This paper critiques the reduction of the significance of human moral action to mere social construction and suggests two perspectives that resist this theoretical maneuver. It is argued that any school of thought within psychology that cannot provide an adequate account of ethics and moral action ultimately fails as a psychology. This paper examines the social constructionist claims of Kenneth Gergen and others, arguing that, because it undermines the possibility of a meaningful morality by ushering in a form of (...) nihilism, social constructionism fails as an adequate school of thought for psychology. By way of an alternative capable of providing a more adequate account of moral action in psychology, this paper explores the contributions of William James and Emmanuel Levinas. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Elvio Baccarini has responded generously to my book Medical Ethics: Ordinary Concepts, Ordinary Lives , but I would like to respond to three of his criticisms: first, about the role that theory ought to play in, and in relation to, moral experience; second, about my defence of a doctor’s right to conscientiously object to performing legal abortions; and third, to the reality of posthumous harm. Baccarini claims that I have overstated my claims, and drawn illegitimate metaphysical conclusions from people’s (...) ordinary language. However, I argue that moral language is special precisely because of the way it expresses an irreducible personal perspective. (shrink)

Demonstrates how the ethical underpinning of Hegel’s political and social philosophy has relevance for contemporary democratic life. The legal regulations and formal rules of democracy alone are not enough to hold a society together and govern its processes. Yet the irreducible ethical pluralism that characterizes contemporary society seems to make it impossible to impose a single system of values as a source of social cohesion and identity reference. In this book, Lucio Cortella argues that Hegel’s theory of ethical life (...) can provide such a grounding and makes the case through an analysis of Hegel’s central political work, the Philosophy of Right. Although Hegel did not support democratic political ends and wrote in a historical and cultural context far removed from the current liberal-democratic scene, Cortella maintains that the Hegelian theory of ethical life, with its emphasis on securing a framework conducive to human freedom, nevertheless offers a convincing response to the problem of the ethical uprootedness of contemporary democracy. (shrink)

This article examines Peter Singer’s animal ethic’s theory and argues that the utilitarian calculus’ inherent process of abstraction and homogenisation is epistemically violent because it erases animals’ singularities. I also argue that considering the sentience we can know of as the only characteristic that marks animals as worthy of moral considerability, as Singer does, can lead to violent actions towards animals because this logic erases all the violence that escapes sentientist logics. I show that key to this critique is Singer’s (...) misunderstanding of human sovereignty, and the relationship between human sovereignty and subjectivity. Further, I examine Singer’s conception of the “I”, and find that it is a lifeless and static one that leads his theory to foreclose ethical judgements. This article shows that animals’ irreducibility, vulnerabilities and otherness are sufficient to regard animals as worthy of moral considerability. Finally, I examine some practical implications of the arguments I advance. (shrink)

I argue that Jonas Olson’s argument from irreducible normativity is not a secure basis for an argument for error theory (section 1) and that a better basis is provided by the argument from supervenience, which has more bite against non-naturalist moral realism than Olson is willing to allow (section 2). I suggest there may be a view which can allow for the existence of irreducibly normative facts while remaining unaffected by the kinds of arguments that work against non-naturalist realism. (...) This view is expressivism. Interestingly, James Dreier has recently suggested that expressivism may not escape these arguments. I very briefly outline (but do not pursue) possible response strategies for expressivists (section 3). I close by discussing Olson’s argument against expressivism. Olson suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that expressivism is a bad fit with a plausible evolutionary explanation of our moral thought. I argue that Olson’s argument does not succeed (section 4). (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize the pairing of irreducible thickness with the traditional view of evaluation which says evaluation is a matter of encoding good or bad in some way. To do this, I first explicate the determination view, which holds that irreducibly thick concepts are to thin concepts as determinates are to determinables. I then show that, even if the determination view did establish irreducible thickness, it would not have proven that the evaluative is well understood as (...) being an instance of the determination relation; in order to do that, the determination view needs to show how the evaluative fit a general analysis of the determination relation. However, when the determination view attempts to fill in the analysis, we get implausible results—so implausible, I claim, that we should see the results as a reductio to the view. To generalize the criticism to any view like the determination view, I show that the same results ensue when we model the evaluative on mereology. Finally, I diagnose the general failure by claiming that the evaluative domain, as conceived by the defender of irreducible thickness, just does not have the structure to secure the tight connection between thick and thin concepts while also carving up our conceptual economy in a plausible way. (shrink)

To intuit something is to apprehend it directly, without recourse to reasoning processes such as deduction or induction. Intuitionism in ethics proposes that we have a capacity for intuition and that some of the facts or properties that we intuit are irreducibly ethical. Traditionally, intuitionism also advances the important thesis that beliefs arising from intuition have direct justification. This means that such beliefs do not need to be justified by appeal to other beliefs or facts because the proposition believed (...) is either self-evident or can have justification without being supported by evidence. So, while intuitionism in ethics is about the apprehension of ethical facts or properties, traditional intuitionism is principally a view about how ethical beliefs are justified: those arising from intuition have direct justification. (shrink)

