I begin by distinguishing two general approaches to metaethics and ontology. One in effect puts our experience as engaged ethical agents on hold while independent metaphysical and epistemological inquiries, operating by their own lights, deliver metaethical verdicts on acceptable interpretations of our ethical lives; the other instead keeps engaged ethical experience in focus and allows our reflective interpretation of it to shape our metaphysical and epistemological views, including our ontology. While the former approach often leads to deflationary views, the latter (...) may lead us to enrich our metaethical picture as needed to capture robust objectivity and categorical normative authority for ethics. Assuming, as I have argued elsewhere, that this requires positing irreducibly evaluative or normative properties and facts, the question I take up here is what ontological implications this has. I argue against quietist non-naturalist views, which maintain that positing such properties and facts either has no ontological implications or has only domain-specific ontological implications that likewise imply nothing about what the world contains. Against these views, I advocate a worldly, dual-aspect view, locating irreducibly evaluative or normative properties as features of relevant worldly things. But while I have previously defended this view as a form of non-naturalism, I here explore the possibility of instead seeing it as a new, more expansive form of naturalism—what might be called “Non-Scientistic Naturalism”—inspired by parallel attempts in the philosophy of mind to accommodate irreducibly phenomenal properties within a more expansive physicalism. (shrink)

When shared decision making breaks down and parents and medical providers have developed entrenched and conflicting views, ethical frameworks are needed to find a way forward. This article reviews the evolution of thought about the best interest standard and then discusses the advantages of the harm principle (HP) and the zone of parental discretion (ZPD). Applying these frameworks to parental refusals in situations of complexity and uncertainty presents challenges that necessitate concrete substeps to analyze the big picture and identify key (...) questions. I outline and defend a new decision-making tool that includes three parts: identifying the nature of the disagreement, checklists for key elements of the HP and ZPD, and a “think list” of specific questions designed to enhance use of the HP and ZPD in clinical decision making. These tools together will assist those embroiled in complex disagreements to disentangle the issues to find a path to resolution. (shrink)

Despite widespread agreement that we have moral responsibilities to future generations, many are reluctant to frame the issues in terms of justice and rights.There are indeed philosophical challenges here, particularly concerning nonoverlapping generations. They can, however, be met. For example, talk of justiceand rights for future generations in connection with climate change is both appropriate and important, although it requires revising some common theoreticalassumptions about the nature of justice and rights. We can, in fact, be bound by the rights of (...) future people, despite the “non-identity problem,” and the force of these rights cannot be diluted by “discounting” future costs. Moreover, a rights-based approach provides an effective answer to political arguments against taking mandatory measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions when these are unpopular with a democratic populace. (shrink)

BackgroundWhen conducting research with Indigenous populations consent should be sought from both individual participants and the local community. We aimed to search and summarise the literature about methods for seeking consent for research with Indigenous populations.MethodsA systematic literature search was conducted for articles that describe or evaluate the process of seeking informed consent for research with Indigenous participants. Guidelines for ethical research and for seeking consent with Indigenous people are also included in our review.ResultsOf 1447 articles found 1391 were excluded (...) ; 56 were relevant and included. Articles were categorised into original research that evaluated the consent process or publications detailing the process of seeking consent and guidelines for ethical research. Guidelines were categorised into international ; national and state/regional/local guidelines. In five studies based in Australia, Canada and The United States of America the consent process with Indigenous people was objectively evaluated. In 13 other studies interpreters, voice recording, videos, pictures, flipcharts and “plain language” forms were used to assist in seeking consent but these processes were not evaluated. Some Indigenous organisations provide examples of community-designed resources for seeking consent and describe methods of community engagement, but none are evaluated. International, national and local ethical guidelines stress the importance of upholding Indigenous values but fail to specify methods for engaging communities or obtaining individual consent. In the ‘Grey literature’ concerns about the consent process are identified but no solutions are offered.ConclusionConsultation with Indigenous communities is needed to determine how consent should be sought from the community and the individual, and how to evaluate this process. (shrink)

