Out of 288 Hong Kong cancer patients, 92.3% include themselves in decision-making, 71% prefer joint decision-making: with family, with doctor, with doctor plus family, with family minus doctor, and with doctor minus family. <5% want decision-making by “doctor-alone” and <1% desire decision-making by “family-alone”. Harmony, communication and responsibility are reasons for family participation. Most patients prefer “specialist” for information, followed by “family”, “friends”, and “GP”. Trust in doctors and prospects for controlling/curing disease are important factors in decision-making. Patients want to (...) participate and be listened to rather than make decisions. Doctors should not disclose information to family without patients’ permission, nor withhold information from patient [End Page 109] on family’s request. Only 25% of patients have discussed post-competent treatment with others and 7% have heard of Advance Directive ; 24% refuse to discuss it. After AD has been explained to them, 66% remain reluctant to sign one, preferring to leave oral instructions or appoint family as proxy decision-makers. The family’s decision-making role increases when patients become incompetent. The top reason for signing AD is to receive preferred post-competent treatments, and for not signing it, difficulty with making a prospective decision. The implications of these findings will be discussed. (shrink)

David Enoch develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view--according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths--is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into reasonably precise arguments. And when the book turns to defend Robust Realism against traditional objections, it mobilizes the original (...) positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections. (shrink)

The law views with suspicion statistical evidence, even evidence that is probabilistically on a par with direct, individual evidence that the law is in no way suspicious of. But it has proved remarkably hard to either justify this suspicion, or to debunk it. In this paper, we connect the discussion of statistical evidence to broader epistemological discussions of similar phenomena. We highlight Sensitivity – the requirement that a belief be counterfactually sensitive to the truth in a specific way – as (...) a way of epistemically explaining the legal suspicion towards statistical evidence. Still, we do not think of this as a satisfactory vindication of the reluctance to rely on statistical evidence. Knowledge – and Sensitivity, and indeed epistemology in general – are of little, if any, legal value. Instead, we tell an incentive-based story vindicating the suspicion towards statistical evidence. We conclude by showing that the epistemological story and the incentive-based story are closely and interestingly related, and by offering initial thoughts about the role of statistical evidence in morality. (shrink)

Metaethical—or, more generally, metanormative— realism faces a serious epistemological challenge. Realists owe us—very roughly speaking—an account of how it is that we can have epistemic access to the normative truths about which they are realists. This much is, it seems, uncontroversial among metaethicists, myself included. But this is as far as the agreement goes, for it is not clear—nor uncontroversial—how best to understand the challenge, what the best realist way of coping with it is, and how successful this attempt is. (...) In this paper I try, first, to present the challenge in its strongest version, and second, to show how realists—indeed, robust realists—can cope with it. The strongest version of the challenge is, I argue, that of explaining the correlation between our normative beliefs and the independent normative truths. And I suggest an evolutionary explanation as a way of solving it. (shrink)

There is a fairly widespread—and very infl uential—hope among philosophers interested in the status of normativity that the solution to our metaethical and, more generally, metanormative problems will emerge from the philosophy of action. In this essay, I will argue that these hopes are groundless. I will focus on the metanormative hope, but—as will become clear—showing that the solution to our metanormative problems will not come from what is constitutive of action will also devastate the hope of gaining significant insight (...) into first-order, normative truths by focusing on what is constitutive of action. (shrink)

People are often offended by beliefs, expect apologies for beliefs, apologize for their own beliefs. In many mundane cases, people are morally criticized for their beliefs. Intuitively, then, beliefs seem to sometimes wrong people. Recently, the philosophical literature has picked up on this theme, and has started to discuss it under the heading of doxastic wrongdoing. In this paper we argue that despite the strength of such initial intuitions, at the end of the day they have to be rejected. If (...) it can be ever truthfully asserted that beliefs wrong, this is always derivative – beliefs wrong only in virtue of other things (like evidence-gathering actions) wronging. We distinguish between modest and ambitious doxastic wrongdoing theories (the former deny, while the latter accept, the possibility of a morally wrong yet epistemically permissible belief); we argue that each of these options faces insurmountable problems; and we offer partly debunking explanations of the intuitions purportedly supporting doxastic wrongdoing. (shrink)