I provide a novel response to scepticism concerning freedom and moral responsibility. This involves my extension to freedom of John McDowell's liberal natural approach to ethics and epistemology. I trace the source of the sceptical problem to an overly restrictive, brute conception of nature, where reality is equated with what figures, directly or indirectly, in natural scientific explanation. I challenge the all encompassing explanatory pretensions of restrictive naturalism, advocating a re-conception of nature such that it already incorporates reasons. This (...) allows for an explanation of free actions which is not ultimately brute, but irreducibly normative. Against the backdrop of liberal naturalism I conceive freedom as an emergent capacity to respond to reasons which arises from the acquisition of language. I claim that freedom is a rational causal power to originate actions based within a naturalised ontology, which has sufficient depth to justify moral responsibility without begging ontological or epistemological questions. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The idea that ‘business ethics’ picks out a distinct discipline within ethical theory is contentious; in particular, it is unclear why theoretical approaches to moral and political philosophy cannot satisfactorily address ethical concerns in the context of business activity, just as they can in the context of other human activities. In response, I argue that some features of the business environment require more focused analysis than currently available. This environment is characterised by the presence of large social groups – (...) business organisations – that are not political in nature, but yet wield considerable power and are the vehicles for complex forms of collective action. The most pressing ethical concern raised by such collective action is collective moral responsibility. I develop an account of collective responsibility that is tailored to business organisations and that combines a number of strands of moral thought – a desert-based account of moral responsibility that is of a kind with that typically applied to individual humans; a pluralistic account of how collective responsibility is generated that is rooted in irreducible group-level properties; and a moderate approach to social ontology that sees nothing mysterious in ‘distinct’ collective entities. From this starting point I develop two detailed models that illustrate how business organisations can constitute distinct collective entities that may be held morally responsible. The first shows how such organisations may satisfy the conditions required to hold moral agency, which is typically assumed to be a prerequisite for moral responsibility. The second breaks with this tradition and argues for the possibility of ‘non-agential’ moral responsibility in cases where complex organisational structures mediate the actions of the moral agents that populate them. I conclude by showing how this distinct organisational-level responsibility, far from insulating organisation members from personal culpability, illustrates quite distinct standards against which such individuals may be judged. (shrink)

This paper explores some issues concerning the relation between ontological reduction and conceptual reduction, as construed by the physicalists. More specifically, it aims at highlighting and analyzing certain general methodological and ethical implications of the physicalistic research projects. Against this background, the paper identifies a certain category of concepts as “irreducibly holistic”, that is, those with regard to which ontological and conceptual reduction are inextricably bound together. Further, the paper argues that since irreducibly holistic concepts are conceptually irreducible to (...) the physical, they have to be ontologically irreducible to the physical as well, thus rendering physicalism false. This conclusion is reached by analyzing and then rejecting a variety of programmes aimed at accommodating irreducibly holistic concepts within a physicalist framework (including eliminativism, preservative irrealism and quasi-realism). Lastly, an ontologically pluralistic framework is proposed for the purpose of reconciling apparently conflicting insights from different areas of philosophical and scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers of science have long discussed the importance of taking situatedness into account in scientific practices to avoid erasing important aspects of lived experience. Through the example of Gillian Einstein’s [2012] situated neuroscience, I will add support to Gallagher’s [2019] claims that intertheoretic reduction is problematic and provide reason to think pluralistic methodologies are explanatorily and ethically preferable.

Although debates about the shape and future of the built environment are usually cast in economic and political terms, they also have an irreducible ethical component that stands in need of careful examination. This paper is the report of an exploratory study in descriptive ethics carried out in Atlanta, Georgia. Archival sources and semi-structured interviews provide the basis for identifying and sorting the diverse value judgments and value conflicts that come into play in a rapidly growing metropolitan area. (...) The goal of the project is to expand and refine a draft framework for grappling with the ethical complexity of the situations from which individuals and communities make important decisions about their surroundings. The success of the framework is to be measured by its usefulness in informing the judgment of professionals and citizens, and in facilitating a robust normative debate about the built environment. (shrink)

This book is a critical attempt to approach world cinema in a new global frame that updates the national frame of territorial cinemas and the transnational frame of their interplay. The global frame implies the reintegration of border-crossing forces onto the postpolitical plane of troubled globalization with two ethical facets: the soft ethical inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their hard ethical symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both, global cinema is formulated as staging crucial challenges that (...) today's globalism and its antinomies bring to the notions of subjectivity and community. Many films indeed depict the antagonism between the inclusive global system and its excluded remnants, allegorizing the impossible political change in various modes of catastrophe and nihilism. A global community often takes on a totalized network of sovereign violence and (counter)terror stuck in the impasse of utopian imagination. Yet some films suggest alternative ethics irreducible to collective politics when abject figures, deprived of social subjectivity and rights, become contingent agents of existential 'gift-giving' by fostering commonality without community, solidarity without unity. The psychoanalytic notion of abjection is redefined here as both the biopolitical mode of bare life and its potential for the ethical agency that opens atopian, if not utopian, networking on the edge of the global regime beyond the problematic 'soft/hard' ethics of tolerance/violence or pity/hate. This precarious yet precious abject agency is explored through a vast net of globally circulating contemporary films and a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies. (shrink)

