Moral indeterminacy can be problematic: prospectively it can give rise to deliberative anguish, and retrospectively, it can leave us in a limbo as to what attitudes it is appropriate to form with respect to past actions with indeterminate moral status. These problems give us reason to resolve ethical indeterminacy. One mechanism for doing so involves the use of our normative powers to place obligations on ourselves and to waive our claims against others. This mechanism could operate (...) through an explicit agreement, but could also operate through implicit endorsement of a social convention. However, there are important limits on when the mechanism can eliminate moral indeterminacy. (shrink)

This paper argues that several sorts of metaphysical and semantic indeterminacy afflict the causal relation. If, as it is plausible to hold, there is a relationship between causation and moral responsibility, then indeterminacy in the causal relation results in indeterminacy of moral responsibility more generally.

Though the art of compromise, i.e. of settling differences by mutual concessions, is part of communal living on any level, we often think that there is something wrong in compromise, especially in cases where moral convictions are involved. A first reason for distrusting compromises on moral matters refers to the idea of integrity, understood in the basic sense of 'standing for something', especially standing for the values and causes that to some extent confer identity. The second reason points (...) out the objective nature of moral values, which seems to make them immune from negotiation and barter. If one sincerely holds some moral conviction to be true, than compromising on that belief must be a sign of serious confusion.In order to reach a better understanding of these two reasons, I analyse what is involved in personal integrity and how this relates to moral integrity. I argue that the search for moral integrity naturally brings us to the question of how one could accept moral compromises and still uphold the idea that moral values and principles have an objective authority over us. To address this question I will present a version of moral pluralism which tries to capture the enormous complexity of what should matter to us as moral persons, and which explains why value-rankings are often deeply indeterminate. The general position I defend in this paper is that compromises involving moral values and norms may be morally required and, therefore, be laudable. To sustain this position I will arrive at a view of ethical objectivity that allows the possibility to negotiate about the truth of moral beliefs. (shrink)

According to moral error theory, morality is something invented, constructed or made; but mistakenly presents itself to us as if it were an independent object of discovery. According to moral constructivism, morality is something invented, constructed or made. In this paper I argue that constructivism is both compatible with, and in certain cases explanatory of, some of the allegedly mistaken commitments to which arguments for moral skepticism appeal. I focus on two particular allegations that are sometimes associated (...) with moral skepticism. The first is the suspicion that in making moral claims we are merely projecting our attitudes onto the world. The second is the suspicion that in arguing for and against moral views we are merely attempting to influence each other to give similar answers to questions that have no determinate answer. (shrink)

In this article we identify three previously unnoticed problems with flexible moral theories, i.e., theories according to which different moral rules apply when there is full compliance and when there is partial compliance. The first problem is that flexible theories are necessarily very complex, which undermines their ability to motivate and guide action. The second problem is that flexible theories allow for a troubling kind of (moral) domination: the duties an agent has depend on other agents' willingness (...) to comply. Finally, flexible theories introduce indeterminacy: it is sometimes impossible to determine which moral rules apply. When agents stand at the threshold—i.e., when a different rule would apply if a single additional act of noncompliance took place—it is impossible to determine which rule should apply. (shrink)

One major objection to social rights is a failure of determining which precise social and economic claims should be granted rights status. The social rights debate has grappled with this ‘indeterminacy problem’ for quite some time, and a number of proposals have emerged aimed at fixing the content of these rights. In what follows I examine three distinct approaches to fleshing out the idea of a minimum threshold: social rights as the fulfilment of basic needs, social rights as the (...) securing of a minimally decent life and social rights as a requirement of citizenship. Each of these proposals progressively expands on what the minimum threshold of social rights requires and, conversely, what obligations they generate on part of the state. I will show that none of these approaches is entirely satisfactory and suggest that the social rights debate look elsewhere to determine its content. (shrink)

Much of the discussion on cosmopolitanism and nationalism has focused on their different normative views. The purpose of this article is to shift the attention away from the normative debate to the metatheoretical argument about how we determine moral and political principles independently of each other. I argue that the discussion among proponents of cosmopolitanism and contextualist models boils down to latent methodological and metatheoretical assumptions about what selection of facts are considered politically relevant. In the article, I explore (...) what I call ‘the indeterminacy failure’ of moral cosmopolitanism, that is, the view according to which moral principles fail to determine what political-institutional level might be preferable; and the ‘indeterminacy failure’ of liberal nationalism, that is, the view according to which national identity fails to determine moral principles. In opposition to dichotomist cosmopolitan models and alternative contextualist approaches, I promote a ‘split-level’ model that is set to avoid the difficulties in the other approaches. The split-level corrects the indeterminacy failures of cosmopolitanism and contextualism by distinguishing clearly between the level of moral theorising and the level of political theorising. (shrink)