How should you update your (degrees of) belief about a proposition when you find out that someone else — as reliable as you are in these matters — disagrees with you about its truth value? There are now several different answers to this question — the question of `peer disagreement' — in the literature, but none, I think, is plausible. Even more importantly, none of the answers in the literature places the peer-disagreement debate in its natural place among the most (...) general traditional concerns of normative epistemology. In this paper I try to do better. I start by emphasizing how we cannot and should not treat ourselves as `truthometers' — merely devices with a certain probability of tracking the truth. I argue that the truthometer view is the main motivation for the Equal Weight View in the context of peer disagreement. With this fact in mind, the discussion of peer disagreement becomes more complicated, sensitive to the justification of the relevant background degrees of belief (including the conditional ones), and to some of the most general points that arise in the context of discussions of scepticism. I argue that thus understood, peer disagreement is less special as an epistemic phenomenon than may be thought, and so that there is very little by way of positive theory that we can give about peer disagreement in general. (shrink)

The combination of this vindication of moral deference and diagnosis of its fishiness nicely accommodates, I argue, some related phenomena, like the (neglected) fact that our uneasiness with moral deference is actually a particular instance of uneasiness with opaque evidence in general when it comes to morality, and the (familiar) fact that the scope of this uneasiness is wider than the moral as it includes other normative domains.

The starting point regarding consent has to be that it is both extremely important, and that it is often suspicious. In this article, the author tries to make sense of both of these claims, from a largely liberal perspective, tying consent, predictably, to the value of autonomy and distinguishing between autonomy as sovereignty and autonomy as nonalienation. The author then discusses adaptive preferences, claiming that they suffer from a rationality flaw but that it's not clear that this flaw matters morally (...) or politically. What matters is whether they suffer from an autonomy flaw. To answer this question, the author develops an account of autonomy failure, according to which a preference is nonautonomous if an injustice played an appropriate role in its causal history. The author then discusses the moral implications—and in an initial way, the political ones as well—of proclaiming a preference, or consent based on it, nonautonomous in this way. (shrink)

Specific moral facts seem to be grounded in relevant natural facts, together with relevant moral principles. This picture—according to which moral principles play a role in grounding specific moral facts—is a very natural one, and it may be especially attractive to non-naturalist, robust realists. A recent challenge from Selim Berker threatens this picture, though. Moral principles themselves seem to incorporate grounding claims, and it’s not clear that this can be reconciled with according the principles a grounding role. This chapter responds (...) to Berker’s Challenge, utilizing a grounding pluralism. In particular, it argues that distinguishing between normative and metaphysical grounding is the key to saving the natural picture. It also shows how such a distinction is one that you have a reason to endorse independently of this challenge, as it does important work elsewhere in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Hypothetical consent is puzzling. On the one hand, it seems to make a moral difference across a wide range of cases. On the other hand, there seem to be principled reasons to think that it cannot. In this article I put forward reasonably precise formulations of these general suspicions regarding hypothetical consent; I draw several distinctions regarding the ways in which hypothetical consent may make a moral difference; I distinguish between two autonomy-related concerns, nonalienation and sovereignty; and, utilizing these distinctions, (...) I show that—and in a preliminary way, when—the objections to the moral significance of hypothetical consent fail. (shrink)

Moral disagreement is widely held to pose a threat for metaethical realism and objectivity. In this paper I attempt to understand how it is that moral disagreement is supposed to present a problem for metaethical realism. I do this by going through several distinct (though often related) arguments from disagreement, carefully distinguishing between them, and critically evaluating their merits. My conclusions are rather skeptical: Some of the arguments I discuss fail rather clearly. Others supply with a challenge to realism, but (...) not one we have any reason to believe realism cannot address successfully. Others beg the question against the moral realist, and yet others raise serious objections to realism, but ones that—when carefully stated—can be seen not to be essentially related to moral disagreement. Arguments based on moral disagreement itself have almost no weight, I conclude, against moral realism. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 143-165, June 2022.

Statistical evidence—say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other—can never render resenting your colleague appropriate, in the way that other evidence (say, the testimony of a reliable friend) can. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why. We put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory; the epistemological context—with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impurism and doxastic wrongdoing; and the context of a (...) wider set of examples of responses and attitudes that seem not to be appropriately groundable in statistical evidence. Regrettably, we do not come up with a fully general, fully adequate, fully unified account of all the phenomena discussed. But we give reasons to believe that no such account is forthcoming, and we sketch a somewhat messier account that may be the best that can be had here. (shrink)

Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people’s feeling, etc. Even if (...) this does make sense, there’s a strong disanalogy between the moral and the religious case. This asymmetry, on a realist picture of morality, calls for explanation. This chapter tries to explain it. The discussion engages some topics familiar from objections to Robust realism—the why-be-moral challenge, the status of de-dicto moral motivation, and whether and why we should care about the moral properties, robustly realistically understood. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an account of the justification thinkers have for employing certain basic belief-forming methods. The guiding idea is inspired by Reichenbach's work on induction. There are certain projects in which thinkers are rationally required to engage. Thinkers are epistemically justified in employing any belief-forming method such that "if it doesn't work, nothing will" for successfully engaging in such a project. We present a detailed account based on this intuitive thought and address objections to it. We conclude (...) by commenting on the implications that our account may have for other important epistemological issues and debates. (shrink)

1. The Shmagency Challenge to Constitutivism In metaethics – and indeed, meta-normativity – constitutivism is a family of views that hope to ground normativity in norms, or standards, or motives, or aims that are constitutive of action and agency. And mostly because of the influential work of Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman, constitutivism seems to be gaining grounds in the current literature. The promises of constitutivism are significant. Perhaps chief among them are the hope to provide with some kind of (...) answer to the skeptic about morality or perhaps practical reason, and the hope to secure for practical reason a kind of objectivity that is consistent with its practical, motivationally engaged nature. The former philosophical motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in much of Korsgaard’s relevant work[1] – relies on the fact that constitutive norms seem to be less mysterious than not-clearly-constitutive norms. There arguably is nothing mysterious about, say, the norms of certain reasonably-well-defined activities, like building a house, or playing chess. And challenges by the relevant skeptic – the one asking "Why should I make sure the house I’m building can shelter people from the weather?" or "Why should I not castle when my king is checked?" – seem very rare, barely intelligible, and anyway remarkably easy to cope with. We should explain to the misguided skeptic that if he doesn’t even try to build something that can protect people from the weather, he’s not in the business of building a house at all; that if she doesn’t even try to play by the rules of chess, she’s not in the business of playing chess at all; and so on. It would be nice, the constitutivist hope seems to go, if we had something equally powerful by way of a response to the skeptic asking "Why be moral?". The other main motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in David Velleman’s relevant work[2] – starts from a commitment to some rather strong kind of existence-internalism about reasons: An agent has a reason to?, according to such views ), only if she can come to?, or at least to be motivated to?, by sound deliberation starting from her actual motivational set. (shrink)

Several influential characterizations of paternalism or its distinctive wrongness emphasize a belief or judgement that it typically involves—namely, 10 the judgement that the paternalized is likely to act irrationally, or some such. But it's not clear what about such a belief can be morally objectionable if it has the right epistemic credentials (if it is true, say, and is best supported by the evidence). In this paper, I elaborate on this point, placing it in the context of the relevant epistemological (...) discussions. I explain how 15 evidentialism is opposed to such thoughts; I show that possible ways of rejecting evidentialism (along lines analogous to those of pragmatic encroachment) won't work; and I sketch an account of the wrongness of paternalism that doesn't depend on any flaw in the belief about others' likely behaviour. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn a recent paper, Michael Pardo argues that the epistemic property that is legally relevant is the one called Safety, rather than Sensitivity. In the process, he argues against our Sensitivity-related account of statistical evidence. Here we revisit these issues, partly in order to respond to Pardo, and partly in order to make general claims about legal epistemology. We clarify our account, we show how it adequately deals with counterexamples and other worries, we raise suspicions about Safety's value here, and (...) we revisit our general skepticism about the role that epistemological considerations should play in determining legal policy. (shrink)

I am writing a mediocre paper on a topic you are not particularly interested in. You don't have, it seems safe to assume, a (normative) reason to read my draft. I then ask whether you would be willing to have a look and tell me what you think. Suddenly you do have a (normative) reason to read my draft. By my asking, I managed to give you the reason to read the draft. What does such reason-giving consist in? And how (...) is it that we can do it? In this paper, I characterize what I call robust reason giving, the kind present in requests. I distinguish it from epistemic and merely triggering reason-giving, I discuss in detail the phenomenology of robust reason-giving, and I offer an analysis of robust reason-giving in terms of the complex intentions of the reason-giver and of the normative background. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 85-103, October 2021.

