Clanak sadrzi obrazlozenje teme kojom ce se autor baviti u okviru rada na projektu 'Mogucnost primene modernih filozofsko-politickih paradigmi na transformaciju drustva u Srbiji/Jugoslaviji' Instituta za filozofiju i drustvenu teoriju. U prvom delu izlaze se osnovna zamisao rada, te teorijska i prakticna relevantnost predlozene teme. U drugom delu ukratko se izlaze 'teorija dva nivoa' moralnog misljenja, koju je razradio utilitaristicki filozof Ricard Mervin Her. U trecem delu skicira se plan i sadrzina predstojeceg rada. Na kraju, data je osnovna i selektivna (...) bibliografija na koju ce se autor oslanjati u razradi predlozene teme. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, (...) taken as a name for threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Photo ID 71252867© Stepan Popov| Dreamstime.com Abstract While Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) has been legalized in Canada since 2016, it still excludes eligibility for persons who have mental illness as a sole underlying medical condition. This temporary exclusion was set to expire on March 17th, 2024, but was set 3 years further back by the Government of Canada to March 17th, 2027. This paper presents a critical appraisal of the case of MAiD for individuals with mental illness as the (...) sole underlying medical condition through the analysis of three ethical theories: principlism, deontology, and utilitarianism. Through evidence and discussion, it will be demonstrated that MAiD, in this context, may be ethically justifiable on the grounds of upholding human rights, protecting dignity, and minimizing suffering. Introduction In June of 2016, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) was legalized in Canada.[1] Throughout the first six years, a temporary exclusion of eligibility for persons suffering solely from mental illness was extended.[2] The exclusion of mental illness as a sole underlying medical condition was set to expire on March 17, 2024.[3] However, on February 1, 2024, just over a month before the set expiration, the Government of Canada once again extended the exclusion, this time setting it back three years to March 17, 2027. There are currently several countries that allow MAiD for mental illness, including Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.[4] Some countries, like Spain,[5] do not give specific guidance, leaving the matter under discussion by ethicists and courts. In these countries, there are specific (although different) requirements for the process; overall, for mental illness, the illness must be verifiable and not simply related to a perception of satisfaction with the length of life. This extension ignited discussion on whether MAiD for persons who have mental illness as a sole underlying medical condition in Canada is ethically acceptable. As a complex, multi-faceted, and interdisciplinary issue, ethicists assessing MAiD must take into account various moral obligations and considerations. This paper analyses MAiD in this context through the application of three ethical theories: principlism, deontology, and utilitarianism. This paper concludes that, based on the current evidence and knowledge of this developing situation, MAiD for persons with mental illness in Canada may be ethically justified on the grounds of upholding human rights, labour obligations, and dignity. Through the exploration of research and discussions, it will be demonstrated that society at large ought to protect liberty and act towards relieving suffering, thereby supporting the potential eligibility of MAiD for persons who have mental illness. Principlism: The Capacity and Ability to Assess and Decide for One’s Own Life Principlism is the application of four principles: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. Principlism supports permitting MAiD for mental illness due to the importance of autonomy in decision-making, equitable and just practices for MAiD assessors, and reducing suffering for patients and their family member(s) and/or friend(s). Carter v. Canada, the Canadian Supreme Court ruling of 2015—which changed Canadian law to allow for MAiD—held that the prohibition of MAiD infringed on Canadians’ right to “life, liberty, and the security of the person.” In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that the criminal prohibition of MAiD violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.[6] The Court concluded that the criminal law prohibiting MAiD interfered with people’s autonomy and dignity, which are protected by the rights of liberty and security of the person.[7] The ruling emphasized that Canada’s constitution reflects the fundamental importance of individual autonomy in personal decision-making. Research provides evidence that MAiD improves autonomy: A study among psychiatric patients found that 8 of 48 psychiatric patients said the mere option of accessing MAiD was enough to assess their future options for living wholly.[8] These findings complement a study entailing interviews with 30 adults who have mental illness, which emphasized that the ability to access MAiD allows individuals to analyze their quality of life, envision their desired future, and make decisions accordingly.[9] Although not all participants agreed that mental illness as the only underlying medical condition was appropriate for MAiD eligibility, many participants agreed that patient autonomy in decision-making was paramount and should be respected. However, autonomy as an ethical principle does not immediately grant all persons with mental illness the option to access MAiD. There are multiple eligibility criteria for those who wish to receive MAiD, which still must be approved and assessed. Currently, eligibility criteria for MAiD states that individuals must “give informed consent to receive MAiD, meaning that the person has consented to receiving MAiD after they have received all information needed to make this decision.”[10] Consent requires capability or capacity, which is the ability to understand relevant information, appreciate its potential consequences, and make an informed decision for oneself.[11] Like for many other diseases, disabilities, and conditions, patient capability is determined on a case-by-case basis.[12] Given the stigma surrounding those struggling with mental health, this thorough case-by-case examination of an individual patient’s capability and capacity without prejudice or partiality should lead to equitable and fair treatment. Without appropriate testing, those with mental illness could be wrongly stripped of their decision-making power. Arguments against MAiD for those with mental illness have raised concerns about the potential for individuals to harm themselves and others. A survey of MAiD providers demonstrated that physicians believed that the bereavement experience following MAiD is challenging and profoundly distinct and that bereavement support for all members involved should be required.[13] However, while watching one die (of MAiD) may cause harm to their families, friends, and support system at large, it is also important to recognize that watching someone suffer and struggle through their mental health journey also poses significant harm. Qualitative studies in Ontario, Canada, have interviewed family members of persons with mental illness as a sole medical condition, and interviewees shared that witnessing the illness and its impacts on their close one's lives was a very difficult experience.[14] As it relates to MAiD, participants emphasized that those living with mental illness are in the best position to understand their own pain and suffering and, in turn, make their own decisions about relief.[15] In an interview, a MAiD provider stated that MAiD may provide less suffering and more peace, and that, although it “depends on the family,... usually the family is more prepared and at peace.”[16] On the contrary, a person who has mental illness may perceive choosing MAiD as beneficial to their family member(s) and/or friend(s). Among those who died by MAiD in 2021, 35.7 percent reported that they perceived themselves as a burden on their family and friends.[17] While some authors report their concerns regarding such social burden as a potential driving factor for MAiD requests, others report that there are other additional burdens associated with requesting MAiD that may be financial, societal, and personal.[18] As such, the extension of MAiD eligibility to those with mental illness will likely only allow a small number of people to be granted MAiD.[19] Many others will be diverted to appropriate services and treatments. Patients’ decision to choose MAID noted their ability to make choices about their own care, reflecting the value of autonomy.[20] Although it is difficult to determine what is good for families in individual cases, MAiD presents an option that is both beneficent and non-maleficent. Therefore, these arguments satisfy the principles which do not necessarily conflict with MAiD. Deontology: The Duty to Recognize Vulnerability and Relieve Suffering The argument here begins with the fundamental focus of deontology—that moral duty lies in an action rather than in its consequences. Further discussion is required to analyze the impact of MAiD on healthcare workers. The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) Code of Ethics and Professionalism requires physicians to abide by virtues, commitments, and responsibilities in delivering health care and service.[21] The code states that “a compassionate physician recognizes suffering and vulnerability, … and alleviate[s] the patient’s suffering.”[22] In the context of MAiD for persons with mental illness as a sole underlying medical condition, vulnerabilities could be wide in range. Many Canadians are concerned with the interaction between mental health and other social determinants of health, such as the lack of medical, disability, financial, housing, and social support and resources.[23] As a result, another layer to the ethical issue arises: Does permitting MAiD for mental illness treat the symptoms of the issue rather than the root problem itself (social, economic, and systemic inequities)? Some argue against MAiD, stating that the nation should first focus on developing better quality care and service.[24] Others support MAiD as a potential harm reduction approach, given that most of these unjust conditions require a higher level of long-term structural and public policy overhaul.[25] The CMA Code also calls upon physicians to recognize and alleviate patients’ suffering. Some argue that while physicians and medical professionals do work to relieve suffering, they are trained to do so through a primary care-based diagnose-and-treat approach.[26] Studies that have captured Canadian physicians’ experiences providing MAiD report that, although physicians stated that the work was rewarding, it came with many challenges, including strained relationships with coworkers, increased workload, and inadequate compensation.[27] Physicians report that a part of the problem is that MAiD rules are written by lawyers and experts who are removed from its reality in medical practice. As a result, there is a lack of clarity surrounding practice norms and a lack of support for physicians.[28] Thus, while healthcare practitioners have a duty to relieve patients’ suffering, they should feel adequately trained and supported in doing so. If physicians and healthcare professionals recognize vulnerability and relieve suffering, then they should act accordingly, regardless of potential associations or outcomes. Making persons with mental illness eligible for MAiD ensures that treatment to relieve their suffering is available. However, it is imperative that there are sufficient resources and support available to healthcare professionals to ensure that they feel prepared and supported to provide MAiD, should they wish to do so. Utilitarianism: Minimizing Intolerable Suffering and Dying with Dignity Overall, utilitarianism is largely concerned with the greatest happiness principle—to increase the amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. So far, this paper has analyzed individual, family, and practitioner-based ethical considerations. But if MAiD were to be extended to those with mental illness as a singular underlying medical condition, what implications would this have for the world and society at large? There is a global drive toward authorizing organized ending of life, with an increasing number of countries legalizing MAiD.[29] The medical system is generally seen as a safe and appropriate system to carry out MAiD, especially when suicide and self-harm are regarded as “alternatives.” Yet despite these worldwide efforts, many argue through the theory of utilitarianism that the inability to see long-term consequences renders MAiD a premature solution, particularly for those who are unable or unwilling to seek other forms of potentially healing treatment or for those who may undergo MAiD only for a technological innovation or biomedical advancement to later come along as a potential cure.[30] While it is true that MAiD does not prevent these “premature deaths,” it is also true that it does not claim to.[31] MAiD provides an option to alleviate intolerable suffering. Some individuals with severe mental illness do describe their condition as intolerable suffering. MAiD is seen as an option to minimize suffering. It can also be seen as a way to die with dignity and relief.[32] While predicting outcomes is difficult, extending MAiD eligibility for persons experiencing mental illness does not undermine its ability to end suffering. It allows eligible individuals to take charge of their health, their life, and their future. Conclusion Based on the current evidence, allowing MAiD for persons with mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition presents as an ethically justifiable action. The right to self-determination and fair accessibility demonstrates that there is more harm done by prohibiting MAiD for mental illness than allowing it. Such liberty is a right, and in the context of relieving suffering, it is a duty that healthcare workers must uphold, although the ability to opt out of providing MAiD is well established. Thus, to recognize vulnerability and relieve suffering means to provide methods, such as MAiD, for those deeply impacted by mental illness. These justifications stand at both the individual level and for society at large. Nevertheless, it remains imperative to take an upstream approach that addresses the social determinants of health and aims to prevent mental illness and promote long-term, beneficial social change for those suffering, struggling, and vulnerable in our communities. - [1] Jaro Kotalik and David W. Shannon, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada Key Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 1st ed. 2023., The International Library of Bioethics, 104 (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30002-8. [2] Department of Justice Government of Canada, “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) Law,” February 21, 2024, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/bk-di.html. [3] Health Canada, “Final Report of the Expert Panel on MAiD and Mental Illness,” transparency - other, May 13, 2022, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/corporate/about-health-canada/public-engagement/external-advi sory-bodies/expert-panel-maid-mental-illness/final-report-expert-panel-maid-mental-illness.html. [4] Federal Public Service (FPS) Health Belgium, “Federal Commission for the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia,” n.d., https://consultativebodies.health.belgium.be/en/advisory-and-consultative-bodies/federal-commission- control-and-evaluation-euthanasia.; Government of Netherlands, “Is Euthanasia Allowed in the Netherlands?,” n.d., https://www.government.nl/topics/euthanasia/is-euthanasia-allowed.; “Information on Requesting Euthanasia or Assisted Suicide,” n.d., https://guichet.public.lu/en/citoyens/sante/fin-vie/euthanasie/euthanasie-assistance-suicide.html. [5] Luis Espericueta, First official report on euthanasia in Spain: A comparison with the Canadian and New Zealand experiences, Medicina Clínica (English Edition), Volume 161, Issue 10, 2023, Pages 445-447, ISSN 2387-0206, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.medcle.2023.06.021. [6] Government of Canada, “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” March 15, 2021, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/. [7] Supreme Court of Canada, “Carter v. Canada,” Constitutional Law, 2015, https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/14637/index.do.; Kotalik and Shannon, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada Key Multidisciplinary Perspectives. [8] Karandeep Sonu Gaind, “What Does ‘Irremediability’ in Mental Illness Mean?,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. Revue Canadienne de Psychiatrie 65, no. 9 (September 2020): 604–6, https://doi.org/10.1177/0706743720928656; Lieve Thienpont et al., “Euthanasia Requests, Procedures and Outcomes for 100 Belgian Patients Suffering from Psychiatric Disorders: A Retrospective, Descriptive Study,” BMJ Open 5, no. 7 (July 27, 2015): e007454, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-007454. [9] Hamer Bastidas-Bilbao et al., “Walking Alongside: Views of Family Members on Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Illness as the Sole Underlying Medical Condition,” Qualitative Health Research 33 (September 29, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323231197365. [10] Government of Canada, “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) Law.” [11] Commission sur les soins de fin de vie, “Les conditions de l’admissibilité à l’aide médicale à mourir au Québec: la constance dans l’évolution de la loi concernant les soins de fin de vie,” June 9, 2023, https://csfv.gouv.qc.ca/ fileadmin/docs/autres_rapports/csfv_lcsfv_conditions_ amm_2023-06-29.pdf.; Trudo Lemmens, “When Death Becomes Therapy: Canada’s Troubling Normalization of Health Care Provider Ending of Life,” The American Journal of Bioethics 23, no. 11 (November 2, 2023): 79–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2023.2265265. [12] Justine Dembo, Udo Schuklenk, and Jonathan Reggler, “‘For Their Own Good’: A Response to Popular Arguments Against Permitting Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) Where Mental Illness Is the Sole Underlying Condition,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. Revue Canadienne De Psychiatrie 63, no. 7 (July 2018): 451–56, https://doi.org/10.1177/0706743718766055. [13] Konia Trouton et al., “Attitudes and Expectations Regarding Bereavement Support for Patients, Family Members, and Friends: Findings from a Survey of MAID Providers,” British Columbia Medical Journal 62, no. 1 (2020). [14] Bastidas-Bilbao et al., “Walking Alongside.” [15] Bastidas-Bilbao et al. [16] Trouton et al., “Attitudes and Expectations Regarding Bereavement Support for Patients, Family Members, and Friends: Findings from a Survey of MAID Providers,” 2020. [17] Ramona Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” Palliative & Supportive Care 21, no. 5 (October 2023): 871–78, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478951523001025; Health Canada, “Third Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2021,” report on plans and priorities;transparency - other, July 26, 2022, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-me dical-assistance-dying-2021.html; Lemmens, “When Death Becomes Therapy.” [18] Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” October 2023.; Bastidas-Bilbao et al., “Walking Alongside.” [19] Olivia Stefanovich, “Opposition Parties Call for Indefinite Pause to MAID Expansion for Mental Illness | CBC News,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, January 28, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/special-joint-committee-maid-mental-illness-report-1.7095679; Benjamin Lopez Steven, “Number of Assisted Deaths Jumped More than 30 per Cent in 2022, Report Says | CBC News,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, October 27, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/maid-canada-report-2022-1.7009704. [20] Hamer Bastidas-Bilbao et al., “Searching for Relief from Suffering: A Patient-Oriented Qualitative Study on Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Illness as the Sole Underlying Medical Condition,” Social Science & Medicine 331 (August 1, 2023): 116075, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116075. [21] Canadian Medical Association, “Canadian Medical Association Code of Ethics and Professionalism” (Canada: Canadian Medical Association, December 8, 2018), https://policybase.cma.ca/link/policy13937. [22] Canadian Medical Association. [23] Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” October 2023; Stefanovich, “Opposition Parties Call for Indefinite Pause to MAID Expansion for Mental Illness | CBC News.” [24] John Paul Tasker, “Liberal Government Promoting a ‘culture of Death’ with Medical Assistance in Dying Law, Conservative MP Says | CBC News,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, March 6, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/culture-of-death-medical-assistance-in-dying-mental-illness-1.67695 04. [25] Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” October 2023; Kayla Wiebe and Amy Mullin, “Choosing Death in Unjust Conditions: Hope, Autonomy and Harm Reduction,” Journal of Medical Ethics, April 26, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1136/jme-2022-108871. [26] Ramona Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” Palliative & Supportive Care 21, no. 5 (October 2023): 871–78, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478951523001025. [27] Konia Trouton et al., “Attitudes and Expectations Regarding Bereavement Support for Patients, Family Members, and Friends: Findings from a Survey of MAID Providers,” British Columbia Medical Journal 62, no. 1 (2020), https://bcmj.org/articles/attitudes-and-expectations-regarding-bereavement-support-patients-family-m embers-and.; William Robert Nielsen, “MAiD in Canada: Ethical Considerations in Medical Assistance in Dying,” Canadian Journal of Bioethics 4, no. 2 (December 9, 2021): 93–98, https://doi.org/10.7202/1084456ar. [28] Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” October 2023. [29] Lemmens, “When Death Becomes Therapy.” [30] William Robert Nielsen, “MAiD in Canada: Ethical Considerations in Medical Assistance in Dying,” Canadian Journal of Bioethics 4, no. 2 (December 1, 2021): 93–98, https://doi.org/10.7202/1084456ar. [31] Steven, “Number of Assisted Deaths Jumped More than 30 per Cent in 2022, Report Says | CBC News.” [32] A. Plaisance et al., “Quebec Population Highly Supportive of Extending Medical Aid in Dying to Incapacitated Persons and People Suffering Only from a Mental Illness: Content Analysis of Attitudes and Representations,” Ethics, Medicine and Public Health 21 (April 1, 2022): 100759, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jemep.2022.100759. (shrink)