Ayahuasca is a psychoactive beverage that is mostly used in ritualized settings (Santo Daime rituals, neo-shamanic rituals, and even do-it-yourself-rituals). It is a common practice in the investigated socio-cultural field to call these settings “healing rituals.” For this study, 15 people who underwent ayahuasca (self-)therapy for a particular disease like chronic pain, cancer, asthma, depression, alcohol abuse, or Hepatitis C were interviewed twice about their subjective concepts and beliefs on ayahuasca and healing. Qualitative data analysis revealed a variety of motivational (...) patterns, subjective effects, and user types. Most participants were convinced that ayahuasca had influenced their illness positively or improved their coping with their illness. More importantly, it had enhanced their well being in general. As a result, we concluded that the effects of ayahuasca should not be reduced to a pharmacological model. The substance should be conceptualized as a psychological catalyst that unfolds within different fields of sociocultural ideas. (shrink)

What implications, if any, does evolutionary biology have for metaethics? Many believe that our evolutionary background supports a deflationary metaethics, providing a basis at least for debunking ethical realism. Some arguments for this conclusion appeal to claims about the etiology of the mental capacities we employ in ethical judgment, while others appeal to the etiology of the content of our moral beliefs. In both cases the debunkers’ claim is that the causal roles played by evolutionary factors raise deep epistemic problems (...) for realism: if ethical truths are objective or independent of our evaluative attitudes, as realists maintain, then we lose our justification for our ethical beliefs once we become aware of the evolutionary shaping of our ethical capacities or beliefs, which would not have disposed us reliably to track independent ethical truths; realism, they claim, thus saddles us with ethical skepticism. I distinguish and spell out various evolutionary debunking arguments along these lines and argue that they all fail: the capacity etiology argument fails to raise any special or serious problem for realism, and the content etiology arguments all rely on strong explanatory claims about our moral beliefs that are simply not supported by the science unless it is supplemented by philosophical claims that just beg the question against realism from the start. While the various debunking arguments do bring out some interesting commitments of ethical realism, and even raise some good challenges as realists develop positive moral epistemologies, they fall far short of their debunking ambitions. (shrink)

This work is an examination of teleological attributions i.e. ascriptions of proper functions and natural ends) to the features and behavior of living things with a view to understanding their application to human life.

This article examines India’s response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country’s Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world’s largest alternative agriculture movements: natural farming. This puts farmer expertise at the centre of soil fertility and attends (...) to the wider ecological health of soils. Despite emerging as a mode of resistance to dominant agricultural systems, natural farming is now being delivered in increasingly bureaucratic ways by India’s state governments. This article offers Himachal Pradesh as a case study in how the soil is governed, drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with scientists, agricultural officers, non-governmental organisation leaders, and activists. Rather than assess approaches to soil health according to their ecological bottom line, we examine the differing forms of knowledge, expertise and ‘truth’ in the SHC and Natural Farming approaches. Our analysis reveals discontinuities in how farmers are imagined, as well as continuities in how quasi-spiritual language combines in a bionationalist project, positing assumptions about the correct arrangement of life in nationalist terms. We point to a shift toward hybrid and pick-and-mix approaches to soil health, as farmers and their organisers are increasingly invested with the capacities to combine multiple options. We see a fracturing of expertise and the opening up of epistemic pluralism in responses to the soil fertility crisis. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of whether chimpanzees possess at least a primitive sense of normativity: i.e., some ability to internalize and enforce social norms—rules governing appropriate and inappropriate behaviour—within their social groups, and to make evaluations of others’ behaviour in light of such norms. A number of scientists and philosophers have argued that such a sense of normativity does exist in chimpanzees and in several other non-human primate and mammalian species. However, the dominant view in the scientific and philosophical (...) literature is that psychological capacities for social norms evolved uniquely in the human lineage, after our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos. After reviewing some of the existing evidence for normative capacity in chimpanzees, I defend the thesis of chimpanzee normativity against three key theoretical objections that have been presented in the literature, each of which have played a part in motivating the dominant sceptical position. I argue that, while we still have much to learn about the nature and extent of the normative capacities of other animals, there is strong prima facie evidence for social norms and normative evaluation in chimpanzees and the main theoretical objections to chimpanzee normativity are not at all compelling. (shrink)

Following recent arguments that cultural practices in wild animal populations have important conservation implications, we argue that recognizing captive animals as cultural has important welfare implications. Having a culture is of deep importance for cultural animals, wherever they live. Without understanding the cultural capacities of captive animals, we will be left with a deeply impoverished view of what they need to flourish. Best practices for welfare should therefore require concern for animals’ cultural needs, but the relationship between culture and welfare (...) is also extremely complex, requiring us to rethink standard assumptions about what constitutes and contributes to welfare. (shrink)