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

Consciousness has an important role in ethics: when a being consciously experiences the frustration or satisfaction of its interests, those interests deserve higher moral priority than those of a behaviourally similar but non-conscious being. I consider the relationship between this ethical role and an a posteriori (or “type-B”) materialist solution to the mind-body problem. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if type-B materialism is correct, then the reference of the concept of phenomenal consciousness is radically indeterminate between (...) a neuronal-level property that is distinctive to mammals and a high-level functional property that is much more widely shared. This would leave many non-mammalian animals (such as birds, fish, insects and octopuses) with indeterminate moral status. There are ways to manage this radical moral indeterminacy, but all of these ways lead to profoundly troubling consequences. (shrink)

The ‘no-difference problem’ challenges us to explain in which way the occurrence of an aggregate effect gives us reason to act in a specific way, although our individual actions make no difference to the effect’s occurrence. When discussing this problem, philosophers usually distinguish between so-called ‘triggering cases’, where the aggregate effect in question is brought about upon reaching a precise threshold, and ‘non-triggering cases’, in which no such precise threshold exists. However, despite their relevant differences, it is widely assumed not (...) only that both categories of cases confront us with the same moral problem, but also that this problem should be solved in the same way no matter which category we are considering. In this paper, I argue that this assumption is mistaken by showing that non-triggering cases pose very different moral problems than triggering cases unless very specific and, arguably, unlikely assumptions in neighbouring debates about causation and decision-making under indeterminacy hold. (shrink)

Miriam Schoenfield argues that moral realism and moral vagueness imply ontic vagueness. In particular, she argues that neither shifty nor rigid semantic accounts of vagueness can provide a satisfactory explanation of moral vagueness for moral realists. This paper constitutes a response. I argue that Schoenfield's argument against the shifty semantic account presupposes that moral indeterminacies can, in fact, be resolved determinately by crunching through linguistic data. I provide different reasons for rejecting this assumption. Furthermore, I (...) argue that Schoenfield's rejection of the rigid semantic account is based on a presupposition that ultimately implies the very same claim that is under dispute: the vagueness of moral predicates in imperfect languages persists in the perfect language, as well. (shrink)

Indeterminacy in its various forms has been the focus of a great deal of philosophical attention in recent years. Much of this discussion has focused on the status of vague predicates such as ‘tall’, ‘bald’, and ‘heap’. It is determinately the case that a seven-foot person is tall and that a five-foot person is not tall. However, it seems difficult to pick out any determinate height at which someone becomes tall. How best to account for this phenomenon is, of (...) course, a controversial matter. For example, some (such as Sorensen (2001) and Williamson (2002)) maintain that there is a precise height at which someone becomes tall and such apparent cases of indeterminacy merely reflects our ignorance of this fact. Others maintain that there is some genuine – and not merely epistemic – indeterminacy present is such cases and offer various accounts of how best to account for it. Supervaluationists (such as Keefe (2008)), for example, claim that the indeterminacy with respect to vague terms lies in their not having a single definite extension. Rather, each term is associated with a range of possible precise extensions or precisifications such that it is semantically unsettled which is the correct extension. One precisification of ‘tall’ might allow that anyone over five feet ten inches is tall, whereas another would only allow those over six foot to qualify; but no precisification will take someone who is five foot to be tall, and someone who is seven foot will count as tall on all precisifications. Thus – while someone who is seven foot will be determinately tall and someone who is five foot determinately not so – it will be indeterminate whether someone who stands at five foot eleven inches is tall. -/- Yet, it is important to stress that putative cases of indeterminacy are not limited to vague predicates of this kind. Philosophers have invoked indeterminacy in discussions of topics as diverse as moral responsibility (Bernstein (forthcoming)), identity over time (Williams (2014)), and the status of the future (Barnes and Cameron (2009)). In this paper, we focus on two areas where discussion of various kinds of indeterminacy has been commonplace: physics and fiction. We propose a new model for understanding indeterminacy across these domains and argue that it has some notable advantages when compared to earlier accounts. Treating physics and fiction cases univocally also indicates an interesting connection between indeterminacy in these two areas. (shrink)

