Some say that concern for morality de dicto grants right actions moral worth. That is, they say that if you do the right thing because of your concern to do the right thing, your action has moral worth (and you are worthy of esteem for that action). Some say that concern for morality de re grants moral worth - that is, they say that if you do the right action for the reasons that make (...) it right (for example, because it protects wellbeing and respects autonomy) then your action has moral worth. Increasingly, some argue, and many seem to think, that both concern for morality de dicto and concern for morality de re grant right actions moral worth In this paper, I will argue that the last position is false. If de dicto concern grants moral worth, de re concern does not, and vice versa. The question turns out to be surprisingly tied to the question of whether moral ignorance excuses from blame. (shrink)

The concept of moral worth, of being creditworthy for doing the right thing, is often seen as essential feature of a moral theory. It forces us to provide a clear account of the relationship between moral motivation and moral action, raising important questions about the demands that morality makes of us. Work on moral worth has a long lineage, especially in Kantian scholarship. Recent years, however, have seen a more focused interest in the (...) nature of moral worth outside of the Kantian tradition. Indeed, part of this interest stems from a rejection of an orthodox Kantian understanding of what moral worth is. In this article, I chart prominent reasons for rejecting the orthodoxy, and distinguish between two rival camps that have emerged: Right Reasons Accounts and Rightness Accounts. I delineate some of the demands that these accounts must meet, and end by discussing a potential way forward that has emerged via hybrid views and goal‐based views that attempt to utilise the most promising features of each. (shrink)

It is commonly recognized that one can act rightly without being praiseworthy for doing so. Those who act rightly from ignoble motives, for instance, do not strike us as fitting targets of moral praise; their actions seem to lack moral worth. Though there is broad agreement that only certain kinds of motives confer moral worth on our actions, there is disagreement as to which ones are up to the task. Many theorists confine themselves to two (...) possibilities: praiseworthy agents are thought to be motivated by either the consideration that their actions are morally right, or the considerations that explain why their actions are morally right. Though there is an important element of truth in these proposals, each has limited explanatory purchase. In this paper, I develop a pluralist conception of moral worth that acknowledges both sorts of motives as grounds for moral praise. (shrink)

To have moral worth an action not only needs to conform to the correct normative theory ; it also needs to be motivated in the right way. I argue that morally worthy actions are motivated by the rightness of the action; they are motivated by an agent's concern for doing what's right and her knowledge that her action is morally right. Call this the Rightness Condition. On the Rightness Condition moral motivation involves both a conative and a (...) cognitive element—in particular, it involves moral knowledge. I argue that the Rightness Condition is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth. I also argue that the Rightness Condition gives us an attractive account of actions performed under imperfect epistemic circumstances: by agents who rely on moral testimony or by those who, like Huckleberry Finn, have false moral convictions. (shrink)

Morally supererogatory actions are traditionally conceived of as actions that are nonobligatory but distinctively morally worthy. Here I challenge the assumption that supererogatory actions are distinctively praiseworthy and offer an alternative definition of moral supererogation. This alternative definition complements, and is complemented by, a novel account of moral praiseworthiness, which I call the Two-Step view. My Two-Step view of moral worth, which I develop in some detail, accounts for currently underappreciated features of moral praiseworthiness.

Julia Markovits has recently argued for what she calls the ‘Coincident Reasons Thesis’: the thesis that one’s action is morally worthy if and only if one’s motivating reasons for acting mirror, in content and strength, the reasons that explain why the action ought, morally, to be performed. This thesis assumes that the structure of motivating reasons is sufficiently similar to the structure of normative reasons that the required coincidence in content and strength is a genuine possibility. But because motivating reasons (...) have only one dimension of strength, while normative reasons have both justifying and requiring strength, one’s motivating reasons can no more coincide with the normative reasons of relevance to one’s action than a line can coincide with a square, or a square with a cube. It is possible to amend the Coincident Reasons Thesis so that it concerns only one dimension of normative strength: for example, requiring strength. But such an amended thesis yields implausible verdicts. In particular it requires us either to deny the existence of supererogatory action, or—still less plausibly—to hold that such action has less moral worth than does doing the morally required minimum. (shrink)

