Common philosophical approaches on the adequacy of emotions usually focus on the most objective assessment of the situation. In contrast to this, I claim that this objective stance, generally called “fittingness”, does not satisfy the current needs of emotional evaluation. Given the motivational role of emotions and their influence on social interactions, it is of utmost importance to also evaluate their moral value. Yet, a further development towards such a moral judgment is missing. In this paper, I (...) provide an approach for the moral adequacy of emotional responses in a social context. I aim to show that in today’s social and political culture the link between emotions and moral norms cannot be neglected. Introducing two instances of judging the moral adequacy, I focus on evaluating either the cause or the consequence of an emotional reaction. By assessing the moral value of emotional responses, I think moral growth can be facilitated – not only in individuals but also in whole societies. (shrink)

This chapter argues for an interpretation of Kant's psychology of moral evil that accommodates the so-called excluded middle cases and allows for variations in the magnitude of evil. The strategy involves distinguishing Kant's transcendental psychology from his empirical psychology and arguing that Kant's character rigorism is restricted to the transcendental level. The chapter also explains how Kant's theory of moral evil accommodates 'the badass'; someone who does evil for evil's sake.

Situationists contend that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. However, it is my contention that there is much confusion over what “empirical adequacy” or “empirical inadequacy” actually means in this context. My aim in this paper is to clarify the meanings of empirical adequacy in order to see to what extent virtue ethics might fail to meet this standard. I argue that the situationists frequently misconstrue the empirical commitments of virtue ethics. More importantly, depending on what we mean by (...) empirical adequacy, either virtue ethics has no need to be empirically adequate or where it does have such a need, the psychological evidence fails to show that it is empirically inadequate. An additional contribution the paper intends to make is to provide a more detailed discussion of the explanatory nature of virtue ethics. (shrink)

: In the analytic tradition of the philosophy of emotions the folk notion of adequacy is understood with regard to – at least four – different questions, viz. a moral question, a prudential question, an epistemic question, and a fittingness question. Usually, the fittingness question is treated as being the central one. I have some doubts concerning this assessment, particularly when it comes to substantial – interpersonal or cultural – controversies about whether a specific emotional response is adequate (...) or whether a specific event deserves the emotional responses it triggers. To approach these matters, I recommend first doing without the established distinctions, for they may prematurely tempt us into assessing the adequacy of emotional responses in terms of one of these categories thereby overlooking other features that deserve attention. Instead, I will start with the folk notion of adequacy and then refine stepwise the conceptual landscape to get closer to what the crucial issues of adequacy are. Keywords: Philosophy of Emotions; Emotional Atmospheres; Existential Feelings; Adequacy of Emotional Responses L’adeguatezza delle emozioni e dei sentimenti esistenziali Riassunto: All’interno della tradizione analitica della filosofia delle emozioni la nozione comune di adeguatezza è presa in considerazione in relazione ad almeno quattro diversi problemi: un primo è di carattere morale ; un secondo riguarda la discrezionalità ; un terzo è di tipo epistemico e un quarto concerne l’ appropriatezza. Di solito, all’appropriatezza viene riservata maggiore importanza. Personalmente nutro diversi dubbi su questa valutazione, in particolare quando si tratta di dirimere questioni sostanziali – interpersonali o culturali –, se una data risposta emotiva è adeguata o se un dato evento merita la risposta emotiva che ha innescato. Per affrontare questi problemi, mi sento in primo luogo di suggerire di fare a meno delle distinzioni maggiormente in uso, poiché possono spiprematuramente a valutare l’adeguatezza delle risposte emotive nei termini una delle categorie già menzionate, trascurando quindi altre proprietà degne di attenzione. Intendo invece partire dalla nozione di adeguatezza propria del senso comune e poi gradualmente raffinare il panorama concettuale, per approssimarmi ai problemi fondamentali dell’adeguatezza. Parole chiave: Filosofia delle emozioni; Atmosfere emotive; Sentimenti esistenziali; Adeguatezza delle risposte emotive. (shrink)