“This monograph is concerned with the ethical theories of two of the most influential thinkers in the history of British philosophy, namely Hobbes and Hume. The author offers a clear and comprehensive exposition of their thought and subjects it to critical assessment from the point of view of contemporary analytical philosophy. The issues with which this book deals are of abiding interest and form the subject matter of lively debate amongst modern moral philosophers. When we say that some action is (...) morally right, or that some state of affairs is morally good, what precisely do we mean? Can any adequate definition of moral rightness or goodness be given in non-moral terms? Could we, for example, substitute for morally right some such expression as ‘commanded by the sovereign power’; or could we, without loss or change of meaning, replace ‘This is morally good’ with some such description as ‘This causes a feeling of satisfaction in those who contemplate it’? Ethical naturalists think that the answer is in the affirmative, although they differ in the naturalistic definitions which they give to moral terms. Their opponents accuse them of being insensitive to the logically irreducible character of moral language.Readers will find that this book provides a valuable introduction to ethical naturalism, in both its classic and contemporary settings, and it will enable them to form their own judgement upon the crucial questions involved.”- Publisher. (shrink)

Traditional ethics has ignored the metaphysics of things, reduced the relation to things to a relation to objects in opposition to subjects, and consequently legitimized the subject's domination over the objects. My dissertation provides a metaphysical and ethical foundation for reappraising the value of things by both challenging and retrieving different aspects of Levinas's and Heidegger's philosophies. ;Levinas considers the Other as the authority capable of suspending the subject's tendency to unlimited power and domination, mistakenly understood as freedom. (...) class='Hi'>Ethics is the place of the suspension of violence and of the encounter with the Other. Yet, the Other is only the other person. As in traditional ethics, things remain instrumental to the relation between the I and the Other. ;Heidegger's notion of thinghood, retraced through a tortuous path of thinking leading from the early works to the later essays, is not ethically colored. Nevertheless, it preserves the Otherness of things thanks to their simultaneous mirroring of the mortals, the gods, the sky, and the earth. ;My dissertation extends Levinas's notion of ethics to Heidegger's notion of things and develops an ethics where tenderness is the essential category. Tenderness is a peculiar mode of touch. It allows us contact with things, but is not subject to the abuses of technological manipulation and as a consequence is respectful of the irreducible Otherness of things. (shrink)

A global information ethics that seeks to avoid imperialistic homogenization must conjoin shared norms while simultaneously preserving the irreducible differences between cultures and peoples. I argue that a global information ethics may fulfill these requirements by taking up an ethical pluralism – specifically Aristotle’s pros hen [“towards one”] or “focal” equivocals. These ethical pluralisms figure centrally in both classical and contemporary Western ethics: they further offer important connections with the major Eastern ethical tradition of Confucian thought. (...) Both traditions understand ethical judgment to lead to and thus require ethical pluralism – i.e., an acceptance of more than one judgment regarding the interpretation and application of a shared ethical norm. Both traditions invoke notions of resonance and harmony to articulate pluralistic structures of connection alongside irreducible differences. Specific examples within Western computer and information ethics demonstrate these pluralisms in fact working in praxis. After reviewing further resonances and radical differences between Western and Eastern views, I then argue that emerging conceptions of privacy and data privacy protection laws in China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Thailand in fact constitute a robust, pros hen pluralism with Western conceptions. In both theory and in praxis, then, this pluralism thus fulfills the requirement for a global information ethics that holds shared norms alongside the irreducible differences between cultures and peoples. (shrink)

Recent discussions in critical social epistemology have raised the idea that the concept 'knower' is not only an epistemological concept, but an ethical concept as well. Though this idea plays a central role in these discussions, the theoretical underpinnings of the claim have not received extended scrutiny. This paper explores the idea that 'knower' is an irreducibly ethical concept in an effort to defend its use as a critical concept. In Section 1, I begin with the claim that 'knower' is (...) an irreducibly normative and social concept, drawing from some ideas in Wilfrid Sellars. In Section 2, I argue that one's being a knower involves demands for various sorts of ethically-laden recognition. I develop this thought by arguing that Axel Honneth's threefold typology of recognition—love, respect, and esteem—finds clear expression within the context of socio-epistemic practice. I conclude in Section 3 by arguing that Miranda Fricker's proposed " analogy " between epistemic and moral perception should be modified to indicate a closer relationship than mere analogy. (shrink)

There is a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics that holds out the promise of giving us a profound insight into Aristotle’s view of the good, A6: 1096a23-29. Unfortunately, the passage - where Aristotle argues, contra Plato, that the good cannot be one thing - has proven remarkably resistant to satisfactory interpretation, defying the efforts of scholars over the last nine decades or so. This essay offers an interpretation which, while attempting both to be true to Aristotle’s text and to (...) avoid the pitfalls of past efforts, shows that he makes a solid case for the claim that goods are irreducibly diverse. It is driven by new theses on several topics: the meaning he attaches to legetai in phrases such as legetai pollacwV, his method for identifying the significance of words, his method for identifying what the good is, and the fundamental manner in which the good is predicated for him. (shrink)

