Consequentialism is often criticized for failing to accommodate impersonal constraints and personal options. A common consequentialist response is to acknowledge the anticonsequentialist intuitions but to argue either that the consequentialist can, after all, accommodate the allegedly recalcitrant intuitions or that, where accommodation is impossible, the recalcitrant intuition can be dismissed for want of an adequate philosophical rationale. Whereas these consequentialist responses have some plausibility, associational duties represent a somewhat different challenge to consequentialism, inasmuch as they embody neither impersonal constraints nor (...) personal options, but rather personal constraints. Our intuitions about associational duties resist capture within the intellectual net of consequentialism, and such duties do admit of a philosophical rationale at least as plausible as anything the consequentialist has to offer. (shrink)

It is common to regard love, friendship, and other associational ties to others as an important part of a happy or flourishing life. This would be easy enough to understand if we focused on friendships based on pleasure, or associations, such as business partnerships, predicated on mutual advantage. For then we could understand in a straightforward way how these interpersonal relationships would be valuable for someone involved in such relationships just insofar as they caused her pleasure or causally promoted her (...) own independent interests. But many who regard love, friendship, and other associational ties as an important part of a happy or flourishing life suppose that in many sorts of associations—especially intimate associations—the proper attitude among associates is concern for the other for the other's own sake, not just for the pleasure or benefits one can extract from one's associates. It is fairly clear how having friends of this sort is beneficial. What is less clear is how being a friend of this sort might contribute to one's own happiness or well-being. Even if we can explain this, it looks as if the contribution that friendship makes to one's happiness could not be the reason one has to care for friends, for that would seem to make one's concern for others instrumental, not a concern for the other for her own sake. (shrink)

The chromodomain is a highly conserved sequence motif that has been identified in a variety of animal and plant species. In mammals, chromodomain proteins appear to be either structural components of large macromolecular chromatin complexes or proteins involved in remodelling chromatin structure. Recent work has suggested that apart from a role in regulating gene activity, chromodomain proteins may also play roles in genome organisation. This article reviews progress made in characterising mammalian chromodomain proteins and emphasises their emerging role in the (...) regulation of gene expression and genome organisation. BioEssays 22:124–137, 2000. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Prudence and authenticity are sometimes seen as rival virtues. Prudence,as traditionally conceived, is temporally neutral. It attaches no intrinsic significance to the temporal location of benefits or harms within the agent’s life; the prudent agent should be equally concerned about all parts of her life. But people’s values and ideals often change over time, sometimes in predictable ways, as when middle age and parenthood often temporize youthful radicalism or spontaneity with concerns for comfort,security, and predictability. In situations involving diachronic, intrapersonal (...) conflicts of value, prudence—in particular,temporal neutrality—appears to require the agent to subordinate her current ideals to her future ones or at least to moderate pursuit of current ideals in light of future ones. But this demand may seem to sacrifice authenticity, if we suppose that authenticity requires acting on the ideals that the agent reflectively and sincerely accepts at the time of action. This tension between prudence and authenticity raises interesting questions about temporal neutrality, the structure of intrapersonal conflicts of value, the nature of ideals, and the demands of authenticity. After examining various aspects of this puzzle, I defend the commitments of prudence in situations involving intrapersonal value conflict and argue that authenticity—understood as being true to oneself— actually supports temporal neutrality. I conclude by suggesting how this defense of prudence lends credibility to the more general demand of temporal neutrality. (shrink)

Of recent time, there has been a proliferation of concerns with ethical leadership within corporate business not least because of the numerous scandals at Enron, Worldcom, Parmalat, and two major Irish banks – Allied Irish Bank (AIB) and National Irish Bank (NIB). These have not only threatened the position of many senior corporate managers but also the financial survival of some of the companies over which they preside. Some authors have attributed these scandals to the pre-eminence of a focus on (...) increasing shareholder value in Western business schools and/or to their failure to inculcate ethical standards. In this paper, we challenge these accounts and the aetiological view of knowledge from which they derive but are grateful for the consensus that they convey regarding the importance of business ethics. The paper focuses on different approaches to ethical leadership concluding with a view that some hybrid of MacIntyre’s virtue ethics and Levinas’s ethics of responsibility may serve as an inspiration for both educators and practitioners. (shrink)

We have looked at worries about expressivism and other forms of noncognitivism. The externalist solution may also seem to be a solution of last resort, because it may seem to deny the platitude that moral judgments are motivationally efficacious. For this reason, we might look seriously at rationalist theories of moral motivation, because they promise to represent moral judgments as intrinsically motivational without giving up cognitivism.