Morgan’s Canon is a very widely endorsed methodological principle in animal psychology, believed to be vital for a rigorous, scientific approach to the study of animal cognition. In contrast I argue that Morgan’s Canon is unjustified, pernicious and unnecessary. I identify two main versions of the Canon and show that they both suffer from very serious problems. I then suggest an alternative methodological principle that captures all of the genuine methodological benefits that Morgan’s Canon can bring but suffers from none (...) of its problems. (shrink)

Andreas Mogensen has recently argued that the current debate over evolutionary debunking in ethics is mired in confusion due to a simple fallacy committed by debunkers and uncritically taken on board by their opponents. I argue that no party to this debate is involved in the type of confusion and fallacy Mogensen has in mind, which he himself notes would be an absurd and outlandish mistake for anyone to make in other domains. Debunkers do plausibly commit an error in their (...) explanatory claims about our moral beliefs, and it is related to an issue Mogensen discusses, but it is not the confusion and fallacy he identifies. (shrink)

The sexual assault of persons with mental disabilities occurs at alarmingly high rates worldwide. These assaults are a form of gender-based violence intersecting with discrimination based on disability. Our research on the treatment of such cases in the Canadian criminal justice system demonstrates the systemic barriers these victims face at the level of both substantive legal doctrine and trial procedure. Relying on feminist legal theory and disability theory, we argue in this paper that abuses of trust and power underlie most (...) sexual assaults of women with mental disabilities. We argue that existing Criminal Code provisions in Canada are inadequate to address this type of exploitation because courts have consistently failed to recognize that such abuses of power and trust are fundamentally inconsistent with any notion of voluntary consent. (shrink)

Any worlds semantics for intentionality has to provide a plenitudinous theory of impossibility: For any impossible proposition, it should provide a world where it is true. Hence, also any semantics for impossibility statements that extends Lewis’s concretism about possible worlds should be plenitudinous. However, several such proposals for impossibilist semantics fail to accommodate two kinds of impossibility that, albeit not unheard of, have been largely neglected in the literature on impossible worlds, but that are bound to arise in the Lewisian (...) context. The proposals discussed here stop short of plenitude because they adhere to what Lewis occasionally referred to as ‘ontological truth’, as they lack the semantic ability to misrepresent ontological facts. The paper develops a framework for systematic misrepresentations on the basis of Mares’s situation-based account of impossible ‘worlds’, and which confines ‘ontological truth’ to possibility. It thus illustrates how a plenitude of impossibilities can be achieved. (shrink)

Social interactions typically involve movements of the body that become synchronized over time and both intentional and spontaneous interactional synchrony have been found to be an essential part of successful human interaction. However, our understanding of the importance of temporal dimensions of social motor synchrony in social dysfunction is limited. Here, we used a pendulum coordination paradigm to assess dynamic, process-oriented measures of social motor synchrony in adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Our data indicate that adolescents with (...) ASD demonstrate less synchronization in both spontaneous and intentional interpersonal coordination. Coupled oscillator modeling suggests that ASD participants assembled a synchronization dynamic with a weaker coupling strength, which corresponds to a lower sensitivity and decreased attention to the movements of the other person, but do not demonstrate evidence of a delay in information transmission. The implication of these findings for isolating an ASD-specific social synchronization deficit that could serve as an objective, bio-behavioral marker is discussed. (shrink)

A wealth of literature and best practices on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) document how it can be implemented in projects. However, each project is too specific to simply replicate existing patterns. Especially in early projects with a high degree of uncertainty, where indicators and measures cannot be applied, the so-called provenance assessment as a methodological change of perspective makes it possible to assess the procedural quality of research by means of narratives. A clear picture of the challenges for European (...) bio-economy projects is sought by mapping the broader debate on "RRI in practice" in the context of biotechnology. The SUSPHIRE project is used as a case study to show how project-specific narratives integrate and signify RRI. By unpacking various concepts of "responsibility" that are already present in the project narrative at an early stage, I will show how this assessment differs significantly from other attempts to "do RRI". It is precisely in the absence of other criteria that the assessment of provenance can bring to the fore the specific form(s) of responsibility inherent in the development of projects. (shrink)

