretical contributions of Kant's approach to our appreciation of the duties we owe to our natural environment, I will also suggest that Kantian Conservationism and Kantian Preservationism provide a sound moral basis for public policy arguments that wish to take the intrinsic value of humanity and nature into account. By requiring decision makers to consider citizens as ethical ends and nature as a functional end-in-itself, public choice becomes a process of restricting the use of the "kingdom of nature" to the essential requirements of the "kingdom of ends.". (shrink)

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)

An enduring question in political and legal philosophy concerns whether we have a general moral obligation to follow the law. In this paper, I argue that Philip Soper’s intuitively appealing effort to give new life to the idea of legal obligation by characterising it as a duty of deference is ultimately unpersuasive. Soper claims that people who understand what a legal system is and admit that it is valuable must recognise that they would be morally inconsistent to deny that they (...) owe deference to state norms. However, if the duty of deference stemmed from people’s decision to regard the law as valuable as Soper argues, then people who do not admit the value of the state would have no duty as such to defer to its norms. And, more importantly, people who admit the value of the state would have a duty not to defer to particular norms, namely those norms which violate the values that ground their preference for a state. This critique of Soper operates within his parameters by accepting his claim that moral consistency generates reasons to act. Even on those terms, Soper’s defence of legal obligation as a duty of deference is unpersuasive. (shrink)

This chapter starts with Kant's basic rationalist, internalist approach to justification, and then considers its connection to his famous principle of universalizability, his account of the absolute value of the goodwill, and his analysis of the motive duty as the determining ground of goodwill. Kant's argument, if it succeeds, rules out externalist theories of justification and also mere natural inclination, even mere sympathy, as a determining ground of goodwill. It does not, however, rule out a consequentialist account of the normative (...) content of morality. (shrink)

Kantian moral concepts concerning respect for human dignity have played a central role in articulating ethical guidelines for medical practice and research, and for articulating some central positions within bioethical debates more generally. The most common of these Kantian moral concepts is the obligation to respect the dignity of patients and of human research subjects as autonomous, self-determining individuals. This article describes Kant’s conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values, and draws on the work of several contemporary Kantian (...) philosophers who employ the distinction to make sense of some common moral intuitions, feelings, and norms. Drawing on this work, the article argues that the conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values is indispensable in the context of considering our obligations to those who are dependent and vulnerable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME ON BLAME AND EXCUSE17. Hume's account of blame and excuse differs in fundamental respects from many contemporary ones. Many contemporary views, ultimately derived from the Kantian dictum that 'ought' implies 'can', base excuses on the nonvoluntary character of an action. For example, H. L. A. Hart argues that the basic requirements for responsibility are that a person have the capacity and a fair opportunity to do what is (...) required. A person is to be excused for an action if he lacked either the capacity or opportunity to do what was required. As these are conditions for an action being voluntary in a suitably narrow sense, Hart primarily bases excuses on the nonvoluntary character of actions. Likewise, Richard Brandt's view, which in many respects is similar to Hume's, requires that the manifestation of a character trait be subject to a high degree of voluntary control before blame.2 is appropriate. Hume, however, explicitly denies that either a character trait or its manifestation in conduct need be subject to voluntary control for blame to be appropriate. The nonvoluntary character of an action does not necessarily excuse one from blame. Hume makes four key claims about blame and excuse. (1) The ultimate objects of praise and blame are mental qualities, not actions. (2) Actions are considered only as signs of mental qualities. (3) The possession and expression of these mental qualities may be appropriate objects of praise or blame even if they are nonvoluntary. (4) Persons have excuses if their actions do not indicate enduring mental qualities. These points need to be substantiated and explained. The first two claims may be considered together. That Hume holds mental qualities are the ultimate objects of praise and blame and that actions are considered only as signs of mental qualities is indisputable. 18. 'Tis evident, that when we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that produced them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper. The external performance has no merit. We must look within to find the moral quality. This we cannot do directly; and therefore fix our attention on actions, as on external signs. But these actions are still considered as signs; and the ultimate object of our praise and approbation is the motive, that produced them. For present purposes, only two points need be noted about this passage. First, it clearly states that the ultimate objects of praise and, as he indicates in his following 4 paragraph, blame are always mental qualities. The expression mental qualities is vague, perhaps deliberately so. Sometimes Hume uses the term motive instead. By 'motive' he does not intend any passing desire or further intention which one may have in acting, e.g., embarrassing others. For Hume, some motives are not even dispositions to act. Second, actions or external performances have no merit. They are only signs of mental qualities. Even if the concept of an action includes more than the external behavior, such as the intention, it does not include motives or desires. A difference in intention may entail a difference in action, but a difference in motive does not. The same action may be performed from different motives. Hence, actions are not logically connected with the objects of praise and blame. Hume's claim that actions themselves have no merit, it might be objected, is incorrect. People do constantly evaluate actions. If they did not, then actions would not be considered untoward and a basis for attributing blame. However, Hume does not deny that actions may be evaluated in some way or other, only that they alone have merit or are appropriate objects of praise and blame. Actions may be evaluated without reference to mental qualities, for example, as right or wrong, useful or unuseful. Hume is 19. chiefly concerned with evaluating actions as virtuous or vicious. The terms virtuous and vicious as applied to actions involve an element of praise and blame, whereas the terms right and wrong, at least in most of their uses, do not. Thus, Hume is not denying that actions alone may have merit in the sense of value or utility. Rather, he is denying that actions... (shrink)

Here I pursue two main aims: (1) to articulate and defend a Kantian conception of duties to self, and (2) to explore the ramifications of such duties for the moral justification of paternalism. I conclude that there is a distinctive reason to resent paternalistic intercessions aimed at assisting others in fulfilling their duties to self (or the self-regarding virtues necessary thereunto), based on the fact that the goods realized via their fulfillment are historical, i.e., their value depends on an (...) individual's casual contribution to their fulfillment. (shrink)

This study aims to reconstruct some of the main strategies to address the controversial position of Kant in his opusculum On the Supposed Right to Lie for the sake of Humanity, namely, an unconditional prohibition of lying, even when the consequences are catastrophic, seeking to ascertain the relevance such as an attempt to better situate the ethics of Kant in the face of overwhelming objections from the critics.Wood, for example, argues that the opusculum does not deal with an ethical duty, (...) but a legal duty not to lie, claiming that the prohibition does not lie in the opusculum comes from the categorical imperative, but the universal principle of law. Korsgaard and Mahon argue that, regardless of the question for the type of duty in dispute between Kant and Constant, the point is that it does not follow the ethics of Kant, at least in some formulations of the categorical imperative of an unconditional prohibition of lying. In addition, it will defend itself in order to avoid such objections to Kantian ethics would need to abandon the distinction between duties of perfect obligation and duties of imperfect obligation, since, although not a dispute about an ethical duty, the classification of the duty not to lie as a perfect duty to oneself or to others signifies your unconditional.Este estudo pretende reconstruir algumas das principais estratégias de enfrentar a controversa posição de Kant em seu opúsculo Sobre o suposto direito de mentir por amor à humanidade, a saber, uma proibição incondicional da mentira, mesmo quando as consequências são catastróficas, buscando averiguar a pertinência dessas enquanto uma tentativa de melhor situar a ética de Kant diante das objeções avassaladoras dos críticos. Wood, por exemplo, defende que o opúsculo não trata de um dever ético, mas sim de um dever jurídico de não mentir, sustentando que a proibição da mentira no opúsculo não deriva do imperativo categórico, mas do princípio universal do direito. Korsgaard e Mahon afirmam que, independente da questão relativa ao tipo do dever em disputa entre Kant e Constant, o ponto é que não se segue da ética de Kant, ao menos em algumas das formulações do imperativo categórico uma proibição incondicional da mentira. Além disso, se defenderá que, a fim de evitar esse tipo de objeções a ética de Kant precisaria abandonar a distinção entre deveres de obrigação perfeita e deveres de obrigação imperfeita, uma vez que, mesmo que não seja uma disputa acerca de um dever ético, a classificação do dever de não mentir como um dever perfeito para consigo mesmo ou para com os outros implica sua incondicionalidade. (shrink)

Kant argues that morality leads to religion, and that religion consists in regarding our moral duties as divine commands. This paper explores a foundational question for Kantian religion: When you think of your duties as divine commands, what exactly are you thinking, and how is that thought consistent with Kant’s own account of the ways that morality is independent from God? I argue that if we assume the Kantian religious person acts out of obedience to God, then her overall (...) outlook will be inconsistent. I then develop an account of regarding duties as divine commands that does not involve acting out of obedience to God. This account, however, faces an objection—that without obedience, one cannot actually be thinking of duties as divine commands. In the final section, I consider this objection and suggest a response. (shrink)