Our present moral traits are unable to provide the level of large-scale co-operation necessary to deal with risks such as nuclear proliferation, drastic climate change and pandemics. In order to survive in an environment with powerful and easily available technologies, some authors claim that we need to improve our moral traits with moral enhancement. But this is prone to produce paradoxical effects, be self-reinforcing and harm personal identity. The risks of moral enhancement require the use of (...) a safety framework; such a framework should guarantee practical robustness to moral uncertainty, empirical adequacy, correct balance between dispositions, preservation of identity, and be sensitive to practical considerations such as emergent social effects. A virtue theory can meet all these desiderata. Possible frameworks incorporate them to variable degrees. The social value orientations framework is one of the most promising candidates. (shrink)

Friendship was recognized as a central moral value in the classical period, but it was dismissed from medieval, modern, and twentieth century moral theories. This book argues that this dismissal is unjustifiable. The validity of this claim is established in four steps. First, it proposes the concept of moral paradigm. This concept enables us to explore the source of moral value and to provide a criterion for the evaluation of the adequacy of moral theory. (...) Second, the book explains why medieval, modern and twentieth century moral theorists neglected friendship as a central moral value in their analysis of moral behavior and why this neglect was unjustifiable. Third, it explains why the classical moral philosophers viewed friendship as a central moral value. Fourth, it argues that friendship is an ontological need, therefore, a necessary condition of the moral life. This need is implicitly recognized in the moral paradigms that underlie the moral theories of the medieval, modern, and twentieth century moral theories. Accordingly it cannot be neglected in the process of moral theorizing. (shrink)

In a wide-ranging inquiry Richard W. Miller provides new resources for coping with the most troubling types of moral conflict: disagreements in moral conviction, conflicting interests, and the tension between conscience and desires. Drawing on most fields in philosophy and the social sciences, including his previous work in the philosophy of science, he presents an account of our access to moral truth, and, within this framework, develops a theory of justice and an assessment of the role of (...) morality in rational choice. In Miller's view, we are often in a position to claim that our moral judgments are true descriptions of moral facts. But others, relying on contrary ways of moral learning, would reject truths that we are in a position to assert, in dissent that does not depend on irrationality or ignorance of relevant evidence or arguments. With this mixed verdict on "moral realism," Miller challenges many received views of rationality, scientific method, and the relation between moral belief and moral choice. In his discussion of justice, Miller defends the adequacy, for modern political choices, of a widely shared demand that institutions be freely and rationally acceptable to all. Drawing on social research and economic theories, he argues that this demand has dramatically egalitarian consequences, even though it is a premise of liberals and conservatives alike. In the final chapters, Miller investigates the role and limits of morality in the choice of conduct, arguing for new perspectives on reason and impartiality. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical pitfalls and challenges that non-ethicists, such as researchers and programmers in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics, face when building moral machines. Whether ethics is “computable” depends on how programmers understand ethics in the first place and on the adequacy of their understanding of the ethical problems and methodological challenges in these fields. Researchers and programmers face at least two types of problems due to their general lack of ethical knowledge (...) or expertise. The first type is so-called rookie mistakes, which could be addressed by providing these people with the necessary ethical knowledge. The second, more difficult methodological issue concerns areas of peer disagreement in ethics, where no easy solutions are currently available. This paper examines several existing approaches to highlight the ethical pitfalls and challenges involved. Familiarity with these and similar problems can help programmers to avoid pitfalls and build better moral machines. The paper concludes that ethical decisions regarding moral robots should be based on avoiding what is immoral in combination with a pluralistic ethical method of solving moral problems, rather than relying on a particular ethical approach, so as to avoid a normative bias. (shrink)

This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social (...) power. The present article explains how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology. (shrink)

This book explores the role of artificial intelligence in the development of a claim that morality is person-made and rational. Professor Danielson builds moral robots that do better than amoral competitors in a tournament of games like the Prisoners Dilemma and Chicken. The book thus engages in current controversies over the adequacy of the received theory of rational choice. It sides with Gauthier and McClennan, who extend the devices of rational choice to include moral constraint. Artificial Morality (...) goes further, by promoting communication, testing and copying of principles and by stressing empirical tests. (shrink)