What is ethics in the contemporary world? What is the need of defining ethics and, secondly, defining it in contemporary context? The meaning of ethics is so ambiguous to nonphilosophical academicians, corporate world, and others who look to the meaning in the branch of Philosophy called Ethics. At the end of endless debates, if the purpose of getting a definition is done, it is clarity in thinking in defining ethics which would happen. This may lead to clarity in the study (...) of ethics. And why should one study ethics at all? Ethics is interwoven at various levels in our life. The same individual is often in an obligation to face ethics at different levels like home, office, society, etc., or different ethical obligations. With a number of normative theories, the individual mind would be indefinite as to which one to follow. Is it just one theory alone which can be resorted to in an ethical dilemma or a combination of them? Are these theories practical also? Or are they just theories per se? To clear this ambiguity and in order to define ethics, the discussion of the meaning of ethics is important. This paper answers the above questions and throws light on the enquiry. This study hence is an exploratory one. Since the word ethics is interwoven with morality, it is worthwhile to define the word moral. (shrink)

The primary goal of this monograph is to justify the possibility of building a hybrid theory of normative ethics which can combine ethical consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. The aim of the book is to demonstrate the possibility of constructing a synthetic theory from ethical traditions that are generally considered to be contradictory. In addition, I propose an outline of an original theory which tries to carry out such a synthesis. I call it Institutional Function Consequentialism. The justification for (...) a hybrid theory of normative ethics requires the resolution of certain meta-ethical issues. I discuss them in part 1.1. After a brief overview of my research aims I consider the answer to the following questions: “What kind of meta-ethical beliefs must we assume for normative ethics?” and "Why should we build ethical theories?". I also discuss the various forms of ethical scepticism, which should be rejected if we develop a hybrid theory of normative ethics. I also describe possible methods of justifying any ethical theory. At the end of part 1.1 I explain that the best method for justifying any ethical theory is the method of wide reflective equilibrium. In parts 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 I analyse three main types of normative ethics which are considered to be competitive: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Part 1.2 is about consequentialism and its difference between utilitarianism and teleological theories. I also present the main reasons for the popularity of consequentialism. In part 1.3 I define deontology, present its variations and show important benefits that motivate its continuous growth. In part 1.4 I discuss virtue ethics, which is often referred as the viable alternative to consequentialism and deontology. If we want to build any new ethical theory, first we should describe the problems of the old ones. For this reason, in chapter 2 I describe the most important arguments against ethical consequentialism, and in chapter 3 I explain the difficulties of deontology. Critical remarks on virtue ethics are considered in part 1.4. The last two chapters directly concern the main aim of the monograph. Because in chapter 3 I show that deontology suffers from a number of problems such as the paradox of deontology, in chapters 4 and 5 I present only consequentialist versions of hybrid theories. These versions try to avoid the common pleas of utilitarianism and combine the advantages of opponents to utilitarianism. I answer the question (4.1) "What is hybrid consequentialism?" and briefly describe (4.2) the most important examples of hybrid theories by others. I discuss the prerogatives without restrictions idea by Samuel Scheffler, rule consequentialism by Brad Hooker, Kantian consequentialism by Richard M. Hare, David Cummiskey and Derek Parfit and consequentializing procedure proposed by Douglas W. Portmore. In the last chapter I present a new hybrid version of consequentialism that I call Institutional Function Consequentialism. I start from the thesis (5.1) that traditional meta-ethics of analytic philosophy incorrectly defines the main field of its research. Rather than focusing on the philosophy of language and metaphysics it should try to answer one question: “What should morality and ethics be for?”. Therefore I introduce an original methodology for meta-ethics that I call the Functional Model of Analysis (FMA). It is a meta-ethical framework in which the fundamental questions concern the practical functions of normative domains such as morality and ethics and the most rational way of achieving them. FMA is meta-ethical project that (a) explains the persistence of fundamental ethical disagreement among experts, (b) sets the background for explaining or justifying the correct structure of the ethical theory, (c) gives the possibility to create a hybrid theory of normative ethics. In part 5.2 I formulate a generalized argument against various popular theories of normative ethics which states that most of the popular theories are too narrow and one-sided, causing permanent dispute between them. There are many distinct practical functions of morality that are usually based on different types of normative theories such as Aristotelian ethics, utilitarianism, contractarianism and contractualism. In order to remove these conflicts, the correct ethical theory should try to take into account all of these relevant features of moral life. Unfortunately, most ethical theories are mono-functional. This means that their supporters consciously or unconsciously (1) recognize or accept only one genuine practical function, (2) think that this one practical function overrides all other practical functions or (3) try to reduce all practical functions to the one that is chosen. In part 5.2 I present a description and justification of a new normative account that I call Hybrid Function Consequentialism. The formal scheme of this consequentialism can be summarized in the following way: we should act according to some important focal points P1…Pn with contents C1…Cn that are selected on the basis of considerations about which kind of P with C will bring the best realization of the best mix of normative functions F1...Fn. In the next part (5.2.2) I present the new way of “consequentializing” particular theories of normative ethics by applying the scheme of Hybrid Function Consequentialism. As an example of the use of this procedure, I formulate perfectionist virtue consequentialism, contractarian institution consequentialism, contractualist rule consequentialism and consequentialism of salvation. In part 5.3 I formulate an original theoretical concept that I call Institutional Function Consequentialism (IFC). It is a hybrid theory that is based on the previously described Functional Model of Analysis and a reflection on the role of institutions in modern developed societies. IFC claims that we should always act according to some rules, virtues, motives and intentions that constitute the homeostasis of normative institutions whose internalization by the overwhelming majority of each new generation has maximum expected value in terms of the best realization of the equilibrium of the most important practical functions of normative domains. Responsibility and sanctions related to wrongful actions should be dependent on the particular institution whose standards have been violated. IFC has several unique features which are described and justified in part 5.3. It is a form of hybrid consequentialism – it mixes features of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. It does this on three different levels: justification, structure and content. The main focal point of the theory is not rules or virtues, but normative institutions. Values to be optimized in the framework of consequentialism are not "happiness", "well-being" or "preferences", but the fulfilment of normative functions. IFC is not limited to the field of ethics only, but it is a meta-normative account of justification for an entire social order which is comprised of a number of different institutions. It also assumes a specific, circular relationship between practical ethics (e.g. research on such important issues as civil disobedience, fair distribution of wealth, philosophy of punishment or autonomy of conscience), and the content of the general rules that may constitute the optimal homeostasis of institutions. It rejects the simplistic belief that moral thinking is based solely on deductive implications from general ethical principles or meta-ethical beliefs. (shrink)

Drawing heavily on recent empirical research to update R.M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism and expand Hare's treatment of "intuitive level rules," Gary Varner considers in detail the theory's application to animals while arguing that Hare should have recognized a hierarchy of persons, near-persons, & the merely sentient.

Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a (...) “living ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process. (shrink)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed (...) task was that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore's early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of 'good', its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with 'emotive' meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell's ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson's theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl's project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the apriori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy conducted in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach's theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of 'values' – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler, who claimed to be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience utilitarianism -/- The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick's and Moore's fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This transformation results in preference utilitarianism combined with a 'Kantian' version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare's two-level preference utilitarianism, where act utilitarianism plays the function of the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs the post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named 'Rehabilitation of practical philosophy' is described. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle's lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger's lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot's and Peter Geach's critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre's grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic ethics -/- The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin's new casuistry. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls' view never will be close – on the essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

‘Moral economy’ has become a popular concept in empirical research in disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology and political science. This research utilizes normative concepts and has obvious normative implications and relevance. However, there has been little to no dialogue between this research and philosophers working on normative ethics. The present article seeks to remedy this situation by highlighting fertile points of dialogue between descriptive and normative ethicists. The proposition is that empirical researchers can become (...) more precise and stringent in their descriptions of moral attitudes and traditions with a greater understanding of normative ethics; and, at the same time, philosophers have much to gain from a closer examination of the realities of moral thinking and social action. The concurrent examination of both strands of research may be especially rewarding. (shrink)

This article defends the centrality of practical wisdom in medical practice by building on a monistic view of moral virtue, termed the “Aretai model,” according to which possession of practical wisdom is necessary and sufficient for virtuousness, grounding both moral growth and effective moral behavior. From this perspective, we argue that practical wisdom should be conceived as a cross-situational ethical expertise consisting of four skills:moral perception, moral deliberation, emotion regulation, and moral (...) motivation. Conceiving of practical wisdom as both overall virtuousness and ethical expertise makes it possible to deal adequately with the uniqueness of concrete ethically relevant situations. We contend that this becomes particularly evident in the context of medical practice, both in terms of decision-making and action-taking, especially in the most challenging or contentious clinical cases. We conclude the article by suggesting the potential implications of the Aretai model for continuing education in medical and healthcare professions. (shrink)

Bioethical research has tended to focus on theoretical discussion of the principles on which the analysis of ethical issues in biomedicine should be based. But this discussion often seems remote from biomedical practice where researchers and physicians confront ethical problems. On the other hand, published empirical research on the ethical reasoning of health care professionals offer only descriptions of how physicians and nurses actually reason ethically. The question remains whether these descriptions have any normative implications for nurses and physicians? (...) In this article, we illustrate an approach that integrates empirical research into the formulation of normative ethical principles using the moral-philosophical method of Wide Reflective Equilibrium (WRE). The research method discussed in this article was developed in connection with the project ‘Bioethics in Theory and Practice’. The purpose of this project is to investigate ethical reasoning in biomedical practice in Denmark empirically. In this article, we take the research method as our point of departure, but we exclusively discuss the theoretical framework of the method, not its empirical results. We argue that the descriptive phenomenological hermeneutical method developed by Lindseth and Norberg (2004) and Pedersen (1999) can be combined with the theory of WRE to arrive at a decision procedure and thus a foundation for the formulation of normative ethical principles. This could provide health care professionals and biomedical researchers with normative principles about how to analyse, reason and act in ethically difficult situations in their practice. We also show how to use existing bioethical principles as inspiration for interpreting the empirical findings of qualitative studies. This may help researchers design their own empirical studies in the field of ethics. (shrink)