Kant famously made a distinction between actions from duty and actions in conformity with duty claiming that only the former are morally worthy. Kant’s argument in support of this thesis is taken to rest on the claim that only the motive of duty leads non-accidentally or reliably to moral actions. However, many critics of Kant have claimed that other motives such as sympathy and benevolence can also lead to moral actions reliably, and that Kant’s thesis is false. In addition, many (...) readers of Kant find the claim that we should deny moral worth to a dutiful action performed from friendly inclination highly counterintuitive. Moreover, Kantian commentators disagree about the status of actions in conformity with duty, some claim that these can be taken as equally morally worthy as those performed from duty, while others argue that they are not even permissible. -/- It has also been claimed that Kant’s theory of moral worth should be related to the theory of the Gesinnung developed in the Religion. Thus, some authors claim that, in order for an action to possess moral worth, the agent has to be unconditionally committed to morality, that is, the agent must possess a virtuous character or good fundamental maxim (i.e. a good Gesinnung). However, according to Kant’s radical evil thesis (that is, the thesis that man is evil by nature ), the default position for man is to possess an evil Gesinnung, i.e. a Gesinnung which is only conditionally committed to morality insofar as morality does not demand a great sacrifice of our own happiness. So, an unwelcome consequence of this line of interpretation is that in Kantian ethics morally worthy actions become very rare indeed. -/- The paper is divided in two parts. The first part aims to clarify why Kant thought that only actions from duty are morally worthy, replying to some common objections against Kant’s view. I argue that Kant’s non-accidental condition should not be understood in terms of reliability because such interpretation is incompatible with Kant’s theory of motivation and rational agency. I propose an alternative interpretation which supports Kant’ s claim that only the motive of duty leads nonaccidently to dutiful actions, and thus only actions from duty possess moral worth. I end by showing that although actions in conformity with duty are worthless from the moral point of view, they are not (in many cases) impermissible. The first part concludes that the criterion for the permissibility of actions is different to the criterion for the ascription of moral worth. Thus, rightness, which pertains to actions performed on maxims that can be willed as universal laws, and moral worth, which pertains to actions performed from a sense of duty, should be understood as two different levels of moral assessment. -/- The second part of the paper examines Kant’s conception of virtue with the aim of showing that although only agents with a virtuous character (good Gesinnung) will reliably act from duty, a person with an evil character (evil Gesinnung) could on frequent occasions act from duty. I argue that we should not deny moral worth to actions performed from duty even when the agent has an evil Gesinnung. Goodness of Gesinnung is not a necessary condition of the action of an agent possessing moral worth; reliability of motivation is necessary for the ascription of virtue but not for the ascription of moral worth. It follows that virtue, which refers to the agent’s character or fundamental maxim (i.e. the agent’s Gesinnung), and moral worth are also two different levels of moral assessment. The paper concludes that three levels of moral assessment can be distinguished in Kant’s ethical system: (i) rightness, (ii) moral worth and (iii) moral virtue. Moral virtue is the highest level of moral perfection for a human being. Striving towards virtue requires constant progress and effort and ultimately a ‘revolution of the heart.’ The important point is that even when we are still striving to achieve virtue (i.e. an unconditional commitment to morality), we can ascribe moral worth to actions performed by a genuine sense of duty. It turns out that, contrary to many influential interpretations, Kantian ethics is not merely concerned with the rightness or wrongness of particular actions nor is Kantian ethics primarily an ethic of virtue. Instead, Kant’s ethical system is complex and allows for different levels of moral assessment in which both an action-centred and agent-centred perspective can be integrated. (shrink)

It has become common to distinguish between two kinds of ethical concepts: thick and thin ones. Bernard Williams, who coined the terms, explains that thick concepts such as “coward, lie, brutality, gratitude and so forth” are marked by having greater empirical content than thin ones. They are both action-guiding and world-guided: -/- If a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a reason for action… At the same time, their application is guided by the world. A concept (...) of this sort may be rightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree that it applies or fails to apply to some new situation. -/- Thin concepts are concepts such as good and bad, right and wrong, obligation and duty. Judgments applying thick concepts have been seen as lending support to the possibility of explaining moral knowledge, and objectivity in ethics. It appears that due to their empirical content – their world-guidedness – judgments employing thick concepts can be true or false, depending on whether they get the worldly facts right. In addition they provide reasons for action – they are action-guiding – and thus may provide the starting point of a realist account of practical reasons: the view that reasons are facts and whether or not a person has a reason to act does not (normally) depend on her attitudes. The cruelty of an action is a reason not to perform it or to prevent it; that an action is kind is a reason in its favour. Of course these remarks aren’t conclusive – far from it. But even so, some non-cognitivists may regard them as completely wrongheaded, and so does Bernard Williams even though he is not a non-cognitivist. However, he believes that having a practical reason does depend on a person’s attitudes and motives. A certain worry about thick concepts will make clear what the problem is. It has most expressly been raised by Simon Blackburn, who sees it as undermining even the most superficial plausibility of moral cognitivism, as well as the claim that the properties picked out by thick concepts provide reasons. While we may readily accept that the kindness of an action or the fact that it is required by justice is a reason to perform it, there are many thick concepts whose action-guiding role we would reject. Some derogatory – e.g., racist or sexist - words express thick concepts too, Blackburn notes. And surely there are no racist or sexist truths. Furthermore there are concepts that some people use evaluatively (like chaste or obscene), but many of us do not regard the propositions in which those concepts feature as even prima facie reason giving. In raising these points, Blackburn claims that it is morally objectionable to regard the facts asserted in propositions which employ thick concepts as action-guiding because it leads to “a conservative and ultimately self-serving complacency.” As he sees it, the problem is that if we believe that the correct application of thick concepts yields evaluative truths and that evaluative truths state reasons for actions, we seem to be committed to accepting that some people are, say, fat, derog., and therefore to be ridiculed, and that there is at least a pro tanto reason to lead a chaste life, or feel affection towards cute women. Therefore, the view that all evaluative properties provide reasons for action or for attitudes such as admiration, affection or (dis)approval must be rejected. I will call this worry henceforth Blackburn’s challenge. The challenge is that understanding judgments employing thick concepts as expressing evaluative truths and providing reasons for actions or for attitudes leads to a morally unacceptable view. Blackburn suggests instead that we should separate the conditions for applying thick concepts and the reasons that we have in virtue of the concept applying. She may be cute, yes, but that is not a reason for “admiration and arousal.” -/- …it is morally vital that we proceed by splitting the input from the output in such a case. By refusing to split we fail to open an essential specifically normative dimension of criticism. -/- According to Blackburn, the meaning of thick concepts is made up of two distinct and in principle separable components: a descriptive one and the expression of an attitude. The truth-aptness and cognitive appearance of judgments employing thick concepts is explained by the descriptive component alone. Blackburn writes “[w]e get nothing but detachable and flexible attitudes, coupled with delineations of traits of character or action”. I will call this reply to Blackburn’s challenge the separability thesis. I agree with Blackburn that any account of thick concepts has to face and answer the challenge that he poses. In this paper, I will focus on one reply to the challenge which denies separability, namely Bernard Williams’s. Williams answers Blackburn’s challenge, while holding on to a cognitivist understanding of thick concepts. But his particular brand of cognitivism is peculiar: Williams rejects the separability thesis, and claims that correct applications of thick concepts yield evaluative (and not just descriptive) knowledge. But this is a special kind of knowledge. It is confined to a local community. The members of a community which uses certain thick concepts may have reasons to act accordingly, but the non-members do not. And even the reasons of members remain a little fragile: they may not want to continue using their concepts upon thorough reflection. The local knowledge view allows Williams to answer Blackburn’s challenge, because even though thick concepts are evaluative concepts and their application can yield evaluative knowledge, no one who isn’t a member of the relevant community has reason to be guided by the concept. Complementing a cognitivist view of thick concepts with reasons internalism allows Williams to answer the challenge. My aim in this paper is to show that Williams’s position is, despite its initial attraction, untenable. In particular, I am going to show why the internal reasons view is incompatible with Williams’s own understanding of thick concepts. My modest result is that the internalist view of reasons does not help to answer Blackburn’s challenge. My aim in this paper is not to answer the challenge but, rather, to explore the possibility of developing Williams’s attenuated version of cognitivism, and the possibility of combining it with reasons internalism. (shrink)

Nonprofit organizations play a crucial role in society. Unfortunately, many such organizations are chronically underfunded and struggle to meet their objectives. These facts have significant implications for corporate philanthropy and Kant’s notion of imperfect duties. Under the concept of imperfect duties, businesses would have wide discretion regarding which charities receive donations, how much money to give, and when such donations take place. A perceived problem with imperfect duties is that they can lead to moral laxity; that is, a failure (...) on the part of businesses to fulfill their financial obligations to nonprofit organizations. This article argues the problem of moral laxity rests on a misinterpretation of Kantian ethics and, therefore, is really not a problem at all. As such, we argue corporate philanthropy while an imperfect duty should be interpreted more akin to perfect duties and, as a consequence, moral laxity does not arise for those corporations committed to acting on the basis of the moral law. More specifically, firms have duty-based obligations on the basis of benevolence, and as good corporate citizens, to help fund non-profit organizations. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

Despite Rousseau’s acknowledged influence on Kant, the moral value of compassion (or pity) is regarded as a major difference between their theories of morality. Pity plays a fundamental role in Rousseau’s theory of moral relations, whereas Kant appears suspicious of compassion. I argue that Kant nevertheless accords compassion a significant moral value, not only because it provides an appropriate supplementary incentive when the incentive of duty is not sufficient to motivate action but also because of the role it plays in (...) attuning individuals to the moral status of others. Rousseau’s account of pity in Emile helps to explain how compassion can play this role. (shrink)