Recent work in applied ethics has advanced a raft of arguments regarding individual responsibilities to address collective challenges like climate change or the welfare and environmental impacts of meat production. Frequently, such arguments suggest that individual actors have a responsibility to be more conscientious with their consumption decisions, that they can and should harness the power of the market to bring about a desired outcome. A common response to these arguments, and a challenge in particular to act-consequentialist reasoning, is that (...) it “makes no difference” if one takes conscious consumption action or not – that one is “causally impotent” to change an outcome. In this paper, I break causal impotence objections into three distinct lines of argument and present causal indeterminacy as a third, unexplored variation of much more common causal impotence lines. I suggest that the causal indeterminacy argument presents additional challenges to consequentialist moral theory because it acknowledges that individual actions can have an impact on outcome, but suggests instead that the outcome can neither be known nor secured by the action itself. (shrink)

You may not know me well enough to evaluate me in terms of my moral character, but I take it you believe I can be evaluated: it sounds strange to say that I am indeterminate, neither good nor bad nor intermediate. Yet I argue that the claim that most people are indeterminate is the conclusion of a sound argument—the indeterminacy paradox—with two premises: (1) most people are fragmented (they would behave deplorably in many and admirably in many other (...) situations); (2) fragmentation entails indeterminacy. I support (1) by examining psychological experiments in which most participants behave deplorably (e.g., by maltreating “prisoners” in a simulated prison) or admirably (e.g., by intervening in a simulated theft). I support (2) by arguing that, according to certain plausible conceptions, character evaluations presuppose behavioral consistency (lack of fragmentation). Possible reactions to the paradox include: (a) denying that the experiments are relevant to character; (b) upholding conceptions according to which character evaluations do not presuppose consistency; (c) granting that most people are indeterminate and explaining why it appears otherwise. I defend (c) against (a) and (b). (shrink)

Most psychological and philosophical theories assume that we know what we feel. This general view is often accompanied by a range of more specific claims, such as the idea that we experience one emotion at a time, and that it is possible to distinguish between emotions based on their cognition, judgment, behaviour, or physiology. One common approach is to discriminate emotions based on their motivations or ultimate goals. Some argue that empathic distress, for instance, has the potential to motivate empathic (...) concerns; personal distress, on the other hand, is self-oriented and motivates egoistic concerns. In this paper, I argue against this and similarly teleological views of emotions and affect. Through a close study of the emotional breakdown of an American drone operator, I make the case that understanding our emotions entails much more ambiguity than dominant theories assume. In our emotional lives, disorientation and confusion are often the norm. (shrink)

In this paper, prediction markets that encourage traders to bet on matters of life and death are used to explore the varieties and dynamics of moral repugnance. We define moral repugnance as morally charged feelings of revulsion that correspond (correctly, incorrectly, and indeterminately) to moral reasons and contexts. Rich variations of moral repugnance and their dynamic qualities are presented by investigating the contextual frames in which they arise. These contextual frames constitute interacting conditions composed of information (...) about states of affairs, moral reasons, and feelings of revulsion. Through careful study of two medical prediction markets that encourage betting on death, we can observe the interaction between these causal conditions to see how the varieties of moral repugnance emerge. We also present three interesting results that arise from analyzing the dynamics of moral repugnance in response to prediction markets. First, a prediction market can elicit several conflicting types of moral repugnance at the same time. Second, moral indeterminacy can arise in two different ways when judging prediction markets. Finally, some prediction markets can generate a moral endogeneity problem, a disruptive feedback loop between a given prediction market and the morally relevant outcome it predicts. (shrink)

Global warming is a very complex collective harm. While various models have been proposed to assign moral responsibility in such cases, global warming presents an additional problem. The complexity of the climate system gives rise to ineliminable indeterminacy, which makes it impossible to determine the extent to which any particular emissions contribute to this collective harm. This indeterminacy poses an obstacle to assigning moral responsibility to individuals. To overcome this obstacle, I propose adopting a supervaluationist approach. (...) This approach has several benefits. Among other things, it supplies a framework for assigning moral responsibility that handles indeterminacy that commonly arises when dealing with complex, global collective-harm scenarios. (shrink)

In the mid-20th century, descriptive meta-ethics addressed a number of central questions, such as whether there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation, whether moral reasons are absolute or relative, and whether moral judgments express attitudes or describe states of affairs. I maintain that much of this work in mid-20th century meta-ethics proceeded on an assumption that there is good reason to question. The assumption was that our ordinary discourse is uniform and determinate enough to (...) vindicate one side or the other of these meta-ethical debates. I suggest that ordinary moral discourse may be much less uniform and determinate than 20th century meta-ethics assumed. (shrink)