This study examines the problem of moral considerability and the Other and from two basic standpoints, namely, a phenomenological analysis of alterity and a hermeneutical-comparative encounter between the continental tradition and its "Other." This hermeneutical-comparative engagement places the phenomenological tradition in dialogue with the East Asian tradition concerning the intersection of knowledge and "moral disclosure." ;I argue that we confront the moral considerability of the Other horizontally, which is to say that the presence of knowing shades into the irreducible (...) difference of the situation occupied by the Other . Sincere attempts to identify with the Other realize a morally transformative confrontation with absolute alterity , namely, the direct phenomenological experience of the Other's autonomy, which constitutes the concrete sense of the Other as morally considerable. Moral relationships with the Other, therefore, are defined as those modes of comportment that allow the Other to be disclosed qua absolute alterity and not merely in terms of relative alterity. For example, relationships of intimacy, solidarity, and compassion, optimally disclose and shelter the absolute alterity of the Other. Hence, "intimation," rather than intentionality, defines the proper mode of directedness by which the Other qua Other is disclosed. ;The fundamental ethical question thus becomes the question of moral disclosure, i.e., the clarification of the domain of moral considerables, and, only secondarily, the question of "correct" moral action, i.e., the regulation of the domain of moral considerables. The project of ethics is thereby reconceived as an "inconceivable devotion" towards the Other, namely, a cultivated attention to alterity that situates us within a field of excessive moral obligation. In the end, an ethics of alterity requires an understanding of moral obligation as a commitment to a process of continually enacting new possibilities of intimacy, solidarity, and moral relation, which are rooted in the maturation of moral skill rather than in the refinement of moral theory. (shrink)

Ethical reductionism is the best version of naturalistic moral realism. Reductionists regard moral properties as identical to properties appearing in successful scientific theories. Nonreductionists, including many of the Cornell Realists, argue that moral properties instead supervene on scientific properties without identity. I respond to two arguments for nonreductionism. First, nonreductionists argue that the multiple realizability of moral properties defeats reductionism. Multiple realizability can be addressed in ethics by identifying moral properties uniquely or disjunctively with properties of the special sciences. (...) Second, nonreductionists argue that irreducible moral properties explain empirical phenomena, just as irreducible special-science properties do. But since irreducible moral properties don't successfully explain additional regularities, they run the risk of being pseudoscientific properties. Reductionism has all the benefits of nonreductionism, while also being more secure against anti-realist objections because of its ontological simplicity. (shrink)

It is common in metaethics today to draw a distinction between “naturalist” and “non-naturalist” versions of moral realism, where the former view maintains that moral properties are natural properties, while the latter view maintains that they are non-natural properties instead. The nature of the disagreement here can be understood in different ways, but the most common way is to understand it as a metaphysical disagreement. In particular, the disagreement here is about the reducibility of moral properties, where the “naturalists” maintain (...) that moral properties are in some way reducible to the lower-level natural properties on which they supervene, while the “non-naturalists” maintain that moral properties are sui generis and robustly irreducible. In this paper I present a novel version of realist ethical naturalism—a view that I call Emergentist Ethical Naturalism—that reveals this common way of understanding the distinction between naturalism and non-naturalism to be flawed by combining a commitment to ethical naturalism with a commitment to the sui generis and robustly irreducible nature of moral properties that typically defines non-naturalism. Then, after presenting the theory and addressing a few worries that one might have about it, I show how it offers some novel, emergence-based responses to the various supervenience challenges that plague moral realism and thereby gives the ethical naturalist a robustly non-reductive option for dealing with these challenges. (shrink)

Ethical pluralists hold that moral values and systems are irreducibly diverse and incommensurable according to a common scale. One criticism of the view is that accepting such incommensurability renders them unable to criticize values, practices, institutions, and so forth that are genuinely bad. This paper considers two ways that pluralists have appealed to human nature to answer this criticism. One way appeals to nature to ground a positive conception of human flourishing, whereas the other appeals to nature as a source (...) of constraints. I argue that both views fail to meet the criticism in a satisfactory way and then advance a view that improves upon the existing options. Specifically, I argue that human nature is the standard by which it is possible to assess humaneness, which is a kind of beauty that represents the elevation or refinement of human nature. Accordingly, pluralists can deploy judgments of humaneness to criticize practices, institutions, and so forth that are not worth tolerating without violating the spirit of pluralism. (shrink)

For some time, the role of culture in language education within schools, universities and professional communication has received increasing attention. This article identifies two aporias in the discourse of intercultural communication : first, that it contains an unstated movement towards a universal consciousness; second, that its claims to truth are grounded in an implicit appeal to a transcendental moral signified.These features constitute IC discourse as ‘totality’, or as ‘metaphysics of presence’.The article draws on the work of Levinas ; and Derrida (...) to propose more considered ethical grounds for intercultural praxis. Contra a Hegelian impetus towards universal consciousness,we posit an irreducible distance and separation between the self and other. In so doing, not only are we able to supersede the field’s implicit appeal to the transcendental as a source of truth but also to counter perceptibly ‘exorbitant’ claims and actions of the intercultural other. In this vein, the article proposes a discourse ethics of responsibility by which it still becomes possible for a critical intercultural praxis to make value judgements and to take potentially transformative action vis-à-vis cultural acts that challenge the limits of intercultural tolerance and hospitality. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the implications that a general view of complexity - i.e. the view that complex phenomena are irreducible - hold for our understanding of ethics. In this view, ethics should be conceived of as constitutive of knowledge and identity, rather than as a normative system that dictates right action. Using this understanding, we elaborate on the ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics. Whilst the former concerns the nature and the (...) status of our modelling choices, the latter denotes a contingent and recursive understanding of ethics. Although the complexity of ethics cannot be captured in a substantive normative model, we argue that this view of ethics nevertheless commits one to, what we term, ‘the provisional imperative’. Like Kant’s categorical imperative, the provisional imperative is substantively- empty; however, unlike Kant’s imperative, our imperative cannot be used to generate universal ethical principles. As such, the provisional imperative simultaneously demands that we must be guided by it, whilst drawing attention to the exclusionary nature of all imperatives. We further argue that the provisional imperative urges us to adopt a certain attitude with regard to ethical decision-making, and that this attitude is supported and nurtured by provisionality, transgressivity, irony, and imagination. (shrink)

This paper argues that even the most extensively refined comparative cost/benefit analysis must be supplemented by other factors, irreducible to it, if we are to develop an adequate framework to guide policy decisions affecting technological design and innovation.