This paper compares Kant’s and Sidgwick’s arguments in defense of objective practical knowledge. While Kant focuses on practical truths in terms of practical laws governing the mind in action, Sidgwick is concerned with practical truths about action. This is a crucial difference in the understanding of practical knowledge, which is matched by a different understanding of moral phenomenology and of the significance of subjective experience in accounting for the authority of moral obligations. Key to these differences is a more fundamental (...) divergence regarding reflection and its impact on agency. On the Kantian view, reflection is inherent to rational action, understood as the result of the activity of reason. On Sidgwick’s view, instead, reflection is direct reflection on the nature of the proposition in question, that is, first-order judgment. This difference affects the prospects of their respective arguments against ethical naturalism, the view that the normative phenomena relative to right and wrong can be explained away in terms of desires and other psychological mechanisms. Ultimately, the Kantian view allows for a more promising conception of ethical objectivity. (shrink)

A too rarely emphasized feature of modern deontological ethics is the structure of its directives. Faced with alternatives, the question for the moral agent is “which, if either, must I perform (or avoid)?” Getting it right, one is, morally speaking, done…until the next set of freighted options presents. We should wonder whether this makes sense: whether there is not a more complex structure to deontological requirements that resists the “one and done” idea. Rehabilitating the Kantian idea of duty as a (...) value-based deliberative principle, I argue for a more plausible deontology whose requirements are often temporally extended and interpersonally complex. (shrink)

Three types of concern for animal welfare are widelyheld: Animals should feel well, they should function well, andthey should lead natural lives. The paper deals with a well-knownanswer to the question of why such concerns are morallyappropriate: Human beings have direct duties towards animals,because animals are beings that can flourish, the flourishing ofanimals is intrinsically or inherently valuable, and that whichis conducive to their flourishing is a legitimate object of moralconcern. Looking for a tenable conception of direct dutiestowards animals, the (...) following questions are discussed: Whatshould we take it to mean that ``animal flourishing isintrinsically or inherently valuable?'''' Under what conditions doesa living being''s ability to flourish create direct duties towardsthis being? Is awareness or sentience required for there to bedirect duties towards a living being? Does such a requirementimply that moral concerns for animals would be limited to theirfeeling well, or does it also give way to having moral concernsfor their functioning well and leading natural lives? Can onetake into account considered judgements that claim that towardsdifferent animals we have moral duties that differ in kind and/orstrength? If environmental ethics cannot be based on theconception of direct duties here discussed, should one draw adistinction between duties towards ourselves, our fellow humanbeings, or animals, and duties regarding plants, or collectiveentities such as populations, species, and ecosystems? (shrink)

In the individual, social, and political dimensions, the shaping of the liberal tradition has met up with and will continue to meet up with the presence of the Roman Catholic Church with its own philosophy. Yet has this always led to sharp conflict between Catholicism and liberalism? Has the social thinking of the Church evolved in its assessment of the liberal tradition and vice versa? Have there been points in common in the two systems of thinking? In contrast, where have (...) sparks appeared? Does Catholicism support the stability of liberal democracy? A response to these questions comprises the primary aim of the work at hand. Herein is a presentation and appraisal of one of the most interesting and continually lively clashes, accompanied by a portrayal of both Catholicism and liberalism. Analysis will be conducted at the level of social philosophy, through incidental political practice, and from the historical perspective – all of which together will enable illustration of the dynamic relationship between Catholicism and liberalism. Due to the scope of liberalism, the analysis of the Catholicism-liberalism relationship will be limited solely to the philosophy of politics and of economics. Such a restricted social philosophy involves the following issues: the genesis, essence, and characteristics of social policy; its ultimate justification or lack thereof; the relationship between the political society and its members; the types of structured political communities; the genesis, nature and duties of political authorities; the definition of the law, its foundations and limitations; the essence and properties of economic life; types of ownership; and, finally, the relations taking place between politics and economics. The problem inherent in an encounter between the social thinking of the Roman Catholic Church and liberalism appear to be especially meaningful in the context of the Polish discourse regarding the new order, its theoretical bases and institutions, projects for the realization of individual freedom, and the superiority or inferiority of values in today’s pluralistic universe. This matter is of great consequence and significance – not only intellectually but above all practically – and manifests itself in political, economic, and cultural life. Nonetheless, for decades now, Polish research into this issue has been entangled in occasional conflicts of a worldview and political nature. In turn, there is a lack of understanding and objective theoretical reflection on the subject. In fact, there are no publications which attempt to understand liberalism and assess the validity of the accusations against it. The vast amount of literature devoted to this problem most frequently opens, right from the start, with arguments stemming from either a Marxist or Catholic apologetics. The liberal credo is not identified with the philosophy of politics, but rather the theory of pro-capitalist economics. This, as a result, not only misrepresents the crux of liberalism, but also narrows the catalogue of responses by the Church on this very topic – starting with the encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) by Pope Leo XIII. In order to resolve this problem, the analysis will be rooted in the broader philosophical and historical context. In other words, it will look into liberalism on the one hand, and into those Church documents in which that institution first spoke of liberalism on the other. The discussions and deliberations contained within this volume are laid out in an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction includes the theoretical bases and methodological assumptions of this work, taking into account the principles of philosophical reflection and analysis. The fundamental chapters present the evolution of an attitude towards liberalism in the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church – from Pius VI to John Paul II – taking under consideration the key moments and figures in the development of liberalism (e.g., John Locke, John Stuart Mills, John Rawls). In this time period four stages of a Catholic reference to liberalism will be distinguished. The first three constitute: 1) animosity and condemnation (from Pius VI to Pius IX), 2) criticism accompanied by tolerance (from Leo XIII to Pius XII, and 3) criticism accompanied by limited concord (from John XXIII to Paul VI). Today, and with increasing frequency, voices are heard speaking of the teachings of John Paul II as marking a new caesura in the Catholic-liberalism relationship. Hence it is worth re-evaluating and re-analyzing if such opinions are justified. The volume closes with a conclusion comprising an attempt to answer the following questions. Are Catholic accusations addressed at liberalism correct or not? Has liberalism turned out to be a philosophy open to criticism and capable of modification as the weak points in liberal theory and practice are disclosed? Can Catholic values enrich the liberal political order? Can Catholic moral-religious norms, introduced into the realm of political responsibilities, endanger the foundations of the liberal system? Reviewing the evolution of Catholicism as well as liberalism, has Catholicism found its place amidst the pluralistic harmony of liberal democracy? Kształtowanie się tradycji liberalnej napotykało i będzie napotykać na promowaną przez Kościół rzymskokatolicki filozofię, zarówno w wymiarze indywidualnym, społecznym, jak i politycznym. Czy zawsze prowadziło to do ostrego sporu między katolicyzmem a liberalizmem? Czy społeczna myśl Kościoła ewoluowała w swojej ocenie tradycji liberalnej i vice versa? Czy w obu systemach myślowych istniały punkty wspólne? Czego dotyczyły ogniska zapalne? Czy katolicyzm wspiera stabilność liberalnej demokracji? Te pytania sprawiły, że głównym celem niniejszej pracy jest prezentacja i ocena jednego z najbardziej interesujących i wciąż aktualnych sporów, a pośrednio przedstawienie dwóch filozofii – katolicyzmu i liberalizmu. Analiza tego sporu prowadzona jest na płaszczyźnie filozofii społecznej, incydentalnie – praktyki politycznej w ujęciu historycznym, co umożliwia ukazanie dynamiki relacji między katolicyzmem i liberalizmem. Z powodu zakresu liberalizmu w analizie relacji katolicyzm – liberalizm praca ta ogranicza się jedynie do filozofii polityki i filozofii gospodarki. Tak okrojona filozofia społeczna interesuje się następującymi problemami: genezą, istotą i cechami społeczności politycznej, jej ostatecznym uzasadnieniem lub brakiem takowego oraz relacjami między społeczeństwem politycznym a jego członkami, typami ustrukturyzowania wspólnoty politycznej, genezą, naturą i zadaniami władzy politycznej, definicją prawa, jego podstawą i ograniczeniami, istotą i właściwościami życia gospodarczego, rodzajami własności, stosunkami zachodzącymi między polityką a ekonomią. Problem spotkania myśli społecznej Kościoła katolickiego z liberalizmem wydaje się szczególnie znaczący również w kontekście polskich dyskusji o tworzącym się ładzie, jego teoretycznych podstawach i instytucjach, projekcie realizacji indywidualnej wolności oraz wyższości i niższości wartości w dzisiejszym, pluralistycznym uniwersum. Problem ten ma olbrzymie znaczenie nie tylko intelektualne, ale przede wszystkim praktyczne, objawiające się na poziomie życia politycznego, ekonomicznego i kulturowego. Jednak od wielu dziesięcioleci polskie studia nad tym zagadnieniem są uwikłane w doraźne konflikty o charakterze światopoglądowym i politycznym, natomiast brakuje rozumiejącej i obiektywnej refleksji teoretycznej na ten temat. Właściwie nie ma publikacji próbujących zrozumieć liberalizm i ocenić zasadność stawianych mu zarzutów. Ogrom literatury poświęcony temu problemowi najczęściej zawiera prace już na wstępie wychodzące z pozycji apologetycznie marksistowskich czy katolickich. Utożsamia się w nich credo liberalizmu nie z filozofią polityki, lecz z teorią ekonomii prokapitalistycznej, co nie tylko zakłamuje istotę liberalizmu, lecz także zawęża katalog wypowiedzi Kościoła na jego temat, rozpoczynając je od encykliki Rerum novarum (1891) Leona XIII. Aby sprawę wyjaśnić w niniejszej książce, analiza jest umieszczona w szerszym kontekście filozoficznym i historycznym, czyli „ma wgląd”, z jednej strony w liberalizm, z drugiej – w dokumenty Kościoła, w których on po raz pierwszy zabrał głos w sprawie liberalizmu. Rozważania zawarte w niniejszej pracy podzielone są na wstęp, cztery rozdziały i zakończenie. We wstępie prezentuję podłoże teoretyczne i założenia metodologiczne rozprawy, przestrzegając zasad refleksji i analizy filozoficznej. Rozdziały przedstawiają ewolucję stosunku do liberalizmu w społecznej nauce Kościoła rzymskokatolickiego, od czasów Piusa VI do Jana Pawła II, z uwzględnieniem ważniejszych momentów rozwoju myśli liberalnej (John Locke, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls). W omawianym okresie wyróżniam cztery etapy katolickiego odniesienia do liberalizmu: pierwszy – wrogości i potępienia (od Piusa VI do Piusa IX), drugi – krytyki, ale zarazem tolerowania (od Leona XIII do Piusa XII), trzeci – krytyki, choć i ograniczonej zgody (od Jan XXIII do Pawła VI) i czwarty – powszechnie oceniany jako przełom w katolickiej percepcji liberalizmu (pontyfikat Jana Pawła II). Całość rozważań zamknie zakończenie, którego treścią jest próba odpowiedzi na pytania: czy katolickie zarzuty pod adresem liberalizmu są trafne czy też nie? Czy liberalizm okazał się filozofią otwartą na krytykę, zdolną do modyfikacji pod wpływem ujawniania słabych stron teorii lub praktyk liberalnych? Czy wartości katolickie mogą wzbogacić liberalny porządek polityczny? Czy też katolickie normy moralno-religijne, wprowadzone w obręb obowiązków politycznych, zagrażają fundamentom ustroju liberalnego? Czy zarówno wobec ewolucji katolicyzmu, jak i liberalizmu katolicyzm odnalazł się w pluralistycznej harmonii liberalnej demokracji? (shrink)

