Drawing inspiration from the profoundly influential work of legal theorist Larry Alexander, this volume tackles central questions in criminal law, constitutional law, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy. What are the legitimate conditions of blame and punishment? What values are at the heart of constitutional protections against discrimination or infringements of free speech? Must judges interpret statutes and constitutional provisions in ways that comport with the intentions of those who wrote them? Can the law obligate us to violate the demands of (...) morality, and when can the law allow the rights of the few to be violated for the good of the many? This collection of essays by world-renowned legal theorists is for anyone interested in foundational questions about the law's authority, the conditions of its fair application to citizens, and the moral justifications of the rights, duties, and permissions that it protects. (shrink)

While many philosophers of law spend their careers exploring the warrens of a single neighbourhood within the sprawling cities of the philosophy of law, Larry Alexander has rambled widely, exploring obscure alleyways and dense downtowns, making significant and influential contributions along the way. The volume under review, a Festschrift in his honour, draws from a correspondingly wide range of areas of scholarship, from the philosophy of criminal law and punishment to constitutional law, from analytic jurisprudence to moral philosophy. Thus, (...) given the breadth and depth of Alexander’s influence, this volume provides a partial snapshot of some of the major preoccupations of American legal theory over the last few decades. In light of the breadth of topics considered, as well as its substantial length—the book includes twenty‐two papers, an introduction by Heidi Hurd, the editor, and a substantial reply by Alexander—my discussion is selective and evocative, rather than comprehensive and detailed. All the more so, as many of the papers are important contributions in their own right that merit close scrutiny. (shrink)

The practice of force-feeding dangerously malnourished patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) raises a puzzle for clinical ethics. Force-feeding AN patients may seem justified to save their lives and to help them recover from a debilitating pathological condition. Yet clinical ethics seems committed to a robust anti-paternalism principle, on which it is normally wrong to force treatment on decisionally capacitated patients for their own good. And some AN patients do retain decisional capacity, at least by standard criteria. Thus, routinely force-feeding AN (...) patients seems to constitute an unjustifiable exception to a well-established principle of clinical decision-making. Call this the moral puzzle of AN. I examine three attempts to solve the puzzle and argue that, individually or taken together, they cannot justify force-feeding those AN patients for whom this intervention would be potentially effective at enabling recovery. I conclude that no such justification is currently available. A solution to the moral puzzle of AN may come from a reevaluation of the anti-paternalism principle, a deeper clinical understanding of the psychology of AN, or even a novel reconceptualization of decisional capacity. (shrink)

Much of the human research conducted in the United States or by U.S. researchers is regulated by the Common Rule. The Common Rule reflects the decision of 17 federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, to require that investigators follow the same rules for conducting human research., though there is significant overlap with the Common Rule.) Many of the obligations delineated in the Common Rule can be traced back to the work of the National Commission for the (...) Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The National Commission was appointed in 1974 as part of the National Research Act in response to revelations about serious abuses involving human subjects, most notably the Tuskegee/United States Public Health Service Syphilis Study. (shrink)

We present a new puzzle about logical truth, necessity, and moral responsibility. We defend one solution to the puzzle. A corollary of our preferred solution is that prominent arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility are invalid.

People engage in pure moral inquiry whenever they inquire into the moral features of some act, agent, or state of affairs without inquiring into the non-moral features of that act, agent, or state of affairs. This chapter argues that ordinary people act rationally when they engage in pure moral inquiry, and so any adequate view in metaethics ought to be able to explain this fact. The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation is how to provide such (...) an explanation. This chapter argues that each of the standard views in metaethics has trouble providing such an explanation. Discussion of why reveals that a metaethical view can provide such an explanation only if it meets two constraints: it allows ordinary moral inquirers to know the essences of moral properties, and the essence of each moral property makes it rational to care for its own sake whether that property is instantiated. (shrink)