I think that utilitarianism is a good moral theory, and definitely better than its rivals, deontology and teleology. For practical purposes in multicultural contexts, at least, I think that no one should overlook a theory that is able to take into account a variety of ethical views and accommodate the ever-changing facts of the material world. But utilitarianism has a bad reputation in bioethics. It is often seen as the inhumane theory that allows the sacrifice of minorities, the (...) killing of the innocent, and simplistic calculations on the value of life. Hardly anyone cares to remember that most formulations of the theory do not allow these actions. The economic doctrine sometimes labeled as utilitarianism could be guilty as charged, but ethics and economy are not interchangeable words. Also as a theory that can actually propose answers to no-win situations, utilitarianism has been an easy target for criticism. (shrink)

Advances in technology have made it possible for us to take actions that affect the numbers and identities of humans and other animals that will live in the future. Effective and inexpensive birth control, child allowances, genetic screening, safe abortion, in vitro fertilization, the education of young women, sterilization programs, environmental degradation and war all have these effects. Although it is true that a good deal of effort has been devoted to the practical side of population policy, moral (...) theory has not dealt adequately with the new possibilities. The dilemma faced by moral theory is that traditional theories cannot answer moral questions involving the creation of people. Two related problems arise. The first concerns numbers: how many people should there be? The second asks what sort of people should live and what their levels of well-being should be. Conventional social-contract theories, including the work of Rawls (1971), are restricted to situations with a fixed number of individuals. Sumner (1978) attempts to extend a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance approach to possible people but is aware of the difficulties involved. The main problem is that possible people must be thought to benefit when they move from non-existence to existence, a view that we reject (see Section 1, Heyd, 1992, Chapter 1; McMahan, 1996a; Parfit, 1984, Appendix G). Rights-based and duty-based theories suffer from a similar problem; there must be a person who has the right or a person to whom the duty is owed (see McMahan, 1981). (shrink)

Recently in this journal, Jessica Morley and colleagues (AI & SOC 2023 38:411–423) review AI ethics and education, suggesting that a cultural shift is necessary in order to prepare students for their responsibilities in developing technology infrastructure that should shape ways of life for many generations. Current AI ethics guidelines are abstract and difficult to implement as practical moral concerns proliferate. They call for improvements in ethics course design, focusing on real-world cases and perspective-taking tools to immerse students (...) in challenging situations with relatable personal, social and environmental implications. The present paper considers the ACTWith model of moral cognition for use in such training contexts. Morley and colleagues' paper and contemporary literature are reviewed. Whistleblowing as a source for relatable case studies is discussed, and the purpose of ethics education considered. The ACTWith model is introduced, and correlations with contemporaries noted. The ACTWith model has been successfully employed in a broad range of technology ethics courses in the Netherlands and South Korea. Illustrations are offered. Correlations with contemporary efforts are drawn in the context of software engineering. Summary discussion considers strengths and limitations of the ACTWith program. Overall, the paper emphasizes training high-level moral reasoning through guided inquiry education informing lifetime professional practice, and indicates an outstanding need for teachers able to do the job. (shrink)

We conducted an on-line survey to investigate the professor’s idea of “morality” and then to compare their moral thinking at the abstract level with their moral thinking in the real life situations by sampling 257 professors from the University of Novi Sad. We constructed questionnaire based on related theoretical ethical concepts. Our results show (after we performed exploratory factor analysis) that the professor’s idea of “morality” consists of the three moral thinking patterns which are simultaneously activated during (...) the process of their abstract moral thinking. We have identified these patterns in the following manner: deontological, formal and subjective pattern. In addition, our results show that of the three, the subjective pattern is more activated than the other two during their process of the moral thinking at the abstract level. We also discovered that there is a statistically significant difference between professor’s moral thinking patterns activation level at the abstract level and their moral thinking patterns activation level in the real life situation. (shrink)

The insistence of utilitarian philosophers on the moral relevance of the fact that animals can suffer has made utilitarian moral thinking central to debates on animal ethics at least since Jeremy B...

This book develops an intellectual framework for analyzing ethical dilemmas that is both grounded in theory and versatile enough to deal rigorously with real-world issues. It sees ethics as a necessary foundation for the social infrastructure that makes modern life possible, much as engineering is a foundation for physical infrastructure. It is not wedded to any particular ethical philosophy but draws from several traditions to construct a unified and principled approach to ethical reasoning. Rather than follow the common academic practice (...) of seeking a reflective equilibrium of moral intuitions and principles, it builds on a few bedrock principles of rational thought that serve as criteria for valid argumentation. It develops the ideas from the ground up, without presupposing any background in ethics or philosophy. Epistemologically, the book views ethics as parallel to mathematics, in that it relies on generally accepted proof techniques to establish results. Whereas mathematics rests on such proof paradigms as mathematical induction and proof by contradiction, ethics can be seen as relying on proof by applying consistency tests, such as generalizability and respect for autonomy. Utilitarianism also plays a key role, but it is reconceived as a deontological criterion. This approach obviously requires that these criteria be formulated more rigorously than is normally the case. To accomplish this, the book begins with the classical idea that an action is distinguishable from mere behavior by virtue of its having a coherent rationale, where coherence requires passing certain consistency tests such as generalizability. An action is therefore inseparable from its rationale, and generalizability is defined in terms of consistency with the rationale. A utilitarian criterion receives a similar treatment with respect to a means-end rationale. Respect for autonomy is grounded in a carefully developed action theory that takes into account such concepts as joint autonomy, implied consent, and the permissibility of interference with unethical behavior. It provides an account of responsibility that is both practical and theoretically satisfying, and it yields a novel solution of the much-discussed trolley car dilemmas. The book is written for a general audience and strives to be as readable and engaging as possible, while maintaining rigor. It begins by dispelling a raft of misconceptions that trivialize ethics and block its development as an essential tool of modern life, such as the notion that ethics is just a matter of opinion without rational foundation. After presenting the ethical principles just described, along with many examples, it provides several chapters that analyze real-life dilemmas, many obtained from the author's students and professional workshop participants. One cannot understand physics or chemistry without seeing how their principles are applied to real problems, and the same is true of ethics. These chapters demonstrate that a unified normative theory can deal with a wide range of real cases while achieving a reasonable level of objectivity and rigor. (shrink)

One of the crucial issues of modern universalistic theories of practical philosophy is the theoretical justification of normative principles and moral judgments that enables their universal validity. The problems these theories face are caused by separating rational theorizing from contexts of real life. That is the separation of theoretical justification and practice. The common for modern practical philosophy opposition between universalism and contextualism is reinterpreted today, new theories of post-metaphysical universalism appear that provide the developments of (...) the last universalistic project of discourse ethics in the context of a critical theory of the “third generation”. The purpose of this article is to present the ethical philosophy of Hannah Arendt as the original conception where the Kantian theory of judgment and the Aristotelian notion of phronesis are brought together in order to clarify the nature of ethical and moral statements. This problem, as the article highlights, lies in the understanding of subsumption of particular under universal. Universal judgments according to Arendt are justified in the Kantian theory of “enlarged mentality” as the human capacity to interact in communication and activity. The sensitivity to situations is reflected in the Aristotelian notion of phronesis. As Arendt’s justification of normative and ethical judgments is analyzed, the hermeneutic character of her theory is revealed, which is appropriate for the theory of J. Habermas and modern followers of critical theory. The article provides additional insight into the concept of “public space” as the realm which enables the overlapping of theory and practice. As proved the “public space” in the practical philosophy of Hannah Arendt becomes the realm of mutual ethical and moral thinking where judgments are oriented to the level of the human condition in general. The paper concludes by arguing that Arendt’s conception may overcome the opposition between universalism and contextualism, which is relevant in current ethical discourse. (shrink)

The question of the legitimacy of the business world has received more attention in recent years, often leading to a call to 'increase' the moral thinking ofeconomic actors. I argue however that the latter has not decreased. Relying on Kohlberg's model of moral development, I suggest that most actors still show a conventional level of moral thinking, i.e., abide by the standards prevailing in their environment. What has however changed are those standards. In consequence, I suggest that (...) solving the actual legitimacy crisis requires a change of the norms of the business system, more than an increase of managers' morality. Leaders ready to set new standards and to develop alternative business research and teaching paradigms are needed. (shrink)

The implications of the repugnant conclusion for consequentialist theories, such as total utilitarianism, have been extensively discussed since the work of Derek Parfit. These discussions make the paradoxes of population ethics depend on welfarist conditions, like the dominance condition (or the Pareto Principle). Thus, one might think that the repugnant conclusion is not a practical problem for deontologists, who deny that we always ought to do what produces the most aggregate welfare. In this study, we offer two impossibility results (...) using what we call the limit aggregation property. This states that when welfaristic and non-welfaristic considerations conflict, there is a threshold number of persons such that the former can override the latter as long as more people than the threshold number can enjoy increases in well-being levels. We argue that this property should be accepted even by deontologists, insofar as they do not commit themselves to the implausible absolutist position that fails to assign any moral weight to aggregate welfare. Our results therefore state that any normative population theory that is not absolutist entails (a variant of) the repugnant conclusion or some other implausible conclusion. Therefore, the repugnant conclusion must be taken seriously even by non-absolutist deontologists, not just consequentialists. (shrink)

Ethics, Aging and Society...is the first major work in ten years to critically address issues and methodologies in aging and ethics...This well-organized volume begins theoretically and offers new ways of thinking about ethics that can handle the complexities and realities of aging in particular social contexts."--Choice This new research-based book, by experts in the field of ethics, is excellent and much-needed...I challenge you to consider reading this book and seeing all the ways in which you might be forced to rethink (...) things that most of us take as given for ethics and aging. I know you will not be disappointed and I guarantee you will end up thinking long and hard about personal and professional decisions you may have made as well as your assumptions about aging in America."--CFLE Network Newsletter This is a book that should be required reading for all involved in the ethical provision of services to the aging on any level, as well as for policy makers and administrators in positions of influence over the lives of older patients."--PsycCRITIQUES...the authors' application of feminist ethics to frail elders rings true to both my clinical experience working with frail elders, and my research experience trying to understand their quality of life concerns...there were true gems of ideas [in this book] that illuminated the limitations of the dominant paradigm of autonomy in bioethics. [The authors] make a compelling critique of end-of-life care."--GeriPal: A Geriatrics and Palliative Care Blog This book presents second generation issues in ethics, aging, and society by presenting critical outcomes that arise when ethics is applied to the practical concerns that occur in day-to-day elder care. The first volume in over 10 years to address ethics and gerontology, it is unparalleled in its comprehensiveness and integration of well-developed philosophical arguments with empirical research, humanistic scholarship, and insights gained from practical experience. This book challenges the tried and true approaches to ethical issues in aging and opens avenues for creative problem-solving. The authors' diverse backgrounds bring the advantages of both interdisciplinary scholarship and practical experience to this comprehensive textbook. It is an essential resource for those interested in, and working with, older people, from upper-level undergraduate students and graduate-division students, to gerontology practitioners in training. Key Features: Presents the first major work in over 10 years to integrate the disciplines of ethics and aging Includes case studies derived from day-to-day practice Addresses individual/clinical ethics in health and long-term care and ethical issues raised by public policy, cultural norms and social attitudes Examines such critical issues as Alzheimer's disease, long-term care, ageism, public policy, anti-aging medicine, elder abuse, and natural disasters Explores new directions in ethical and social philosophy as they pertain to gerontology and care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Health Care Ethics: Theological Foundations, Contemporary Issues, and Controversial Cases, revised edition by Michael R. Panicola, David M. Belde, John Paul Slosar, and Mark F. Repenshek, and: On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, third edition ed. by M. Therese Lysaught and Joseph J. Kotva Jr. with Stephen E. Lammers and Allen VerheyLindsey EsbensenReview of Health Care Ethics: Theological Foundations, Contemporary Issues, and Controversial Cases, revised (...) edition MICHAEL R. PANICOLA, DAVID M. BELDE, JOHN PAUL SLOSAR, AND MARK F. REPENSHEK Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2011. 438 pp. $37.95Review of On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, third edition EDITED BY M. THERESE LYSAUGHT AND JOSEPH J. KOTVA JR. WITH STEPHEN E. LAMMERS AND ALLEN VERHEY Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 1180 pp. $61.55Health Care Ethics and On Moral Medicine are excellent resources for those studying and teaching in the field of medical ethics. Each text on its own provides a very good initial evaluation of contemporary conversations in health care ethics. Together they provide a thorough foundation for the study of health care ethics that encourages further exploration of topics in the field. They both provide an excellent overview for undergraduate students as well as anyone interested in the field of medical morality.Health Care Ethics is especially helpful for those entering the field of ethics in general and the more particular realm of medical morality. User-friendly, [End Page 211] the book is accessible to beginners while also being relevant to those already well-versed in medical ethics. The book provides case studies culled from the experiences of the authors throughout their careers in the practice of medical ethics. Perhaps even more useful, however, are the other exercises in which readers are given the opportunity to actively engage the text in order to discover and more fully articulate their own moral stance. Although Health Care Ethics approaches the topic from a theological perspective, using scriptural passages as well as broader religious themes and contexts, the book is accessible to those outside of the religious arena as well.The first three chapters lay the framework for general theological and ethical inquiry while the later chapters discuss more specific topics in applied health care ethics. The opening chapters by Michael Panicola are thought-provoking, especially since they encourage readers to participate in exercises to determine how they would respond to particular scenarios in their personal decision making. For example, after laying out the classic ethical theories, readers are asked to take a “quiz” by responding to multiple-choice questions to determine how they would respond to various ethical situations. The exercise demonstrates that moral discernment that relies on one ethical theory alone or one single approach to ethics is too narrow and confining for authentic dialogue in ethics. Another exercise calls upon readers to examine their fundamental bases for personal decision making by asking them to create a list of what they think are the ten things that constitute human flourishing and then narrow that list down to the top two. In addition to being engaging, these exercises help readers establish their personal moral stance by asking them to appropriate foundational norms in the process of moral discernment to the case studies throughout the book. They also help readers apply these norms to the specific topics in health care ethics presented in the later chapters.The authors of Health Care Ethics clearly identify human flourishing as the center and goal for all ethical inquiry. Demonstrating that “human flourishing” has different connotations for different people, they also argue that certain norms can be agreed upon to establish a framework for all conversations regarding moral decision making in health care. They especially emphasize a concern for the optimization of human flourishing in final chapters of the text. Chapters 4–12 provide detailed examinations of current topics in medical ethics. Each chapter includes case studies that raise questions concerning social ethics as well as health care morality, employing sources from law, sociology, philosophy, and theology. Each case underscores the complexity of moral decision making in health care ethics as well as the point that there is no one, pure approach to medical ethics that... (shrink)