In this book, Toby Svoboda develops and defends a Kantian environmental virtue ethic, challenging the widely-held view that Kant's moral philosophy takes an instrumental view toward nature and animals and has little to offer environmental ethics. On the contrary, Svoboda posits that there is good moral reason to care about non-human organisms in their own right and to value their flourishing independently of human interests, since doing so is constitutive of certain virtues. Svoboda argues that Kant’s account of indirect duties (...) regarding nature can ground a compelling environmental ethic: the Kantian duty to develop morally virtuous dispositions strictly proscribes unnecessarily harming organisms, and Svoboda argues that this duty compels us to act in ways that benefit non-human organisms, given that doing so can enhance one’s virtues. Svoboda’s argument engages the recent literature on environmental virtue and provides an original argument for an environmental virtue ethic firmly rooted in Kant’s moral philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant without SadeFrancis SparshottErmanno Bencivenga’s discussion of “Kant’s Sadism” rests on a misrepresentation of Kant’s enterprise. 1 It presents Kantian morality as a matter of motivation, so that reason has to be pitted against desire. But Kant’s whole point is that, because the psychological causes of one’s actions can never be ascertained, they are irrelevant to morality. Morality is entirely a matter of the reasons for one’s actions, no (...) matter what one’s feelings. It is true that moral questions arise, morality exists, only for finite rational beings, who have inclinations that are relatively independent of the dictates of reason. But that independence does not mean that one should always act against one’s inclinations.The morality of an action depends on the agent’s “maxim”—the subjective practical principle on which one acts, the reasons one has and can give for thinking that what one is doing is right. Kant’s whole discussion is in terms of maxims. The word does occur twice in Bencivenga’s paper, but his account makes no use of it. When he says that “It is the motives of the action, the motives the person actually has—never mind what evidence we have for them—that confer moral content on the action” (p. 41), he does so in flat contradiction of Kant.The confusion underlying Bencivenga’s misunderstanding is most familiar to English-language Kantians from Schiller’s joke: “Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. / Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person. // —Surely, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely, / and then with aversion do what your duty enjoins you.” 2 Both participants in the exchange think [End Page 151] the morality of an action depends on its psychological causes, not on the reasons the agent has for thinking the action right and doing it. Both are wrong.What is revolutionary in Kant’s position is his contention that all a maxim requires to be moral is that agents should really make it their principle at the time of action—that the agent should really stand by it. That means, obviously, that at that moment the agent should be able consistently to will that everyone should act on it. Kant argues that it also means, less obviously, that doing the right thing should be one’s paramount principle, which involves treating humanity and human freedom as an end in itself—ultimately, treating oneself and others as “law-making members of a kingdom of ends.” Thus, for Kant, morality is entirely a matter of rational consistency.Since rational consistency is all that morality requires, morality lays down no plan of action, but presupposes the familiar world in which people already have plans and purposes. What one wills is always some particular thing. Morality has to do with the principles to be followed in pursuing these objectives. 3 Bencivenga’s contention that “making the well-being of some other human, or of one’s own community, or of humankind the goal of one’s action would be relegating rationality to (at best) an instrumental role, and thus denying any ethical value to that action” is wrong. Kant insists that finite rational beings inevitably pursue happiness, 4 and it is their duty to do so for others and (in a sense) for themselves. 5 A leading contention of the Critique is that happiness, like duty, is a component of the summum bonum. Making a principle of maximizing happiness does not destroy the autonomy of the will; the principle is a principle and subject to the critique of consistency, like other principles. Kant explicitly denies what Bencivenga asserts, that it is merely an empirical matter that humans are desirous as well as rational. On the contrary, it belongs to their essence. 6 What is empirical, as Kant explains at some length, is the specific content of a person’s desires.Neither of Bencivenga’s examples tends to show that morality is opposed to inclination. It is true that if the reason moral agents treat people well is really only that, on each occasion, this is... (shrink)

Many philosophers have objected to Kant’s account of duties regarding non-human nature, arguing that it does not ground adequate moral concern for non-human natural entities. However, the traditional interpretation of Kant on this issue is mistaken, because it takes him to be arguing merely that humans should abstain from animal cruelty and wanton destruction of flora solely because such actions could make one more likely to violate one’s duties to human beings. Instead, I argue, Kant’s account of duties (...) class='Hi'>regarding nature grounds much stronger limitations on how humans may treat non-human animals and flora, since such duties are rooted in the imperfect duty to increase one’s own moral perfection. This duty proscribes actions affecting non-human nature that decrease one’s moral perfection, such as those that cause organisms unnecessary harm. Moreover, the duty to moral perfection prescribes (but does not strictly require) actions affecting non-human nature that increase one’s moral perfection, such as those that benefit organisms. Given this interpretation, I show that, contrary to a widely held view, Kant’s moral philosophy can ground a coherent and robust approach to environmental ethics. (shrink)

Antinatalist commentators recommend that humanity bring itself to a close, on the theory that pain and suffering override the value of any possible life. Other commentators do not require the voluntary extinction of human beings, but they defend that outcome if people were to choose against having children. Against such views, Richard Kraut has defended a general moral obligation to people the future with human beings until the workings of the universe render such efforts impossible. Kraut advances this view on (...) the grounds that we are obliged to exercise beneficence toward others and on the grounds that the goods available in human lives are morally compelling. This account ultimately succeeds in making no more than a prima facie defense of human perpetuation because considerations of beneficence could override – in some cases probably should – override any duty to perpetuate human beings. While the goods of human life may be distinctive, they cannot serve as reason-giving in regard to their own perpetuation. Ironically, the exercise of beneficence may authorize the extinction of human beings, if it becomes possible to enhance the goods available to human descendants in a way that moves them away from human nature as now given. The defense of a morally obligatory and strictly human future remains elusive, even as it becomes morally desirable to work against Fateful Catastrophes, those human-caused events that threaten to extinguish existing lives already good and enriching for their bearers. (shrink)

Illustrations and examples have always been deemed rare in the otherwise abundant materials Kant sent to be printed. In this sense, tradition has made out of the Königsbergs philosopher a rather arid writer. He himself advocated for the perks of a proper scholastic method in presenting arguments. It is thus a common place among scholars that Herr Professor valued discursive clarity over any whimsical rhetorical garments the popular thinker could have been tempted to wield in defense of his surely more (...) than dubious reasons. But even with that in mind, in Kants writings there is this persistent and everlasting metaphor regarding the activity of navigation. A metaphor going all through the Kantian philosophical enterprise: either in the form of sailing the thin air and pretending to avoid -- or surf -- any resistance, like the figure of the dove in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); or better with the picture of the wandering unconcerned under the celestial and immeasurable vault only to discover we were lost in search for the North in What Does It Mean To Orient Oneself In Thinking?(1786), Kants critical philosophy insisted in the depiction of the task of thinking not only as a concrete one depending on facts and experience gathered -- pinpoint locations -- but also as a matter of orientation depending on the necessity of categories -- criteria, cardinal points -- of thought. If fanciful aspirations of ideas happen to take off from the objective ground irresponsibly as if empirical experience and facts had no substance at all -- it is with good reason that due operations of counterbalance should be taking place with help of the sound weight of articulated reasonable concepts based on formal and material reality. Kants theory of mind presupposes a responsibility of a subject in relation to several types of objects. The two of these epistemic extremes are intertwined and in need of each other. When it comes to orientation, leaning on some sort of inner compass, each of us would have both in regard to sensitivity, knowledge, and moral thinking which serves like a guide to the trip within all three domains, and even comes in handy to map them out. This collective volume is precisely devoted to the task of revisiting some landscapes of the Kantian thought-itinerary along the brave seas and deep into the thick forests of justified knowledge, principles of morals and judgement in aesthetics: through its pages this work has put together renowned scholars from very different traditions eager to circumnavigate again the issues and concerns of 18th Century Philosophy and the particular Kantian solution of a new branded type of metaphysical inquiry, one inquiry subject to intellectual global duties as well. (shrink)