In developing artificial intelligence (AI), researchers often benchmark against human performance as a measure of progress. Is this kind of comparison possible for moral cognition? Given that human moral judgment often hinges on intangible properties like “intention” which may have no natural analog in artificial agents, it may prove difficult to design a “like‐for‐like” comparison between the moral behavior of artificial and human agents. What would a measure of moral behavior for both humans and AI look (...) like? We unravel the complexity of this question by discussing examples within reinforcement learning and generative AI, and we examine how the puzzle of evaluating artificial agents' moral cognition remains open for further investigation within cognitive science. (shrink)

Christopher Boehm's always intriguing and stimulating work in biological anthropology in some ways revives the interest in reconstructing origins which preoccupied cultural anthropology in the last half of the nineteenth century. This essay falls into a difficulty the earlier studies encountered, a tendency to metaphysical speculation leading to assertions which do not readily lend themselves to the confirmation or disconfirmation procedures that allow scientific advance. More seriously, the notion of ‘common good’ is also less precise and nuanced than any theory (...) of morality and its origins requires. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is no genuine puzzle of ‘imaginative resistance’. In part 1 of the paper I argue that the imaginability of fictional propositions is relative to a range of different factors including the ‘thickness’ of certain concepts, and certain pre-theoretical and theoretical commitments. I suggest that those holding realist moral commitments may be more susceptible to resistance and inability than those holding non-realist commitments, and that it is such realist commitments that ultimately motivate the problem. However, (...) I argue that the relativity of imaginability is not a particularly puzzling feature of imagination. In part 2, I claim that it is the so-called ‘alethic’ puzzle, concerning fictional truth, which generates a real puzzle about imaginative resistance. However, I argue that the alethic puzzle itself depends on certain realist assumptions about the nature of fictional truth which are implausible and should be rejected in favour of an interpretive view of fictional truth. Once this is done, I contend, it becomes evident that the supposed problem of imaginative resistance as it has hitherto been discussed in the literature is not puzzling at all. (shrink)

The past is full of terrible tragedies, including slavery, World War I, and the Holocaust. Morality would clearly appear to support the preference that the victims of those calamities would have lived free and peaceful lives. And yet, a puzzle or even a paradox appears to be lurking here. Moral evaluation can be either personal or impersonal, yet neither one of these two perspectives, nor any other prevalent moral evaluation of events, appears to yield the morally expected conclusion. (...) To the best of my knowledge this puzzle has not been discussed before. If there is no way to escape this surprising conclusion, then morality appears to be much more grim and unsympathetic than we normally think. (shrink)

Case B. You tell me that eating meat is immoral. Although I believe that, left to my own devices, I would not think this, no matter how long I reflected, I adopt your attitude as my own. It is not that I believe that you are better informed about potentially relevant non-moral facts (e.g., about the conditions under which livestock is kept, or about the typical effects of eliminating meat from one’s diet). On the contrary, I know that I (...) have all of the non-moral information relevant to the issue that you have. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic or knowledge requirement of moral responsibility. Haji argues that an agent can be blamed (or praised) only if the agent harbors a belief that the action in question is wrong (or right or obligatory). Defending the importance of an "authenticity" condition when evaluating moral responsibility, Haji holds that one cannot be morally responsible for an action unless the action issues from sources (like desires or beliefs) that are truly the agent's own. Engaging crucial (...) arguments in moral theory to elaborate his views on moral responsibility, Haji addresses as well fascinating, underexamined topics such as assigning blame across an intercultural gap and the relevance of unconscious or dream thoughts when evaluating responsibility. (shrink)