Photo by Karl Raymund Catabas on Unsplash “After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. – And we – we must still defeat his shadow as well!” – Friedrich Nietzsche[1] INTRODUCTION Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead!”[2] but lamented that his contemporaries remained living in the (...) shadow of God. For Nietzsche, the morality of his time was still based in the Christian tradition, even though faith in God was waning. Bioethics lives under a similar shadow: the shadow of Enlightenment Era-rationalism. Bioethics curricula focus on principles derived from Kantian deontology and utilitarianism. The allure of maintaining a moral framework that provides a rational method that can be handily applied to any situation remains strong. The principlist approach advanced by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress is taught to nearly all medical students in the United States,[3] and is essentially the canonical ethical framework of bioethics. In this model, the principle of autonomy is Kantian in nature, and the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence are utilitarian in nature.[4] Moreover, the presented framework is an approach that, when applied rationally to any healthcare scenario, will yield an outcome “considered moral.”[5] This reflects a faulty conception of philosophy that plagues much of bioethics, wherein the only contribution of philosophy pertinent to bioethics is moral philosophy elucidated by European thinkers in the Enlightenment Era. The landscape of moral philosophy has evolved significantly from the 18th century. However, the bioethical world has not kept up with the philosophical world, remaining instead in the shadow of antiquated moral thinking. Also lacking in bioethics are other disciplines of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, existentialism, and aesthetics, which are often given no consideration at all. The inclusion of both modern moral philosophy and other philosophical fields is necessary if bioethics is to survive its transition into modernity. l. The Shadow of Enlightenment Enlightenment Era philosophers such as Immanuel Kant argued that one need only employ reason to obtain knowledge; emotion bore no relevance when determining ethical behavior. Kant’s moral theories thus privileged a duty to act according to moral imperatives over feelings. Other Enlightenment Era philosophers such as John Locke developed systems that attempted to quantify human goods and human ills. This quantification potentially reduces human welfare and suffering to utility. Today, in the world of philosophy, such a “neutral analysis,” as Cora Diamond noted, is “dead or moribund.”[6] Bernard Williams remarked that such moral philosophy is “empty and boring,”[7] and G. E. M. Anscombe stated that it “no longer generally survives.”[8] And yet, just as the atheists in Nietzsche’s world dwelt in the moral code of a dead God, bioethicists still pursue a unified moral system that takes an input, applies some moral rules, and generates a moral outcome, like the four principles approach that Beauchamp and Childress laid out.[9] Some detractors of principlism take issue with their approach for not being unified enough and want to replace it with a procedural framework that is even more systematic and complicated. They argue that the resulting moral framework would be a “comprehensive decision procedure for arriving at answers”[10] that retains the “impartiality that is an essential part of morality.”[11] The shadow of rationalist morality has caused bioethical decision making to become detached and rigid when bioethics should concern itself with the humans whose lives it affects. A rational, divorced-from-emotion way of thinking ultimately fails to yield satisfactory results when decisions are made by and for emotional beings. Dr. Paul Farmer, among others, championed the idea that bioethics should be de-philosophized, as philosophy, cold and calculated, fails to adequately respond to the realities of those worst off.[12] Instead, Dr. Farmer emphasized the inclusion of the social sciences, like sociology and anthropology, in bioethics. Undoubtedly, Dr. Farmer was on the right track; bioethics should certainly engage directly with the people whom its decisions involve. If the narrow band of moral philosophy currently found in bioethics – that of stringent rationalism – were all that philosophy had to offer, I, too, would advocate for a de-philosophization. Ludwig Wittgenstein notes that to attempt to capture the complexity of moral thinking in a manner that employs reason alone and casts aside emotion is a “hopeless task,” like reconstructing a sharp image “from a blurred one.”[13] Unfortunately, bioethics is mired in the remnants of this hopeless task. To Dr. Farmer, the dominant moral framework was too restrictive and was unresponsive to the social and humanitarian needs of those whom bioethics is meant to help. As such, he wished to free bioethics from the shadow of a morality derived from rationalist thinkers. ll. Beyond Rationalism Like Nietzsche, who tried to resolve Europe’s post-religion vacuum by providing his society with a new way to live, Dr. Farmer wanted to replace the rationalist philosophy upon which bioethics was built with a “resocialization” of the field.[14] I agree with Dr. Farmer’s call for resocialization, as well as his denouncement of philosophy as it exists in bioethics. Evaluating risks and benefits along a predetermined array of moral principles is far too rigid and impersonal to guide what are often the most important decisions one will make. For Dr. Farmer, the most needed change was restoring the social element of bioethics. However, in advocating for this resocialization, Dr. Farmer casts philosophy as the antithesis of social science, noting that “few would regard philosophy … as a socializing discipline.”[15] I disagree. Rationalist moral philosophy may be lacking in socializing force, but there are other fields of philosophy that are responsive to our social reality. Rather than de-philosophizing bioethics, it makes more sense to replace the antisocial philosophies predominant in bioethics with prosocial philosophies better suited to it. Of course, the contribution of philosophy to bioethics is more than moral theories from the Enlightenment Era. There are more recent philosophical contributions from outside the field of moral philosophy that have roused bioethical interest. Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, et al., argue for philosophy’s continued place in bioethics, citing Derek Parfit’s “non-identity problem,” which altered the landscape of reproductive ethics, and David Chalmers’ contributions to philosophy of consciousness, which have implications for the moral status of brain organoids.[16] Still, these are narrow applications of philosophy to highly specialized areas of bioethics, which not all bioethicists are inclined to delve into. Philosophy in bioethics should not be confined to niche applications in specialist fields but should influence all bioethical thought. Fortunately, there remains untapped a wealth of philosophical disciplines that pertains to exactly this. Philosophy of language investigates the nature of meaning and understanding in communication, which is a necessary social action. Successfully deciphering and conveying moral values in discourse is a bioethicist’s bread and butter, as is resolving disagreements and reaching agreements. Indeed, it is often the case that miscommunication lies at the root of an impasse between a doctor and a patient. An understanding of the nature of the disagreement would help resolve the conflict, as different types of disagreements require different interventions for resolution. For instance, a “substantive disagreement,”[17] in which two parties use the same terms in the same ways and have a fundamental disagreement on which outcome is more desirable, can be resolved only if one party yields to the other. On the other hand, a “merely verbal dispute,”[18] in which two parties use the same terms to represent entirely different concepts and values, requires standardization of terminological usage for its resolution. As such, no one can overstate the moral importance of successful communication in bioethics, and an exploration of language itself would prove invaluable to a bioethicist’s training. Existentialism is another subset of philosophy that acknowledges the social nature of human existence, noting that one’s being in the universe is concomitant with the existence of others sharing the same universe.[19] Thus, there is the recognition that whatever existence is, it is not complete without the existence of others. With this as a starting point, existentialists examined how to live meaningfully with others in this world. Since ethics crucially involves others, it is no surprise that existentialists pondered how to live moral lives. Existentialist conceptions of morality did not revolve around acting in accordance with a set of rules, but rather, recognized individual freedom in choosing how to act and emphasized acting authentically. In this vein, bioethicists should commit to doing what is right rather than committing to applying a set of principles. Existentialism, while part of the broader bioethics literature, is less common throughout bioethics curricula and deserves more prominence. Martin Heidegger, for instance, emphasized the difference between two types of thinking: “calculative thinking” and “meditative thinking.” Heidegger characterizes calculative thinking as a computation, wherein from some given starting conditions “definite results”[20] are determined, and contrasts this with meditative thinking, which he describes as “thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.”[21] Heidegger was critical of the pervasiveness of calculative thinking, seeing it as the “ground of thoughtlessness,”[22] in which we only relate to the world in a meaningless, mechanical way. This is the emphasized type of thinking in rationalist conceptions of morality popular in bioethics; from a set of starting conditions, a series of rules are applied, and a moral outcome is calculated. Such a technique, however, discounts the personal meaning individuals place on the aspects of their lives relevant to their decision making, as well as the meaning in committing to doing what is right. Under calculative thinking, such a commitment is reduced to rote rule-following. A turn to meditative thinking would ensure that bioethical decisions comport with living meaningful lives. Even aesthetics, a discipline devoted to examining beauty and taste,[23] has a place in bioethics. Just as the viewing of a painting, the listening of a song, or the reading of a book elicits an effective response, hearing a patient’s story leaves an emotional imprint. The recounting of a traumatic moment imparts sadness, and a joyous occasion begets joy in the listener as well. As acknowledged in the field of everyday aesthetics, these aesthetic experiences often spur us to act:[24] The unsightly appearance of a polluted riverbank drives us to remove the trash; the presence of sorrow in one’s life drives us to ameliorate it. To be mindful of aesthetic experiences and allow them to affect us emotionally is paramount to the motivation of a bioethicist to serve the patient, not out of an obligation to a job description, but out of a desire to truly avail the patient of their anguish. For example, the new field of narrative medicine utilizes critical reading and literary techniques to train clinicians and bioethicists in emotional understanding and listening skills that stress the social aspects of medicine beyond rational analysis and decision making. CONCLUSION Dr. Farmer is absolutely correct; bioethics is in dire need of resocialization. It should not be the case that the justification for a moral action is essentially that “the rules say so,” or that simply by teaching such rules to medical students, the very act of making bioethical decisions that diverge from those determined by principles can be seen as an act of “bad faith … hubris or, worse, malpractice.”[25] As bioethicists are coming to realize, the rationalist philosophical traditions that bioethics was founded upon are past their expiry, and the time for change is now. Indeed, as Dr. Farmer urges, “socializing disciplines” like anthropology, history, political economy, and sociology are necessary to humanize the field of bioethics.[26] So too, however, can philosophy be a socializing discipline, if we know where to look. Bioethics should evolve. Its new goal should be to focus on meaningful human relationships, and to phase out rigid, impersonal modes of moral thinking. The limited sampling of unsatisfying moral theories from hundreds of years ago leaves many bioethics students cold, and it is easy to see why bioethicists are ready to part ways with philosophy. I believe this is a move in the wrong direction; there is a place for philosophy in the future of bioethics. Just as bioethics needs a resocialization, it is also needs of a re-philosophization. These enrichments complement one another. There is more to bioethics than mechanically determining the right course of action in a healthcare setting. Bioethics engages with the most ancient of philosophical questions: questions of what makes human existence meaningful, what makes us who we are, how we want to relate to others, how and why we feel, what our place in the world is, how we can communicate what we think, and why our moral intuitions are so compelling. We would be remiss if we did not begin to investigate additional contributions to morality from a wider range of philosophies that try to provide answers to such questions, as they offer a richness to moral thinking that cannot be gleaned from traditional bioethical approaches alone. - [1] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, Josefine Nauckhoff, and Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 109. [2] Nietzsche, 120. [3] Daniel C O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced: Principlism, Narrative Ethics, and the Case of Living Donor Liver Transplantation,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 47, no. 1 : 97, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhab039. [4] K. D. Clouser and B. Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 15, no. 2 : 219–36, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/15.2.219. [5] O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced,” 97. [6] Cora Diamond, “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 : 168, https://doi.org/10.2307/468998. [7] Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Canto ed, xvii. [8] G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 : 1, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100037943. [9] Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 7th ed, 13. [10] Clouser and Gert, 233. [11] Clouser and Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” 235. [12] Paul Farmer and Nicole Gastineau Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics: A View from Below,” Developing World Bioethics 4, no. 1 : 17–41, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-8731.2004.00065.x. [13] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. Joachim Schulte, trans. P. M. S. Hacker, 4th edition, 40. [14] Farmer and Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics,” 20. [15] Farmer and Campos, 20. [16] Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby et al., “The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today,” The American Journal of Bioethics: AJOB, June 30, 2021, 3–5, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1940355. [17] Brendan Balcerak Jackson, “Verbal Disputes and Substantiveness,” Erkenntnis 79, no. S1 : 31–54, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9444-5. [18] C. S. I. Jenkins, “Merely Verbal Disputes,” Erkenntnis 79, no. 1 : 11–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9443-6. [19] Steven Crowell, “Existentialism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/existentialism/; Anita Avramides, “Other Minds,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/other-minds/. [20] Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, Harper Torchbooks, 46. [21] Heidegger, 46. [22] Heidegger, 45. [23] Nick Zangwill, “Aesthetic Judgment,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/aesthetic-judgment/. [24] Yuriko Saito, “Aesthetics of the Everyday,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/aesthetics-of-everyday/. [25] O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced,” 112. [26] Farmer and Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics,” 20. (shrink)