The paper attempts to account for the confusion over the validity of the concept of schizophrenia in terms of two closely related aspects of conceptual indeterminacy. Firstly, it is identified on the basis of a breakdown in intelligibility, but what constitutes such a breakdown is indeterminate. Secondly, the concept sits between the categories of natural disease or illness on the one hand, and character trait or moral failing or gift on the other. This entails an indeterminacy in (...) attempting to define the role that physiological explanation could have. Light may be thrown on the concept by exploring a distinction between a life story in which the schizophrenic condition emerges as the conclusion of the story and a causal process in which the condition is the end result or final consequence. (shrink)

Common-sense morality includes various agent-centred constraints, including ones against killing unnecessarily and breaking a promise. However, it's not always clear whether, had an agent ϕ-ed, she would have violated a constraint. And sometimes the reason for this is not that we lack knowledge of the relevant facts, but that there is no fact about whether her ϕ-ing would have constituted a constraint-violation. What, then, is a constraint-accepting theory to say about whether it would have been permissible for her to have (...) ϕ-ed? In this paper, I canvass various possible approaches to answering this question and I argue that teleology offers the most plausible approach—teleology being the view that every act has its deontic status in virtue of how its outcome ranks, relative to those of its alternatives. So although, until recently, it had been thought that only deontological theories can accommodate constraints, it turns out that teleological theories not only can accommodate constraints, but can do so more plausibly than deontological theories can. (shrink)

This paper argues against the indeterminacy thesis that attempts to defeat traditional natural law by asserting that specific moral norms cannot be based on human nature. As put by Jean Porter (Nature as Reason 2005, 338): “the intelligibilities of human nature underdetermine their forms of expression, and that is why this theory does not yield a comprehensive set of determinate moral norms, compelling to all rational persons.” However, if this were so, one could adopt any morality with (...) impunity from nature’s sanctions. But I argue that nature punishes violators of the natural law in various ways. In addition, I argue that the indeterminacy thesis cannot be supported by appealing to the diversity of moral norms across the globe. Such diversity is required, for instance, both by the reliance of Thomistic natural law on the practical syllogism and by its reliance on practical reason’s ability to prescribe for the sake of the person in highly unique situations as required by Wojtyla’s Personalistic Norm and Aquinas’s norm of neighborly love. (shrink)

Discussions of the framework and terminology associated with the right to health tend to treat the indeterminacy of ‘health’ as conceptual noise that the construction of effective policy must not focus on, but find ways of bracketing out. On this basis, the right to health is broadly regarded as a social and economic, rather than a civil and political right. This article draws critically on literature about the implications of developments in medical biotechnologies, to argue that a positive acknowledgement (...) of the indeterminate character of health should transform, rather than simply hinder, the quality of debate over what is to be understood and expected in connection with a right to health. A focus on indeterminacy allows for the perception and the formulation of health-related demands that may not stem from the scarcity of material resources or technical means, but from the misplaced authority of particular voices in defining what possibilities are to be seriously envisaged. This proposition only becomes politically effective, it is argued, when ‘indeterminacy’ (and the capacity for normativity) is referred to life itself and not merely to social and moral judgements about life. Although more immediately pertinent to the concerns of relatively privileged populations, the focus on indeterminacy provides a key to generating a certain symmetry and complementarity of interest, across the privileged/underprivileged divide, in promoting health as a (human) right. (shrink)

It has become fashionable to question attempts to derive internationally agreed duties of clinical care from more general theories of human rights. For example, some argue that such attempts risk moral abstraction through their neglect for the importance of culture and community in shaping moral consciousness and are thus often unhelpful in the resolution of concrete moral dilemmas within medicine. Others denounce the importance of general moral principles altogether in bioethics and attempt to articulate what are (...) claimed to be more practical approaches to resolving moral conflict. This paper challenges such arguments. It does so through arguing that: i) all humans everywhere have the same basic human needs; ii) the satisfaction of these needs varies with culture; iii) the imputation of moral duties on others entails respect for their right to basic need satisfaction, including the right to choose between cultures; iv) internationally accepted clinical duties of care embrace presumptions about the duties and rights of patients which follow from these more general principles and v) problems of moral indeterminacy that arise from putting these principles into practice can be resolved through associated procedural policies of rational negotiation and compromise. The moral importance and practicality of respect for individual human rights within the practice of medicine is thus defended. Indeed, the paper concludes by arguing that without belief in human rights linked to a theory of basic human needs, communitarian theories of morality are incoherent. (shrink)