The puzzle of resultant moral luck arises when we are disposed to think that an agent who caused a harm deserves to be blamed more than an otherwise identical agent who did not. One popular perspective on resultant moral luck explains our dispositions to produce different judgments with regard to the agents who feature in these cases as a product not of what they genuinely deserve but of our epistemic situation. On this account, there is no genuine resultant (...) moral luck; there is only luck in what evidence becomes available to observers. In this paper, I develop an evolutionary account of our inclination to take the results of actions as evidence for the mental states of agents, thereby explaining why the resulting intuitions are recalcitrant to correction. The account explains why the puzzle of resultant moral luck arises: because our disposition to take the harms agents cause as evidence of their mental states can produce intuitions which conflict with those that arise when we examine agents’ mental states without reference to the results of their actions. The account also helps to solve the puzzle of resultant moral luck, by providing a strong reason to ignore the intuitions caused by our disposition to regard actual harms as evidence of mental states. Since these intuitions arise using an unreliable proxy for agents’ mental states, they ought to be trumped by more reliable evidence. (shrink)

According to moral testimony pessimists, the testimony of moral experts does not provide non-experts with normative reasons for belief. Moral testimony optimists hold that it does. We first aim to show that moral testimony optimism is, to the extent such things may be shown, the more natural view about moral testimony. Speaking roughly, the supposed discontinuity between the norms of moral beliefs and the norms of non-moral beliefs, on careful reflection, lacks the intuitive (...) advantage that it is sometimes supposed to have. Our second aim is to highlight the difference in the nature of the pragmatic reasons for belief that support moral testimony optimism and moral testimony pessimism, setting out more clearly the nature and magnitude of the challenge for the pessimist. (shrink)

Two thought experiments are provided which elicit whatappear to be opposing judgments about the demands of morality.One Unger-inspired thought experiment suggests that a personmust give up four decades of earnings just to save a singlelife. The other evokes the contrary intuition that onedoesn't have to labor forty years without compensation inorder to prevent the death of an individual. However,considerations of consistency do not demand that weabandon one of our intuitive responses. This is becausethere is a morally significant difference between thetwo (...) burdens that the people suffer in the respectivethought experiments. The difference is a result of humanpsychology being such that it is easier to bear theaftermath of an event that renders one's earlier effortsfutile than it is to suffer identical efforts goingunrewarded in the future. A conclusion that can bedrawn from this temporal asymmetry is that while moralityis not quite as demanding as Unger and many consequentialistsmaintain, it is much more demanding than many of their opponents realize. (shrink)

When someone is poised to fail to fulfil a moral duty, we can respond in a variety of ways. We might remind them of their duty, or seek to persuade them through argument. Or we might intervene forcibly to ensure that they act in accordance with their duty. Some duties appear to be such that the duty-bearer can be liable to forcible interference when this is necessary to ensure that they comply with them. We’ll call duties that carry such (...) liabilities enforcement-apt. Not all duties seem to be enforcement-apt. Some, for example, accept that a person in a monogamous marriage has a moral duty to refrain from infidelity, but deny that a spouse can be compelled to comply with their duty to be faithful without transgressing her rights. More controversially, some think that our duties to assist others in severe need are not enforcement-apt. What could explain the contrast between duties that are enforcement-apt while and those that are not? We’ll call this the puzzle of enforceability and our paper considers three broad strategies for responding to it. The first strategy takes the form of identifying some substantive feature or features that are necessary and/or sufficient for a duty to possess some enforcement status. We consider a range of candidate explanations of this sort but find that none are plausible. The second strategy rejects the idea that there are genuinely enforcement-inapt duties and instead seeks to explain why there can nonetheless be marked differences amongst duties concerning how they can be enforced and who can enforce them. We find that this strategy too is largely unsuccessful. The third strategy offered seeks an explanation of differences in enforcement status by appeal to the broader social costs of enforcing certain kinds of duties. We find that this approach holds some promise but note that it requires adopting a controversial set of moral commitments. We conclude by considering our options in the absence of a solution to our puzzle. (shrink)