The concept of morality underpins the moral responsibility that not only depends on the outward practices (or ‘output,’ in the case of humanoid robots) of the agents but on the internal attitudes (‘input’) that rational and responsible intentioned beings generate. The primary question that has initiated the extensive debate, i.e., ‘Can humanoid robots be moral?’, stems from the normative outlook where morality includes human conscience and socio-linguistic background. This paper advances the thesis that the conceptions of morality and (...) creativity interplay with linguistic human beings instead of non-linguistic humanoid robots, as humanoid robots are indeed docile automata that cannot be responsible for their actions. To eradicate human ethics in order to make way for humanoid robot ethics highlights the moral actions and adequacy that hinges the myth of creative agency and self-dependency, which a humanoid robot can scarcely express. (shrink)

In this article, I consider a number of arguments that assume that beings who have immortal souls occupy a special position in the sphere of moral concern. First, I place these arguments in their historical and cultural contexts. Next, I formulate several conditions of adequacy that all such arguments must satisfy. Subsequently, I distinguish two different general kinds of such arguments: Inclusionary arguments attempt to use the immortality of soul as a criterion for either including someone into a (...) sphere of morality while excluding others or, at least, for elevating someone's position within this sphere. Modifying arguments attempt to strengthen or weaken moral considerations that already apply to a being included into the sphere of morality. I argue that, although some modifying arguments may fulfill all conditions of adequacy, they have very little practical importance. (shrink)

The paper engages the conceptual question of the nature of rights. First, moral methodology for developing criteria to judge the adequacy of theories for the concept of rights is discussed. Standard methodologies for conceptual theory, such as analysis of language practices, appealing to intuitions to test and correct hypotheses, and mixtures of these with appeals to substantive moral values, are shown to fail in important ways to give us reasons to adopt one or another view of the (...) concept. An alternative methodology is proposed which appeals to the distinct role of concepts in our value scheme (the added value of being able to employ such concepts in our moral judgments). This is then used to develop criteria for a successful theory of rights. Two existing theories are shown, as a matter of illustration, to fail to satisfy the criteria, and finally an alternative theory of rights which does satisfy these criteria is proposed and defended. (shrink)

This paper connects work in psychology on the Big Five Model to the recent debate in philosophy on the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.

The concept of morality underpins the moral responsibility that not only depends on the outward practices (or ‘output’, in the case of humanoid robots) of the agents but on the internal attitudes (‘input’) that rational and responsible intentioned beings generate. The primary question that has initiated extensive debate, i.e. ‘Can humanoid robots be moral?’, stems from the normative outlook where morality includes human conscience and socio-linguistic background. This paper advances the thesis that the conceptions of morality and creativity (...) interplay with linguistic human beings instead of non-linguistic humanoid robots, as humanoid robots are indeed docile automata that cannot be responsible for their actions. To eradicate human ethics in order to make way for humanoid robot ethics highlights the moral actions and adequacy that hinges the myth of creative agency and self-dependency, which a humanoid robot can scarcely express. (shrink)

This article discusses explanatory theories of normative concepts and argues for a set of criteria of adequacy by which such theories may be evaluated. The criteria offered fall into four categories: ontological, theoretical, pragmatic, and moral. After defending the criteria and discussing their relative weighting, this article uses them to prune the set of available explanatory theories of oppression. Functionalist theories, including Hegelian recognition theory and Foucauldian social theory, are rejected, as are psychoanalytic theory and social dominance theory. (...) Finally, the article defends structural rational choice theory as the most promising methodology for explaining oppression. Key Words: oppression • explanation • rational choice theory. (shrink)