In this paper I present an account of a distinctive form of ‘practical’ or ‘deliberative’ uncertainty that has been central in debates in both ethics and metaethics. Many writers have assumed that such uncertainty concerns a special normative question, such as what we ought to do ‘all things considered.’ I argue against this assumption and instead endorse an alternative view of such uncertainty, which combines elements of both metaethical cognitivism and non-cognitivism. A notable consequence of this view is that (...) even if there are objective and irreducible truths about how we ought to act, all things considered, the ‘central deliberative question,’ as it’s sometimes called, doesn’t concern such truths. Instead, that question doesn’t have a true answer. (shrink)

Violence is signaled by a mark of discontinuity, interruption, rupture. The tripartite temporality of violence, with its strong focus on the present, points to the originary violence. Moreover, the violent event is structuring the order of the action sequences in an actual violent (embodied) interaction. The interactional dynamics in violent encounters between co-present actors shapes the specific forms of the experiencing in (and of) the violent interaction. Based on how violence is experienced in an interactive situation, the phenomenon of violence (...) articulates itself according to three coordinates: directedness, co-performativity and de-capabilisation. The outlining of the structure of the lived experience of violence is revealing something irreducible in it. To understand the experience of violence as such, I propose that we accept the idea of violence per se and depart from the idea that the acts of violence are essentially moral actions. The core of the ethical-moral discussion concerning violence should be grounded instead on the moment of conversion identifiable when we take into account the reaction to violence. (shrink)

This work renews the basic questions and principles of philosophical ethics and provides a thorough account of how being oneself presupposes freedom and responsibility. _Elements of Ethics_ focuses on the descriptive and conceptual analysis of the experiences through which human lives become aware of themselves and shows how we are provoked to respond appropriately to the various dimensions and phenomena of the universe. Operating on the provocative thesis that "if the ethical is real, it cannot be proved, because it (...) is either nothing at all or an irreducible origin," this book pursues the question that defines ethics: "How should I live?" After setting out a preliminary definition of terms, _Elements of Ethics_ gives insight into the relation of human individuals and the world by showing that the traditional separation between "is" and "ought" overlooks their profound coincidence, and by clarifying the determining, though often overlooked, role of _affectivity _ and _katharsis_ in all ethical experiences. (shrink)

This article starts with a brief overview of well-known criticisms of modern democracy in order to suggest a different approach: reflecting on the principles of Western democracy in the basic horizon of the problematic of the self and wondering if the ‘multiple’ self should not be conceived as the single subjective correlate that is adequate to democratic pluralism and also as the only chance of curing ourselves of ‘fundamentalism’. I try to highlight the Derridian radical view of democracy as “always (...) still to come”, placing it in the generic framework of ‘postmodern ethics’. I distinguish between two trends in postmodern ethics and also between three kinds or models of relationship to the self, in order to argue that the ‘multiple’ self, that is the self conceived as an irreducible multiplicity of voices, positions, tendencies, vocabularies, and characters, might claim the status of an ideal that needs to be fully embraced and understood in all its consequences – some of them profoundly disturbing for the old ‘images of the self’ consecrated by our tradition, on the one side Greek and Latin, on the other, Judeo-Christian –, if we want that democracy actually become a social and political reality. I conclude this paper with a plea for resistance to biopolitical normalization. (shrink)

In this paper I continue to probe the roles of philosophy and psychology in moral education. In a previous article published in this journal, I criticized the moral views of various schools of psychotherapy, and argued that philosophers are the sole professionals equipped to teach normative morality in a pluralistic, critical, and reasoned way . In this paper, I argue that effective moral education involves emotional education; that philosophers’ views of emotions tend to be reductive, and when they are not, (...) they point to an irreducibility of affectivity which is not amenable to philosophical investigation. While emotional and moral education should go hand in hand, philosophers seem poorly equipped for the former. Psychotherapists are trained in educating emotions and in attending the irreducible affectivity of individual emotions. Interested as we might be in psychotherapists’ specialization in emotional education, we cannot dissociate it from moral education, as emotional education is not value-free. Recalling that psychological theories involve views of morality which do not withstand critical examination , we are reluctant to entrust psychotherapists with moral education. Turning once again to psychology, we realize that we have added a new complexity to the initial problematic status of psychological moral education. While emotional and moral education should go hand in hand, the untenable situation that obtains is that philosophers educate us morally while psychologists educate us emotionally. Moral education is impaired whether it is left to psychotherapists or to philosophers. I conclude by sharing some thoughts on the possibilities of amending this situation. (shrink)

I argue that irreducible multiple conceptions of moral obligation may be found in efforts to define "sustainability." Individualistic ethics currently dominate and will probably continue to shape discussions of natural resource depletion. Non-individualistic, organic ethics, which focus on entire generations of humans, are useful for overcoming problems of intergenerational identification. Finally, however, an expansion of the purview of ethics to the entire biotic community, as suggested by Aldo Leopold, represents a third scale of concern and obligation. (...) By means of an articulated, scalar bequest package, incorporating each of these disparate foci, I outline a hierarchical ethic of sustainability. (shrink)