IntroductionIn May 2006, the small group of doctoral students working on ecophilosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at K.U.Leuven invited the Dutch environmental philosopher Martin Drenthen to a workshop to discuss his writings on the concept of wilderness, its metaphysical and moral meaning, and the challenge social constructivism poses for ecophilosophy and environmental protection. Drenthen’s publications on these topics had already been the subject of intense discussions in the months preceding the workshop. His presentation on the workshop and (...) the three critical responses by Wim Bollen, Glenn Deliège, and Richard Kover are published here in a thoroughly revised form on the basis of further and ongoing discussions about the issues involved. Three further contributions to the discussion are added: one by Nathan Edward Kowalski, a young Canadian philosopher who studied in Leuven and wrote his as yet unpublished dissertation on “Evil in Nature,” a second one by Kingsley Goodwin who is currently writing a dissertation on deep ecology at University College in Dublin and, finally, my own unsystematic thoughts inspired by Martin Drenthen’s provocative and stimulating hermeneutics of our postmodern understanding of nature and wilderness, as well as the diverse critical responses to Drenthen’s views by the other contributors. I owe gratitude to all of them for enriching my own ecophilosophical thought and enlarging its horizon although as my fragmentary reflections show at the cost of yet greater uncertainty and more questions about the possibilities of arguing for a radical environmentalist position. Such a position would somehow connect or ground our moral obligation to preserve genuine non-human otherness, wild and free nature, in the non-human meaning of such nature and in our essential need to be in direct and concrete contact with that field of wild non-human meaning because we ourselves belong to nature, because we are not only and purely civilized but are also and most fundamentally wild and free. Three fundamental questions need to be distinguished: the question about our moral obligations regarding nature and its preservation, the metaphysical question about the nature of nature or the meaning of nature, and the question of the metaphysical grounding of our morals in general, and of our moral obligation regarding nature in particular, in the nature or meaning of nature. The complex intertwinement between these three questions is at the heart of Martin Drenthen’s reflections.The authors contributing to the present discussion approach the various issues from markedly different philosophical backgrounds and concerns: critical theory, anthropology, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deep ecology are all to some degree or other brought to bear on the question of what wilderness means for us, why we are fascinated by it and what it actually and in the first place is.Another interesting difference between the five respondents to Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy relates to the place from which they write: while the Canadians Richard Kover and Nathan Edward Kowalski have wilderness of some sort still close at hand, the Belgians Wim Bollen and Glenn Deliège write from a place which has been thoroughly domesticated, cultivated, and industrialised for a long time. Martin Drenthen himself, of course, writes from the same kind of place as these last two, which explains why he only refers to the wilderness that he has read about in novels, seen in movies, or experienced as recreated in the reserves of the Netherlands. The Irish Kingsley Goodwin writes perhaps from a third, intermediate place that is not wild anymore but still much more natural than Belgium or the Netherlands are.The differences in philosophical approach and concern combined with the difference of place generate a rich tapestry of perspectives and voices wrestling with the fundamental questions of our perceived homelessness and alienation from nature, our cultural discontent, our longing for and need for radical alterity, of immanence and transcendence, of who we are and where we belong, and more concretely of whether there is more to ground our efforts to preserve nature than enlightened self-interest and subjective preference. Martin Drenthen deserves praise for inaugurating this fruitful discussion with his intriguing and highly paradoxical effort to hybridize a postmodern deconstruction of the idea and ideal of wilderness as unspoilt and true nature on the one hand with a new metaphysics of wilderness on the other. Arne Naess, who is generally regarded as the founding father of deep ecology, pointed out the positive and stimulating role that vagueness in the expression of ideas can play in political and philosophical debate. Such general and vague but highly suggestive expressions as ‘all life is one’ are not empty at all, as is often claimed; they are rather full of possibilities of ‘precisation’ and differentiation. Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy is certainly not vague to the degree of ‘all life is one,’ but his expositions are similarly pregnant with a wealth of further questions, precisations, distinctions, and conceptual clarifications. Good examples of different kinds are to be found in the contributions of Nathan Edward Kowalski and Richard Kover. Kowalski points out that Drenthen’s notions of culture and wilderness need to be made more precise by distinguishing them from the notions of civilization and wildness such that wild cultures become a conceptual possibility. Richard Kover takes the lead from Drenthen’s question about the reason for our postmodern fascination for wilderness to confront it with our primordial fascination in terms of the dependence in the evolution of our subjectivity and our consciousness on the focused perceptual attention on wild forms.Glenn Deliège situates Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy in its original context of the Dutch debate on the preservation of nature, in particular on the new wilderness paradigm. According to this paradigm, the nature to be preserved should be true and pure, truly natural and wild nature, that is nature outside of and free from the cultivating and domesticating influence of humans. In the Netherlands, however, such nature no longer exists; it can only be preserved after it has first been artificially recreated. Deliège gives an informative summary account of the highly charged three-cornered debate between the adepts of this wilderness-paradigm, the proponents of the more traditional form of conservation of remnants of the typical European landscapes created by pre-industrial farming practices and the modern technocratic functionalists. This debate makes obvious that there are quite different views of the nature of nature and its value. Enter social constructivism: the contested nature of nature is nothing more than a social construct, an idea in a collective mind. The contestation itself is a struggle for authority and power between different such social constructs, any claim to scientific objectivity and objective truth for one’s image of nature is an arrogation of a truth which doesn’t exist and is potentially oppressive by silencing other views. Nature then is up for the grabs of politics, political negotiation, and compromise between various interest groups who all want to get some benefit from nature, some use-value.The problem with Drenthen’s effort to articulate a normative concept of nature which cannot be deconstructed in this way is the extreme formality and emptiness of his metaphysical concept of wilderness as that which is always ‘beyond’, always ‘more’ and which can never be exhausted by any image and construction of nature. Any more concrete determination is mere appearance; the thing in itself is a border concept of that which in fact cannot be grasped conceptually. Glenn Deliège is critical of this formality and emptiness from which it will be impossible to derive any concrete guidance for our conservation practices. He then goes on to defend the Arcadian tradition of our appreciation of nature as giving us a historically well-grounded orientation for those practices. Of course that Arcadian tradition is obviously a cultural construction but that doesn’t make it completely arbitrary and contingent since it is itself ultimately grounded in and open to modification by our concrete sensuous experiences of nature.Deliège here raises the very important issue of the relation between our concrete perceptual and bodily experiences in and with nature and our concepts and metaphysical images of nature. Drenthen himself approaches this issue from the hermeneutical perspective of our need to make sense of our experiences and to articulate their meaning. His confrontation with social constructivism and his effort to salvage something from its relativizing acid lead him, however, into the direction of a highly abstract and empty concept of wilderness.Richard Kover shows that perception is, indeed, the key to a radical critique of social constructivism. He does this with the help of the ecological anthropology of Paul Shepard, the structuralist anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It needs to be said here that Kover takes his leave from an unpublished paper by Martin Drenthen with the title “How to appropriate wilderness appropriately?” – the paper is accessible though on Drenthen’s web-site - in which Drenthen comments and reflects upon three contemporary wilderness-tales, one of them being Werner Herzog’s much-discussed documentary on Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist drop-out who lived thirteen summers among wild grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness before being killed together with his girlfriend by a grizzly bear.Kover tries to show that we are not imprisoned in the mirror-cabinet of our mind or of our human sociality. To make his case, he starts from Paul Shepard’s thoughtful observation that the evolutionary emergence of the mind did not remove us from the natural world but actually connected us deeper with it. Through our mind we evolved more fully into it because our mind is primordially in our senses and in the ability to articulate a perceptual world. The natural world in the form of the system of natural species and their relations is the primary model for perceptual discriminations, for the fundamental discovery of order with its twin-aspects of distinction and discontinuity on the one side and relations and continuity on the other side. Our cognition is essentially perceptually based, our subjectivity is primordially informed by our inherence in the sensible world. Perceptual cognition is inherently intentional and relational, it is not an autonomous mental construction, it is rather in the world and informed by that which is perceived. The other is always intertwined with the subject. We are always already hooked up with the world, with the others, before we start reflecting, thinking, and conceptualizing. This is one of the major themes in Shepard’s work: what this insight means with regard to our relations to non-human otherness, in particular to our perceptual encounter with wild animals. In our encounter with non-human otherness, we are confronted with an essentially ambiguous sense of both affinity and disjuncture. Wild animals demonstrate to us that we are not homeless or alien to this world, that we fundamentally belong to it and are part of it. Their difference, however, shows us that there are different perspectives and ways of being in the world. “Thus the encounter with non-human others inform humans that we are both of the world and simultaneously not the world and there are horizons of significance beyond our own perspective.”Nathan Edward Kowalski comes to a similar conclusion when he situates our morality in the larger moral order of wild nature. According to Kowalski it is indeed a moral order though not our own, an Other to our morality but not simply a negative one. It is, as Drenthen says, a highly paradoxical amoral morality. But what can it mean to speak of morality here? For Kowalski it means that the issue is not merely the theoretical recognition and acknowledgment of axiological transcendence, of non-human values out there, but whether we will appropriately conform to and comport ourselves towards that axiological transcendence so that we can find a human homeland in wild nature instead of turning it into a wasteland. The question then is, how to fit our own human morality into this larger order and greater reality, to subordinate it to that greater reality as a part of it and encompassed but not denied by it so that we can be moral and natural at the same time, tender carnivores hunting the sacred game. Indigenous people follow a moral protocol in their relationship with non-human others which acknowledge and respects their autonomy, their alterity, and the sacred mystery of their different ways of being. They are not befriended but some of them are hunted and eaten – as an exchange in the gift-economy of nature.The problem of the homelessness and alienation from nature is discussed by Wim Bollen from the radically different vantage point of critical theory. In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the human story unfolds as a tragic effort to liberate ourselves from nature and to become fully human through rational control when in the end this effort turns against ourselves and instead of liberation and human flourishing we get social domination and repression of our natural needs. The frustrations and mutilations imposed upon us by a repressive civilization give rise to the regressive desire for a return to a natural existence. Referring to the myth of Odysseus and Circe as interpreted by Adorno and Horkheimer, Wim Bollen equates such a natural existence with animal life. In the light of contemporary knowledge about primitive existence, however, this equation is highly problematic. Palaeolithic foragers were already fully human in all respects. A life without civilization need not be an animal-existence.According to Adorno/Horkheimer, our subjectivity and autonomy have to be wrested from animal-nature through an exertive struggle that cannot but proceed by a threefold strategy of domination: the domination of non-human otherness, of human others, and of our own inner nature. The siren song of nature consists in the temptation to give up that struggle for the promise of an unreflective, non-alienated natural existence without toil.When Odysseus’ men give in to Circe’s seduction they are, however, not transformed into wild animals but into swine. According to Bollen this signifies that we cannot re-wild ourselves, that we remain imprisoned in civilization, either as master-subjects or as domesticated animals. Bollen, by the way, like Drenthen, does not distinguish conceptually between civilization and culture. Since re-wilding for Bollen means the impossibility of returning to animal-existence, which is actually the impossibility of becoming another species since biologically we are animals already, to be imprisoned in civilisation means nothing else than to be imprisoned in our humanity. The fact that we cannot become wild animals again – according to Paul Shepard, however, we are still wild animals – is indeed, as Bollen stresses, a trivial form of alienation. A more meaningful concept of alienation which can be put to critical use must refer to a culturally and historically determined frustration and deficit inside the cultural order that is to be overcome not by an impossible regression but by progressive politics leading beyond the three intertwined forms of domination. Not back to nature but forward towards a reconciliation of culture with nature! Such a reconciliation would neither collapse culture into the immanence of nature nor submerge nature into the transcendence of culture. According with the three forms of domination it would be a three-dimensional form of reconciliation.Odysseus’ men did not got what they thought were promised them: the complete liberation from the burden of being autonomous subjects, of being civilized, but they got something worthwhile, namely a certain from of pleasure, a limited and provisional relief and escape. Bollen sees a critical potential in these piggish pleasures after all and consequently even in the siren song of nature since these pleasures were only experienced because Odysseus’ men gave in to it. But one has to give in to this siren song critically if it is to unfold its liberating potential. The problem with pleasure though in bourgeois society is that it is necessarily betrayed, instrumentalized and sold.Kingsley Goodwin’s paper starts by defending deep ecology against the charge of asserting a naïve and dogmatic metaphysics of nature. For convenience sake, but not quite unproblematically, he identifies deep ecology with the environmental thought of Arne Naess. A metaphysics of nature for Naess is always part of a personal worldview. Worldviews which are partly inspired by ecology Naess calls ecosophies. Naess always stresses the personal character of such a worldview and the irreducible plurality of them. It used to be a common misunderstanding of the platform of deep ecology which Naess conceived together with George Sessions that it expressed in a condensed form the metaphysical beliefs of deep ecology. Naess’ intention, however, was to try to articulate in a general fashion the basic viewpoints on which the supporters of the deep ecology movement agreed. It would be possible then to derive these viewpoints from quite different worldviews. In light of this, I think, that Goodwin’s characterisation of the platform as “pragmatic and activist” is not quite appropriate.Goodwin goes on to compare Drenthen’s conception of wilderness and wildness with the similar position developed by Neil Evernden in his book The Social Creation of Nature. He like Naess in his personal ecosophy stresses the crucial role of perceptual experience of wild otherness to find an antidote to the relativity and contingency of our interpretations of nature. Evernden refers to studies on child development to argue for a non-dualistic and relational conception of the self, similar to Naess’ relational ontology. According to Goodwin, Drenthen, in spite of his hermeneutical approach remains too much indebted to the Western subject/object-dualism. The object, in this case wild nature, is pure otherness.With regard to a compost heap, Goodwin shows that we are not separated from nature by an inseparable gulf, that nature is close at hand, and that we can experience and explore it, appreciate the complex play of identity and difference it consists of, the exchanges and transformations and that we can identify with the organisms involved in these exchanges.*The proceeding remarks only highlight some of the prominent themes and considerations in the various contributions to this topical issue of Ethical Perspectives. Hopefully the reader will feel invited and enticed to read the articles themselves, starting, preferably of course, with the essay by Martin Drenthen, who sparked off this lively discussion on the moral meaning of wild nature. I am honoured and pleased to be able to introduce these rich explorations by such talented young environmental philosophers who are eager to develop environmental philosophy further and lead it into new directions. They all have to wrestle with and find answers to the challenge postmodern deconstruction and social constructivism pose for environmental philosophy. In the face of that challenge, it is even more difficult than it already was to provide solid and convincing arguments for the defence of wild and free nature beyond merely pragmatic arguments in terms of its utilitarian value for us. The reason for that defence is not clear-cut and proves to be just as evasive as the moral meaning of nature itself. But neither that reason nor that meaning are mere phantoms and mirages that vanish when we approach them and try to grasp them. They are more substantial, even if they will never have the solidity of a mathematical proof or a scientific measurement. Their locale is the lifeworld which from the point of view of scientific and logical precision and clarity is a messy place where subject and object, reason and heart, fact and value, experience and thought and, yes, nature and culture cannot be clearly separated. This has important consequences for environmental philosophy and its methodology. Conceptual analysis and logical argumentation have to become sensitive to the richness of experience in the lifeworld and to the diverse efforts of its articulation: i.e., they have to open themselves up and maybe even to subordinate themselves to phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. For me personally this is one of the most important conclusions I draw from the discussion presented here. (shrink)