For well over a thousand years, countless audiences have taken pleasure in watching unfold the following fearful event:Filled with dread, desperately tossing unchewed grass from its mouth, looking back at the hunting king, a beautiful deer springs into flight to escape a fast-approaching chariot from which repeated arrows fly — one of which will inevitably lodge in the deer’s defenseless body. This is not a scene from “National Geographic” or an episode from some sadly popular TV hunting show. Indeed, this (...) scene has been played out far longer than any current program on America’s “Outdoor Channel,” and it comes to most Westerners from half a world away. Kālidāsa’s The Signet-Ring of Śakuntalā, the most famous poem.. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a neglected puzzle for the moral realist. I then canvass some potential responses. Although I endorse one response as the most promising of those I survey, my primary goal is to make vivid how formidable the puzzle is, as opposed to offering a definitive solution.

Our puzzle about moral motivation can be seen as a tension that we encounter when we try to reconcile intellectual and practical aspects of morality. Cognitivists interpret moral judgments as expressing cognitive attitudes, such as belief. Moral judgments ascribe properties – axiological, deontic, and aretaic – to persons, actions, institutions, and policies. Internalists believe that moral judgments necessarily engage the will and motivate. We expect people to be motivated to act in accord with their moral (...) judgments and would find it odd for people to be systematically indifferent to what they judge morally significant. It is also a common view that motivation involves pro-attitudes, such as desires. We explain intentional action as the product of informational states, such as beliefs, and practical states, such as desires. But beliefs and desires are logically independent states; no belief entails any particular desire. These assumptions are in tension. (shrink)

A largely overlooked and puzzling feature of morality is Moral Memory: apparent cases of directly memorising, remembering, and forgetting first-order moral propositions seem odd. To illustrate: consider someone apparently memorising that capital punishment is wrong, or acting as if they are remembering that euthanasia is permissible, or reporting that they have forgotten that torture is wrong. I here clarify Moral Memory and identify desiderata of good explanations. I then proceed to amend the only extant account, Bugeja’s Non-Cognitivist (...) explanation, but show that it isn’t superior to a similar Cognitivist-friendly view, and that both explanations face a counterexample. Following this, I consider and reject a series of alternative Cognitivist-friendly explanations, suggesting that a Practicality-Character explanation that appeals to the connection between the practicality of moral attitude and character is superior. However, I conclude that support for this explanation should remain conditional and tentative. (shrink)

My argument proceeds in two stages. In §I, I sum up the intuitions of a popular argument for 'satisfaction accounts' of Purgatory that I label, TAP. I then offer an argument, taken from a few standard orthodox Christian beliefs and one axiom of Christian theology, to so show that TAP is unsound. In the same section, I entertain some plausible responses to my argument that are prima facie consistent with these beliefs and axiom. I find these responses wanting. In §II, (...) I offer a sorites problem for TAP, given the orthodox Christian understanding of Christ’s parousia, showing that TAP and the intuitions driving it are faulty. To attempt something of a corrective, I end by offering some modest theological suggestions for thinking through “the logic of total transformation.”. (shrink)

Some form of agent-relative constraint against the killing of innocent personsis a central principle in deontological moraltheories. In this article I make two claimsabout this constraint. First, I argue that somekillings of innocents performed incircumstances usually not taken to exculpatethe killer are not even pro tanto wrong.Second, I contend that either there is noagent-relative constraint against the killingof innocents or this constraint has a verydifferent shape from that which deontologistsnormally take it to have. My defence of theseclaims rests on two (...) propositions. First, inkilling someone one may actually prolong thatperson''s life. Roughly, life-prolongingkillings are possible, because to kill someoneis to perform an act that causes someone''sdeath and it might well be true that, had onenot performed this act, one''s ``victim'''' wouldhave died earlier. Second, all other thingsbeing equal, killing and causing a person to beunconscious are morally equivalent. Both ofthese propositions are defended in thearticle. (shrink)