I trace the development of an emerging global Information and Computing Ethics , arguing that ethical pluralism – as found in both Western and Asian traditions – is crucial to such an ICE. In particular, ethical pluralism – as affiliated with notions of judgment , reson-ance, and harmony – holds together shared ethical norms alongside the irreducible differences that define individual and cultural identities. I demonstrate how such pluralism is already at work in both contemporary theory and praxis, (...) including in development projects in diverse cul-tures. I conclude with a number of resonances between this global pluralism and African thought and tradi-tions that thus suggest that such a pluralism may also succeed in the African context, as diverse African cultures and countries seek to benefit from ICTs while maintaining their cultural identities. (shrink)

Several foundational documents of bioethics mention the special obligation researchers have to vulnerable research participants. However, the treatment of vulnerability offered by these documents often relies on enumeration of vulnerable groups rather than an analysis of the features that make such groups vulnerable. Recent attempts in the scholarly literature to lend philosophical weight to the concept of vulnerability are offered by Luna and Hurst. Luna suggests that vulnerability is irreducibly contextual and that Institutional Review Boards (Research Ethics Committees) can (...) only identify vulnerable participants by carefully examining the details of the proposed research. Hurst, in contrast, defines the vulnerable as those especially at risk of incurring the wrongs to which all research ethics participants are exposed. We offer a more substantive conception of vulnerability than Luna but one that gives rise to a different rubric of responsibilities from Hurst's. While we understand vulnerability to be an ontological condition of human existence, in the context of research ethics, we take the vulnerable to be research subjects who are especially prone to harm or exploitation. Our analysis rests on developing a typology of sources of vulnerability and showing how distinct sources generate distinct obligations on the part of the researcher. Our account emphasizes that the researcher's first obligation is not to make the research participant even more vulnerable than they already are. To illustrate our framework, we consider two cases: that of a vulnerable population involved in international research and that of a domestic population of people with diminished capacity. (shrink)

This paper argues that in the case of mental illnesses whose somatic bases are not known or do not exist, a promising route to understand mental illness is to see it as the lack of a patient’s engagement with some moral values that are necessary for a good human life. The paper explains how the first-person perspective, which is constitutive for mental illnesses, makes it impossible to provide an adequate, third-person explanation of the pathological. Because of its irreducible first-personal (...) nature, mental illness must be understood in terms of a moral harm to the patient, and so an integration of ethics and psychiatry is required. This view is further illustrated with A. Kępiński’s idea of psychiatry as therapy with moral values. (shrink)

The encounter between a patient and her surgeon is unique for several reasons. The surgeon inflicts pain upon a patient for the patient’s own good. An operative intervention is irreducibly personal, such that the decisions about and performance of operations are inseparable from the idiosyncrasies of the individual surgeon. Furthermore, there is a chasm of knowledge between the patient and surgeon that is difficult to cross. Hence, training in the discipline of surgery includes the inculcation of certain virtues and practices (...) to safeguard against abuses of this relationship and to make sure that the best interests of the patient are prioritized. The stories in this issue are evidence that in contemporary practice this is not quite enough, as surgeons reflect on instances they felt were ethically challenging. Common themes include the difficulty in communicating surgical uncertainty, patient–surgeon relationships, ethical issues in surgical training, and the impact of the technological imperative on caring for dying patients. (shrink)

Disease in wildlife raises a number of issues that have not been widely considered in the bioethical literature. However, wildlife disease has major implications for human welfare. The majority of emerging human infectious diseases are zoonotic: that is, they occur in humans by cross-species transmission from animal hosts. Managing these diseases often involves balancing concerns with human health against animal welfare and conservation concerns. Many infectious diseases of domestic animals are shared with wild animals, although it is often unclear whether (...) the infection spills over from wild animals to domestic animals or vice versa. Culling is the standard means of managing such diseases, bringing economic considerations, animal welfare and conservation into conflict. Infectious diseases are also major threatening processes in conservation biology and their appropriate management by culling, vaccination or treatment raises substantial animal ethics issues. One particular issue of great significance in Australia is an ongoing research program to develop genetically modified pathogens to control vertebrate pests including rabbits, foxes and house mice. Release of any self-replicating GMO vertebrate pathogen gives rise to a whole series of ethical questions. We briefly review current Australian legal responses to these problems. Finally, we present two unresolved problems of general importance that are exemplified by wildlife disease. First, to what extent can or should 'bioethics' be broadened beyond direct concerns with human welfare to animal welfare and environmental welfare? Second, how should the irreducible uncertainty of ecological systems be accounted for in ethical decision making? (shrink)