I argue that a right action has moral worth if and only if it is done for the right reasons - that is, for its right-making features. The reasons the agent acts on have to be identical to the reasons for which the action is right. I argue that Kantians are wrong in thinking that a right action has moral worth iff it is done because the agent thinks it is right, giving examples of morally worthy (...) actions that are done by agents who think they are wrong (Huckleberry Finn) and right actions done "because they are right" that have no moral worth. I also discuss degrees of moral worth as well as blameworthiness. (shrink)

This paper explores the question of what makes an action morally worthy. I start with a popular theory of moral worth which roughly states that a right action is morally praiseworthy if and only if it is performed in response to the reasons which make the action right. While I think the account provides promising foundations for determining praiseworthiness, I argue that the view lacks the resources to adequately satisfy important desiderata associated with theories of moral (...) class='Hi'>worth. Firstly, the view does not adequately capture the degree to which an action has moral worth, and secondly, the view does not identify if right actions produced from overdetermined motives have moral worth. However, all is not lost; I also argue that the account can satisfy the desiderata when it attends to the agent’s counterfactual motives in addition to their actual motives. By considering counterfactual motives, we can measure the robustness of the actual praiseworthy motive, and attending to motivational robustness allows the new proposal to fully satisfy the two desiderata. At the end of this paper, I respond to some criticisms typically brought against a counterfactual view of moral worth. (shrink)

It’s one thing to do the right thing. It’s another to be creditable for doing the right thing. Being creditable for doing the right thing requires that one does the right thing out of a morally laudable motive and that there is a non-accidental fit between those two elements. This paper argues that the two main views of morally creditable action – the Right Making Features View and the Rightness Itself View – fail to capture that non-accidentality constraint: the first (...) because it morally credits agents who make heavy-duty moral mistakes; the second because it fails to generalise and is too conservative – a point which this paper gives renewed defence. The paper then goes on to defend and develop an alternative according to which moral worth is mediated by the agent’s knowing how to respond to the reasons of the type which make acting in that way right. It’s argued that this view avoids the problems for the alternatives, and it’s shown that in order for the view to avoid collapsing into a problematic form of Reliabilism we’ll have to think of states of knowing how as essentially successful in character. (shrink)

Some right acts have what philosophers call moral worth. A right act has moral worth if and only if its agent deserves credit for having acted rightly in this instance. And I argue that an agent deserves credit for having acted rightly if and only if her act issues from an appropriate set of concerns, where the appropriateness of these concerns is a function what her ultimate moral concerns should be. Two important upshots of the (...) resulting account of moral worth are that (1) an act can have moral worth even if it doesn’t manifest a concern for doing what’s right and that (2) an act can lack moral worth even if it is performed for the right reasons. (shrink)

The view that morally worthy actions must be motivated by moral knowledge faces counterexamples. This paper offers a counterexample in which Ava and Beth text a wise rabbi for answers to the same moral question, receive the same correct answer, and accordingly act rightly. Beth however receives her answer from a thief who stole the rabbi's phone and randomly chose the correct answer. Beth therefore is Gettierized and lacks moral knowledge that Ava has. But this doesn't seem (...) to diminish the moral worth of Beth's action. This is a counterexample to Paulina Sliwa and JJ Cunningham's accounts of moral worth, which require moral knowledge. (shrink)

According to some, when you do the right thing, your moral beliefs make no difference to your act’s moral worth. Huckleberry Finn believes he is doing something wrong in helping Jim escape slavery. Yet his act reflects well on him. Some conclude that acting rightly reflects just as well on you whether you believe you are doing something right, wrong, supererogatory, or neutral. I argue against this. Doing the right thing with certain moral beliefs can diminish (...) the moral worth of doing it. In such cases, you do the right thing in the wrong spirit. (shrink)