This chapter offers non-retributive, broadly Kantian justifications of punishment and remorse that can be endorsed by free will skeptics. We lose our grip on some Kantian ideas if we become skeptical about free will, but we can preserve some important ones that can do valuable work for free will skeptics. The justification of punishment presented here has consequentialist features but is deontologically constrained by our duty to avoid using others as mere means. It draws on a modified Rawlsian original position (...) in which we assume we are just as likely to be among the punished when the veil of ignorance is raised as we are to be among those protected by the institution of punishment. The justification of remorse presented here is care-based and draws on the value of sympathizing with people we have wronged, which has a Kantian ground in the duty to take others’ ends as our own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MEANING IN A '.REALIST PERSPECTivE STEPHEN THERON National University of Lesotho Lesotho I DISCUSSION OF meaning and ref,erring in the terms laid down in a classic article of Frege's has generated a stereotyped attitude to the question in the minds of many. It is simply assumed that meaning is, as it were, the contrary of reference. In logic this is 11eflected by the assumed pamdigm of there being formal (...) systems which al'e.called purely formal to the extent that they are ' uninterpreted ', i.e. ·divol'ced from all questions of reference.1 If as a matter of history we accept that modern logic has grown basically out of Kantian soil, then it should not surprise that it is generally linked with a form of apriorism. The violence of the movement against ' psychologism ' shows how strong the danger is of linking the necessities of logic with those supposed epistemic necessities the non-Kantian realist can only regard as spurious. Anyhow this paper will be less·directly about logic than about those supposed necessities. I mean such constraints as Jonathan Bennett calls in general the " veil of perception " 2, ·as if perceiving, which should be an un- :veiling or bringing to lighrt, at the same time obscures what is seen or thought. The same idea recurs in the recent theory of 1 Of. Henry Veateh, Intentional Logic (Yale, 1952): In trying to subsume ordinary intentional relations like that of subject. predicate under the more abstract forms of a completely uninterpreted relational pattern... treated simply as a one-term relation on a par with all the... n-term real relations •. • mathematical logicians have in effect changed the character of such intentional relations completely.... (pp. 7778 ) :i See J. L. Mackie's Problems from Locke. ~9 30 STEPHEN THERON 'internal realism', just a more confusing name for transcendental idealism so far as I can see. There is of course no sense to the idea of checking what we claim to know against what we do not yet know. Yet he:re we should not be discussing precisely truth but the quite separate ontological question whether " THE WORLD is independent of any particular representrution we have of it" (Putnam's notion of the 'metaphysical realism' he rejects), whether "reality is altogether independent of experience," as Michael Devitt argues.3 This is a question of the being of the world, which existed before I d1d. Even as concerns the present moment, the wor1d is such that I or you might not exist, and this contingency of cognitive beings, severally or generally, to the actual world, as a possibility inherent in it, may not without more ado be identified with the quite different possibility of another world, like to this e.x:cept for the absence of me or you. For the former is a real if passive possibility in a thing, viz., the world, the latter is merely an alternative conception or idea of a different and merely possible thing. The concept of my dog with a broken leg is a different concept from that of my dog as healthy, but it is of the same dog, and that is why I don't want him to break his 1eg. The world without me was and would be the same world, though differently conceived. This is the basic requirement of realism, which philosophers have often violated, confusing the metaphysical with the epistemological, the real with the certain. For example Descartes reasoned fallaciously from his being certain, as he thought, of the soul's but not of the body's existence to the ontological separateness of these two. Kant, again, seemed to reason from duty as a pure concept or epistemic entity to the real separwteness, as a positivie value, of the motive of duty from any motive of pleasure or aspiration to happiness. Yet it is possible, indeed probable, that in reality soul and body, a M. Devitt," Realism and the Renegade Putnam," Nous 1983, p. 297. MEANING IN A REALIST PERSPECTIVE 31 though distinguishable, do not have separate acts of existence,,and, in any human existence, that the motive of duty both cannot and ought not to be separated from the distinguishable... (shrink)

Kant is the philosophical tradition's arch-anti-consequentialist – if anyone insists that intentions alone make an action what it is, it is Kant. This chapter takes up Kant's account of the relation between intention and action, aiming both to lay it out and to understand why it might appeal. The chapter first maps out the motivational architecture that Kant attributes to us. We have wills that are organized to action by two parallel and sometimes competing motivational systems. One determines us by (...) way of motives that are sensuous, natural and given from without, the other by motives that are intellectual, rational, and given from within. Each set of motives belongs to a system of laws – natural motives to the laws of nature, rational motives to the laws of freedom. For Kant, all things, including actions, are what they are in virtue of the laws governing them; actions, qua actions, are always governed by laws that govern individual wills. These laws are Kantian maxims, 'or subjective practical laws.' Maxims, for Kant, thus make actions the actions they are. The chapter then maps out the implications of this motivational architecture for Kant's theory of value. Maxims always advert to or 'contain' both ends and means. Ends are always specifications of one of two ultimate ends. Actions have the moral value they have depending on which of two ultimate ends the maxim adverts to. The possibilities are 'happiness,' or gratification of desires with sensuous origins, and 'duty,' or accord with the moral demand to will in ways that respect free rational agency wherever it is found. Only actions aimed at the latter – actions with rational motives – have moral value. Actions aimed at the former – actions with natural motives – though not immoral in themselves, become so when pursuit works against rational motives. For Kant, actions aimed at happiness are ultimately allied with efforts to sustain our 'animal' existence, and so are governed by terms and conditions given by the natural world. Actions aimed at duty, in contrast, are ultimately allied with efforts to impose a rational form on nature, to make it over, so to speak, according to values not given by nature itself. Actions aimed at duty, therefore, create a specifically moral world, one in which mores and norms, formal and informal arrangements, institutions, policies, and so on, realize, harmonize, and promote free rational agency itself. Finally, the chapter addresses motivations for Kant's view. The architecture of will and the theories of action and value he proposes allow Kant to accommodate a host of intuitions and commitments. His view makes room for metaphysically free agency, and for the lived experience of motivational freedom from ever-changing natural desires. It makes room for conflicts within the will while still holding out hope that resolution is possible. It accommodates views that the best human lives engage 'higher' faculties in sustained ways. It identifies a stable, necessary, universal end amidst the evident contingency, pluralism, and instability of most ends. It makes us, and not God or nature, the authors of our moral lives. In the end, Kant's 'anti-consequentialism,' his focus on intentions, is a way of insisting on actions that take their character and value from what should matter most to us, namely individual and collective free rational agency, rather than only and always taking the character of reactive responses to circumstance. (shrink)