In the contemporary debate between determinism and indeterminism, quantum mechanics are used by libertarianists, both as a resource to escape the determinism imposed by classical physics, and as a tool to search for a ground to the possibility of free will and moral responsibility. This paper will show that every defense of free will based on quantum mechanics has to overcome at least two objections: on the one hand what I have decided to call the scale principle, and, on (...) the other hand Robert Kane´s luck principle. As will be shown, to answer the first objection does not imply answering the second. Through an analysis of the most recent proposals attempting to solve the latter, this paper will try to conclude that none of the proposals offers a convincing explanation of how quantum mechanics can help to solve the problem of free will. Instead, quantum mechanics seem to contribute to its complication. (shrink)

Let the moral question of personal identity be the following: what is the nature of the entities we should focus our prudential concerns and ascriptions of responsibility around? (If indeed we should structure these things around any entities at all.) Let the semantic question of personal identity be the question of what is the nature of the entities that ‘person’ is true of. A naive (in the sense of simple and intuitive) view would have it that the two questions (...) are so intimately connected that the entities we should focus our concerns and ascriptions around are, pretty trivially, the persons. In part, my aim here is to evaluate this naive view. However, I will not actually attempt to give a definite verdict on it. Rather, I will identify the assumptions under which the naive view is true, and discuss how to go about evaluating those assumptions. (shrink)

Two competing accounts of value incomparability have been put forward in the recent literature. According to the standard account, developed most famously by Joseph Raz, ‘incomparability’ means determinate failure of the three classic value relations ( better than , worse than , and equally good ): two value-bearers are incomparable with respect to a value V if and only if (i) it is false that x is better than y with respect to V , (ii) it is false that x (...) is worse than y with respect to V and (iii) it is false that x and y are equally good with respect to V . Most philosophers have followed Raz in adopting this account of incomparability. Recently, however, John Broome has advocated an alternative view, on which value incomparability is explained in terms of vagueness or indeterminacy . In this paper I aim to further Broome’s view in two ways. Firstly, I want to supply independent reasons for thinking that the phenomenon of value incomparability is indeed a matter of the indeterminacy inherent in our comparative predicates. Secondly, I attempt to defend Broome’s account by warding off several objections that worry him, due mainly to Erik Carlson and Ruth Chang. (shrink)

Quine’s thesis of translational indeterminacy stands as one of the most central, surprising, and influential results of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. The suggestion that the meaning of linguistic terms and sentences, as shown in the situation of radical translation, is systematically indeterminate and undetermined by actual speech practice, has for decades engendered thought and reflection on the nature and basis of linguistic meaning. And even beyond this surprising moral itself, Quine’s theoretical use of the radical translation (...) scenario has been wholly or partly responsible for a wide variety of theoretical programs in analytic philosophy since the middle of the last century, including Davidsonian semantics, Dummett’s consideration of the form and shape of knowledge about meaning, Rorty’s celebration of “philosophy without foundations,” and, more recently, Brandom’s pragmatist project of analyzing the roots of meaning and normativity in intersubjective and socially regulated speech behavior. On many retellings of the history of the analytic tradition, the suggestion that the philosophical analysis of language and meaning depends on reflection about the structure of intersubjective linguistic practice marks a general sea change in the methodological self-conception of analytic philosophy, away from the brands of metaphysical, epistemological, or purely syntactic analyses that had characterized its earlier projects, and toward the more concrete, pragmatic, and empirically influenced reflective practice that philosophers inherit today. (shrink)

According to moral error theory, morality is something invented, constructed or made; but mistakenly presents itself to us as if it were an independent object of discovery. According to moral constructivism, morality is something invented, constructed or made. In this paper I argue that constructivism is both compatible with, and in certain cases explanatory of, some of the allegedly mistaken commitments to which arguments for moral skepticism appeal. I focus on two particular allegations that are sometimes associated (...) with moral skepticism. The first is the suspicion that in making moral claims we are merely projecting our attitudes onto the world. The second is the suspicion that in arguing for and against moral views we are merely attempting to influence each other to give similar answers to questions that have no determinate answer. (shrink)