My purpose in this dissertation is to show that a wide-ranging investigation of Michael Polanyi's epistemology and ontology taken together with his social-political writings reveals the possibility of explicating an ethical language which can be seen, in Polanyi's terms, to be tacit within these works. The work naturally divides into two parts: the first deals with Polanyi's epistemology and ontology; the second deals with the social and political writings. ;The first part consists in two major arguments: the epistemological and the (...) ontological arguments. The epistemological argument consists in lifting out the fundamental dynamic of the knowing act in order to show that this dynamic might apply as well to the knowlede of values, if, as is pointed out, Polanyi includes many other objects of knowledge than those of science in his epistemology. The key point here is that value knowledge, like all forms of knowledge for Polanyi, must be seen as personal knowledge, i.e. value knowledge is rooted in a commitment to believe that some aspect of reality is touched in it, though the standard of correctness is neither a subjective standard nor a claim to complete objectivity but rather an obedience to a commitment to which we expect all persons, including ourselves, to submit. Value knowledge is personal knowledge. ;The second major argument of the first part is the ontological argument. I lift out the ontological structure of the knowing person to demonstrate that a right knowledge of values implies a commitment to the right action involved in attaining such knowledge. This intimate link between knowing and being is essentially the link between values and right actions. ;The first part of the dissertation establishes the possibility of a Polanyian ethic. After taking detailed exception to Harry Prosch's analysis of the possibility of a Polanyian ethic based upon his notion of symbols, an analysis which claimed that ethics must be grounded in a Polanyian understanding of symbols, I push forward the notion of personal ethical knowledge. . . . UMI. (shrink)

Swartz, Campbell, and Pestana offer this original application of neo-pragmatism with the expressed desire to "rethink commonly accepted notions of community in order to imagine new possibilities for social, political, and economic organization—in short, new ways of imaging solidarity and citizenship with others, especially those who languish outside the range of our moral radar" (p. 2). Neither the rethinking of community nor the postulating of ideas for solidarity are unfamiliar concepts in the world of neo-pragmatism; perhaps those objectives are defining (...) characteristics of neo-pragmatism itself. If that is the case—and fans of Richard Rorty will likely agree—then the value of the volume is in its concentration .. (shrink)

Many commentators agree that the trend to try juveniles as adults fails to recognize that there should be an asymmetry in our treatment of juvenile and adult crime such that all else being equal juvenile crime deserves less punishment than does adult crime. This essay explores different rationales for this asymmetry. A political rationale claims that the disenfranchisement of juveniles compromises the state’s democratic authority to punish juveniles in the same way it is permitted to punish adults. A developmental rationale (...) claims that juveniles deserve to be punished less than adults because their immaturity makes them less responsible and, hence, less culpable for their wrongdoing. Gideon Yaffe’s new book The Age of Culpability expresses skepticism about the developmental rationale and defends a version of the political rationale. By contrast, this essay finds important limits to the political rationale and defends a qualified version of the developmental rationale. In the process, it argues against treating the asymmetry between juvenile and adult crime as a categorical one. (shrink)

Thomas Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism (1970) is one of the few sustained attempts to reject instrumental and prudential conceptions of practical reason and to defend the possibility of practical reason that is impartial or altruistic. Nagel makes claims about both moral motivation and practical reason, and each claim has both negative and positive constituents.