This essay concerns two forms of moral non-naturalism according to which general moral principles or laws enter into the grounding explanations of particular moral facts. According to bridge-law non-naturalism, the laws are themselves partial grounds of the moral facts; whereas according to grounding-law non-naturalism, the laws explain the grounding connections that obtain between particular natural facts and particular moral facts. I pose and develop an objection to BLNN concerning moral worth: as compared to (...) GLNN, BLNN has trouble accommodating the common intuition that actions performed out of motivation for rightness de dicto are, at least in paradigm cases, deficient in their moral worth as compared to those performed out of motivation for rightness de re. After presenting the moral worth objection to BLNN, I respond to a possible defense of the view and explain why GLNN is not itself imperiled by an analogous objection. I finally argue that in light of the moral worth objection, a purported analogy between the law and morality fails to give us any reason to prefer BLNN to GLNN. I conclude that non-naturalists who accept the existence of general and explanatory moral principles should adopt GLNN rather than BLNN. (shrink)

Someone acts in a morally worthy way when they deserve credit for doing the morally right thing. But when and why do agents deserve credit for the success involved in doing the right thing? It is tempting to seek an answer to that question by drawing an analogy with creditworthy success in other domains of human agency, especially in sports, arts, and crafts. Accordingly, some authors have recently argued that, just like creditworthy success in, say, chess, playing the piano, or (...) archery, creditworthy moral success is a matter of getting things right by way of manifesting a relevant skill. My main aim in this paper is to bring out an important structural difference between moral creditworthiness and creditworthiness in sports, arts, and craft, undermining attempts to use examples of the latter as a model for understanding the former. As an alternative, I propose an account of morally creditworthy action, according to which such action is a matter of manifesting virtue, not skill—a claim that's based on an important, but underappreciated, difference between the sorts of excellences constituting virtues and skills. The paper thus contributes to a more nuanced picture of normative achievements across different domains of human agency, highlighting largely overlooked structural dissimilarities among them. (shrink)

According to Arpaly and to Markovits, actions have moral worth iff they are done for the reasons that make them right. Can this view have implications for normative ethics? I argue that it has such implications, as you can start from truths about the moral worth of actions to truths about the reasons that make them right. What makes actions right is the question of normative ethics. I argue from the moral worth view to (...) a pluralistic view of ethics - not Kantianism or utilitarianism but an account according to which there are at least two important moral factors, one of which is wellbeing. Part of this argument involves objecting to Kant's view of the moral worth of actions performed out of altruism and not universalizability. I also specify various implications for the relationship between the true normative theory and common sense morality. (shrink)

ABSTRACTKantian conceptions of moral worth are thought to enjoy an advantage over their rivals in virtue of accommodating two plausible intuitions—that the praiseworthiness of an action is never ac...

Ford, Norman The moral worth and dignity of the unborn child varies according to peoples' fundamental religious and personal beliefs on what constitutes a human person. The antithetical views on the moral value of the unborn child are due to different philosophies, which admits the existence and meaningfulness of nonmaterial reality and the other that practically denies both.

This paper defends an account of moral worth. Moral worth is a status that some, but not all, morally right actions have. Unlike with merely right actions, when an agent performs a morally worthy action, she is necessarily creditworthy for doing the right thing. First, I argue that two dominant views of moral worth have been unable to fully capture this necessary connection. On one view, an action is morally worthy if and only if (...) its agent is motivated by the features of the action that make it right. On the other, an action is morally worthy if and only if its agent is motivated by the action’s rightness itself. Neither of these views captures the connection between moral worth and creditworthiness, because each view leaves room for cases of accidentally doing the right thing. Next, I develop a new account, which I call the Guise of Moral Reasons Account. On my account, morally worthy actions are right actions that are motivated by moral reasons as such. This account rules out cases of accidentally doing the right thing, thus capturing the necessary connection between moral worth and creditworthiness for doing the right thing. (shrink)