A spectre is haunting legal positivists – and perhaps jurisprudes more generally – the spectre of the normativity of law. Whatever else law is, it is sometimes said, it is normative, and so whatever else a philosophical account of law accounts for, it should account for the normativity of law[1]. But law is at least partially a social matter, its content at least partially determined by social practices. And how can something social and descriptive in this down-to-earth kind of way (...) be normative?[2] This is presumably a problem for any theory of law, but it is especially acute for legal positivism, according to which (roughly speaking) all there is to facts about legality are such descriptive social facts. If this is so, the thought goes, the task of accommodating the law’s normativity immediately becomes both more daunting, and more urgent[3]. Unfortunately, though, it is entirely unclear what the problem of the normativity of law is supposed to be. Indeed, I suspect that there is no one problem here, as different people seem to have in mind different problems when they use this unhelpful phrase[4]. At least one family of issues people seem to have in mind when they talk about the normativity of law is a host of issues pertaining to the reason-giving force of the law. The law, it is sometimes said, gives reasons for action, and a theory of law should accommodate this obvious fact. But even when we focus just on questions regarding the reason-giving force of the law (and from now on I will restrict myself to just those, leaving other things people may have in mind when they talk about the normativity of law for another occasion), it is still not clear what the problem is. Indeed, my main purpose in this paper is to make some progress in understanding the relevant question here. And my conclusion is going to be somewhat skeptical: Once we are clear on what reason-giving in general consists in, and on what reason-giving powers the law actually has, there is not much by way of a problem here that needs to be solved, not a deep and interesting phenomenon here that theories of law need to accommodate, and that therefore places adequacy constraints on plausible theories of the nature of law.. (shrink)

More and more people seem to think that constructivism - in political philosophy, in moral philosophy, and perhaps in practical reasoning most generally - is the way to go. And yet it is surprisingly hard to even characterize the view. In this paper, I go to some lengths trying to capture the essence of a constructivist position - mostly in the realm of practical reason - and to pinpoint its theoretical attractions. I then give some reason to suspect that there (...) cannot be a coherent constructivist view about practical reason as a whole, at least not if it is to be interestingly constructivist, in a sense I make reasonably precise. (shrink)

In "Moral Luck" Bernard Williams famously drew on our intuitive judgments about agent-regret – mostly, on our judgment that agent-regret is often appropriate – in his argument about the role of luck in rational and moral evaluation. I think that Williams is importantly right about the appropriateness of agent-regret, but importantly wrong about the implications of this observation. In this paper, I suggest an alternative understanding of the normative judgment Williams is putting forward, the one about the appropriateness of agent-regret. (...) I distinguish between being responsible and taking responsibility. The judgment about the appropriateness of agent-regret, I argue, is better understood as a judgment about the (forward-looking) moral duty to take responsibility than about the (backward-looking) fact of being responsible. The distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility is wider in scope, though, than the discussion of agent-regret, and in this paper I go to some lengths elaborating on this distinction and its theoretical usefulness. Thus, I distinguish different senses of taking responsibility (forward- and backward-looking; just acknowledging responsibility that is already there vs. making it the case that one is responsible); I argue against initial doubts about the very coherence of this stronger understanding of taking-responsibility; and I specify the background conditions for the possibility of taking responsibility in this strong sense. The discussion of the normative background conditions necessary for the possibility of taking responsibility in the strong sense leads to a discussion of an intuitive notion of penumbral agency. Thus, I cannot take responsibility for Jefferson's owning slaves – the relevant actions and events are just too far from my agency to allow for me to take responsibility over them. Of course, I can issue statements that sound like an attempt to take responsibility. But I cannot thereby become responsible. It is just not within my power to make it the case that I am responsible for Jefferson's slave-ownership. At the other extreme, for some things I do not need to take responsibility in order to be responsible. For my actions – or perhaps intentions, or some such – I am already responsible, independently of whether I ever take (or even acknowledge) responsibility. These things are within the core of my agency, and I am responsible for them regardless of whether I take responsibility for them. But we should acknowledge the fact that there is more to this spectrum than just the extremes. Some actions and events are not within my core agency, but nor are they too far to allow me to take responsibility for them (thereby becoming responsible for them). Possible examples include the actions of my country, the actions of my rather young children, and – now getting back to Williams's discussion – the uncontrolled consequences of my actions. In these cases of penumbral agency, I argue, we are not responsible, but we can become responsible by taking responsibility. Furthermore, we may have a moral duty to take responsibility. Thus, the distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility is theoretically useful in accounting for our intuitively problematic and ambivalent responsibility-judgments. In the case of my country's actions, for instance, we want to say both that I am not responsible for them (given my very limited power to influence them); but we also want to say that there's something wrong about my refusing to accept responsibility for my country's actions, or about my just noting that I am not responsible for those actions. Utilizing the distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility, we can say that while I am not responsible for my country's actions, I am under a moral duty to take (some) responsibility for them. In the case of agent-regret and moral luck, this distinction allows us – vis-à-vis Williams – to have our cake and eat it too. True, agent-regret is often appropriate. But this shows nothing directly about responsibility. Rather, it shows something about our moral duties to take responsibility. And that these duties are sensitive to lucky circumstances is not more mysterious or paradoxical than the circumstances-sensitivity of pretty much all of our other moral duties. In other words, thus understood, the appropriateness of agent-regret is perfectly compatible with the denial of moral luck. (shrink)