The article analyzes the concept of universality in Oleg Drobnitskii’s ethics. As opposed to most Soviet ethicists of the 1960s and early 1970s, Drobnitskii viewed this concept along the lines of the principle of universality presented in the moral theories of Immanuel Kant and Richard Hare. However, while they considered universality to be a feature of individual moral thinking in the forms of maxims, principles, and evaluations, Drobnitskii understood universality as the main feature of moral requirements and (...) essentially external to the moral agent, representing to her social relations and the ‘general laws of history.’ It was conceptually significant in Drobnitskii’s approach to universality that he analyzed it within the context of a more general concept of morality—as a mode of normative regulation of behavior. In this capacity, universality was presented as a characteristic of general appeal, or the general way in which a moral requirement is binding. The principle of equality is a normative correlate of universality understood in this way. Universality also characterizes judgments, whose moral adequacy is verified through the procedure of universalization. Regarding universality, Drobnitskii discussed important questions of the individualization of the universal moral requirement in the form of the moral agent’s personal task and the universality of class moral views. He tried to explain these differing, and not always interconnected, aspects of universality by appealing to certain ‘general laws of history,’ and thus offered a historicist basis of morality. This article shows that, despite this unprecedented analysis of the issue of universality, Drobnitskii did not achieve a systematic conclusion in his conceptualization of universality. Nevertheless, he was able to offer a number of significant insights, with the potential to aid our further comprehension of the phenomenon of universality and how it ought to be understood. (shrink)

A continuous objection to virtue ethics has been its alleged inadequacy in providing a distinctive account of right action and determinate action guidance. The virtue ethical criterion “An action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically (i.e., acting in character) do in the circumstances,” has been claimed by some to give wrong results in some cases, and thus doomed to failure. However, I argue that the opponents who raise these objections overlook an important (...) distinction between “action assessment” and “action guidance” in virtue ethics. Once this distinction which is alien to other dominant moral theories is taken into consideration, I show that virtue ethics can supply a distinctive theory of right action and sufficient action guidance. Moreover, I will demonstrate that this distinction allows us to see that virtue ethics has some structural advantages that enable it to provide multiple guidance strategies to different agents with differential cognitive and moral developmental levels. Finally, I will argue that while theories that tell moral agents what to do by providing exact answers might affect moral agency in negative ways by frustrating the development of an integrated moral character, virtue ethics also avoids this effect. (shrink)

Cushman, Young, & Greene (2010) urge the consolidation of moral psychology around a dual-system consensus. On this view, a slow, often-overstretched rational system tends to produce consequentialist intuitions and action-tendencies, while a fast, affective system produces virtuous (or vicious) intuitions and action-tendencies that perform well in their habituated ecological niche but sometimes disastrously outside of it. This perspective suggests a habit-corrected-by-reason picture of moral behavior. Recent research, however, has raised questions about the adequacy of dual-process theories of (...) cognition and behavior, which tend to distinguish categorically between fast, affect-laden, automatic, sometimes-unconscious, nearly-incorrigible mental processes and slow, rational, effortful, conscious, corrigible mental processes. Processes of one alleged type often have properties associated with the contrary type. For instance, rational processes can be emotional, and fast thinking can perform logical operations. In addition, the fast-slow binary transforms a continuous temporal scale into a dichotomous one, losing potentially important information along the way. While these problems are beginning to be addressed in some subfields of psychology, moral psychology has yet to grapple with them. In this theoretical paper, we argue that moral psychology needs a framework that accounts for our knowledge of both temporal and spatial (anatomical) dimensions of the brain basis of moral cognition and virtuous decision-making. We argue that methodologies with very fine-grained temporal granularity, such as electroencephalography (EEG), should be used to complement more frequently used methodologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We outline how this might be accomplished using generosity, gratitude, and integrity as a case study. (shrink)