Gilbert and colleagues are to be commended for drawing our attention to the need for a sounder empirical basis, and for more careful reasoning, in the context of the neuroethics debate on Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and its potential impact on the dimensions of personality, identity, agency, authenticity, autonomy and self (PIAAAS). While acknowledging this, this extended commentary critically examines their claim that the real-world relevance of the conclusions drawn in the neuroethics literature is threatened by the fact that the (...) concepts at the center of the discussion have “weak empirical grounding”. First, I show that while some possible understandings of multifaceted concepts like identity, authenticity and autonomy may indeed be unsuitable for a purely empirical inquiry, this is not the case of all of them. Secondly, I call into question the authors’ apparent suggestion that reliance on constructs involving an irreducibly normative dimension makes for a suboptimal state of affairs, and that they should ideally be replaced with substitutes taken from the language of neuroscience or social science in order to ensure an adequate empirical grounding for the debate. Such a suggestion, I argue, commits the authors to a controversial reductionist view in metaethics that the valid empirical concerns they raise in the rest of their article do not presuppose, and which could potentially us lead to lose sight of important ethical considerations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and CharacterIvan A. BoldyrevMark D. White. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 270. Cloth, $55.00.This remarkable book provides a new ethical perspective for economics based on Kantian ethics of autonomy and dignity. There are two main messages in it that I find particularly important. First, Mark White derives (...) from Kant the idea of irreducible moral principles that govern the behavior of economic agents independently of welfarist and, more generally, consequentialist concerns. These principles of duty and the “incomparable worth” (21) of human dignity, as well as justice or rights, may not be economically traded off against some other motivations; hence, they simply evade economic reasoning altogether.Second, White endorses a version of libertarian Kantianism that treats people as individuals in essence (“autonomous”) and social in orientation (respecting the rights and the choices of the others). In discussing individualism, White attacks the conventional wisdom of economics and claims that preferences alone do not account for the identity of individuals [End Page 298] in space and time, although their unique characters do. Persons should be given free choice (absent in deterministic rational-choice models) and hence responsibility for their choices that incorporates the social factors in decision-making. However, White never mentions the almost insurmountable difficulties associated with fleshing out the truly individual features of a given person. Although he allows for a person’s identity and character changing over time, he does not recognize that character itself is in many respects a social construction.White criticizes paternalistic economic policies that suggest manipulating choice environments in order to follow the “true” preferences of the individuals. Instead, real consent, as satisfying both relevant preferences and principles (e.g. rights and human dignity), is, in his view, the sole criterion for justifying particular policy measures—not Pareto-efficiency or Kaldor-Hicks compensation. Economists’ obsession with efficiency leading to the misconceived notions such as “efficient level of crime” or “manageable level of terrorism” is also severely criticized.For White, the most popular formalistic version of the categorical imperative is less important than the other two—prohibiting treating other people simply as means and instituting the “Kingdom of Ends.” Formalism is reserved merely for the negative evaluation of actions and providing strict perfect duties that give clear guidance concerning what should not be done. White’s “Kantian-economic” model of decision-making incorporates perfect duties as constraints, and imperfect (positive) duties as preferences. He also stresses that for Kant, duties derived from the imperative depend on empirical knowledge, the context of decision-making, and judgment as a unique personal interpretation of the moral law. He further emphasizes the intersubjective role of Kantian morality: moral law should be universalizable to all rational persons (the “Kingdom of Ends” formula of the imperative), whereas rationality means not just following the patterns of behavior developed in the preference-oriented choice model, but rather acting on one’s beliefs and desires or choosing not to follow them, thus exhibiting genuine autonomy.The new and important contribution to the discussion is an explicit treatment of will as an inner faculty that, together with judgment, constitutes a person’s character or “self,” and helps to overcome the mere inclination to follow duty. Will is the missing link between decision and action and should be “well-trained” for bringing about true morality.The book is clearly written, and the author has upheld the interdisciplinary appeal of the topic, demonstrating an outstanding knowledge of the vast literature on ethics (both Kantian and not) and economics. White’s emphasis on the irreducibility of moral principles is absolutely relevant for current economic and political debates. However, some reservations are in order.There is an ambiguity concerning the status of his analysis. If in its positive aspect White’s recommendations for economists is to accept the Kantian vision of morality, then almost no arguments are given for this, and his modifications of the standard choice model are introduced in an ad hoc manner, just to reconcile it with the Kantian framework. Are an individual’s decisions to act on principles and to overcome mere inclinations really... (shrink)

Through a close reading of the works of the Ancient Greek Cynics , the Marquis de Sade , and Friedrich Nietzsche , this dissertation explores "ethics of destruction" that undermine set goals and determinate approaches to the world and that confront dominant social-historical institutions while privileging an approach to philosophy as a way of living and of relating to the world. Ethics of destruction affirm difference and irreducible singularities and undermine inherited beliefs and traditions; they reject prescribed (...) social values set on universality, transcendence, and fixity, and embrace singularity, indeterminacy, and transformation. ;The ethics of destruction described in this dissertation involve practices that oppose any domination and that attempt to do justice to what is "hidden and forbidden" and "ex-communicated" in the name of what has been constructed as life. The Cynics, Sade, and Nietzsche engaged in different ethics of destruction that led them towards transforming themselves and towards "becoming tyche," "becoming chaos," or "becoming fatum" respectively. These ethics privilege the multiple, unlimited, and indeterminate at the basis of something that can no longer be called "ontology" but that can be designated as "ways of living." They also accentuate the permeation and stratification of an unlimited, or rather an ungraspable, multiplicity of sensations, feelings, emotions, events, interpretations, etc., at the basis of what can no longer be called "epistemology" but that can be designated as "ways of relating to the world." The particular ways of living and of relating to the world associated with ethics of destruction are shown to privilege practices that open pathways towards "multiplicity.". (shrink)