Bernard Williams has famously argued that all reasons for action are internal reasons.1 The internalist requirement on reasons is that all reasons must be linked to the agent’s subjective motivational state by a sound deliberative route. This argument has been the subject of a great deal of debate. In this paper I wish to draw attention to a much less discussed aspect of Williams’ papers on internalism. Williams believes that there is an essential indeterminacy regarding what an agent has (...) a reason to do. In this paper I explain indeterminacy in practical reason and give a qualified defense of it. I argue that indeterminacy has two sources according to Williams. One source is that deliberation is guided by imagination, not by rules. The second is that agent’s motivational set can be indeterminate. I do not attempt to evaluate or defend the first sort of indeterminacy. Rather, I argue that even if we reject this sort of indeterminacy we are still left with the indeterminacy of desire. The indeterminacy of desire sheds light on some little discussed problems in practical reason. (shrink)

Moral expertise in the Laches -- The Laches -- Socratic ignorance and socratic wisdom -- Vituperation -- Virtue and craft -- Expertise in the Charmides -- Ironies -- The definitions -- Quietness -- Modesty -- Doing or making one's own -- Doing, not making, one's own -- Doing good things -- Knowing oneself -- Knowledge of itself and all other knowledges -- Good, evil, and temperance -- Expertise in republic -- Preliminaries -- Republic viii -- The text -- Mathematical (...) indeterminacy -- Metaphysical necessity -- Justice "writ large" -- The most formidable question -- Preliminaries -- The context of the argument -- The most formidable argument itself -- The image -- Not knowing the things we know -- Attending to words -- Larger issues -- The third man argument. (shrink)

This paper defines and defends time-slice epistemology, according to which there are no essentially diachronic norms of rationality. First I motivate and distinguish two notions of time-slice epistemology. Then I defend time-slice theories of action under indeterminacy, i.e. theories about how you should act when the outcome of your decision depends on some indeterminate claim. I raise objections to a theory of action under indeterminacy recently defended by Robbie Williams, and I propose some alternative theories in its place. (...) Throughout this discussion, I defend a more general moral about action under indeterminacy, namely that time-slice theories are supported by strong analogies with ethical theories. In particular, our understanding of agents torn between interpretations of a decision situation should be guided by our theories of agents torn between incommensurable values. (shrink)

We discuss ethical aspects of risk-taking with special focus on principlism and mid-level moral principles. A new distinction between the strength of an obligation and the degree to which it is valid is proposed. We then use this distinction for arguing that, in cases where mid-level moral principles come into conflict, the moral status of the act under consideration may be indeterminate, in a sense rendered precise in the paper. We apply this thought to issues related to (...) pandemic influenza vaccines. The main conclusion of the paper is that on a principlist approach some acts may be neither right nor wrong (or neither permissible nor impermissible), and we claim that this has important implications for how we ought to make decisions under risk. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to raise a question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. Our question has rarely been raised previously. Among those who believe in the reality of human freedom, compatibilists have traditionally devoted their energies to providing an account that can avoid any commitment to the falsity of determinism while successfully accommodating a range of intuitive examples. Libertarians, in contrast, have aimed to (...) show that either physical indeterminacy or a certain kind of agent causation can find a place in the world for what they take to be genuine freedom. Few have considered whether moral responsibility requires a commitment to conscious attitudes.2 Our question derives from a confluence of two sources. First, there is reason to think that conscious attitudes matter to theories of responsibility, either directly, as a result of the latter’s commitments, or indirectly, by virtue of the assumptions that they make about certain intuitive examples. Second, there is accumulating evidence suggesting that there aren’t any conscious mental states possessing the sorts of causal roles required of propositional attitudes. Since theorists of responsibility should in general be concerned to make their views compatible with plausible claims about the natural world, the implications of this data should be carefully considered. Our aim is therefore to motivate and begin exploring answers to the following conditional question: If it should turn out that there are no conscious attitudes, then what would be the implications of this fact (if any) for theories of responsibility? We propose that theorists who aren’t skeptics about moral responsibility should examine their accounts, asking whether their theories (or the examples that motivate them) could survive the discovery that there are no conscious judgments, decisions, or evaluations. Since we take it that moral theorizing in general should operate with the weakest possible empirical assumptions about the natural world, such theorists should consider whether their accounts could be motivated in such a way as to be free of any commitment to the existence of conscious attitudes.. (shrink)