Naturalistic ethics is the reigning paradigm among contemporary ethicists; in God and Cosmos, Baggett and Walls argue that this approach is seriously flawed. This book canvasses a broad array of secular and naturalistic ethical theories in an effort to test their adequacy in accounting for moral duties, intrinsic human value, prospects for radical moral transformation, and the rationality of morality. In each case, the authors argue, although various secular accounts provide real insights and indeed share common ground (...) with theistic ethics, the resources of classical theism and orthodox Christianity provide the better explanation of the moral realities under consideration. Among such realities is the fundamental insight behind the problem of evil, namely, that the world is not as it should be. Baggett and Walls argue that God and the world, taken together, exhibit superior explanatory scope and power for morality classically construed, without the need to water down the categories of morality, the import of human value, the prescriptive strength of moral obligations, or the deliverances of the logic, language, and phenomenology of moral experience. This book thus provides a cogent moral argument for God's existence, one that is abductive, teleological, and cumulative. (shrink)

The moral error theory, it seems, could be true. The mere possibility of its truth might also seem inconsequential. But it is not. For, I argue, there is a sense in which the moral error theory is possible that generates an argument against both non‐cognitivism and moral naturalism. I argue that it is an epistemic possibility that morality is subject to some form of wholesale error of the kind that would make the moral error theory true. (...) Denying this possibility has three unwelcome consequences such that allowing for and explaining it is an adequacy condition on meta‐ethical theories. Non‐cognitivism and moral naturalism, I argue, cannot capture the epistemic possibility of wholesale moral error and so are false. My argument additionally provides independent reason to accept Derek Parfit's claim that if moral non‐naturalism is false then nothing matters. I conclude that whether wholesale moral error is epistemically possible may be, in Richard Rorty's words, ‘one of those issues which puts everything up for grabs at once’ and that even if so, and even if non‐cognitivists and moral naturalists remain unmoved by an argument based upon it, this only helps to highlight the significance of my argument. (shrink)

By making use of Aurel Kolnai's ethical writings I want to offer a more adequate understanding of moral conflicts and moral dilemmas. Insisting on Kolnai's phenomenological method, in particular, focussing on the agent's moral awareness (or conscience) and his deliberation, results in an understanding of moral conflicts as moments of moral choice rather than anomalies of moral theory. In this way, I argue that one can account for Bernard Williams's phenomenological description of moral (...) conflicts without having to accept his anti-realist conclusions. Moreover, this approach indicates the adequacy of ordinary moral reasoning for decisionmaking and action guidance. Lastly and importantly, the essay illustrates the relevance of Kolnai's writings to contemporary moral philosophy. (shrink)

There is an apparent tension in Laozi 老子 between his denial of the adequacy of positive theoretical formulations and his concomitant endorsement of certain kinds of practical action over others. Laozi writes, for example, “Where they all know the good as good, there is evil, Therefore Being and non-being produce each other” (Laozi 2.3–5), which suggests that good and evil produce each other the way being and non-being produce each other; in which case to do good will lead to (...) evil and to do evil will lead to good. The result threatens to become moral paralysis. I argue that this destabilization of moral concepts does not amount to a moral relativism, but leaves us with a consistent moral point of view in its own way. (shrink)

This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social (...) power. The present article explains how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology. (shrink)

Robert M. Adams (1979, 1987a, 1987b) defends a modified variant of the divine command theory (hereafter MDCT) to the effect that he proposes a moral argument for God’s existence driven in the form of practical reasoning with respect to rational moral agents’ beliefs in the adequacy of MDCT. For Adams, one’s commitment to MDCT as the most adequate theory legitimately provides her a practical reason for why she ought to believe in God’s existence which MDCT implies. In (...) this paper, I criticize the viability of Adams’ moral argument considering its argumentative structure and strategy. Adams’ strategy behind his moral argument, i.e. mediating theistic beliefs with deontic ones, seeks out a non-decisive medium that might be used to ubiquitously generate equally plausible arguments for/against God’s existence based on distinct sorts of allegedly adequate theories of some subject matter. Thus, his argument does not seem to distinctively ground God’s existence in comparison with a myriad of practical arguments which might follow the same argumentative strategy on the same practical grounds. More significantly, there seems to be coherent no way for Adams to disambiguate his argument on theoretical grounds. (shrink)