Algumas passagens bastante controversas dos Fundamentos da Metafísica dos Costumes sáo comumente interpretados como se Kant propusesse a tese de que as ações náo podem ter qualquer valor moral quando estiverem acompanhadas de inclinações ( Neigungen ) favoráveis a tais ações. O que resulta dessa interpretaçáo é uma retrato de Kant como um severo defensor de uma moralidade em que sentimentos de compaixáo e assemelhados nada acrescentam ao valor moral de uma açáo, e em vez disso, o solapam. (...) Neste artigo, sustento que tal interpretaçáo náo é apoiada pela evidência textual. Além disso, discuto tentativas feitas por diversos autores no sentido de mostrar que as inclinações favoráveis sáo na verdade compatíveis com a argumentaçáo de Kant nos Fundamentos e defendo uma versáo em particular da tese da compatibilidade. (shrink)

An act that accords with duty has moral worth if and only if the agent’s reason for performing it is the same as what would have motivated a perfectly virtuous agent to perform it. On one of the two leading accounts of moral worth, an act that accords with duty has moral worth if and only if the agent’s reason for performing it is the fact that it’s obligatory. On the other, an act that (...) accords with duty has moral worth if and only if the agent’s reason for performing it is the fact that it has that feature of obligatory acts that makes them obligatory. I argue that both views are incorrect, providing counterexamples to each. I then argue that, on the correct account, an act can have moral worth only if its agent is motivated out of a fundamental concern for the things that ultimately matter. (shrink)

While it is tempting to suppose that an act has moral worth just when and because it is motivated by sufficient moral reasons, philosophers have, largely, come to doubt this analysis. Doubt is rooted in two claims. The first is that some facts can motivate a given act in multiple ways, not all of which are consistent with moral worth. The second is the orthodox view that normative reasons are facts. I defend the tempting analysis (...) by proposing and defending a heterodox account of both normative and motivating reasons that is inspired by Donald Davidson’s primary reasons. We should adopt the heterodox view, I argue, because it addresses an overlooked but fatal defect in the orthodox conception of reasons, of which challenges to the tempting analysis are a special case. (shrink)

Sometimes, agents do the right thing for the right reason. What’s the normative significance of this phenomenon? According to proponents of the special status view, when an agent acts for the right reason, her actions enjoy a special normative status, namely, worthiness. Proponents of this view claim that self-effacing forms of consequentialism cannot say this plausible thing, and, worse, are blocked from having a perspicuous view of matters by the self-effacing nature of their consequentialism. In this paper, I argue that (...) this claim is based on an illicit assumption. I show that whatever version of the special status view proponents of that view prefer, self-effacing consequentialists can adopt a version of it. Moreover, I show that proponents of extant versions of the special status view have reason to prefer the specific version of that view I articulate on behalf of self-effacing consequentialists. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Two Views of Morality Two Possible Moral Worlds The Reality of the Issue Needs, Moral Requirements, and Moral Worth: the Basic Logic.

_Kant, Duty and Moral Worth _is a fascinating and original examination of Kant's account of moral worth. The complex debate at the heart of Kant's philosophy is over whether Kant said moral actions have worth only if they are carried out from duty, or whether actions carried out from mixed motives can be good. Philip Stratton-Lake offers a unique account of acting from duty, which utilizes the distinction between primary and secondary motives. He maintains (...) that the moral law should not be understood as a normative moral reason but as playing a transcendental role. Thus a Kantian account of moral worth is one where the virtuous agent may be responsive to concrete particular considerations, whilst preserving an essential role for universal moral principles. _Kant, Duty and Moral Worth _is a lucid examination of Kant's moral thought that will appeal to Kant scholars and anyone interested in moral theory. (shrink)