In garden-variety instances of intentional action, according to a popular account, agents intend to perform actions of particular kinds, their intentions are based on reasons so to act, and the intentions issue in appropriate behaviour. On this account, the reasons that give rise to our intentions are reasons for action. Interesting questions for this view are raised by cases in which an agent seemingly has a reason to intend to do something while having no reason to do it. Can such (...) reasons to intend issue in appropriate intentions? If so, can these intentions issue in corresponding intentional actions -- even though the agent has no reason to perform those actions? If these questions are properly given an affirmative answer, at least one popular thesis in the philosophy of action is false. One could not properly "define an intentional act as one which the agent does for a reason." A popular thesis about the explanation of intentional actions would be false as well -- namely, that explaining an intentional action (qua intentional) requires reference to reasons for action. My point of departure in this paper is a puzzle—Gregory Kavka's toxin puzzle(1983) -- in which agents seem to have an excellent reason to intend to A while having no reason at all to A. Generally, commentators on the puzzle have set their sights on questions about rational intentions. However, the puzzle raises difficult questions about intending itself and about the nature of intentional action. Showing that this is so is easy. Answering the question is more challenging. (shrink)

The Puzzle of the Hats is a betting arrangement which seems to show that a Dutch book can be made against a group of rational players with common priors who act in the common interest and have full trust in the other players’ rationality. But we show that appearances are misleading—no such Dutch book can be made. There are four morals. First, what can be learned from the puzzle is that there is a class of situations in which credences and (...) betting rates diverge. Second, there is an analogy between ways of dealing with situations of this kind and different policies for sequential choice. Third, there is an analogy with strategic voting, showing that the common interest is not always served by expressing how things seem to you in social decision-making. And fourth, our analysis of the Puzzle of the Hats casts light on a recent controversy about the Dutch book argument for the Sleeping Beauty. (shrink)

Lampert and Waldrop have recently presented a puzzle about moral responsibility and logical truth, in which they derive a contradiction from three apparently plausible principles: (A) no one is responsible for any logical truth; (B) if no one is responsible for something, then no one is responsible for what it strictly implies; and (C) someone is responsible for something. They argue that, in response, we must give up (B)—a principle that plays a key role in arguments for incompatibilism. In (...) this paper, I argue that this response is mistaken, and that the lesson to be drawn lies elsewhere. For the puzzle also rests on a conception of logical truth according to which there are contingent logical truths. And, given this conception, (A) is false—for reasons independent of (B). So the import here concerns, not a connection between responsibility and the debate over incompatibilism, but a connection between responsibility and the debate over the correct conception of logical truth: one can hold on to (A), or hold on to the relevant conception of logical truth, but not both. (shrink)

The moral disciplining theory proposes that people moralize excessive innocent behavior to discipline others to behave in ways that facilitate cooperation. However, such disciplining might not always be effective. To solve this puzzle of ineffective moralization we should think of puritanism in terms of moral advertisement aimed at reputation management rather than the manipulation of others.

Philosophers think that there is something fishy about moral deference. The most common explanation of this fishiness is that moral deference doesn’t yield the epistemic states necessary for certain moral achievements. First, I argue that this explanation overgeneralizes. It entails that using many intuitively kosher belief-formation methods should be off-putting. Second, I argue that moral deference is sometimes superior to these other methods because it puts one in a better position to gain the relevant moral (...) achievements. (shrink)

This paper develops an argument that, if rule consequentialism is true, it’s not possible to defend it as the outcome of reflective equilibrium. Ordinary agents like you and me are ignorant of too many empirical facts. Our ignorance is a defeater for our moral intuitions. Even worse, there aren’t enough undefeated intuitions left to defend rule consequentialism. The problem I’ll describe won’t be specific to rule consequentialists, but it will be especially sharp for them.