This article examines the Canadian case, focusing on the ways in which the political rationalities that have informed the Canadian variants of post-war social liberalism and neoliberalism have opened and then closed spaces for the articulation and institutionalization of gender-based equality claims-making. The article recounts how the Canadian welfare state underwrote a unique gender equality infrastructure inside the state and a thick field of gender organizations in civil society and later how this potent political and symbolic node of social liberalism (...) became a critical field of contestation for those promoting neoliberal political rationalities. The article describes a protracted war of position in which the gendered politics and identities of the 20th century have been displaced and marginalized, but not fully consumed by neoliberal idioms, representations and policy interventions. (shrink)

A remarkable surge in efforts to assess the quality of life of patients has occurred in recent years in medical research. Philosophical discussions of these developments have focused, on the one hand, on epistemological reservations about the plausibility of measuring quality of life and, on the other hand, on moral and ethical qualms about the meaning of life conveyed in such assessments. Whilst providing an important note of caution, such critiques fail to recognise two basic principles of quality of life (...) in medical research. Firstly it is intended to provide understanding about groups and categories of patients rather than individuals. Secondly the purpose of such research is to produce generalisations about the relative costs and benefits of specific health care interventions rather than absolute judgements regarding the quality of life of patients per se. Selecting a good quality of life measure for a clinical trial requires balancing criteria such as validity with practical feasibility. Such measures will play an increasingly central role in providing research evidence to improve health care. (shrink)

This paper seeks to clarify and link Levinas’s understanding of who we are to both his metaphysics of conversation and his unique understanding of justice, suggesting that Levinas’s markedly religious understanding of the subject provides an important clue as to what constitutes meaningful dialogue, and what the work of philosophy – grounded in meaningful dialogue – ought to entail. Based on Levinas’s account, in addition to searching for order and clarity (making transcendence immanent), the task of philosophy is to safeguard (...) thinking from the delusion that truth has been discovered once and for all. That is, to break up proposed identifications of truth, to reject ideology – to refuse to take order and clarity for granted, even at the risk of uncertainty, as this uncertainty is what allows for the possibility of an existential shift, a new way of understanding things, a new mode of being. This inevitably involves welcoming, in hospitality, the death that necessarily accompanies metanoia. (shrink)

The mindshaping hypothesis proposes a “de-intellectualized” explanation for human unique cooperation. In contrast to standard mindreading accounts, which emphasize the evolution of sophisticated reasoning about others’ propositional attitudes to explain how our ancestors became hyper cooperators, the hypothesis holds that sophisticated mindreading was a late-arriving product of our ancestors becoming better cooperators via the evolution of mechanisms that shape and regulate the minds of members of human groups to be suited to cooperation. Comparative research with nonhumans, especially our closest living (...) relatives, the great apes, is of utmost importance for evaluating the mindshaping hypothesis—for instance, to what extent can apes maintain relatively complex forms of culture and cooperation without reasoning about propositional attitudes? The concept of mindshaping also opens up new questions in comparative cognition that are worth exploring in their own right, such as whether apes regulate each other’s behavior via social norms. This chapter assesses what we currently do and do not know about the nature and extent of various mindshaping mechanisms in nonhuman great apes, focusing on culture and social learning, pedagogy, and social norms. (shrink)

There is perhaps no more widely shared conviction in contemporary metaethics, even among those who hold otherwise divergent views, than that practical normativity must be capable of being naturalized (i.e., captured fully within a metaphysically naturalist worldview). My aim is to illuminate the central reasons for skepticism about this. While certain naturalizing projects are plausible for very limited purposes, it is unlikely that any can provide everything we might reasonably want from an account of goodness and badness, rightness and wrongness, (...) and unqualified reasons for acting—at least if we are unwilling to accept certain deflationary or bullet-biting moves. Some naturalizing views can be shown to fail outright to capture the relevant normative facts or properties, while others have more promise but can also be seen to have certain limitations and costs, failing to capture elements that some of us take to be important to an adequate theory of practical normativity. There are, of course, far more naturalizing moves than can be considered here, so the aim is not to establish the truth of nonnaturalism through a process of elimination. But I hope to say enough to bring out the central worries about naturalizing projects and to pose some challenges that apply more widely, with the aim of showing that ethical nonnaturalism remains an attractive and well-motivated option at least for those of us who reject both nihilism and various forms of ethical deflation. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of integrated reporting on the integration of environmental, social, and governance issues into the business model and the related economic and ESG performance changes. To investigate these internal and external transformational effects of IR, important differences between IR and alternative ESG reporting strategies are worked out. Using three matched samples of companies from around the world for the sample period 2002–2011, IR companies are matched with companies applying no ESG reporting, stand-alone ESG reporting, or ESG (...) reporting in the annual report. The results suggest that IR is a superior mechanism only for the integration of ESG issues into the core business model when comparing IR with the ESG reporting strategies of no ESG reporting and ESG reporting in annual reports. In comparison with, stand-alone ESG reporting, the results indicate that IR is negatively associated with the ESG integration level and with the economic and ESG performance. Moreover, this negative impact is lower for companies that have already implemented ESG management tools prior to the initiation of IR and is stronger for companies residing in countries with legal requirements for the disclosure of ESG information. A separate change analysis reveals that companies do not benefit from a switch from stand-alone ESG reporting to IR. Thus, this paper provides empirical evidence that contradicts the general notion of IR as a superior reporting mechanism, as the benefits of IR are driven by several factors. (shrink)