The present article is an attempt to clarify the Kantian conception of duties to the self and to defend them against common objections. Kant’s thesis that all duty rests on duties to the self is shown to follow from the autonomy of the human will; and the allegation that they are impossible because the agent could always release himself from such a duty turns out to be question-begging. There is no attempt to prove that there are such duties, but they (...) are revealed to be an indispensable part of morality. Traditional attributes of moral commands, such as ‘categoricity’ or ‘overridingness’ make no sense in a one-sidedly other-regarding or social conception of morality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nishida and Western PhilosophyAmos YongNishida and Western Philosophy. By Robert Wilkinson. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. vii + 175 pp.Robert Wilkinson is a comparative philosopher who teaches at Open University in Edinburgh and has worked for years in the areas of comparative philosophy of mind and comparative aesthetics. This book should be read as part of a larger discussion of the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), which began with (...) Keiji Nishitani (Nishida Kitarō, trans. S. Yamamoto and J. W. Heisig, University of California Press, 1991) and continues with Robert E. Carter (The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro, Paragon House, 1997) and Robert J.Wargo (The Logic of Nothingness: A Study of Nishida Kitarō, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), among others. Going beyond his predecessors, however—even though it is unfortunate that Wilkinson does not interact much with them explicitly—Nishida and Western Philosophy prosecutes a clear even if perhaps controversial thesis: that in the end, Nishida’s philosophy of self-contradictory identity was, as a natural outgrowth of his Buddhist and Zen experience of satori (awakening), fundamentally incommensurable with the philosophy of identity that has characterized the major trajectory of the Western philosophical tradition.There are four chapters to the book (besides the introduction and then the summary and conclusions). The first focuses on Nishida’s starting point, the Zen Buddhist experience of enlightenment regarding the ultimate emptiness (mu), which albeit a difficult term to translate can be understood at least in part as referring to the nonduality, or even the interrelatedness, of all reality. Nishida’s work can be seen as a lifelong quest to formalize this experiential insight systematically in dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition. In a sense, this can be understood as a spirituality in search of a metaphysic, and given the emergence of Japan on the world stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that up-and-coming Japanese philosophers like Nishida sought to legitimate their own insights in the Western idiom. But precisely for the same reason, however, Nishida rarely appealed to Asian sources, even within the Buddhist tradition, especially in his earlier work.Chapter 2 explicates Nishida’s early philosophy of pure experience, particularly as summarized in his Inquiry into the Good (1911; English translation: Yale University Press, 1990). The major dialogue partner at this point was William James and his notion of radical empiricism, which provided Nishida with Western conceptual resources to think through the primordial base from out of which conscious experience emerged. Thus did pure experience point to the nondual dimension of consciousness before the split between subject and object. Nishida never repudiated his Jamesian connection, although his ongoing work pushed him further and deeper into the metaphysical and ontological dimensions of consciousness that eventually left behind James’s more psychologically driven formulations.Next Wilkinson turns to Nishida’s second major book, Intuition and Reflection in [End Page 231] Self-Consciousness (1917; English translation: State University of New York Press, 1987), and focuses primarily on the Japanese philosopher’s interactions with the Neo-Kantian school of philosophy, Fichte, and Bergson. Each of these provided specific resources for this stage of Nishida’s philosophical project. The Neo-Kantians helped him to think about how the noumena-phenomena and fact-value distinctions contrasted with his own philosophical intuitions regarding their primordial unity in historicity. Fichte enabled the forging of a philosophy of action-consciousness, which promised to go beyond the subject-object distinction, even if in the end (for Nishida), the Fichtean ego remained “trapped” within the logic of identity rather than becoming “delivered” by or within the Zen logic of no-thingness. Bergson, meanwhile, was attractive precisely because of his dynamic (rather than static) philosophy of elan vital or conscious becoming even if Nishida was already discerning at this time that the Bergsonian elan both presumed an ontological togetherness that succumbed to the Western logic of identity on the one hand, and was not sufficiently attentive to the contrary of becoming—death, or the lapsing back into no-thingness—which was a prominent feature of historical reality on the other hand. Yet these Western interlocutors... (shrink)

The relation between Kant’s philosophy and the “philosophy of balance” as it is described in the report Come on! Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet, delivered to the Club of Rome in 2018, requires some analysis. The authors of the report consider Kant to be a philosopher of European Enlightenment which laid the foundations of the modern world, but also proved to be the source of global problems. The report characterises the philosophy of the Enlightenment as lop-sided (...) rationalism which dismisses everything that does not possess desirable properties. In exchange, the authors offer a philosophy of balance, described in several points as the balance between conflicting values. The overarching problem of the philosophy of balance is the restraining of egoism. For this reason I first examine the relationship between duty and human inclinations in Kant’s ethics. I then demonstrate that the topic of political forecasts and the recommendations which Kant prescribes both in his philosophy of history and in his reflections on politics, right and justice, essentially boils down to three points of the philosophy of balance: the balance between development and justice (Kantian republicanism), between the speed and stability of development (external policy, the Kantian peace project), and between the short-term and long-term perspectives (reform policy). I then touch upon the problem of the implementation of Kantian principles in politics in the light of the reception of Kant in the modern theories of social conflicts, the communication theory of J. Habermas and the justice theory of J. Rawls. The overall conclusion is that Kant’s philosophy is not a philosophy of exclusion, capitalist values and utilitarianism and is not their ideological basis. (shrink)

Many traditional arguments in favor of enhancement are consequentialist in nature. Many of the classic arguments against enhancement seem to have loosely Kantian origins. In this paper I offer a different interpretation of what a Kantian should be committed to with respect to enhancement by focusing on Kant's sometimes overlooked imperfect duty to cultivate our talents. I argue that in promoting an end that Kant thinks we have a duty to set, enhancing is more than just permissible, but has morally (...) weighty reasons behind it and would in part constitute a duty we owe to ourselves. This shows that Kantians have a unique position to add to debates about enhancement and positions Kant as pushing a view that is potentially more radical than even most ethicists friendly to enhancement, who might grant that enhancement is permissible in a wide array of cases, but often fall short of judging it part of a duty we owe to ourselves. (shrink)

In this article, I address the issue of whether we have an obligation to remember past immoral actions. My central question is: do we have an obligation to remember past moral transgressions? I address this central question through three more specific questions. In the first section, I enquiry whether we have an obligation to remember our own past transgressions. In the second section, I ask whether we have an obligation to remember the wrongful actions that others have committed against ourselves. (...) In the last section, I investigate whether we have a duty to remember the suffering of victims of crimes that have a political aspect, crimes such as state violence, oppression and racial discrimination, for example. Here I use the term ‘obligation’ in a board sense to refer to actions that are recommended from the moral point of view, that is, when we have moral reasons to act in a certain way. Here I decided to explore these issues from a Kantian perspective. At first glance, Kant does not seem to have much to offer to an ethics of memory since he does not ask these questions directly. Nevertheless, I was interested to explore to what extent Kant’s ethics, and Kantian ethics more generally, can give us tools to answer these questions. What I have discovered is that, despite my initial doubts, the Kantian framework can provide us with materials to build arguments that can help us to answer these questions. In fact, I will argue that in Kant’s ethics, we have an obligation to remember past immoral actions. With regard to our own transgressions, I argue that we ought to remember our past transgressions because this is an aspect of our moral development. With regard to others’ transgressions, I argue that we have a duty of self-respect to demand that others respect us (in the Kantian sense, that is, that others treat us in a morally correct way) and that this involves remembering others’ transgressions, particularly when there is no evidence of their repentance or if they have not apologized. However, if we have (fallible) reasons to think that the wrongdoer has repented, then there is certainly no need to continue to remind them of their offenses. Thus, in the first two sections, my arguments are based on a certain interpretation of Kant’s ethical texts. However, when I address the political dimension of the ethics of memory I have based my arguments on the work of contemporary authors, especially Jeffrey Blustein. In the last section then, the perspective is more ‘Kantian’ than Kant’s. I argue that we have a duty to remember the victims of social and political injustice (social and political violence, oppression, discrimination, atrocity and crimes against humanity). Defenders of the importance of political memory usually appeal to consequentialist arguments. However, these arguments have limits. A Kantian perspective (deontological) is relevant here because it allows us to provide new arguments in support of the importance of political memory and thus ultimately to provide a stronger defense of duties of memory. -/- The issues that arise in relation to an ethics of memory will no doubt require that we study other sources in addition to the materials and arguments provided from a Kantian perspective. Nevertheless, I conclude that perhaps a bit surprisingly, the Kantian tradition has more to offer than it initially seemed, and it can certainly provide part of the theoretical framework to develop an ethics of memory. (shrink)

This paper explores and ultimately affirms the surprising claim that artificial intelligence (AI) can become part of the person, in a robust sense, and examines three ethical and legal implications. The argument is based on a rich, legally inspired conception of persons as free and independent rightholders and objects of heightened protection, but it is construed so broadly that it should also apply to mainstream philosophical conceptions of personhood. The claim is exemplified by a specific technology, devices that connect human (...) brains with computers and operate by AI-algorithms. Under philosophically reasonable and empirically realistic conditions, these devices and the AI running them become parts of the person, in the same way as arms, hearts, or mental capacities are. This transformation shall be called empersonification. It has normative and especially legal consequences because people have broader and stronger duties regarding other persons (and parts of them) than regarding things. Three consequences with practical implications are: (i) AI-devices cease to exist as independent legal entities and come to enjoy the special legal protection of persons; (ii) therefore, third parties such as manufacturers or authors of software lose (intellectual) property rights in device and software; (iii) persons become responsible for the outputs of the empersonified AI-devices to the same degree that they are for desires or intentions arising from the depths of their unconscious. More generally, empersonification marks a new step in the long history of human–machine interaction that deserves critical ethical reflection and calls for a stronger value-aligned development of these technologies. (shrink)