Horgan and Timmons, with their Moral Twin Earth arguments, argue that the new moral realism falls prey to either objectionable relativism or referential indeterminacy. The Moral Twin Earth thought experiment on which the arguments are based relies in crucial ways on the use of intuitions. First, it builds on Putnam’s well-known Twin Earth example and the conclusions drawn from that about the meaning of kind names. Further, it relies on the intuition that were Earthers and Twin (...) Earthers to meet, they would be able to have genuine moral disagreements. I will argue that the similarities with Putnam’s thought experiment are questionable and so the reliance on Putnam-like intuitions is questionable. I will then further argue that even if we accept the intuitions that Horgan and Timmons rely on, the anti-realist conclusion is not warranted due to there being more to the meaning of kind terms than the argument assumes. Once we develop the meaning of kind terms further we can acknowledge both that Earthers and Twin Earthers refer to different properties with their moral terms, and that in spite of that they can have a substantive disagreement due to a shared meaning component. (shrink)

This paper examines implicaturist hybrid theories by examining how closely attitude expression by moral utterances fits with the varieties of implicature (conventional, particular conversational, generalized conversational) using five standard criteria for implicature: indeterminacy (§3), reinforceability (§4), non-detachability (§5), cancellability (§6), and calculability (§7). I argue (1) that conventional implicature is a clear non-starter as a model of attitude expression by moral utterances (2) that generalised conversational implicature yields the most plausible implicaturist hybrid but (3) that a non-implicaturist, (...) and non-hybrid, alternative might in fact be superior. (shrink)

Synthetic meat products promise to serve as inexpensive substitute proteins that can replace meat made through conventional animal agriculture. At least some of the excitement about these products stems from ethical and moral concerns regarding animal welfare, environmental costs, and human health. A governing idea behind the creation of substitute meat is that consumers will recognize the ethical and moral concerns of conventional production and substitute one (better) product for another (worse) product. This approach, however, overlooks a much (...) more practical complication: the problem of indifference. That is,--consumer demand does not in practice greatly hinge on the well-known moral issues in conventional animal agriculture, as evident by the immense scale of the current meat market. In this paper, we ask how consumer indifference and producer strategy might influence the uptake of clean meat in the economic market. We suggest that thinking about the challenge in this way reveals powerful presuppositions that confuse our thinking about the potential of synthetic meat. Rather than understanding synthetic meat in terms of its substitution value, we propose approaching the challenge of synthetic meat from the standpoint of reasons-for and reasons-against. Doing so, we suggest, exposes the complications of “causal indeterminacy” that in turn implicate our thinking both about moral responsibility and the broader nature of technocratic solutions to environmental problems. We argue instead that synthetic meat offers an exciting and novel product, but likely not a substitute that will displace the conventional protein industry. (shrink)

I address four questions that arise out of Nigel Simmonds's book, Law as a Moral Idea : Is politics a moral idea too? Is there any such thing as law making? Is there a right answer to every legal dispute? What justifies a judicial decision? To each question I propose an answer that shares much with Simmonds's views, but diverges. Simmonds is right to call law a 'moral idea', and that implies a connection between law and a (...) moral ideal; in my view, the connection is compatible with a necessary connection between law and the morally non-ideal. (shrink)

This paper provides a new analysis and critique of Rawlsian public reason’s handling of the abortion question. It is often claimed that public reason is indeterminate on abortion, because it cannot say enough about prenatal moral status, or give content to the (allegedly) political value which Rawls calls ‘respect for human life’. I argue that public reason requires much greater argumentative restraint from citizens debating abortion than critics have acknowledged. Beyond the preliminary observation that fetuses do not meet the (...) criteria of political personhood, I contend, public reasoners may say nothing about prenatal moral status. Indeed, respect for human life (as distinct from respect for persons) is not, I show, a genuine political value, whose interpretation lies within public reason’s remit. This fact does not, however, prevent deliberators from drawing determinate conclusions regarding the law of abortion. Instead, I show, public reason has radically permissive implications for the legal regulation of feticide, inclining heavily towards the view that abortion should be allowed with little or no qualification, right until birth. I end by giving grounds for thinking that, even if the argumentative restraint which public reason enjoins over prenatal moral status does not generate indeterminacy, it is nonetheless objectionable. (shrink)