Existing approaches to the relation of law and society have for a long time seen law as either autonomous or grounded in society. Drawing on untapped resources in social theory, Fitzpatrick finds law pivotally placed in and beyond modernity. Being itself of the modern, law takes impetus and identity from modern society and, through incorporating 'pre-modern' elements of savagery and the sacred, it comes to constitute that very society. When placing law in such a crucial position for modernity, (...) class='Hi'>Fitzpatrick ranges widely from the colonizations of the Americas, through the thought of the European Enlightenment, and engages finally with contemporary arrogations of the 'global'. By extending his previous work on the origins of modernity, this book makes a significant contribution to continuing developments in law and society, legal philosophy, and jurisprudence. (shrink)

The Public Relations Society of America's Member Code of Ethics 2000 assumes professional standing for PRSA members, emphasizes public relations' advocacy role, and stresses education rather than enforcement as key to improving industry standards. Code development involved more than 2 years of research and writing and the counsel of outside ethics experts. In this article I review the code development process, providing an insider's perspective on the ethics initiative.

Empirical studies of the social lives of non-human primates, cetaceans, and other social animals have prompted scientists and philosophers to debate the question of whether morality and moral cognition exists in non-human animals. Some researchers have argued that morality does exist in several animal species, others that these species may possess various evolutionary building blocks or precursors to morality, but not quite the genuine article, while some have argued that nothing remotely resembling morality can be found in any non-human species. (...) However, these different positions on animal morality generally appear to be motivated more by different conceptions of how the term “morality” is to be defined than by empirical disagreements about animal social behaviour and psychology. After delving deeper into the goals and methodologies of various of the protagonists, I argue that, despite appearances, there are actually two importantly distinct debates over animal morality going on, corresponding to two quite different ways of thinking about what it is to define “morality”, “moral cognition”, and associated notions. Several apparent skirmishes in the literature are thus cases of researchers simply talking past each other. I then focus on what I take to be the core debate over animal morality, which is concerned with understanding the nature and phylogenetic distribution of morality conceived as a psychological natural kind. I argue that this debate is in fact largely terminological and non-substantive. Finally, I reflect on how this core debate might best be re-framed. (shrink)

This paper examines whether and to what extent the overall business strategy influences the firm’s mismanagement of sustainability. Specifically, an empirical measure for the mismanagement of sustainability is developed by exploiting the newly available materiality guidelines for US firms to define industry-specific material sustainability issues. Using this measure, this paper shows that mismanagement of sustainability can represent unethical business behavior when firms intentionally perform better on immaterial issues than on material issues by diverting stakeholders’ attention from the firm’s low overall (...) sustainability performance. This paper assumes that the right business strategy can prevent such unethical actions. Based on Miles and Snow’s organizational theory, this paper distinguishes between Prospector and Defender business strategies. By employing multiple firm-level panel regressions, the findings suggest that Prospector-type firms are more likely to mismanage sustainability issues compared to Defender-type firms intentionally. The results give implications for researchers, regulators and standard setters, auditors, sustainability practitioners, and scholars. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas asked the essential philosophical question which continues to resound to the modern day: what constitutes a human being? This volume looks at Aquinas's views on bodily and spiritual identity through a lens of theological concerns, pagan and Arabic authoritative sources, and contemporary polemic with dualist heresy.