This paper explores how a virtuous Kantian agent would regard and express her sexuality. I argue both that Kant has a rich account of virtue, and that a virtuous Kantian agent should view her sexuality as a good thing–as an important aspect of her animal nature. On my view, the virtuous agent does not seek to suppress her sexuality, but rather to find modes and contexts for its expression that allow the agent to maintain her self-respect and to avoid degrading (...) others. The paper begins by considering reasons, grounded in Kant’s texts, why one might reasonably think that Kant has a pejorative view of sexuality, and only the thinnest account of virtue, to offer. I then aim to correct this picture by more carefully and fully exploring Kant’s work, putting his apparently negative comments about sex, and apparently narrow account of virtue, in their proper context. I also dispute—based on Kant’s own principles—some of Kant’s claims about homosexual sex and masturbation as violations of duties to oneself as an animal and moral being. Finally, I conclude the paper with an account of the virtuous Kantian agent’s proper attitude toward her sexuality. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Many philosophers accept the idea that there are duties to promote or create just institutions. But are the addressees of such duties supposed to be individuals – the members of the citizenry? What does it mean for an individual to promote or create just institutions? According to the ‘Simple View’, the citizenry has a collective duty to create or promote just institutions, and each individual citizen has an individual duty to do their part in this collective project. The simple view (...) appears to work well with regard to – you guessed it – ‘simple’ scenarios but it is riddled with further questions and problems. In this chapter, we raise five problems for the Simple View: (a) We suggest that one cannot develop a view concerning the citizenry’s duty to promote just institutions in isolation from a conception of the ontological relationship between the state and its citizens; (b) We argue that it is not obvious that the citizenry is the right entity to be attributed duties in the first place; (c) We show that a plausible account of collective duties to promote just institutions must not remain silent on the complexities and difficulties amorphous, unorganized group face in vis-à-vis collective action; (d) We contend that without allocation principles for contributory duties amongst the citizenry, or – alternatively – a method for practical deliberation that is action-guiding in collective action contexts, the claim that the citizens have a collective duty to promote just institutions remains moot; and, finally, (e) We demonstrate that the problem of reasonable disagreement is a serious threat to a collective duty to promote or create just institutions – it potentially undermines such a duty altogether and allows for conflicting contributory duties amongst the citizenry. We hope that our discussion will ultimately help improve existing theories and conceptual frameworks with a view to better understanding citizens’ obligations to promote justice under non-ideal conditions. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Western-European concept of libertarian rights-based autonomy, which advocates respect for individual rights, may conflict with African cultural values and norms. African communitarian ethics focuses on the interests of the collective whole or community, rather than rugged individualism. Hence collective decision-making processes take precedence over individual autonomy or consent. This apparent conflict may impact informed consent practice during biomedical research in African communities and may hinder ethical principlism in African bioethics. This study explored African biomedical researchers' perspectives regarding (...) informed consent and potential limitations to the principle of respect for autonomy in African communities.MethodsWe conducted a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 12 biomedical researchers, five females and seven males aged 34 to 74 years, currently working at an African university. Interviews lasted 35–40 min each and involved semi-structured open-ended interviews, which allowed participants to offer information about their perceptions and feelings regarding respect for autonomy and informed consent as practised in Africa. Empirical data from the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using thematic content analysis, together with an interrogation of relevant scientific literature about African communitarian ethics, making evaluations and drawing inferences consistent with the empirical bioethics approach.ResultsBased on these interviews and analysis of relevant literature, we found that informed consent is difficult to apply in an African context because it derives from a Western conception of libertarian rights-based autonomy. Most respondents pointed out that it was challenging to implement informed consent in the African setting. Furthermore, communalism, customary beliefs, spirituality, and relational autonomy are predominant in most African communities, as exemplified by the African moral philosophies of Ubuntu/botho and Ukama, which emphasize communitarianism over individual rights. We also found that language, education, poverty, and cultural beliefs are barriers to obtaining proper informed consent in African communities.ConclusionsWe conclude that there are limitations to applying the principle of respect for autonomy and informed consent in African communities, especially in the context of human biomedical research. We recommend using a more relational approach, such as Ross’s prima facie duties, to implement informed consent in African communities. (shrink)

In thirteen specially written essays, leading philosophers explore Kantian themes in moral and political philosophy that are prominent in the work of Thomas E. Hill, Jr., such as respect and self-respect, practical reason, conscience, and duty. In conclusion Hill offers an overview of his work and responses to the preceding essays.

This paper situates abortion in the context of women’s duties to themselves. I argue that Kant’s fundamental moral requirement to respect oneself as a rational being, combined with Kant’s view of our animal nature, form the basis for a view of pregnancy and abortion that focuses on women’s agency and moral character without diminishing the importance of their bodies and emotions. The Kantian view of abortion that emerges takes abortion to be morally problematic, but sometimes permissible, and sometimes even required. (...) I first sketch Kant’s account to duties to oneself, highlighting duties to oneself as an animal and moral being. Next, I discuss pregnancy and the challenges it poses to women’s self-preservation, development, and efficacy as rational human agents. I then give my main argument: that abortion is morally problematic because it is antagonistic to an important subset of morally useful emotions that we have self-regarding duties to protect and cultivate. I argue that self-regarding moral considerations ground a rebuttable deliberative presumption against maxims of abortion for inclination-based ends. Finally, I consider three objections to this account of abortion : that it rests on implausible assumptions about the effects of abortion on women’s morally useful sentiments; that it portrays the virtuous agent’s reasoning about abortion as objectionably self-regarding; and that it fails adequately to recognize the moral significance of the fetus as a potential rational being. (shrink)

The Kantian legacy has had a key impact on the landscape of theoretical philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Philosophers both in Germany and in Russia saw Immanuel Kant’s ideas as seminal for their philosophical research. The main schools of that era were formed in discussions of the problems and the solutions which were proposed by Kant. The methodological legacy of the critical philosophy effectively became the main benchmark of the thinking of a whole generation of intellectuals. (...) Research into the unity of “form” in the structure of human cognition was also in many ways mediated by the Kantian tradition. To prove this thesis I first look at the philosophy of Gustav Shpet who creatively interpreted the German tradition and proposed an original project of his own, and then I examine the theory of Ernst Cassirer, an outstanding representative of Neo-Kantianism who in the later period of his work proposed considering the phenomena of the humanities to be symbolic forms closest to the spontaneity of the biological. The common feature of the approaches of the two philosophers is their attempt to preserve the integrity of cognition which is destroyed by mathematisation of the common denominator (ultimate categorisation) and hierarchisation of the phenomena of human life. The alternative is the metaphor of mutational change, through which the concept of “form” acquires a new meaning. In conclusion I show that the analysis of the projects of Shpet and Cassirer has heuristic value for the historical-philosophical understanding of the fate of the Kantian philosophy and for modern philosophical culture. (shrink)

This chapter offers non-retributive, broadly Kantian justifications of punishment and remorse which can be endorsed by free will skeptics. We lose our grip on some Kantian ideas if we become skeptical about free will, but we can preserve some important ones which can do valuable work for free will skeptics. The justification of punishment presented here has consequentialist features but is deontologically constrained by our duty to avoid using others as mere means. It draws on a modified Rawlsian original position (...) in which we assume we are just as likely to be among the punished when the veil of ignorance is raised as we are to be among those protected by the institution of punishment. The justification of remorse presented here is care-based, and draws on the value of sympathizing with people we have wronged, which has a Kantian ground in the duty to take others’ ends as our own. (shrink)

This paper analyses the thorny interpretative puzzle surrounding the connection between humanity and the good will. It discusses this puzzle: if the good will is the only good without qualification, why does Kant claim that humanity is something possessing an absolute value? It explores the answers to this question within Kantian scholarship; answers that emanate from a commitment to the human capacity for freedom and morality and to actual obedience to the moral law. In its final analysis, it endorses Richard (...) Dean’s good will reading as the most reflective of Kant’s ethics. It claims that in order for a person to reach the moral ideal of acting rightly and giving priority to moral law, he must always honour his duties to himself. Accordingly, it argues that before a person can be deemed as an object of respect, he must first respect the right of humanity in his own person. (shrink)

The aim is to develop some new alternatives for a phenomenalistic reading of Kant. Although the concern is ultimately with empirically real objects, I begin with a reading of the Aesthetic and the notion of appearances as at least possibly of empirically real objects. Employing Husserlian terminology, I take these to be the “noematic correlate” of a fundamental mode of directedness borne by an (at least initially) purely aesthetic “noesis.” From here, and with a new reading of Kant’s discussion of (...) the “transcendental object = X,” new possibilities open for a sense in which even a phenomenalistic Kant might – without regarding them as also existing in themselves – regard empirically real objects as more than mere “logical constructs” out of the Aesthetic’s “appearances.”. (shrink)

In the Doctrine of Virtue Kant divides duties of love into three categories: beneficent activity , gratitude and Teilnehmung – commonly referred to as the duty of sympathy . In this paper I will argue that the content and scope of the third duty of love has been underestimated by both critics and defenders of Kant's ethical theory. The account which pervades the secondary literature maintains that the third duty of love includes only two components: an obligation to make use (...) of our natural receptivity to sympathetic feelings as a means to fulfilling other duties of love, and an indirect duty to cultivate these feelings. As a result, Kant's duty of sympathy has been widely regarded as a duty whose value is derived from the way in which it serves other duties, in particular, the duty of beneficent activity, which obliges agents ‘to promote according to one's means the happiness of others in need’ . Teilnehmung has thus assumed something of a second-class status among the duties to others. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that the prevailing account of Kant's third duty of love is incomplete. (shrink)

In ‘Human Fallibility and the Need for Forgiveness’, Claudia Blöser has proposed a Kantian account of our reasons to forgive that situates our moral fallibility as their ultimate ground. Blöser argues that Kant’s duty to be forgiving is grounded on the need to be relieved from the burden of our moral failure, a need that we all have in virtue of our moral fallible nature, regardless of whether or not we have repented. Blöser claims that Kant’s proposal yields a (...) plausible account of the normative status of forgiveness. Kant classifies the duty to be forgiving as a wide duty of virtue, and according to Blöser, this means that Kantian forgiveness is elective in the sense that forgiveness is good in general but without being obligatory in each particular case. In the course of presenting her own reconstruction of Kant’s account, Blöser also objects to some aspects of an interpretation of Kant’s theory of forgiveness which I had previously defended in my paper ‘Forgiveness and Moral Development’. Although there are a lot of points of agreement between our interpretations, the aim of this article is to highlight four key points of disagreement. These issues are worth discussing because they have implications not only for a plausible interpretation of a recognisable Kantian account of forgiveness but also for wider debates in the contemporary literature on forgiveness. First, I show that Kant is not committed to a form of weak situationism as suggested by Blöser and that Kant’s grounding of the duty to be forgiving does not appeal to moral luck. Second, I argue that although Kant’s duty to be forgiving is elective in one sense of the term, it is not elective in another important sense of the term, and that it is in fact better not to interpret Kantian imperfect duties as being elective. Third, I show that awareness of moral fallibility per se does not provide a morally appropriate ground for forgiveness and offer an alternative reconstruction of Kant’s account- in which fallibility plays a role, but it is not the main reason to forgive. Finally, I argue that Blöser’s account of the need to be forgiven is not recognisable Kantian because, from a Kantian perspective, repentance is a necessary condition for the desirability and, in fact, the very possibility of ameliorating our own guilt. (shrink)