Recent discussions of the nature of mind, emotion, and self have often intersected with renewed interest in the sources of morals and morality. In this article I examine proposals on these matters by Charles Taylor and two of his interlocutors, Thomas Wren and Justin Oakley. I describe and compare the “holistic” epistemological approaches of these three in their searches for the “moral self,” and then evaluate the adequacy of their correlative ontological proposals. Finally, I discuss the meta-ethical implications (...) of these emotive views of selfhood in terms of the objective or subjective status of moral values to determine whether these views meet the philosophers' own criteria for moral plausibility. (shrink)

The emerging field known as experimental philosophy has expanded into moral philosophy: by presenting experimental subjects with vignettes describing scenarios with moral implications, data about people's moral intuitions are gathered and analyzed. This paper examines the adequacy of applying the common methodology of experimental philosophy to the study of moral thought. By employing Raimond Gaita's notion of moral seriousness and his distinction between form and content, it argues that the kind of empirical research on (...) moral intuitions conducted by experimental philosophers fails to take into consideration some fundamental characteristics of moral thinking. (shrink)

A moral code consists of principles that assign moral status to individual actions – principles that evaluate acts as right or wrong, prohibited or obligatory, permissible or supererogatory. Many theorists have held that such principles must serve two distinct functions. On the one hand, they serve a theoretical function, insofar as they specify the characteristics in virtue of which acts possess their moral status. On the other hand, they serve a practical function, insofar as they provide an (...) action-guide: a standard by reference to which a person can choose which acts to perform and which not. Although the theoretical and practical functions of moral principles are closely linked, it is not at all obvious that what enables a principle to fill one of these roles automatically equips it to fill the other. In this paper I shall briefly examine some of the reasons why a moral principle might fail to fill its practical role, i.e., be incapable of guiding decisions. I shall then sketch three common responses to this kind of failure, and examine in some detail the adequacy of one of the most popular of these responses. (shrink)

This exploration of the virtue of accurate self-appraisal in great people as seen by some philosophers argues that a justified belief in one's fundamental superiority need not entail arrogant or egotistical behaviour towards others, but can harmonize with marked tendencies to respectfulness, generosity and understanding, although not with moral permissiveness. Even if accurate self-appraisal means thinking oneself basically better, this virtue can be consistent with social dispositions that contemporary egalitarians admire. ;The proposal to interpret humility as accurate knowledge of (...) one's merits comes from current writers who reject any merit in humility's more traditional associations of self-effacement. The new humility, they claim, can apply to those preeminent in any field, who keep their exceptional merits in perspective in spite of recognizing them. This self-restraint is attributed to an underlying assumption that all persons have equal worth or rights. The thesis disputes the adequacy of this account by noting that moral virtues themselves can be regarded as merits of unrivalled importance and that, with regard to their distribution, people are basically unequal. Consequently, humility in highly moral people might be better seen as a kind of accurate self-estimate that balances an assumption of human equality with an equally crucial awareness that one's moral character and concomitant judgments are basically superior. The assumption of equality is claimed to be fully compatible with the belief in personal superiority and not the sine qua non of moral decency in social relations. ;Aristotle's megalopsuchos, or "great soul," and Spinoza's good person, while not egalitarians, know themselves morally preeminent, yet both possess many still admirable beliefs and traits. The same applies to one interpretation of Nietzsche's noble soul. These thinkers suggest the compatibility of self-preference with respectfulness towards all--sometimes especially towards the weakest--people. Kant's egalitarian view downplays any notion of personal superiority, but not convincingly. Aquinas suggests a tension between humility and moral competence in worldly dealings, but only because he tries to uphold the Aristotelian great soul while not jettisoning the recurrent Christian motif of self-denigration. (shrink)

Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? If the human moral sense is an unconscious computational mechanism of some sort, as many cognitive scientists have suggested, then the answer should be yes. So too if the search for reflective equilibrium is a sound enterprise, since achieving this state of affairs requires demarcating a set of considered judgments, stating them as explanandum (...) sentences, and formulating a set of algorithms from which they can be derived. The same is true for theories that emphasize the role of emotions or heuristics in moral cognition, since they ultimately depend on intuitive appraisals of the stimulus that accomplish essentially the same tasks. Drawing on deontic logic, action theory, moral philosophy, and the common law of tort, particularly Terry's five-variable calculus of risk, I outline a formal model of moral grammar and intuitive jurisprudence along the foregoing lines, which defines the abstract properties of the relevant mapping and demonstrates their descriptive adequacy with respect to a range of common moral intuitions, which experimental studies have suggested may be universal or nearly so. Framing effects, protected values, and implications for the neuroscience of moral intuition are also discussed. (shrink)

This article provides a critical introduction to contractualism as a moral or ethical theory, that is, as a theory of the rightness and wrongness of individual conduct – focusing specifically on the influential 'Kantian' version of contractualism due to T. M. Scanlon. I begin by elucidating the key features of Scanlon's contractualism: justifiability to others; reasonable rejectability; the individualist restriction; and mutual recognition. I then turn to discuss both its appeal and the main objections that have been raised to (...) it – objections concerning our duties to the cognitively limited and impaired, aggregation, demandingness, normativity and explanatory adequacy. I conclude by mentioning some contractualist alternatives to Scanlon's theory. (shrink)

The idea that legal theories seek not only to explain but to evaluate the moral justification of particular areas of law is quite familiar. Yet little attention has been paid to the minimal criteria of adequacy for justificatory legal theories. Whereas many theories claim to identify the moral grounds that justify a particular area of law, such as contracts or torts, none of them explains how its justification determines the outcomes of adjudication governed by the law in (...) that area. In this brief Essay for the William and Mary Law Review Symposium on Law and Morality, I argue that a particular area of law can be justified only by identifying moral reasons that fully determine the results of adjudication. No matter how compelling the moral reasons a legal theory identifies, and how tight the fit between those reasons and the structure and content of the legal rules governing a judicial decision, a legal theory fails to justify a particular area of law if the reasoning it identifies falls short of fully determining the results in the judicial decisions governed by that law. Though this bold claim may seem unrealistic, I argue that legal theories can satisfy this determinacy requirement by identifying determinate but inconclusive reasoning that explains outcomes in adjudication. While such reasoning may prove to be erroneous, that does not undermine its justificatory force. (shrink)

Many theists believe that the so-called ‘free will defence’ successfully undermines the antitheist argument from moral evil. However, in a recent issue of Sophia Joel Thomas Tierno provides the ‘adequacy argument’ in order to show an alleged difficulty with the free will defence. I argue that the adequacy argument fails because it equivocates on the notion of moral evil.

In moral psychology, “psychological rationalism” is the view that moral judgments are caused by a process of reasoning. Jonathan Haidt argues against this view by showing that people succumb to “moral dumbfounding”—they cannot adequately provide reasoning for their moral judgment. I argue that this evidence undermines psychological rationalism only if the view is committed to two claims about reasoning: (a) reasoning must meet an adequacy condition, and (b) reasoning must be sufficiently conscious. I argue that (...) plausible variants of psychological rationalism are not committed to these requirements. Thus, the efficacy of the dumbfounding objection is more limited than it might initially seem. (shrink)

In their article, Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky present an alternative to market theories of voting behavior. Contrary to market theories which view the voter as acting to maximize the expected self-interest, the alternative view sees voting as fundamentally an act of self-expression: “Voting, like speech, is an expressive activity providing an outlet for one's moral sentiments. We suggest that it is the expressive return to a vote that frequently determines the behavior of individuals in large-number electorates.”.

After distinguishing three criteria of adequacy for any acceptable moral theory's treatment of moral conflict, or conflicts of duties, I explain how Kant's ethics can satisfy all three. Although Kant denies the possibility of conflicting duties, he does allow conflicting "grounds of obligation." I develop a new interpretation of such conflicts, rejecting one proposed earlier by Onora O'Neill.