Consider: You can save either a human or a normal adult dog from a burning building (with no risk to yourself and at little cost), but not both. However, the human is a human with a severe intellectually disability (or, as we shall say, a “SID”). -/- Which one should you save? There is disagreement in the literature about which this issue. Two opposing camps exist, which we call “the intrinsic property camp ” and “the special relations camp.” Those in (...) the intrinsic property camp think that in most cases it is equally permissible to save either the dog or the human, and that in fact in some cases you should save the dog and not the human. Those in the special relations camp, by contrast, maintain that you should always save the human and not the dog. There is disagreement between these two camps about the answer to this question because there is disagreement between them about the moral significance of SIDs. Those in the intrinsic property camp believe that the moral value of a human with a SID is equal to (and in some cases less than) the moral value of a nonhuman animal such as a dog. (They thus believe that the value of a human with a SID is strictly less than the value of a normal adult human.) Those in the special relations camp believe that the value of a human with a SID is strictly higher than the value of a nonhuman animal. (But they are not thereby committed to, but may nonetheless believe, that a human with a SID has equal moral value to a normal adult human.) The questions we address in this chapter include: 1. Why do those in each camp hold the view that they do? 2. Which camp is right? (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of making sense of Kant’s notion of moral worth. Kant’s identification in GMM1 I of the good will as the unconditional good leads to understanding the moral worth of human agency in ways which, some critics claim, is at odds with our moral intuitions. By first focusing upon how Kant singles out action out of duty as characteristic of the good will, we shall show that a covert assumption about our (...) nature potentially weakens the force of Kant’s argument. This paper claims that this assumption is not needed, and proposes an interpretation of Kant’s notion of moral worth that dispenses with it. In so doing, the interpretative strategy draws upon Kant’s solution to the Third Antinomy, and therefore on Transcendental Idealism. An analysis of the moral worth of the action of a benevolent agent who heeds the requirements of duty will show how inclinations contribute to morally worthy action, while the action’s moral worth lies in its being motivated by duty. A further analysis of the issue of moral worth in the light of recent scholarship introduces a distinction between the moral worth of the action and of the agent. This provides the material to address an important standard criticism of Kantian ethics. The paper concludes by suggesting that the proposed interpretation is required to make proper sense of Kant’s indirect duty to develop compassionate inclinations. (shrink)

Samuel Kerstein argues that an asymmetry between moral worth and maxims prevents Kant from accepting a category of acts that are impermissible, but have moral worth. Kerstein contends that an act performed from the motive of duty should be considered as a candidate for moral worth, even if the action's maxim turns out to be impermissible, since moral worth depends on the correct moral motivation of an act, rather than on the (...) moral lightness of an act. I argue that Kant cannot consistently maintain that there are morally forbidden, though good, acts since one of the conditions of acting from the moral law should be that one has a true belief about what the moral law requires. My project, then, rejects the possibility of morally impermissible, worthy acts for Kant, and qualifies the conditions for moral worth Kerstein gives with an epistemological constraint on moral worth. (shrink)

Thomas Hill, a leading figure in the recent development of Kantian moral philosophy, presents a set of essays exploring the implications of basic Kantian ideas for practical issues. The first part of the book provides background in central themes in Kant's ethics; the second part discusses questions regarding human welfare; the third focuses on moral worth-the nature and grounds of moral assessment of persons as deserving esteem or blame. Hill shows moral, political, and social philosophers (...) just how valuable moral theory can be in addressing practical matters. (shrink)

People often act from both motives that are good and motives that are not. How should we assess the moral worth or value of these actions from mixed motives? Having neglected these actions, the recent literature leaves us with no obvious answer. In this paper, I develop an answer. A mixed action, I argue, can be morally worthy even if it is done neither purely from good motives nor partly from good motives that suffice in some relevant sense (...) to prompt it. Whether the action is morally worthy, and if so, to what degree it is, I argue, should be settled by weighing the total goodness of its motives against the total badness of its motives. And two properties of each motive, its intentional object and its motivational strength, together determine the degree of goodness or badness that it contributes to the action’s net worth. (shrink)

I consider three questions concerning the relation of the good will to the moral worth of actions. (1) Does a good will consist simply in acting from the motive of duty? (2) Does acting from the motive of duty presuppose that one has a good will? (3) Does the fact that one has a good wilI entail that all of one’s duty-fulfilling actions have moral worth, even if they are not (directly) motivated by duty? I argue (...) that while only persons with a good will are capable of acting from the motive of duty, it does not follow either that a good will consists in acting from duty or that if one has a good will, all of one’s dutiful actions will be motivated by duty. Whereas the good will is constituted by the agent’s highest-order maxim (the moral law itself), moral worth is a function of the agent’s first-order maxims. (shrink)