A cognitivist interpretation of moral inquiry treats it, like other kinds of inquiry, as aiming at true belief. A dialectical conception of moral inquiry represents the justification for a given moral belief as consisting in its intellectual fit with other beliefs, both moral and nonmoral. The essay appeals to semantic considerations to defend cognitivism as a default metaethical view; it defends a dialectical conception of moral inquiry by examining Sidgwick's ambivalence about the probative value of appeal to common moral beliefs (...) or intuitions. The essay then addresses two main concerns about the compatibility of cognitivist and dialectical conceptions of moral inquiry. The probative value of moral intuitions requires that they be sufficiently approximately true. The individual and collective benefits of regulating our interactions by norms like those of commonsense morality help explain how we can view ourselves as sufficiently reliable detectors of moral properties. But the probative value of moral intuitions may also seem threatened by the existence of pervasive moral disagreement both within and between cultures. However, a dialectical conception of moral inquiry has resources for resolving moral disagreement; in fact, the dialectical examination of diverse moral perspectives contributes to the justification of moral beliefs. (shrink)

This essay explores different conceptions of freedom in Kant, Green, and their critics. Kant introduces three kinds of freedom—negative freedom, positive freedom or autonomy, and transcendental freedom. Sidgwick objects that Kant's conception of positive freedom is unable to explain how someone might be free and responsible for the wrong choices. Though Green rejects transcendental freedom, he thinks Kant's conception of practical freedom can be defended by identifying it with the capacity to be determined by practical reason. Green identifies his own (...) tripartite conception of freedom—juridical freedom, moral freedom, and real freedom. He thinks that these are stages in the perfection of freedom. Green's tripartite conception provides a principled reply to Berlin's doubts about positive freedom, explains Kant's claims that respect and esteem are fitting attitudes toward different aspects of freedom, and supports Schiller's criticisms of Kantian freedom and virtue. Green's conception of freedom defends the best elements of the Kantian perspective while addressing legitimate worries. In doing so, it unifies different aspects of freedom in a way that is grounded in moral personality or rational nature. (shrink)

Viktor D. Kudryavtsev-Platonov is one of the most prominent representatives of Russian religious-academic philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century whose theory of cognition bears an imprint of the Kantian theoretical philosophy. Kudryavtsev was not only thoroughly familiar with the Königsberg thinker’s work, but offered a critically reinterpreted version of Kant’s teaching on space, time and categories of understanding. But was the Russian philosopher original in his reading and critique of Kant? In his later works Kudryavtsev often cites (...) the works of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg whose works turn out to be very close to the Russian philosopher. Could it be that Kudryavtsev read Kant through Trendelenburg’s optics? To answer this question consistently I give outlines of Trendelenburg’s and Kudryavtsev’s theories of cognition and compare their views on the basis of the sources. I then draw on archive materials to characterise Kudryavtsev’s acquaintance with the works of Kant and Trendelenburg. It turns out that Kudryavtsev was well-versed in Kant’s philosophical ideas already in the early years of his teaching activities — but not from primary sources, but largely through German historical-philosophical renderings. I establish similarities between the teachings of Trendelenburg and Kudryavtsev on space, time and the categories of understanding and their critique of the relevant Kantian teaching. Finally, Kudryavtsev’s early manuscripts attest to his acquaintance with Trendelenburg’s ideas. I conclude that Trendelenburg influenced Kudryavtsev’s own theory of cognition, a fact that should be borne in mind when reading the Russian philosopher’s epistemological works. (shrink)

Perfectionism is an underexplored tradition, perhaps because of doubts about the grounds, content, and implications of perfectionist ideals. Aristotle, J.S. Mill, and T.H. Green are normative perfectionists, grounding perfectionist ideals in a normative conception of human nature involving personality or agency. This essay explores the prospects of normative perfectionism by examining Kant’s criticisms of the perfectionist tradition. First, Kant claims that the perfectionist can generate only hypothetical, not categorical, imperatives. But insofar as the normative perfectionist appeals to the normative category (...) of personality or agency, rather than a biological category of humanity, it can represent perfectionist demands as categorical imperatives. Second, Kant accepts a moral asymmetry in which we aim at our own perfection but at the happiness, rather than the perfection, of others. However, the importance of autonomy in normative perfection explains why the perfectionist should recognize a self/other asymmetry. Indeed, when we see how the normative perfectionist can answer Kant’s criticisms while respecting Kant’s own claims about the connection between rational nature and moral requirements, we can see the basis for a normative perfectionist interpretation of Kant’s own ethical theory. Insofar as Kantians and normative perfectionists both base ethical demands on an appeal to rational nature, they face a common worry that the appeal to rational nature is empty or incomplete. Normative perfectionists have more and less concessive responses to this worry, providing perfectionist explanations of various apparently non-perfectionist goods. Even if we end up being pluralists about the good, perfectionist elements play an important role. Finally, because the normative perfectionist, like the Kantian, grounds its ideals and requirements in a conception of persons as rational agents, it provides a promising account of the rational authority of perfectionist demands. This comparison of normative perfectionist and Kantian essentials gives us reason to take the normative perfectionist tradition seriously. (shrink)