Non-naturalists about the normative face the problem of providing a metaphysical explanation for the supervenience of the normative on the natural. Recently, Gideon Rosen has argued that non-naturalists can side-step this problem by rejecting strong supervenience and the view that normative truths are metaphysically necessary. Rosen proposes to take normative truths to be normatively necessary, where normative necessity is different from and irreducible to metaphysical necessity. I argue that if Rosen is right, that creates a deeper problem for robust (...) ethical realism (the view that there are mind-independent, non-natural moral facts). According to robust ethical realism, it is a normative fact that persons are an especially valuable kind of being. But if Rosen is right, that is a metaphysically contingent fact. The existence of persons is also contingent. According to robust ethical realism, then, there is a striking match between what the normative facts happen to be and the kinds of beings that happen to exist. Persons could have failed to exist and they could have failed to be valuable, but it just so happens to be a fact about the natural world that they exist and a normative fact that they have value. Given that this match is accidental, it amounts to a miraculous coincidence. To the extent that commitment to unexplained coincidences counts against a view, robust ethical realism faces a problem. (shrink)

Kant's formalism remains unreal if it cannot be concretized in a historical ethos. An ethos belongs—with texts, contexts, structures, processes, networks, etc.—to an economy of customs and opinions, which presupposes that participating individuals have been and are being initiated and acculturated to it. The analysis of education, transmission, and transition unveils the irreducible—noneconomic and non-textual— essence of addressing and interlocution, without which no culture could exist. The otherness that is involved implies, but is not confined to, "you." The third (...) and I myself are also other by imposing the same inescapable responsibility for them on me. (shrink)

It is one of the paradoxes of our age that the 'success' of democracy in Eastern Europe and South Africa is coupled with grave disappointment in the 'birth places' of modern democracy. This dis appointment is partly due to the irreducible ambiguity entailed in democratic institutional arrangements. Democracy, in fact, is founded on this ambiguity. It attempts to construct social unity on the basis of recognizing the lack around which the social field is always structured. In that sense the (...) source of the disappointment caused by democracy is of an ethical status. It is the antithesis between the ambiguity of democracy and a still hegemonic ethics of harmony. Any aspiration, however, to eliminate the ambiguity of democracy ignores the innovative logic of democratic politics. If the ethics of harmony lead to a de-democratization of democracy, what a radical democratic project needs today is an ethical basis of a totally different nature. Here, the ethics of psychoanalysis, as formulated in the Lacanian tradition, can be of great help. Key Words: democracy • ethics • harmony • Lacan • psychoanalysis. (shrink)

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

In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic.’ In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use,’ we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late lectures. We investigate how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality and also how its methodological foundation (...) is developed in an interpretation of truth-telling in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Our interpretation emphasizes the ambiguous status of ethics in Foucault’s late work: on the one hand, Agamben is right that Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics thereby connecting it intrinsically to governmentality. On the other hand, Agamben overlooks how Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality which emphasizes how ethical practices cannot be captured solely in strategic terms. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach thus articulates a dimension of ethics that remains, using Agamben’s own terms, ‘ungovernable’ and therefore also genuinely creative. Even so, Foucault’s approach to ethics remains in Agamben’s perspective on the deepest level faced with an antinomy that Agamben seeks to mediate with his Pauline conception of ‘inoperativity.’. (shrink)

This volume, emanating from the Fourth Keeling Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, presents essays and comments by nine outstanding scholars of ancient philosophy, which examine the influence of Plato on the development of Aristotle's ethics. The essays focus on the role of pleasure in happiness and the good life (Christopher Taylor and Sarah Broadie), the irreducibility of ethical concepts to value-neutral concepts (Anthony Price and Sarah Broadie), the relation of virtue to happiness (Roger Crisp and Christopher Rowe, Terry Irwin and (...) Sir Anthony Kenny), the role of the requirement of self-sufficiency in determining the content of happiness (John Cooper and Sir Anthony Kenny), and the question of whether the just man should be a participant in the political life of his city (Richard Kraut and Christopher Rowe). (shrink)

This essay starts with the possibility of situating Derrida’s aporetic ethics in the domain of normative ethics and argues that Derrida’s reflection on ethics is enrooted in the specific way he conceives the phenomenological notion of auto-affection. In the second section, I analyze, in the early work, auto-affection with signs and show its centrality in Derrida’s first encounter with Levinas’s philosophy. Derrida refuses to substitute the hetero-affective relation to the Other for auto-affection as the source of universal (...) law and normativity. He does not sacrifice universality and tackles the problem of autonomous ethical decision-making even though he welcomes through affectivity the signification of the singular other, which is irreducible to conceptual, emotive, and normative self-relation. This background helps us understand the rootedness of ethical aporias in a reflection on auto-affection. (shrink)

In the management and business ethics literatures, stakeholder engagement has been demonstrated to lead to more ethical management practices. However, there may be limits on the extent to which stakeholder engagement can, as currently conceptualized, resolve some of the more difficult ethical challenges faced by managers. In this paper we argue that stakeholder engagement, when seen as a way of reducing five types of knowledge problems—risk, ambiguity, complexity, equivocality, and a priori irreducible uncertainty—can aid managers in resolving such (...) ethical challenges. Using a practical illustration of the ethical challenges surrounding the development and application of genetic modification technologies, we demonstrate how stakeholder engagement enables managers to better address these knowledge problems, thereby to manage more ethically. In this way, we suggest that stakeholder engagement has an even more crucial role to play in business ethics research and practice. (shrink)