Background The case of Margaret Haywood, the ‘undercover nurse’, is a significant one for the UK's National Health Service (NHS). She investigated complaints made about the Royal Sussex County Hospital and covertly filmed inpatients experiencing care detrimental to their health. The material was subsequently broadcast on the BBC's Panorama programme. It caused a scandal and brought about changes at the hospital, as well a demand for greater clinical leadership. Margaret Haywood was, however, struck off the nursing register for breaching confidentiality (...) and because of the methods she used to blow the whistle. Methods The authors apply the ethical lenses of purpose, principle, people and power to explore this case. Results This is a morally ambiguous situation in which both the protagonist and the organisation compromised their core values. The undercover nurse used individuals as a means to a ‘higher’ end, and the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust are seen to have deviated from the ethical to the business map, in a contradiction of what the health service represents. Conclusions These deficits can be repaired by reinforcement of the ethics of duty and ideals on a practical level and the involvement of clinicians to lead at a management level, to act as a moral compass. (shrink)

Should we accept that different moral norms govern our treatment of human and nonhuman animals? In this paper I suggest that the answer is both yes and no. At the theoretical level of morality, a single, unified set of norms governs our treatment of all sentient beings. But at the practical level of morality, different sets of norms can govern our treatment of different groups in different contexts. And whether we accept that we should, say, respect rights or (...) maximize utility at the theoretical level, we might also accept that we should apply a relatively Kantian set of norms to our treatment of humans and a relatively utilitarian set of norms to our treatment of nonhumans in practice, with many caveats. I argue that this moderate “monist in theory, hybrid in practice” view has many advantages over fully monist or hybrid alternatives. (shrink)

Evolutionary ethics (EE) is a branch of philosophy that arouses both fascination and deep suspicion. It claims that Darwinian mechanisms and evolutionary data on animal sociality are relevant to ethical reflection. This field of study is often misunderstood and rarely fails to conjure up images of Social Darwinism as a vector for nasty ideologies and policies. However, it is worth resisting the temptation to reduce EE to Social Darwinism and developing an objective analysis of whether it is appropriate to adopt (...) an evolutionary approach in ethics. The purpose of this article is to ‘dedemonise’ EE while exploring its limits. I shall begin by presenting two ways of integrating a Darwinian way of thinking into the context of social and political sciences : Social Darwinism and what one could label ‘Pro-social Darwinism’. Next I will point out some of the fundamental errors on which Social Darwinism is grounded; this will help in understanding why contemporary evolutionary ethicists cannot possibly hold the views defended by this theory (unless they are inclined to intellectual dishonesty). On the contrary, EE seems more akin to a Pro-social Darwinian approach, except for the fact that it restricts its reflections to theoretical ethics. The second part of the paper (sections 3 to 7) provides a clear and detailed picture of EE as well as an analysis of its relevance at the different levels of ethics (descriptive, meta-, normative and practical). Special focus will be given to questions relating to the genesis of morals and the delicate shift from facts to norms. (shrink)

Tailored to the Ethics components of AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies. What does pleasure have to do with morality? What role, if any, should intuition have in the formation of moral theory? If something is ‘simulated’, can it be immoral? -/- This accessible and wide-ranging textbook explores these questions and many more. Key ideas in the fields of normative ethics, metaethics and applied ethics are explained rigorously and systematically, with a vivid writing style that enlivens the topics (...) with energy and wit. Individual theories are discussed in detail in the first part of the book, before these positions are applied to a wide range of contemporary situations including business ethics, sexual ethics, and the acceptability of eating animals. A wealth of real-life examples, set out with depth and care, illuminate the complexities of different ethical approaches while conveying their modern-day relevance. -/- This concise and highly engaging resource is tailored to the Ethics components of AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies, with a clear and practical layout that includes end-of-chapter summaries, key terms, and common mistakes to avoid. It should also be of practical use for those studying Philosophy as part of the International Baccalaureate or an introductory Philosophy course at university. -/- Ethics for A-Level is of particular value to students and teachers, but Fisher and Dimmock’s precise and scholarly approach will appeal to anyone seeking a rigorous and lively introduction to the challenging subject of ethics. (shrink)

This focus issue considers the normative implications of the recent emergence in genome editing technology known as CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) or CRISPR‐associated protein 9. Originally discovered in the adaptive immune systems of bacteria and archaea, CRISPR enables researchers to make efficient and site‐specific modifications to the genomes of cells and organisms. More accessible, precise, and economic than previous gene editing technologies, CRISPR holds the promise of not only transforming the fields of genetics, agriculture, and human (...) medicine, but also heralding a new era of democratized biotechnology. However, the speed with which developments in the field have progressed threatens to overwhelm our normative sensibilities about the long‐term practical and ethical implications. The contributors to this focus issue attempt to think through some of the more salient moral and practical consequences of CRISPR in the context of religious ethics, particularly as they relate to themes of autonomy, human flourishing, social justice, and the ethics of enhancement. (shrink)

Ethics education in post-graduate philosophy departments and professional schools involves disciplinary knowledge and textual analysis but is mostly unconcerned with the ethical lives of students. Ethics or values education below college aims at shaping students’ ethical beliefs and conduct but lacks philosophical depth and methods of value inquiry. The «values transmission» approach to values education does not provide the opportunity for students to express doubt or criticism of the proffered values, or to practice ethical inquiry. The «inquiry» approach to values (...) education recognizes the need and the capacity of young people to grapple with moral ambiguity and pluralism, to confront their own moral doubts, to criticize conventional norms and to engage in ethical inquiry. Values clarification, critical thinking and Philosophy for Children are inquiry approaches to values education, with important differences. Five wisdom practices common among early Greek and Roman philosophical schools should inform ethics education at all levels. First, philosophy was understood as the disciplined study and practice of living well. Second, knowledge and discursive thinking played a limited role in relation to the life worth living. Third, these schools taught certain contemplative or «spiritual» exercises, including meditation, examination of one’s conscience, fraternal correction, contemplation of the cosmos, practicing present-moment awareness and reflection on death. Fourth, many of these schools established philosophical communities that practiced collaborative research, dialogue, mutual correction, and the cultivation of philosophical friendship. Fifth, the primary aim of intellectual and contemplative practices in these schools was self-transformation, from states of confusion, restlessness, egotism, and craving, to states of temperance, compassion, and tranquility. (shrink)

Researchers in applied ethics, and some areas of bioethics particularly, aim to develop concrete and appropriate recommendations for action in morally relevant real-world situations. When proceeding from more abstract levels of ethical reasoning to such concrete recommendations, however, even with regard to the very same normative principle or norm, it seems possible to develop divergent or even contradictory recommendations for action regarding a certain situation. This may give the impression that such recommendations would be arbitrary and, hence, not (...) well justified. Against this background, we, first, aim at showing that ethical recommendations for action, although being contingent in some sense, are not arbitrary if developed appropriately. For this purpose, we examine two types of contingencies arising in applied ethics reasoning based on recent examples of recommendations for action in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, we refer to a three-step model of ethical reasoning towards recommendations for actions. This, however, leaves open the question of how applied ethics may cope with contingent recommendations for action. Therefore, in a second step, we analyze the role of bridge principles for developing ethically appropriate recommendations for action, i.e., principles which connect normative claims with relevant empirical information to justify certain recommendations for action in a given morally relevant situation. Finally, we discuss some implications for reasoning and reporting in empirically informed ethics. (shrink)

Intuition has increasingly been considered as a legitimate foundation for decision-making, and the concept has started to find its way into military doctrines as a supplement to traditional decision-making procedures, primarily in time-constrained situations. Yet, absent inside the military realm is a critical and level-headed discussion of the ethical implications of intuitive behaviour, understood as an immediate and situational response with no recourse to thoughtful or deliberate activity. In this article the author turns to phenomenological philosophy, and in particular to (...) the works of Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, to elaborate on the ethical implications and consequences of intuitive behaviour. Dreyfus and Dreyfus understand moral behaviour as a skill, and as such they claim that it is possible to develop this capability through practice. They even claim that intuitive behaviour is the hallmark of the way experts respond to situations. The article seeks to investigate if the prerequisites for development of experience-based intuition are fulfilled inside the frames of military operations. The possible implications and consequences of utilizing such a capability are also emphasized. The article's empirical materials are qualitative and build mainly upon extracted information from interviews and informal conversations with Norwegian soldiers and officers serving in Afghanistan under ISAF's Regional Command North in 2007 and 2008. (shrink)

Traditional methods of teaching professional nursing ethics in the classroom have translated into limited success in clinical practice. Students don’t perceive an integration of ethics education in practical clinical settings, while educators grapple with a lack of perceived ‘excellence of moral character’ in their students when they are taught intellectual virtues and theoretical wisdom in the classroom that they do not see demonstrated in the clinical setting. Also traditionally, emphasis in ethics teaching has tended to focus on the (...) nurse-patient relationship, while less attention has been paid to nursing in a more inter/intra professional or global context. The purpose of using constructivist theory and concept-based learning strategies to teach junior level nursing students ethics was to present implications for nurse educators that will help them foster/improve their student’s critical thinking, and increase their mastery and global integration of the complex abstract concepts associated with professional nursing ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 11.2 (2003) 141-156 [Access article in PDF] Music Education as Critical PracticeA Naturalist View Lauri Väkevä University Of Oulu, Finland I This essay defends naturalism as a framework for philosophy of music education. I have three general reasons for supporting naturalism. First, by taking naturalism seriously we can keep our philosophies up-to-date with scientific inquiry. Second, naturalism can emancipate us from transcendental pseudo-questions and (...) instead help us to deal with the empirical problems of everyday life. Third, with naturalism, we can free ourselves from a priori theories of morals and aesthetics and thus view the active part that normative and aesthetic concerns play in human praxis. Even if I endorse naturalism, I do not subscribe to scientism. 1 Rather, I submit to a pragmatist view that stresses the role of philosophy (and science) in dealing with the questions of our life practices. Of the recent perspectives in the philosophy of music education my approach comes closest to the critical praxialism discussed in the MayDay group. 2All in all, I find a lot in common with the praxialist discussion (within or outside the MayDay group) and the kind of pragmatism that follows John Dewey's mature philosophy. 3 However, it seems to me that the naturalist bent of Deweyan pragmatism has not been thoroughly analyzed in our field. 4 One reason for this [End Page 141] might be the bad report that 'hard' or reductive naturalism has been given in connection with the experimental paradigm of music education research. 5 I want to argue that the critical potential of Deweyan pragmatism should not (and cannot) be separated from a naturalist approach. Taken together, critical and naturalist views can contribute to any philosophy, especially in fields that have a long tradition of leaning on otherworldly explanations.In what follows, I begin by outlining (in broad brushstrokes) the historical position of pragmatism and its status in present day philosophy. Next, I focus on the implications of Deweyan naturalist pragmatism and the possibility of maintaining a critical pragmatist attitude with naturalist presumptions in a pedagogical context. In the final part of the essay, I outline an interpretative framework for a critical pragmatism of music education that takes advantage of the naturalizing tendencies in contemporary philosophy without losing its grasp on the things that matter musically. II For a while, pragmatism had a bad name in academic philosophy. This was especially true after the linguistic turn in the first half of the last century. 6 By making the linguistic turn, many philosophers hoped to disassociate themselves from the speculative tradition(s) once and for all. Logical analysts also made it more difficult for philosophers to ignore the findings of scientists. Thus they paved the way for contemporary reductive naturalism that takes science as the measure of what can be known. 7However, analytic philosophers were not alone in their attempt to provide philosophy with scientific rigor. Classical pragmatists, too, had integrated a naturalist penchant in their output. Embracing naturalism with an open-ended experimental spirit, they wanted to focus on "the problems of men" as the chief subject matter of philosophy. 8 To many analytic philosophers, this seemed like a return to armchair speculation with an ingredient of sentimental ethics thrown in for good measure. Worse still, it looked as though the classical pragmatists were giving in to the spirit of the corporate West: speaking of the truth as "cash-value" surely seemed like a blasphemy to intellectuals who sought from formal logic and mathematics a purity of mind to clear up the messiness of everyday experience. 9Logical analysis also had its shortcomings. While many mainstream philosophers turned to logical analysis for clarity and certainty, at the same time they submitted to Cartesian-Kantian mind-body dualism with its problematic epistemology. Thus, they kept supporting the tensions between the rationalist and empiricist or analytic and synthetic domains of knowledge that haunted modernist neo-Kantian arguments.These distinctions turned out to be easy targets for postanalytic critics. 10 [End Page 142]Classical pragmatists anticipated this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics without Principles: Another Possible Ethics—Perspectives from Latin America by Roy H. May JrRamon LuzarragaEthics without Principles: Another Possible Ethics—Perspectives from Latin America Roy H. May Jr. EUGENE, OR: PICKWICK PUBLICATIONS, 2015. 80 PP. $16.00Roy May presents a collection of five essays that critique deontological ethics. He argues that deontology stands outside sociocultural and historical contexts, ignoring concrete human differences and the local histories of diverse human cultures. (...) Therefore, it is a false universal, an otherworldly, legalistic, and ideologically hegemonic construct. Consequently, it provides no space for diverse Latin American experiences and contexts. Such ethics do not liberate marginalized groups precisely because they do not take their concrete lived experiences and contexts into account. May proposes instead a nominalist, contextual, postmodern ethics. He traces the history of this ethic from Ockham, through its development in classical and modern Protestant thought, and finally Latin American liberation theology, Protestant and Catholic. It is a program to generate a dialogue over moral conduct and its significance for human [End Page 215] relationships and the concrete situations and conditions of daily life lived in diverse ways while modeled after the example of Jesus Christ.In the first essay, May proposes a contextual ethic where the lived context of human moral agents includes a reliance on moral experience and wisdom for clues to the best course of moral action. Engaging Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Lehman, and Latin American contextual ethicists, he rejects the idea that formal principles undergird Christian behavior. Contextual ethics is instead based on an obedient response to God's activity in the world, resulting in love of neighbor, building human life, seeking God's will in history, following Jesus's concrete moral example practiced in history, and participating in a Christian community that seeks the Kingdom of God. In the second essay, May sketches a method for an ethics of liberation, arguing how the analysis of concrete situations by moral agents could produce concrete norms of conduct. An ethics of alterity results, where marginalized people are freed from oppression and opened to horizons of new life. The third essay argues that a contextualist ethic must be Christomorphic instead of Christocentric. People practice "creative loyalty" to Jesus's example by engaging the other and his or her needs within one's particular context (34). This activity imitates but does not replicate how Jesus treated people in his context. In the fourth essay, May argues how a contextual ethic enables its practitioners to engage in "moral interrogations" of concrete life experiences and actions from which wisdom is gained (51). He calls for an intercultural ethics whereby diverse peoples in their respective contexts engage in mutual learning and respectful dialogue. The last essay speaks to the result of this dialogue: a polyphonic global discussion among people faithful to God and open to new life.May's exposition of contextual ethics is an excellent summary for people seeking to understand its origins, history, and ideas. Unfortunately, his criticism of deontological ethics causes him to miss a rich vein of thought. Those medieval scholastics who believed in universals knew well that such universals instantiated themselves in a myriad of ways. Lived, concrete, historical experiences serve as portals to the universal norm, which is not so much a bland uniform abstraction as a mosaic where diverse human experiences combine to help us realize that such norms exist. The mistake is made when one thinks her piece of the mosaic is the entire mosaic, which makes deontological ethics vulnerable to the problems May wants to avoid. Moreover, contextual ethics could defeat the intercultural dialogue he seeks precisely because the lack of an agreed objective measure leads to human power struggles over defining the terms of any ethical discussion. [End Page 216]Ramon LuzarragaBenedictine University at MesaCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Joshua Greene has argued that the empirical findings of cognitive science have implications for ethics. In particular, he has argued (1) that people’s deontological judgments in response to trolley problems are strongly influenced by at least one morally irrelevant factor, personal force, and are therefore at least somewhat unreliable, and (2) that we ought to trust our consequentialist judgments more than our deontological judgments when making decisions about unfamiliar moral problems. While many cognitive scientists have rejected Greene’s dual-process theory (...) of moral judgment on empirical grounds, philosophers have mostly taken issue with his normative assertions. For the most part, these two discussions have occurred separately. The current analysis aims to remedy this situation by philosophically analyzing the implications of moral dilemma research using the CNI model of moral decision-making – a formalized, mathematical model that decomposes three distinct aspects of moral-dilemma judgments. In particular, we show how research guided by the CNI model reveals significant conceptual, empirical, and theoretical problems with Greene’s dual-process theory, thereby questioning the foundations of his normative conclusions. (shrink)