An adequate moral theory must provide for cooperation and trust between moral agents, but a tension exists between cooperating and maximizing. This tension is prominent in utilitarianism and contractarianism . Various puzzles illustrate this tension, and both utilitarians and contractarians must solve these to present a coherent moral theory. These puzzles include new and resilient versions of classic objections to utilitarianism, such as the claims that utilitarian agents cannot be trusted to keep promises and cannot (...) take rights seriously. They also include the contractarian puzzle of why rational agents would cooperate by making and keeping impartial contracts. In solving these problems, utilitarians and contractarians alike must choose between traditional and revisionary maximizing theories. ;In light of these problems: David Gauthier urges contractarians to appeal to a revisionary theory of rationality, Donald Regan has developed a new variety of utilitarianism, and many other theorists still argue for the revisionary theory of rule utilitarianism. These people underestimate the potential of traditional theories. Although traditional theories like act utilitarianism look only to the future--while revisionary theories sometimes take prior acts such as promises, deliberations, and intentions to justify action--traditional theories are still able to solve these puzzles and furnish a satisfactory account of cooperation and trust. Surprisingly, even though these puzzles were developed as objections to the traditional theories and the revisionist theories were designed to deal with these puzzles, the traditional theories provide superior solutions. ;This defense of traditional theories has broad implications in philosophy and elsewhere, but I specifically discuss two significant implications for modern moral theory and two implications for applied ethics. I reject the criticism that act utilitarianism fails on its own terms and argue that it has previously unnoticed advantages over rule utilitarianism. I also reformulate Gauthier's moral theory using the traditional theory of rationality, thereby answering a major criticism of his theory. In addition, I apply my understanding of traditional maximizing theories to the utilitarian theory of rights and then to the strategic problems of nuclear deterrence and of threats in general. (shrink)

Moral Appraisability is not quite such a good book as its confident and lucid introduction leads one to hope, but it is work of both substance and promise. Ishtiyaque Haji’s main project is to determine sufficient conditions for moral appraisability: that is, for the propriety of holding an agent praiseworthy or blameworthy for an action. Identifying three primary conditions—control, autonomy, and epistemic—he refines them with the aid of a meticulous analysis of recent discussions and a range of vivid (...) examples, and applies them in his closing chapters to such vexed questions as the responsibility of addicts for their addictive behavior, the justification of cross-cultural attributions of blame, and our appraisability for our thoughts when dreaming. (shrink)