In The Sources of Normativity (1996) Christine Korsgaard provides a dialectical examination of different conceptions of the sources of normativity or reasons -- conceptions that appeal to voluntarism, realism, and reflective endorsement -- that culminates in her own Kantian or neo- Kantian conception of normativity that is grounded in autonomy. Her method is dialectical (Dialectical) inasmuch as her neo-Kantian conception is supposed to reveal the truth or grain of truth in each of the three prior conceptions. Korsgaard begins Lecture 1 (...) with a statement of the main problems that arise in connection with the normativity of ethics. She factors normative adequacy into answers to two kinds of problems (12-13). (shrink)

Brink analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. He argues that an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused, and that responsibility consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities, and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities.

Culpability is not a unitary concept within the criminal law, and it is important to distinguish different culpability concepts and the work they do. Narrow culpability is an ingredient in wrongdoing itself, describing the agent’s elemental mens rea. Broad culpability is the responsibility condition that makes wrongdoing blameworthy and without which wrongdoing is excused. Inclusive culpability is the combination of wrongdoing and responsibility or broad culpability that functions as the retributivist desert basis for punishment. Each of these kinds of culpability (...) plays an important role in a unified retributive framework for the criminal law. Moreover, the distinction between narrow and broad culpability has significance for understanding and assessing the distinction between attributability and accountability and the nature and permissibility of strict liability crimes. (shrink)

What role, if any, should our moral intuitions play in moral epistemology? We make, or are prepared to make, moral judgments about a variety of actual and hypothetical situations. Some of these moral judgments are more informed, reflective, and stable than others (call these ourconsideredmoral judgments); some we make more confidently than others; and some, though not all, are judgments about which there is substantial consensus. What bearing do our moral judgments have on philosophical ethics and the search for first (...) principles in ethics? Should these judgments constrain, or be constrained by, philosophical theorizing about morality? On the one hand, we might expect first principles to conform to our moral intuitions or at least to our considered moral judgments. After all, we begin the reflection that may lead to first principles from particular moral convictions. And some of our moral intuitions (e.g., that genocide is wrong) are more fixed and compelling than any putative first principle. If so, we might expect common moral beliefs to have an important evidential role in the construction and assessment of first principles. On the other hand, common moral beliefs often rest on poor information, reflect bias, or are otherwise mistaken. We often appeal to moral principles to justify our particular moral convictions or to resolve our disagreements. Insofar as this is true, we may expect first principles to provide a foundation on the basis of which to test common moral beliefs and, where necessary, form new moral convictions. (shrink)

Since his article, ‘Outline for a Decision Procedure in Ethics,’ John Rawls has advocated a coherentist moral epistemology according to which moral and political theories are justified on the basis of their coherence with our other beliefs, both moral and nonmoral. A moral theory which is maximally coherent with our other beliefs is in a state which Rawls calls ‘reflective equilibrium’. In A Theory of Justice Rawls advanced two principles of justice and claimed that they are in reflective equilibrium. He (...) defended this claim by appeal to a hypothetical contract; he argued that parties in a position satisfying certain informational and motivational criteria, which he called ‘the original position,’ would choose the following two principles of justice to govern the basic structure of their society. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by T.H. Green. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

I argue that disputes within constitutional theory about whether recent supreme court decisions exceed the scope of legitimate judicial review and disputes within legal theory about the nature and determinacy of law are best seen and assessed as disputes over the nature of legal interpretation. I criticize the interpretive assumptions on which these disputes generally depend and defend a theory of interpretation which tends to vindicate the determinacy of law even in hard cases and the style of recent court decisions (...) which many critics find troublesome. (shrink)