Does it count against a normative theory in political philosophy that it is in some important sense infeasible, that its prescriptions are unlikely to be complied with? Though a positive answer seems plausible, it has proved hard to defend against the claim that this is not how normative theories work - noncompliance shows a problem with the noncomplying agents, not with the normative theory. I think that this line of thought - this defense of Utopianism - wins the battle but (...) loses the war. It’s right about what does and what does not refute a normative theory. It’s wrong in misidentifying the problem. The right way to think about the feasibility worry is as essentially involving multiple agents, and how expected noncompliance by one agent may refute a normative claim addressed at another. Thus understood, feasibility problems may very well refute a theory in political philosophy. In this paper I develop this understanding of the feasibility worry, tie it to more general discussions in normative ethics, and in political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper responds to a recently popular objection to non-naturalist, robust moral realism. The objection is that moral realism is morally objectionable, because realists are committed to taking evidence about the distribution of non-natural properties to be relevant to their first-order moral commitments. I argue that such objections fail. The moral realist is indeed committed to conditionals such as “If there are no non-natural properties, then no action is wrong.” But the realist is not committed to using this conditional in (...) a modus-ponens inference upon coming to believe its antecedent. Placing the discussion in a wider epistemological discussion—here, that of “junk-knowledge”, and of how background knowledge determines the relevance of purported evidence—shows that this objection does not exert a price from the realist. (shrink)

This is a contribution to the symposium on Tim Scanlon’s Being Realistic about Reasons. We have two aims here: First, we ask for more details about Scanlon’s meta-metaphysical view, showing problems with salient clarifications. And second, we raise independent objections to the view – to its explanatory productivity, its distinctness, and the argumentative support it enjoys.

Political philosophy should focus not on uplifting ideals, but rather, so I argue, on minimizing serious suffering. This is so not because other things do not ultimately matter (they do), but rather because in the political context, the stakes in terms of suffering are usually extremely high, so that any other considerations are almost always outweighed. Put in moderately deontological terms: the high stakes carry most political decisions across the thresholds of the relevant deontological constraints. While the argument is substantive (...) rather than exegetical, I engage in detail Judith Shklar's “Liberalism of Fear”. I share with Shklar her pessimistic starting point, but I also show how a focus on suffering (rather than cruelty and fear) is what plausibly follows from such a starting point. I then pursue the implications of this difference—they are theoretically profound, but perhaps less significant practically. (shrink)

Is there a difference in moral blameworthiness between a murderer and an attempted murderer? Should there be a legal difference between them? These questions are particular instances of the question of moral luck and legal luck (respectively). In this paper, I survey and explain the main argumentative moves within the general philosophical discussion of moral luck. I then discuss legal luck, and the different ways in which this discussion may be related to that of moral luck.

What you ought to do is sensitive to circumstances that are not under your control, or to luck. So plain luck is often morally significant. Still, some of us think that there's no moral luck - that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are not sensitive to luck. What explains this asymmetry between the luck-sensitivity of ought-judgments and the luck-insensitivity of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness judgments? I suggest an explanation, relying on the analogy to rational luck. I argue that some rational assessments - like (...) how well one plays the hand one's dealt - are luck-insensitive; that we have reason to believe some moral evaluations are analogous to such assessments; and that blameworthiness and praiseworthiness judgments are precisely those luck-insensitive moral evaluations. I also draw an implication regarding agent-regret. (shrink)

Some of the recent philosophical literature on moral luck attempts to make headway in the moral-luck debate by employing the resources of empirical psychology, in effect arguing that some of the intuitive judgments relevant to the moral-luck debate are best explained - and so presumably explained away - as the output of well-documented cognitive biases. We argue that such attempts are empirically problematic, and furthermore that even if they were not, it is still not at all clear what philosophical significance (...) they would have. (shrink)

You may think that you're a moral relativist or subjectivist - many people today seem to. But I don't think you are. In fact, when we start doing metaethics - when we start, that is, thinking philosophically about our moral discourse and practice - thoughts about morality's objectivity become almost irresistible. Now, as is always the case in philosophy, that some thoughts seem irresistible is only the starting point for the discussion, and under argumentative pressure we may need to revise (...) our relevant beliefs. Still, it's important to get the starting points right. So it's important to understand the deep ways in which rejecting morality's objectivity are unappealing. (shrink)