In the wake of the most recent financial crisis, corporations have been criticized as being self-interested and unmindful of their relationship to society. Indeed, the blame is sometimes placed on the corporate legal form, which can exacerbate the tension between duties to shareholders and interests of stakeholders. In comparison, the Benefit Corporation (BC) is a new legal business entity that is obligated to pursue public benefit in addition to the responsibility to return profits to shareholders. It is legally a for-profit, (...) socially obligated, corporate form of business, with all the traditional corporate characteristics combined with societal responsibilities. Considering the history and perception of shareholder primacy in United States law, it is argued that this new business structure is an ethical step toward empowering socially committed commercial entities. The contribution of this research is to provide a fundamental base of knowledge about the new legal form of business, the BC, upon which further study may rely. First, the legal history of the corporation is briefly reviewed in order to provide context to the relationship of the corporate form to society, including exploration of the premise that shareholder wealth maximization is its best and only purpose. Second, the BC is described in detail, and state statutes are compared. Third, the BC is placed within the context of corporate social responsibility. Finally, opportunities for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Reports of children participating in hunger strikes while detained in offshore detention centres raise interrelated ethical issues and recognizable challenges for the medical decision-makers at these sites. A composite case study, informed by reports in the public domain, is employed to explore the unique challenges of consent and decision-making in these circumstances and the perennial issues inherent in adolescents’ developing capacity and autonomy. We present an amalgamated case of a fourteen-year-old adolescent who refused to consent to medical reversal of her (...) hunger strike protest. The medical team became the final arbiter when her parents, who were also in detention, could not agree with each other even after mediation. The case explores the complexity of evaluating the adolescent’s capacity to provide informed consent while influenced by the opinions of co-detainees in this extreme setting. We argue that the parents and the child had compromised decisional capacity due to the effects of detention. The challenges to the medical team are recognized and discussed. The team members faced a difficult dilemma and considered the competing values of the multiple cultural and ethical factors. Each team member integrated his or her own roles, duties, and discipline-specific professional guidelines with the primary goal of mitigating potential harms. (shrink)

The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible therapeutics that Bernard Stiegler’s recent works have pointed to (The Automatic Society, 2016, The Neganthropocene, 2018 and Qu’appelle-t-on Panser, 2018). The therapeutic aspect of pharmacology takes place through processes that are neganthropic; therefore, which attempt to counteract the entropic nature of digital technologies where there is flattening out to the measurable and the calculable of Big Data. The most obvious examples of this (...) flattening out can be seen in relation to the use of natural language processing technologies for text interpretation and the use of text analytics alongside student analytics. However, the process of exosomatisation of knowledge takes place in forms of hypomnesic tertiary retentions or digital technologies. The loss of knowledge is inherent to these processes of exteriorisation, this loss of knowledge takes place through a process proletarianisation which Marx had pointed to in the Grundisse (1939). The therapeutic gesture is, therefore, an intrinsically educational one, where the loss of knowledge of the pharmacological nature of digital technologies is counteracted by other forms of knowledge construction that can be enabled by digital technologies. Hence, there is a profound educational gesture necessary to enable the re-harnessing of technology to enable the therapeutics. This paper will argue that the positive re-harnessing, the therapeutics, can take place through the development of new forms of neganthropic gestures which can be afforded by the development of specific forms of digital technologies. These also enable a contributive research process whereby the rationalisation of the production of knowledge within the university can be challenged by collaborative, interpretative processes of knowledge production. (shrink)

"In Applied Ethics and Social Problems Tony Fitzpatrick presents introductions to the three most influential moral philosophies: consequentialism, Kantianism ...

An increasingly common form of naturalism associated with the study of morality is what might be called “scientific naturalism,” which takes as its subject matter various empirical phenomena associated with talk of “morality” and aims to subject them to scientific inquiry, just like any other empirical phenomena. This is unproblematic when it comes to scientific investigations into the origins of the human capacity for normative guidance or moral emotions, or the neurophysiology associated with moral feeling and behavior, but things get (...) much more complicated when it comes to the project of explaining our moral beliefs. It is, of course, an empirical phenomenon that we hold the moral beliefs we do, so it may seem obvious that this too can be causally explained using scientific tools. But, while there is room for scientific inquiry into causal factors, such as evolutionary influences, that have plausibly helped to shape many moral beliefs to some degree, it is a mistake to assume that our moral beliefs across the board can best be explained through appeal exclusively to scientifically accessible causes. This scientific naturalist exclusivity assumption is in fact deeply problematic, overlooking (or prematurely dismissing) the possibility that at least many of our moral beliefs are best explained through our grasping of good reasons for them – considerations we correctly understand as justifying them, though this is not something that shows up in scientific causal explanations. It is easy to miss this point about the potential role of the appreciation of justification by the believing mind when considering moral judgments simply from the external perspective of an amoral anthropologist, but it becomes clear when taking up the internal perspective of the committed moral agent, as when thinking about why we ourselves believe that human trafficking is wrong. This matters because, while science is invoked by those who purport to provide “debunking explanations” of our moral beliefs across the board (showing them to result simply from causal factors insensitive to any objective moral facts), they are actually relying on the scientific naturalist exclusivity assumption, thus begging the question against their opponents, who hold that we have knowledge of objective morality as a result of grasping good reasons for it. I explore these complexities surrounding the explanation of our moral beliefs and argue that while the picture advocated by debunkers remains a possibility, it is certainly not established by science, and recent arguments purporting to debunk the idea of knowable, objective morality fail. (shrink)