This textbook offers a unique and accessible approach to ethical decision-making for practicing pharmacists and student pharmacists. Unlike other texts, it gives clear guidance based on the fundamental principles of moral philosophy, explaining them in simple language and illustrating them with abundant clinical examples and case studies. The strength of this text is in its emphasis on normative ethics and critical thinking, and that there is truly a best answer in the vast majority of cases, no matter how (...) complex. The authors place high trust in a pharmacist’s moral judgment. This teaches the reader how to think, based on ethical principles, not necessarily what to think. This means navigating between the two extremes of overly theoretical and excessively prescriptive. The cogent framework given in this text uses the language of competing duties, identifying the moral principles at stake that create duties for the pharmacist. This is the balancing act of normative ethics, and of deciding which duties should prevail in a given clinical situation. This work presents a clear-cut pathway for resolving ethical dilemmas encountered by pharmacists, based on foundational principles and critical thinking. Presents a clear-cut pathway for resolving the ethical dilemmas encountered by pharmacists, based on foundational principles and critical thinking. Jon E. Sprague, RPh, PhD, Director of Science and Research for the Ohio Attorney General. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An Ethical Life: A Practical Guide to Ethical Reasoning by Richard KyteChristine FletcherAn Ethical Life: A Practical Guide to Ethical Reasoning Richard Kyte WINONA, NM: ANSELM ACADEMIC, 2012. 254 PP. $25.95Richard Kyte's introductory guide to ethics is designed to meet three concerns about current ethics textbooks: they tend to decrease students' confidence in their ability to think, they inculcate a distrust of deliberative processes, and they (...) create an appearance of moral relativism. Kyte succeeds in creating a text that overcomes these deficiencies. He uses common language and examples while remaining rigorous and fully explaining the common ethical theories.He opens with a chapter debunking thirteen misconceptions about ethics, such as "Ethics Is 'Nothing but Words,'" "Ethics Is Just a Matter of Opinion," and "Ethics Is Separate from Religion." This chapter should set the tone for a class that doesn't allow sloppy thinking or the reduction of ethics to feelings. The chapter concludes by defining ethics as common sense, meaning "the ability to find shared meaning in the words we use together to make sense of our lives" (51).The second chapter examines four ways of ethical thinking: truth, thinking in terms of the facts of the situation; consequences, thinking in terms of the results of an action; fairness, thinking in terms of equality and consistency; and character, thinking in terms of people's motivations, character traits, or both. He then uses practical problems to illustrate how, by using these four ways of ethical thinking, a conversation working toward an agreed-on action can take place. Ethics is no longer a shouting match but a way of appreciating different points of view and coming to a reasoned conclusion.The following chapters explore these four ways of ethical thinking. Chapter 3, "Truth," on its own would be an excellent text for any course that has "critical thinking" as a learning outcome. He covers moral responsibility, bias, self-deception, and power with succinct but powerful illustrations from life. He then moves on to discernment, which includes a discussion of good reading, evaluating sources of information, and evaluating arguments, including examples of the most common fallacies. His examples are from diverse sources such as Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, the Bible, Francis Bacon, and situations in ordinary life. This gives richness to the text and presents these concepts in an accessible and interesting way.The next three chapters, "Consequences," "Fairness," and "Character," cover the main features of utilitarianism, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics [End Page 191] in good detail, with summaries about major figures associated with these theories: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Epictetus, Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas. These give the students biographical information as well as the significance of each thinker's work, explaining the key features, strengths, and weaknesses of their theories. The chapter on character has a very helpful discussion of the cardinal and theological virtues. Each chapter has suggestions for further reading.The appendix covers how to use this four-way method in group decision-making and in writing case studies or issues analyses, helpfully including an example of each. This book is written by a gifted teacher who draws students into his subject, shows them its relevance, and helps them develop the confidence and skills they need to take their part in the ethical conversations that will occur throughout their lives. It is an excellent text on its own or as a supplement to a standard textbook in professional ethics.Christine FletcherBenedictine UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This book tells the story of modern ethics, namely the story of a discourse that, after the Renaissance, went through a methodological revolution giving birth to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s new science of natural law, leaving room for two centuries of explorations of the possible developments and implications of this new paradigm, up to the crisis of the Eighties of the eighteenth century, a crisis that carried a kind of mitosis, the act of birth of both basic paradigms of the (...) two following centuries: Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. The new science of natural law carried a fresh start for ethics, resulting from a mixture of the Old and the New. It was, as suggested by Schneewind, an attempt at rescuing the content of Scholastic and Stoic doctrines on a new methodological basis. The former was the claim of existence of objective and universal moral laws; the latter was the self-aware attempt at justifying a minimal kernel of such laws facing skeptical doubt. What Bentham and Kant did was precisely carrying this strategy further on, even if restructuring it each of them around one out of two alternative basic claims. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment attacked both not on their alleged failure in carrying out their own projects, but precisely on having adopted Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project. What counter-enlightenment has been unable to spell out is which alternative project could be carried out facing the modern condition of pluralism, while on the contrary, if we takes a closer look at developments in twentieth-century ethics or at on-going discussions on practical issues, we might feel inclined to believe that Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project is as up-to-date as ever. -/- Table of Contents -/- Preface I. Fathers of the Reformation and Schoolmen 1.1. Luther: passive justice and the good deeds; 1.2. Calvin: voluntarism and predestination; 1.3. Baroque Scholasticism; 1.4. Casuistry and Institutiones morales -/- II Neo-Platonists, neo-Stoics, neo-Sceptics 2.1. Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, neo-Epicurean and neo-Cynic Humanists; 2.2. Oeconomica and the art of living; 2.3. Neo-Stoics; 2.4. Neo-Sceptics; 2.5. Moralistic literature -/- III Neo-Augustinians 3.l. The Jansenists on natura lapsa, sufficient grace, pure love; 3.2. Nicole on the impossibility of self-knowledge; 3.3. Nicole on self-love and charity; 3.4. Nicole against civic virtue, for Christian civility; 3.5. Malebranche on general laws and necessary evil; 3.6. Malebranche on Neo-Augustinianism and Platonism. -/- IV Grotius, Pufendorf and the new moral science 4.1. Grotius against Aristotle and the sceptics; 4.2. Mersenne and Gassendi; 4.3. Descartes on ethics as the last branch of philosophy’s tree; 4.4. Hobbes on scepticism and the new moral science; 4.5. Spinoza on the new moral science as a descriptive science;4.6. Locke on voluntarism and probabilism; 4.7. Pufendorf on natural law as an exact science; 4.8. Pufendorf on physical and moral entities; 10. Pufendorf on self-preservation -/- V The empiricist version of the new moral science: from Cumberland to Paley 5.1. Cumberland against Hobbesian voluntarism; 5.2. Cumberland and theological consequentialism; 5.3. Cumberland on universal benevolence and self-love; 5.4. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 5.5. Hutcheson on natural law and moral faculties; 5.6. Gay, Brown, Paley and theological consequentialism. -/- VI The rationalist version of the new moral science: from Cudworth to Price 6.1. The Cambridge Platonists; 6.2. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 6.3. Butler and a third way between voluntarism and scepticism; 6.4. Price and the rational character of moral truths; -/- VII Leibniz’s compromise between the new moral science and Aristotelianism 1.Leibniz against voluntarism; 2.Leibniz against the division between the physical and the moral good; 3.Leibniz on la place d’autrui and theological consequentialism; 4.Thomasius, Wolff, Crusius -/- VIII French eighteenth-century philosophers without the new moral science 8.1. The genealogy of our ideas of virtue and vice; 8.2. Maupertuis and moral arithmetic 8.3. The philosophes and the harmony of interests; 8.4. Rousseau on corruption, self-love, and virtue; 8.5. Sade on the merits of vice -/- IX Experimental moral science: Hume and Adam Smith 9.1. Mandeville’s paradox; 9.2. Hutcheson on the law of nature and moral faculties; 9.3. Hume on experimental moral philosophy and the intermediate principles; 9.4. Hume’s Law; 9.5. Hume on the fellow-feeling; 9.6. Hume on natural and artificial virtues and disinterested pleasure for utility; 9.7. Adam Smith’s anti-realist metaethics; 9.8. Adam Smith on self-deception and the paradox of happiness; 9.9. Adam Smith on sympathy and the impartial spectator; 9.10. Adam Smith on the twofold criterion for moral judgement and its paradox; 9.11. Reid on the refutation of scepticism and the self-evidence of duty -/- X Kantian ethics 10.1. Kantian metaethics: moral epistemology; 10.2. Kantian metaethics: moral ontology; 10.3. Kantian metaethics: moral psychology; 10.4. Kantian normative ethics; 10.5. Kant on the impracticability of applied ethics; 10.6. Kantian moral anthropology; 10.7. Civilisation and moralisation; 10.8. Theology on a moral basis and the origins of evil; 10.9. Fichte and the transformation of theoretical philosophy into practical philosophy XI Bentham and utilitarianism 11.1. Bentham’s linguistic theory; 11.2. Bentham’s moral ontology, psychology, and theory of action; 11.3. The principle of greatest happiness; 11.4. The critique of religious ethics; 11.5. The new morality; 11.6. Interest and duty; 11.7. Virtues; 11.8. Private ethics and legislation -/- XII Followers of the Enlightenment: liberal Judaism and Liberal Theology 12.1. Mendelssohn; 12.2. Salomon Maimon; 12.3. Haskalā and liberal Judaism; 12.4. Liberal Theology. -/- XIII Counter-Enlighteners 13.1.Romanticism and the fulfilment of individuality as the Summum Bonum; 13.2. Hegel on history as the making of liberty; 13.3. Hegel on the unhappy consciousness and the beautiful soul; 13.4. Hegel on Morality and Sittlichkeit; 13.5. Marx on ideology, alienation, and praxis; 13.6. Schopenhauer on compassion; 13.7. Kierkegaard on faith beyond ethics. -/- XIV Followers of the Enlightenment: intuitionists and utilitarian 14.1 Whewell‘s criticism of utilitarianism; 14.2 Whewell on morality and the philosophy of morality; 14.3 Whewell on the Supreme Norm; 14.4 Whewell on the conflict between duties; 14.5 Mill and the proof of the principle of utility; 14.6 Mill’s eudemonistic utilitarianism; 14.7 Mill on rules -/- XV Followers of the Enlightenment: neo-Kantians and positivists 15.1. French spiritualism; 15.2. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.3. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.4. Comte’s positivism and the invention of altruism; 15.5. Social Darwinism; 15.6. Wundt and an ethic of humankind -/- XVI Post-enlighteners: Sidgwick 16.1. Criticism of intuitionism; 16.2. On ethical egoism; 16.3. Criticism of utilitarianism -/- XVII Post-enlighteners: Durkheim 17.1. Sociology as physics of customs; 17.2. Morality as physics of customs and as practical science; 17.3. On Kantian ethics and utilitarianism; 17.4. The variability of moralities;17.5. Social solidarity as end and justification of morality; 17.6. Secular morality as “sociodicy”; XVIII Post-enlighteners: Nietzsche 18.1. On the Dionysian; 18.2. On the deconstruction of the world of values 18.3 On the twofold genealogy of moralities; 18.4. On ascetics and nihilism; 18.5. Normative ethics of self-fulfilment -/- Bibliography / Index of names / Index of concepts -/- . (shrink)