Most advocates of biogenetic modification hope to amplify existing human traits in humans in order to increase the value of such traits as intelligence and resistance to disease. These advocates defend such enhancements as beneficial for the affected parties. By contrast, some commentators recommend certain biogenetic modifications to serve social goals. As Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu see things, human moral psychology is deficient relative to the most important risks facing humanity as a whole, including the prospect of Ultimate (...) Harm, the point at which worthwhile life is forever impossible on the planet. These risks can be mitigated, they say, by enhancing moral psychology in novel ways. Persson and Savulescu argue that some parents should modify the underlying biogenetics of their children's moral psychology, if such measures were safe and effective, but they admit these interventions may not decouple humanity from Ultimate Harm. Neither are these modifications the only options, they concede, for addressing risks to humanity. Even with these concessions, saving humanity from itself is a fairly poor reason to modify the moral psychology of children. In most ways, adults would be better candidates, morally speaking, for modifications of psychology. Even then, there is no direct link between morally enhanced human beings and the hoped-for effect of better protection from Ultimate Harm. Asserting a general duty of all to contribute to the avoidance of Ultimate Harm is a better moral strategy than intervening in the moral psychology of some, even though meeting that duty may involve substantial interference with the free exercise of one's interests. (shrink)

This paper establishes a Kantian duty against screen overexposure. After defining screen exposure, I adopt a Kantian approach to its morality on the ground that Kant’s notion of duties to oneself easily captures wrongdoing in absence of harm or wrong to others. Then, I draw specifically on Kant’s ‘duties to oneself as an animal being’ to introduce a duty of self-government. This duty is based on the negative causal impact of the activities it regulates on a human being’s mental and (...) physical powers, and, ultimately, on the moral employment of these powers. After doing so, I argue that the duty against screen overexposure is an instance of the duty of self-government. Finally, I consider some objections. (shrink)

In Kant’s moral theory, we do not have duties to animals, though we have duties with regard to them. I reconstruct Kant’s arguments for several types of duties with regard to animals and show that Kant’s theory imposes far more robust requirements on our treatment of animals than one would expect. Kant’s duties regarding animals are perfect and imperfect; they are primarily but not exclusively duties to oneself; and they condemn not merely cruelty to animals for its own sake, (...) but also, such things as killing them for food when our health does not require it and ingratitude to service animals. Central to understanding these duties is appreciating Kant’s concern for our morally useful emotions, for it is primarily because of the effect that cruelty to animals has on our sympathetic emotions—which greatly help us treat other rational beings appropriately—that we have duties not to be cruel to animals. Yet cruelty and callousness toward animals are not problematic only because they may weaken some of our morally useful emotions. Cruelty and callousness toward animals are problematic also because they oppose our morally useful emotions; these emotions, as part of the perfection of our nature, should be honored, supported, and furthered, unless there are compelling reasons not to do so in particular cases. (shrink)

This article seeks to show one way in which moral philosophy, considered by the authors to be essential to the nursing and midwifery curricula, can be presented to achieve an optimal learning experience for nurses and midwives. It demonstrates that what might be considered a standard approach, that is, one that begins with ethical principles concerned with rights and duties and then often follows a linear pattern of teaching, may be in danger of promoting a focus on standardized outcomes. Such (...) use of philosophy could therefore actually detract from the process of care. Moral philosophy underpinning health care ethics is commonly misperceived as a method of problem solving when there is an obvious dilemma regarding appropriate care and/or treatment. However, it is readily recognized that key principles within philosophy, for example, deontology and utilitarianism, despite their approach to a standard or criterion of right action, are both deficient in terms of providing ready-made right decisions. This is because their main virtue is to expose the difficulty rather than to solve the problem. Given these difficulties, any subsequent principles such as respect, beneficence, nonmaleficence and justice, incur the same deficiencies a fortiori. It can be argued that the complexity of the environment in which nurses and midwives now practice requires them to develop a capability that begins with the philosophical construction of an issue. This can subsequently enable a recognition of the essential nature of their own involvement as a nurse or midwife. By so doing, nurses and midwives can then bring issues into a nursing or midwifery paradigm and ensure that this perspective informs debate. Ultimately the focus is on the process by which care decisions are made. The intent therefore, is not simply for nurses or midwives to learn moral philosophy or to copy what is considered by others to be right action, but to recognize that a number of right actions are possible and, in so doing, develop their ability either to choose or influence a final action through a valid process. This article proposes and demonstrates by case example that what is often considered as a chance effect for nurses and midwives learning moral philosophy should be seen as the main effect and intended outcome. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and CharacterIvan A. BoldyrevMark D. White. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 270. Cloth, $55.00.This remarkable book provides a new ethical perspective for economics based on Kantian ethics of autonomy and dignity. There are two main messages in it that I find particularly important. First, Mark White derives from Kant the (...) idea of irreducible moral principles that govern the behavior of economic agents independently of welfarist and, more generally, consequentialist concerns. These principles of duty and the “incomparable worth” (21) of human dignity, as well as justice or rights, may not be economically traded off against some other motivations; hence, they simply evade economic reasoning altogether.Second, White endorses a version of libertarian Kantianism that treats people as individuals in essence (“autonomous”) and social in orientation (respecting the rights and the choices of the others). In discussing individualism, White attacks the conventional wisdom of economics and claims that preferences alone do not account for the identity of individuals [End Page 298] in space and time, although their unique characters do. Persons should be given free choice (absent in deterministic rational-choice models) and hence responsibility for their choices that incorporates the social factors in decision-making. However, White never mentions the almost insurmountable difficulties associated with fleshing out the truly individual features of a given person. Although he allows for a person’s identity and character changing over time, he does not recognize that character itself is in many respects a social construction.White criticizes paternalistic economic policies that suggest manipulating choice environments in order to follow the “true” preferences of the individuals. Instead, real consent, as satisfying both relevant preferences and principles (e.g. rights and human dignity), is, in his view, the sole criterion for justifying particular policy measures—not Pareto-efficiency or Kaldor-Hicks compensation. Economists’ obsession with efficiency leading to the misconceived notions such as “efficient level of crime” or “manageable level of terrorism” is also severely criticized.For White, the most popular formalistic version of the categorical imperative is less important than the other two—prohibiting treating other people simply as means and instituting the “Kingdom of Ends.” Formalism is reserved merely for the negative evaluation of actions and providing strict perfect duties that give clear guidance concerning what should not be done. White’s “Kantian-economic” model of decision-making incorporates perfect duties as constraints, and imperfect (positive) duties as preferences. He also stresses that for Kant, duties derived from the imperative depend on empirical knowledge, the context of decision-making, and judgment as a unique personal interpretation of the moral law. He further emphasizes the intersubjective role of Kantian morality: moral law should be universalizable to all rational persons (the “Kingdom of Ends” formula of the imperative), whereas rationality means not just following the patterns of behavior developed in the preference-oriented choice model, but rather acting on one’s beliefs and desires or choosing not to follow them, thus exhibiting genuine autonomy.The new and important contribution to the discussion is an explicit treatment of will as an inner faculty that, together with judgment, constitutes a person’s character or “self,” and helps to overcome the mere inclination to follow duty. Will is the missing link between decision and action and should be “well-trained” for bringing about true morality.The book is clearly written, and the author has upheld the interdisciplinary appeal of the topic, demonstrating an outstanding knowledge of the vast literature on ethics (both Kantian and not) and economics. White’s emphasis on the irreducibility of moral principles is absolutely relevant for current economic and political debates. However, some reservations are in order.There is an ambiguity concerning the status of his analysis. If in its positive aspect White’s recommendations for economists is to accept the Kantian vision of morality, then almost no arguments are given for this, and his modifications of the standard choice model are introduced in an ad hoc manner, just to reconcile it with the Kantian framework. Are an individual’s decisions to act on principles and to overcome mere inclinations really... (shrink)

Discussion regarding education’s aims, especially its ultimate aims, is a key topic in the philosophy of education. These aims or values play a pivotal role in regulating and structuring moral and other types of normative education. We outline two plausible strategies to identify and justify education’s ultimate aims. The first associates these aims with a normative standpoint, such as the moral, prudential, or aesthetic, which is overriding, in a sense of ‘overriding’ to be explained. The second (...) associates education’s ultimate aims with the intrinsic value of personal well-being. We advance reasons to doubt that these strategies are successful. The shortcomings of these strategies impute yet further urgency to the issue of how we are to ascertain and validate education’s ultimate aims. (shrink)