The distinction between harm that is intended as a means or end, and harm that is merely a foreseen side-effect of one’s action, is widely cited as a significant factor in a variety of ethical contexts. Many use it, for example, to distinguish terrorist acts from certain acts of war that may have similar results as side-effects. Yet Bennett and others have argued that its application is so arbitrary that if it can be used to cast certain harmful actions in (...) a more favorable light, then it can equally be manipulated to do the same for any kind of harmful action. In response, some have tried to block such extensions of the intend/foresee distinction by rejecting its application in cases where the relation between the plainly intended means and the harm is “too close”. This move, however, has been attacked as vague and obscure, and Bennett has argued that all the plausible candidates for explicating the idea of excessive closeness ultimately fail. In this paper, I develop and defend an account of excessive closeness with the aim of rescuing the intend/foresee distinction from such charges of arbitrariness. The account is based on the distinction between merely causal and constitutive relations among states of affairs, and I show both how it escapes Bennett’s objections to other accounts and how it applies to a variety of cases. Finally, I also examine Quinn’s alternative move of shifting the focus of the intend/foresee distinction in an attempt to sidestep the issue of closeness, and argue that it is not ultimately successful. In fact, Quinn’s view has shortcomings that can be resolved only by returning to an appeal to some notion of closeness, underscoring the need for the sort of account I offer. (shrink)

For most of us, learning to communicate is as effortless as breathing, and like air, communication skills are elemental; integral to our human existence in this world. Our communicative competencies might be seen as a bridge, facilitating our relationship with the world we are immersed in. But what happens when a child has difficulty learning to communicate effectively? What happens when their most basic messages of hunger or thirst fail to be understood or they are unable to jointly share in (...) everyday experiences of curiosity, joy, frustration, or anger? In these situations, it is the role of the Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) to span the distance between a child and their family, a child and the world, building a route for life experiences and understandings to cross over. An SLP often begins with assessment and after a brief interaction, an SLP may come to a ‘naming’ such as delay or disorder. While the caring professional may intend this naming to be helpful in better understanding a child or facilitating access to valuable support, this naming may also place an immeasurable weight upon the child and their family. The act of naming is therefore an ethical concern. Through observation and interviews, this paper presentation explores SLP’s experiences of coming to a diagnosis through the human lens of phenomenological inquiry. It seeks to enhance thoughtful and conscientious practice by considering the ‘ethical experience of caring responsibility’ as applied to SLP (van Manen, 2016). (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry on the debate over simplicity/parsimony and Ockham's Razor in the philosophy of science.

Ethical realists hold that our ethical concepts, thoughts, and claims are in the business of representing ethical reality, by representing evaluative or normative properties and facts as aspects of reality, and that such representations are at least sometimes accurate. Non-naturalist realists add the further claim that ethical properties and facts are ultimately non-natural, though they are nonetheless worldly. My aim is threefold: to elucidate the sort of representation involved in ethical evaluation on realist views; to clarify what exactly is represented (...) and how non-naturalism comes into the picture for non-naturalists; and to defend worldly non-naturalism against some objections. The first question addressed is how we should model evaluation on any realist view, which should in turn guide the identification of which properties and facts are credibly regarded as ‘evaluative’ ones. Then the question is: what role might non-natural properties and facts play, and how are they related to what is represented in ethical evaluation? Once that is clear, we will be in a position to answer certain objections to non-naturalist realism from Jackson, Gibbard, Bedke, and Dreier. I argue that the objections all mischaracterize the role played by non-natural properties and facts on plausible versions of non-naturalist realism. (shrink)