The purpose of __Aquinas's Ethics__ is to place Thomas Aquinas's moral theory in its full philosophical and theological context and to do so in a way that makes Aquinas readily accessible to students and interested general readers, including those encountering Aquinas for the first time. Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Colleen McCluskey, and Christina Van Dyke begin by explaining Aquinas's theories of the human person and human action, since these ground his moral theory. In their interpretation, Aquinas's theological commitments crucially (...) shape his account of the human person, human capacities for action, and human flourishing. The authors develop a comprehensive picture of Aquinas's thought, which is designed to help students understand how his concept of happiness and the good life are part of a coherent, theologically-informed worldview. Many studies of Aquinas naturally focus on certain areas of his thought and tend to assume a general knowledge of the whole. __Aquinas's Ethics_ _takes the opposite approach: it intentionally links his metaphysics and anthropology to his action theory and ethics to illuminate how the moral theory is built on foundations laid elsewhere. The authors emphasize the integration of concepts of virtue, natural law, and divine grace within Aquinas's ethics, rather than treating such topics in isolation or opposition. Their approach, presented in clear and deliberately non-specialist language, reveals the coherent nature of Aquinas's account of the moral life and of what fulfills us as human beings. The result is a rich and engaging framework for further investigation of Aquinas's thought and its applications. _"___Aquinas’s Ethics_ _is a perfect introduction to one of the most sophisticated and influential ethical systems in Western thought. DeYoung, McCluskey, and Van Dyke capture the brilliant clarity of Aquinas’s moral vision, offering an illuminating perspective true to both the theoretical depth and practical richness of Aquinas’s writings. Those new to Aquinas’s ideas will find this book eminently readable. Everyone—students and scholars alike—will appreciate its direct, distinctive voice and clear philosophical intelligence." —_Scott MacDonald, Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University_ "__Aquinas's Ethics_ _is an excellent contribution to the literature on Aquinas and ethics, providing an integrated and robust account of the relationship between a metaphysics of human nature, natural law theory, and virtue theory. Showing these inextricable connections, it is very much like the work of St. Thomas himself, and suggests why so many lesser theories of ethics are unsatisfying for their lack of depth and comprehensive reach." —_John Kavanaugh, S.J., Saint Louis University_ “DeYoung, McCluskey, and Van Dyke have written the ideal introduction to Aquinas’s ethics, situating it in the broader context of his thinking about human nature and action. Although Aquinas cared more about—and wrote more about—ethics than about any other philosophical topic, it remains the most unjustly neglected aspect of his thought. I know of no better guide to that territory than this book.” —_Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado at Boulder_. (shrink)

This article identifies limitations in traditional approaches to engineering ethics pedagogy, reflected in an overreliance on disaster case studies. Researchers in the field have pointed out that these approaches tend to occlude ethically significant aspects of day-to-day engineering practice and thus reductively individualize and decontextualize ethical decision-making. Some have proposed, as a remedy for these defects, the use of research and theory from Science and Technology Studies to enrich our understanding of the ways in which technology and engineering practice are (...) intricated in social and institutional contexts. While endorsing this approach, this article also argues that STS scholarship may not sufficiently address the kinds of questions about normativity and agency that are essential to engineering ethics. It proposes making use of the growing body of research in a field called “postphenomenology,” an approach that combines STS research with the traditional phenomenological concern with the standpoint of lived-experience. Postphenomenology offers a method of inquiry that combines STS’s investigation into social and institutional dimensions of technology with phenomenological reflection on our lived experience of embodied engagement with technical objects and sociotechnical systems, particularly the ways in which these involvements affect our moral perception and agency. The aim in using this approach in engineering ethics is thus to illuminate moral dimensions of everyday professional life of which practitioners may not typically be aware. The article concludes with some concrete curricular interventions for engineering ethics classrooms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition ed. by John Berkman and William C. Mattison IIIStewart D. ClemSearching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition Edited by John Berkman and William C. Mattison III GRAND RAPIDS, MI: EERDMANS, 2014. 339 PP. $35.00Despite its generalist title, this book is the result of (...) a very specific and multilayered textual history. The core of the volume is the official English translation of the International Theological Commission (ITC) document In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law, which alone composes nearly a quarter of the book's text. Following five years of work, the commission first published the document in 2009. The following year, a special session at the annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics was convened for the purpose of discussing the document, and this session served as the impetus for the present volume. Along with Berkman and Mattison's introductory chapter, the remainder of the book is composed of responses to the document from no less than twenty-two scholars representing a broad range of religious and philosophical commitments.If there is anything approaching a consensus among the volume's diverse respondents, it is a nearly unanimous verdict that the ITC document offers a more winsome portrayal of natural law theorizing than anything that has been promulgated in official Church documents during the last several decades. As Serge-Thomas Bonino, OP (one of the document's coauthors), explains, the commission endeavored to situate the doctrine of natural law within "a larger theological framework that is both Christological and Trinitarian" (98). Many respondents praise the document's more nuanced and open-ended analysis of the natural law—one that accommodates a wide variety of sociocultural contexts—as well as the document's clarity and boldness in articulating a Christian (and specifically Christological) interpretation of the natural law tradition.The high level of admiration bestowed on the document does not mean that it is without its detractors, however. Some of the more critical respondents maintain that, in spite of the commission's "new look" at the natural law, many of the classical objections to the doctrine still hold. Gilbert Meilaender, for example, lauds the document's Christological commitments but worries that it fails to explain how this facet of the Catholic natural law tradition can help us to develop a universal ethic on which all can agree (226). Others express doubts precisely about what is "new" in this new look at the natural law. This [End Page 202] is perhaps best reflected by Jennifer Herdt's remark that "the note of epistemological modesty repeatedly sounded by In Search of a Universal Ethic seems to ring hollow" (210). In other words, the move toward less specificity regarding moral norms may in fact render the natural law inadequate as a framework for dialogue across cultures.Given the perennial subject matter of this volume, the editors have done an excellent job of balancing a vast range of perspectives and approaches to the natural law, rendering it useful to a wide audience. The sheer number of authors could easily have resulted in a collection that reflected breadth at the expense of depth. Thankfully, however, the presence of the ITC text as the locus of discussion helps to ground the conversation in such a way that all of the authors are fruitfully engaging the same set of questions. For this reason, it is among the best volumes currently available for those who wish to engage the most creative and rigorous thinking within the natural law tradition.Stewart D. ClemUniversity of Notre DameCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Within the nursing ethics literature, there has for some time now been a focus on the role and importance of character for nursing. An overarching rationale for this is the need to examine the sort of person one must be if one is to nurse well or be a good nurse. How one should be to live well or live a/the good life and to nurse well or be a good nurse seems to necessitate a focus on an agent's character (...) as well as actions because character is (for the most part) expressed in action (e.g. seeLaird). This paper will give an overview of the reasons for the role and importance of character in nursing practice and explain its relation to nursing's frequent use of virtue ethics in order to recommend caution. While the paper agrees that the role of character is important in nursing caution is needed in both how much moral and thus normative, emphasis is being placed on the psychology of character and on the drift to virtue ethics. The psychological which may be explanatory needs to be linked with the normative, and a justification for the normative is needed. A justification as virtue ethics is contested, and nursing practice does not need to take on this explanatory and justificatory burden.A tentative proposal raised but not discussed in depth in this paper is that when an ultimate explanation or explanatory ground is needed, nursing practice leads quite naturally to a form of consequentialism as well as a realist metaethic. On this account, there are two levels of moral thinking, and nursing practice entails the virtues at one level and leads quite naturally to moral thinking at another more critical level of the criterion of what makes something right and good independently of character. (shrink)

Morality is the individual or social conventions about moral norms and rules while morality management signifies the process and functions of planning, organising, motivating, and controlling morality. This book presents the philosophical assumptions of situation ethics to show the practice of morality management that follows from them. This research comprises theoretical and applied aspects: It is an investigation into metaethics that encompasses strategic and quality management problems. With the example of situation ethics, the book illustrates the role of philosophical (...) investigations and solutions in management theory and practice. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and advanced students in the fields of business and management studies, ethics, quality management, and philosophy. Furthermore, this book may be useful for senior executives and politicians charged with negotiating complicated moral quandaries and overseeing the implementation of ethical policies in their organisations and communities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and History, Customs and EthicsHui-Chieh Loy (bio)Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom. By Tao Jiang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China is a serious tour de force of a study. In many ways, I am reminded of Angus Graham's Disputers of the Tao and Benjamin Schwartz' The World of Thought (...) in Ancient China—but updated. A signal difference is that it is more constrained in its coverage of figures, texts, and especially in having the topical focus upon moral-political philosophy. At the same time and within the chosen (narrower) confines, it often examines its subject in greater detail and draws on more recent discussions.One neat thing that Jiang does is to deliberately weave in explicit discussions of how each subsequent thinker or text incorporated or criticized ideas associated with earlier thinkers. (I formulated it this way since there isn't enough historical evidence about who-actually-read-what in the ancient world, citation practices being what they were.) In this regard, I am especially heartened to read, for example, the sections on "Traces of Mohist Elements in the Laozi" (3.3.2), and "Mohist Elements in Han Feizi's Thought" (7.3.3).By no means should the desultory remarks below be counted as a full review or assessment (impressionistically, this is the sort of book I will recommend that my grad students read—there, I've said it). Think of them as humble shards of pottery thrown in the hope for some jade in response. To make my task more focused, I will comment on the Sinology versus Philosophy distinction, and Jiang's treatment of the Mohists.I. Philosophy and History of PhilosophyAn important part of Jiang's Introduction is devoted to discussing the situation of Chinese Philosophy as a field in the Western Academy, caught between Sinology on the one hand and academic Philosophy on the other. Due to the different scholarly objectives and norms in the two disciplines, scholars working on Chinese Philosophy often find themselves caught [End Page 420] between two distinct audiences who demand different things. Jiang's aim is to propose an "interpretive model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in Sinology and philosophy. These objects are related and at times overlap, but they are also often irreducibly distinct, i.e., original text versus inherited text, historical author versus textual author, and authorial intent versus textual intent, with the former in the pairs belonging to Sinologists and the latter to philosophers" (p. 7). In general, I am highly sympathetic to the distinctions Jiang draws. But I do wonder if we need to step back and start from a wider context involving what is potentially a deeper divide.Now, it is entirely a caricature but the joke around the water cooler is that philosophers—especially those of a more "analytic" bent—often exude the attitude that they are not in the business of reading old books. Their project is one focused on issues and problems and puzzles that are ultimately about the natural and human world, rather than about texts and their interpretation, or even the historical thinkers themselves. To give some obvious examples, the intellectual questions they see themselves as answering are the likes of:• Can we know that God exists, if God exists at all?• What is the nature of moral claims? Do they admit of truth and falsity?• How is causation related to possibility?• Is a logic that dispenses with the law of non-contradiction viable?• What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge?• Is abortion morally justifiable?Sometimes the questions they ask even infringe on the results and insights from nearby fields, for instance linguistics and the natural and empirical sciences:• What is time?• Can a presentist conception of time be made consistent with contemporary physics?• What is the nature of consciousness? How is it related to physical neural states or informational computational processes?• Can computers be sentient?• How is morality related to the passions?• In what sense is a political order that does justice to diversity of moral beliefs... (shrink)

Ethical behaviors are taught in business classrooms using multiple methods, among which case studies are a standard method. However, when introduced at the undergraduate level, until students have developed a strong foundation in moral philosophy, a prescriptive case analysis template may help them build constructive mental models towards that foundation. The paper thus proposes a case analysis method template based on critical components identified in the Ethics literature that lead to ethical decision-making that can be used as a tool (...) by teachers in Ethics in Business classrooms. The critical components entail the development of moral awareness by training the students to develop ethical values through practice. Students learn how to identify an ethical dilemma, analyze various stakeholder characteristics, explore ethical principles, and make moral judgments before recommending moral actions in each context. A sample case analysis is also provided for classroom use. The implications and value to educators, students, and managers are discussed. (shrink)

The implementation of socially sustainable practices in suppliers situated in challenging institutional contexts is examined using institutional theory, both in terms of how institutional pressures affect implementation and what explains the decoupling of practices from the day-to-day reality. A multi-case study approach is employed based on seven apparel industry suppliers in Bangladesh. Cross-case analysis highlights the coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures on suppliers to implement socially sustainable practices. A key pressure identified that has not previously been highlighted in the (...) literature is horizontal collaboration between buyers, which intensifies coercive pressure on suppliers and increases the consequences of non-compliance. The factors that contribute to decoupling are categorized into firm-, supply chain-, and environment-related factors. Further, six propositions are developed on how specific forms of institutional pressure can tackle particular decoupling factors to support implementation. The paper responds to recent calls for greater scrutiny of why and how firms decouple ethical practices and supports the development of the literature specifically on social sustainability, which lags behind that on environmental sustainability and has been largely focused on the Western buyer perspective. The findings have implications for the diffusion of ethical practices into supply chains, especially distant suppliers in very different and challenging institutional contexts. (shrink)

Although the study of moral judgment has gained in popularity in the field of psychology in recent years, little research has focused on confidentiality dilemmas in the context of moral judgment. Yet clinicians regularly face such dilemmas, which often arise in emotionally charged contexts. This study assesses the role of emotions in responses to these confidentiality dilemmas. A total of 186 participants studying psychology at different universities in Quebec were randomly assigned to one of three groups in an (...) experimental design (dramatic audio modality, neutral audio modality, text modality) and responded to confidentiality dilemmas by choosing between protecting or lifting confidentiality. Also taken into consideration were participants’ positioning on a continuum ranging from deontology to utilitarianism, based on their response to sacrificial dilemmas. The hierarchical multiple linear regression model used indicates a significant contribution from responses to sacrificial dilemmas, perceived emotional intensity of confidentiality dilemmas and training obtained in the field of ethics and deontology. The analysis further reveals the moderating effect of exposure to the experimental condition on the relationship between the tendency towards utilitarianism and the propensity to waive confidentiality in a psychotherapeutic relationship. These results have practical implications for psychology curricula, where situation scenarios with ecological validity could enhance ethics training. (shrink)