The general conceit of Schiller’s aesthetic education is that our experiences with art and beauty set us free from internal and external constraints and allow us to embrace our full humanity as rational and sensuous beings. Experiencing the aesthetic, or the play impulse, puts one in a state of aesthetic determinacy—or rather indeterminacy—that Schiller calls the highest sense of freedom, aesthetic freedom. Gail K. Hart examines Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange as an example of what Schillerian aesthetic education might (...) look like in practice. Though it represents a distortion of Schiller’s aesthetic education, Hart argues that it also reveals an ineradicable element of coercion in aesthetic education. I argue that Burgess’s Ludovico Technique leaves out a key element of Schiller’s conception of aesthetic cultivation—play—and that Hart’s analysis of Schiller’s work likewise lacks a robust analysis of his notion of play. I argue that, when Schiller’s account of the play impulse is taken seriously as a necessary condition for aesthetic cultivation to take place, coercion is by definition made impossible. Aesthetic play is accomplished by the mutual destruction of physical and moral determinations, and this mutual erasure leads to a higher and more expansive freedom. External constraints and coercion cannot induce the aesthetic state, so aesthetic education as Schiller presents it in On the Aesthetic Education of Man cannot contain the element of coercion Hart suspects. (shrink)

Munch-Jurisic’s book thoroughly describes several cases of severe distresses reported and expressed by perpetrators of tremendous acts such as mass murders. Arguing against a simplistic reading according to which these signs of distress are straightforward manifestations of some innate moral nature, and against the optimistic reading according to which they will lead to prosocial behaviors, Munch-Jursic offers compelling reasons to adopt a more complex theory of emotion. In this commentary, I aim to stress the implications of her book for (...) the debate on moral enhancement and for emotion theory in general. However, while I concur with Munch-Jurisic that emotion theory must make room for complexity and indeterminacy, I challenge her claim that motivational theories of emotion are ill-equipped to face the challenges she poses. (shrink)

It is argued that the ethical neutrality of science could be undermined in one or more of the following ways: by the discernment of a tychistic factor in nature, By incorrigible observer-Introduced indeterminacy, By the discovery of neurophysiological limits to knowing, Or by the discovery of an unacceptable neurophysiological cost of learning. At this point science would have to confront the moral choice either to maintain or reject certain classical assumptions upon which its self-Identity currently rests.

This essay defends an epistemicist response to the phenomenon of vagueness concerning moral terms. I outline a traditional model of - and then two novel approaches to - epistemicism about moral predicates, and I demonstrate how the foregoing are able to provide robust explanations of the source of moral, as epistemic, indeterminacy. The first approach to moral epistemicism concerns the extensions of moral predicates, as witnessed by the non-transitivity of a value-theoretic sorites paradox. The (...) second approach to moral epistemicism is induced by the status of moral dilemmas in the epistemic interpretation of two-dimensional semantics. I examine the philosophical significance of the foregoing, and compare the proposal to those of ethical expressivism, constructivism, and scalar act-consequentialism. Finally, I examine the status of moral relativism in light of the epistemicist models of moral vagueness developed in the paper. (shrink)

Many theoretical claims about the folk concept of moral responsibility coming from the current literature are indeterminate because researchers do not clearly specify the folk concept of moral responsibility in question. The article pursues a cognitive approach to folk concepts that pays special attention to this indeterminacy problem. After addressing the problem, the article provides evidence on folk attributions of moral responsibility in the case a failed attempt to kill that goes against a specific claim coming (...) from the current literature - that the dimension of causation is part of the structure of the folk concept of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Informed consent is required for any medical procedure although the situations in which it is given are beset by uncertainties and indeterminacies. These make medicolegal scrutiny of such situations very difficult. Although some people find the decision in the Sidaway case incomprehensible because of its continuing regard for a 'professional practice standard' in informed consent, I will argue that an important fact in many cases is the moral integrity of the doctor concerned and the pattern of his practice. This (...) may provide the only morally principled and legally accessible evidence enabling a correct decision to be made in a difficult case. Although the epistemological significance of a professional practice standard is thereby defended the 'prudent patient standard' for what counts as consent is left intact. (shrink)

Priority-setting policy-makers often face moral and political pressure to balance the conflicting motivations of efficiency and rescue/non-abandonment. Using the conflict between these motivations as a case study can enrich the understanding of institutional design in developed democracies. This essay presents a cognitive-psychological account of the conflict between efficiency and rescue/non-abandonment in health care priority-setting. It then describes three sets of institutional arrangements—in Australia, England/Wales, and Germany, respectively—that contend with this conflict in interestingly different ways. The analysis yields at least (...) three implications for institutional design in developed democracies: (1) indeterminacy at the level of moral psychology can increase the probability of indeterminacy at the level of institutional design; (2) situational constraints in effect require priority-setting policy-makers to adopt normative-moral pluralism; and (3) the U.S. health care system may be in an anti-priority-setting equilibrium. (shrink)