For the past decade and a half, Aristotelians have tried to counter the following criticism articulated by John Doris: if we look at personality and social psychology research, we must conclude that we generally neither have, nor have the capacity to develop, character traits of the kind envisioned by Aristotle and his followers. Some defenses of Aristotelian virtue ethics proceed by trying to insulate it from this challenge, while others have tried to dissipate the force of Doris's critique by showing (...) how virtue ethics and recent findings in personality psychology share surprisingly extensive common ground. For example, in their 2009 books, Daniel Russell and Nancy Snow both argue that the empirical research regarding character complements - not undermines - virtue ethics. Specifically, each argues that the situationally sensitive Cognitive-Affective Personality System developed by Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda can be integrated into a virtue ethical moral philosophy and theory of character. In this paper, I raise several objections to their attempts to use the CAPS model to rehabilitate Aristotelian virtue ethics and argue that, as a result, this model has not been shown to have the promise Snow and Russell allege it has. (shrink)

This paper challenges what I call ‘Frankfurt's Care-Importance Principle’ (or ‘the CIP’), according to which, ‘If there is something that a person does care about, then it follows that it is important to him.’ Indeed, caring may generate genuine importance. I claim, however, that the agent's caring may have blinding effects too, it may blind him to what is really important to him. In this kind of case, caring does not generate genuine importance; rather, it reinforces the agent's false belief (...) that what he cares about is really important to him. In the second part of the paper, I try to explain the philosophical urgency in correcting the CIP. I claim that Frankfurt's adherence to the CIP casts doubt upon the adequacy of his conceptual framework to deal with a special kind of conflict, namely, the conflict between the moral and the personal. (shrink)

In considering a domain of knowledge – language, music, mathematics, or morality – it is necessary to derive principles that can describe the mature state and explain how an individual reaches this state. Although Sunstein's heuristics go some way toward a description of our moral sense, it is not clear that they are at the right level of description, and as stated, they provide no guidelines for looking at the acquisition process – the problem of explanatory adequacy.

A popular view in philosophy of science contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, economic, or social values, but only by the available evidence. A large body of results in the psychology of motivated-reasoning has put pressure on the empirical adequacy of this view. The present study extends this body of results by providing direct evidence that the moral offensiveness of a scientific hypothesis (...) biases explanatory judgment along several dimensions, even when prior credence in the hypothesis is controlled for. Furthermore, it is shown that this bias is insensitive to an economic incentive to be accurate in the evaluation of the evidence. These results contribute to call into question the attainability of the ideal of a value-free science. (shrink)

Part Two, Area A. Resuming the investigation set afoot in Part 1,1 we there proposed that subliminally people do commonly sense moral obligation as a kind of debt (chreos) of shared responsibility ? every person's share in the cost of a good community which is the common cause of all. Testing this ?common understanding? by the facts of human nature and community, this article examines the substratum of my good, good of others, idea of good community, of common cause (...) in it, of shared responsibility for it, of consequent debt of all to whole, and of human freedom and capacity to estimate and pay on a basis to be examined in Area B projected. ?Elementary freedom? depends on capacity for truthful purpose and for independent judgment, ?ultimate freedom? on a determined truthful purpose coupled with adequacy of ideas for interpretation of entire experience. Every human is free in the elementary sense, and accordingly responsible. Ultimate freedom has to be won, and actively affirmed. (shrink)

In professional medical ethics, the physician traditionally is obliged to fulfil specific duties as well as to embody a responsible and trustworthy personality. In the public discussion, different concepts are suggested to describe the desired underlying attitude of physicians. In this article, one of them—empathy—is presented in an interpretation that is meant to depicture (together with the two additional concepts compassion and care) this attitude. Therefore empathy in the clinical context is defined as the adequate understanding of the inner processes (...) of the patient concerning his health-related problems. Adequacy is scrutinized on behalf of the emotional and subjective involvement of he physician, and on the necessary dependence on medical—moral—goals. In the present interpretation, empathy alone is no guarantee of the right moral attitude, but a necessary instrumental skill in order to perceive and treat a patient as an individual person. The concepts of compassion and care that will be discussed in two forthcoming articles are necessary parts to describe the desired moral attitude of the physician more completely. (shrink)