Doubts about the adequacy of appeals to impartial practical reason give those with rationalist sympathies reason to explore the metaphysical, and not merely strategic, reconciliation of prudence and altruism contained in metaphysical egoism. Even if we recognize impartial practical reason, the supremacy of moral demands may depend upon the plausibility of metaphysical egoism. For as long as we recognize the demands of prudence, the conflict between altruism and prudence will threaten altruism's supremacy. We might consider one version of metaphysical egoism (...) that appeals to psychological reductionism about personal identity and exploits some Platonic and Aristotelian analogies between intrapersonal and interpersonal relations and concern. (shrink)

The process of obtaining informed consent in a teaching hospital in a developing country (e.g. Nigeria) is shaped by factors which, to the Western world, may be seen to be anti-autonomomous: autonomy being one of the pillars of an ideal informed consent. However, the mix of cultural bioethics and local moral obligation in the face of communal tradition ensures a mutually acceptable informed consent process. Paternalism is indeed encouraged by the patients who prefer to see the doctor as all-powerful and (...) all-knowing, and this is buttressed by the cultural practice of customary obedience to those ‘above you’: either in age or social rank. The local moral obligation reassures the patients that those in authority will always look after others placed in their care without recourse to lengthy discussions or signed documentation, while the communal traditions ensure that the designated head of a family unit has the honor and sole responsibility of assenting and consenting to an operation to be carried out on a younger, or female, member of the family. Indeed it is to only a few educated patients that the informed consent process is deemed a shield against litigation by the doctors. This paper later addresses the need for physicians to update their knowledge on the process of informed consent through the attendance of biomedical ethics courses, which should highlight socio-cultural practices that may make this process different from the Western concept, but perfectly acceptable in this setting. (shrink)

The situationist literature in psychology claims that conduct is not determined by character and reflects the operation of the agent's situation or environment. For instance, due to situational factors, compassionate behavior is much less common than we might have expected from people we believe to be compassionate. This article focuses on whether situationism should revise our beliefs about moral responsibility. It assesses the implications of situationism against the backdrop of a conception of responsibility that is grounded in norms about the (...) fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing that require that agents to be normatively competent and possess situational control. Despite the low incidence of compassionate behavior revealed in situationist studies, situationism threatens neither situational control nor normative competence. Nonetheless situationism may force revision of our views about responsibility in particular contexts, such as wartime wrongdoing. Whereas a good case can be made that the heat of battle can create situational pressures that significantly impair normative competence and thus sometimes provide a full or partial excuse, there is reason to be skeptical of attempts to generalize this excuse to other contexts of wartime wrongdoing. If so, moral responsibility can take situationism on board without capsizing the boat. (shrink)

SOME THINK THAT MORAL REALISTS CANNOT RECOGNIZE THE PRACTICAL OR ACTION-GUIDING CHARACTER OF MORALITY AND SO REJECT MORAL REALISM. THIS FORM OF ANTI-REALISM DEPENDS UPON AN INTERNALIST MORAL PSYCHOLOGY. BUT AN EXTERNALIST MORAL PSYCHOLOGY IS MORE PLAUSIBLE AND ALLOWS THE REALIST A SENSIBLE EXPLANATION OF THE ACTION-GUIDING CHARACTER OF MORALITY. CONSIDERATION OF THE PRACTICAL CHARACTER OF MORALITY, THEREFORE, DOES NOT UNDERMINE AND, INDEED, SUPPORTS MORAL REALISM.

Consideration of the objection from the personal point of view reveals the resources of utilitarianism. The utilitarian can offer a partial rebuttal by distinguishing between criteria of rightness and decision procedures and claiming that, because his theory is a criterion of rightness and not a decision procedure, he can justify agents' differential concern for their own welfare and the welfare of those close to them. The flexibility in utilitarianism's theory of value allows further rebuttal of this objection; objective versions of (...) utilitarianism can treat self-determination or autonomy as a dominant good which trumps even large magnitudes of lesser goods such as pleasure. After the resources of utilitarianism are exhausted, though, there remains a worry, generated by the personal point of view, about utilitarianism's impartiality. But this worry is correctly viewed, not as a moral worry about the merits of utilitarianism as a moral theory, but as a worry about morality concerning the rationality or supremacy of impartial moral demands. Whether or not this worry can be answered, the fact that it arises supports rather than undermines a utilitarian account of morality. (shrink)