The first section of the Groundwork begins “It is impossible to imagine anything at all in the world, or even beyond it, that can be called good without qualification— except a good will.”1 Kant’s explanation and defense of this claim is followed by an explanation and defense of another related claim, that only actions performed out of duty have moral worth. He explains that actions performed out of duty are those done from respect for the moral law, (...) and then culminates the first section with a formulation of that law, “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law”. Kant dubs this fundamental principle of morality “the Categorical Imperative”. (shrink)

This research explores the experiences of UK NHS healthcare professionals working with asylum applicants housed in contingency accommodation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a critical understanding of the concept of moral resilience as a theoretical framework, we explore how the difficult circumstances in which they worked were navigated, and the extent to which moral suffering led to moral transformation. Ten staff from a general practice participated in semistructured interviews. Encountering the harms endured by people seeking asylum prior (...) to arrival in the UK and through the UK’s ‘Hostile Environment’ caused healthcare staff moral suffering. They responded to this in several ways, including: (1) feeling grateful for their own fortunes; (2) defining the limitations of their professional obligations; (3) focusing on the rewards of work and (4) going above and beyond usual care. Although moral resilience is reflected in much of the data, some participants described how the work caused ideological transformations and motivated challenges to systems of oppression. We show how current moral resilience theory fails to capture these transformative political and social responses, warning of how, instead, it might encourage healthcare staff to maintain the status quo. We caution against the widespread endorsement of current formulations of moral resilience in contemporary social and political climates, where the hostile and austere systems causing suffering are the result of ideological political decisions. Future work should instead focus on enabling working conditions to support, and developing theory to capture, collective resistance. (shrink)

That abortion is the unjust killing of an innocent human person is the contention of the authors of this book. It does not intend to be a comprehensive defence of a pro-life position; rather, it ad...

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Although a great deal of literature has looked at how individuals respond to stigma, far less has been written about how professional groups address challenges to their self-perception as abiding by clear moral standards. In this paper, we ask how professional group members maintain a positive self-perception in the face of moral stigma. Drawing on pragmatic and cultural sociology, we claim that professional communities hold narratives that link various aspects of the work their members perform with specific understanding (...) of the common good. These narratives allow professionals to maintain a shared view of their work as benefitting society and to perceive themselves as moral individuals. As a case study, we focus on the advertising industry, which has long been stigmatized as complicit in exploitative capitalist mechanisms and cultural degradation. We draw on nine total months of fieldwork and seventy-four interviews across three US advertising agencies. We find that advertising practitioners use narratives to present their work as contributing to the common good, depicting themselves as moral individuals who care about others in the process. We analyze three prevalent narratives: the account-driven narrative, which links moral virtue to caring for clients; the creative-driven narrative, which ties caring to the production of meaningful advertisements; and the strategic-driven narrative, which sees caring in finding meaningful relationships for consumers and brands. (shrink)

It is plausible that we have moral reasons to become better at conforming to our moral reasons. However, it is not always clear what means to greater moral conformity we should adopt. John Harris has recently argued that we have reason to adopt traditional, deliberative means in preference to means that alter our affective or conative states directly—that is, without engaging our deliberative faculties. One of Harris’ concerns about direct means is that they would produce only a (...) superficial kind of moral improvement. Though they might increase our moral conformity, there is some deeper kind of moral improvement that they would fail to produce, or would produce to a lesser degree than more traditional means. I consider whether this concern might be justified by appeal to the concept of moral worth. I assess three attempts to show that, even where they were equally effective at increasing one’s moral conformity, direct interventions would be less conducive to moral worth than typical deliberative alternatives. Each of these attempts is inspired by Kant’s views on moral worth. Each, I argue, fails. (shrink)

In this fascinating book, Sarah Worth addresses from a philosophical perspective the many ways in which reading benefits us morally, socially and cognitively.

won a shopping spree on her birthday, but the 99-year-old Californian wanted nothing for herself. Instead, she used the opportunity to make well-stuffed holiday stockings for children in need, which she plans to distribute through her church. “I’m going to cry, I’m so happy,” she said last week as she filled her cart with toys and candy, along with essentials like toothbrushes and socks, at a 99-cent store in Beverly Hills. “I feel bad that I can’t do it for every (...) [poor child],” Goldstein said. “But it makes me feel very good that I am able to do what I can.”. (shrink)

What minimal role—if any—must consciousness of morally significant information play in an account of moral worth? According to one popular view, a right action is morally worthy only if the agent is conscious (in some sense) of the facts that make it right. I argue against this consciousness condition and close cousins of it. As I show, consciousness of such facts requires much more sophistication than writers typically suggest—this condition would bar from moral worth most ordinary, (...) intuitively morally worthy agents. Moreover, I show that the attraction to this flavor of consciousness condition rests on mistaken assumptions about what is required for a right act to be non-accidentally right and attributable to the agent. Drawing some lessons from the discussion, I defend a Value-Secured Reliability Theory of Moral Worth and show how a minimal yet indispensable role for consciousness falls out from it. On this independently plausible theory, an action can be morally worthy even when the agent is unaware of the right-making features of her action. (shrink)

Kelly Sorensen defends a model of the relationship between effort and moral worth in which the effort exerted in performing a morally desirable action contributes positively to the action’s moral worth, but the effort required to perform the action detracts from its moral worth. I argue that Sorensen’s model, though on the right track, is mistaken in three ways. First, it fails to capture the relevance of counterfactual effort to moral worth. Second, (...) it wrongly implies that exerting unnecessary effort confers moral worth on an action. Third, it fails to adequately distinguish between cases in which effort is required because of defects of moral character and those in which effort is required because of barriers external to moral character, such as social pressures or non-moral cognitive deficits. I suggest three amendments to Sorensen’s model that correct these three defects. (shrink)

Moral internalism and moral externalism compete over the best explanation of the link between judgment and relevant motivation but, it is argued, they differ at best only verbally. The internalist rational-conceptual nature of the link’ as accounted by M. Smith in The Moral Problem is contrasted to the externalist, also rational, link that requires in addition support from the agent’s psychological-dispositional profile; the internalist link, however, is found to depend crucially on a, similarly to the externalist, psychologically (...) ‘loaded’ profile. It is also argued that the differentiation of the two competing explanations is insufficient partly because they both fail to consider crucial quantitative parameters of the judgment-motivation link. Such parameters become very important particularly in the light of Smith’s claim that this link is grounded on the observable “striking fact” where changes in the set of one’s moral beliefs systematically bring about changes in one’s moral behavior. Examples of algorithms measuring moral coherence and moral worth are provided to serve as evidence for what it comes down to, vis-à-vis the alleged fact, only a verbal dispute between the two camps. Finally, the ‘misfiring’ of these explanations is understood in connection to the irreducibility of concepts such as ‘moral worth’, and/or, ‘moral sensitivity’. (shrink)

People do good or bad things, and get or do not get good or bad credit for their actions, depending (in part) on knowledge of their actions. I attempt to unfold some of the interconnections between these matters, and between them and the achievement of moral worth. The main conclusion is that the heights of moral worth seem to appear in the oddest places.

This article examines the possibility of a Kantian justification of the intrinsic moral worth of education. The author critiques a recent attempt to secure such justification via Kant's notion of the Kingdom of Ends. He gives four reasons why such an account would deny any intrinsic moral worth to education. He concludes with a tentative justification of his own and a call for a more comprehensive engagement between Kant's moral theory and the philosophy of education (...) for purposes of understanding what constitutes the moral core of education. (shrink)

One of the factors that contributes to an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness — his or her moral worth — is effort. On the one hand, agents who act effortlessly seem to have high moral worth. On the other hand, agents who act effortfully seem to have high moral worth as well. I explore and explain this pair of intuitions and the contour of our views about associated cases.