Moralising is a venerable last resort strategy. The ancient Melians presented the Athenian generals with a splendid example when in a particularly tight corner. In our Western philosophical tradition moral rhetoric is often couched in the form of reasons for action either external to preference and desire (eg. Kant) or internal to the agent''s calculus of desire (e.g., Hume, Gauthier). A third tradition dismisses such rhetoric as the last recourse of the weak (e.g., Aristotle, Nietzsche) whereas a fourth calls (...) for an examination of the social context (e.g., Socrates, Marx, Wittgenstein, Habermas). This paper reports on an experiment which throws some empirical light on these debates and offers a surprising twist to the interpretation of the Melians'' plea. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:247 TWO PUZZLES IN MOSSNER'S LIFE OF DAVID HUME It is a tribute to the rare quality of Mossner's great Life of David Hume that in those few instances where he seems to have got something wrong, one feels an irresistible urge to put the record straight. The two puzzles that have perplexed me are: (1) Why was Adam Smith adamant in his refusal to take the (...) responsibility for publishing the Dialogues after Hume's death? ; and (2) why, despite his long-standing resolution not to answer his opponents directly, did Hume in October 1775 take the step of drawing up the short Advertisement, disavowing his Treatise of Human Nature, which was to be prefixed to the second volume of all future editions of Essays and Treatises? The clue to the first puzzle is to be found in Boswell 's Life of Johnson: On the 6th of March [1754] came out Lord Bolingbroke's works, published by Mr David Mallet. The wild and pernicious ravings, under the name of "Philosophy," which were thus ushered into the world, gave great offence to all well-principled men. Johnson, hearing of their tendency, which nobody disputed, was roused with a just indignation, and pronounced this memorable sentence upon the noble author and his editor. "Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward; a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman, to draw the trigger after his death!" The editors of the 1934 Oxford Edition note: "Adam Smith, perhaps had this saying in mind when, in 1776, he refused the request of the dying Hume to edit 248 after his death his Dialogues on Natural Religion. Hume wrote back:? think... your scruples groundless. Was Mallet any wise hurt by his publication of Lord Bolingbroke? He received an office afterwards from the present King and Lord Bute, the most prudish men in the world... '."4 I don't think that this letter of Hume's was an answer to a letter from Smith (who was a notoriously bad correspondent, see below). I think that, on his way back from London to his mother at Kirkcaldy, Smith had made up his mind to tell his beloved friend, to his face, that he was determined not to undertake this task. One must put oneself in Smith's position in 1776. He had (it is true) an annuity of £300 from the Bucci euch estates, and he had just spent ten years writing The Wealth of Nations. But he did not think this annuity sufficient for him to be justified in devoting the rest of his life to literary pursuits, despite the wealth of material which was already more or less complete, and has been posthumously published. He knew his masterpiece was not going to make him much money (single books did not do so in those days), but he hoped that it might put him in the way of a job or a royal pension -- as Beattie's Truth had secured a pension for him, three years earlier. Moreover, Smith had just spent three years in London, where Boswell had engineered that he be elected to the celebrated dining Club presided over by Johnson and Burke (where Smith was none too popular), and he knew well that if he were to bring out the Dialogues after Hume's death, the members of the Club would say (and feel) the same sort of things about Hume and him, as Johnson had said (and felt) about 249 Bolingbroke and Mallet. London society was a small world, and this sort of gossip would not advance his (Smith's) chance of getting a job, nor would it enhance Hume's reputation. He decided to dig in his toes, and was perfectly justified in doing so. So, of course, the modern editors of Boswell 's Johnson are right in their conjecture. But Mossner says that Smith was suffering under a bad conscience about this refusal, when he came to write his marvellous letter (which caused him so much trouble), and which was appended to the posthumous publication... (shrink)

This study aimed to present a novel explanation for the perplexing nature of moral intuition regarding abstract and concrete descriptions of deterministic actions. Nichols and Knobe (2007) have found that, when deterministic actions are described concretely, most people exhibit compatibilist responses. Conversely, when deterministic actions are described abstractly, most people exhibit incompatibilist responses. The prevailing explanation for this phenomenon is that one of the two responses is an error. However, this study argues that this phenomenon can be understood as (...) a consequence of normal operation of the mechanism that generates moral intuition. The focus is on Björnsson’s Explanation Hypothesis (Björnsson & Persson, 2012, 2013; Björnsson, 2015), which posits that differences in explanations provided for deterministic actions in different cases account for the discrepancy in intuition between concrete and abstract cases. This study reinterpreted this proposal by focusing on how actions were represented in concrete and abstract cases and presented a new theory, which is the explanation-representation hypothesis. This theory accounts for both compatibilist and incompatibilist intuition without relying on error accounts. (shrink)

Are there limits to what it is morally okay to imagine? More particularly, is imaginatively inhabiting morally suspect perspectives something that is off-limits for truly virtuous people? In this paper, I investigate the surprisingly fraught relation between virtue and a familiar form of imaginative perspective taking I call empathy. I draw out a puzzle about the relation between empathy and virtuousness. First, I present an argument to the effect that empathy with vicious attitudes is not, in fact, something that the (...) fully virtuous person can indulge in. At least one prominent way of thinking about the psychology of the virtuous person excludes the possibility that the virtuous could emotionally apprehend the world in a less than virtuous way, and empathizing with vicious outlooks does seem to run afoul of that restriction. Then, I develop an argument that runs in the contrary direction: virtue in fact requires empathy with vicious outlooks, at least in some situations. There is reason to think that a crucial part of being virtuous is ministering effectively to others’ needs, and there is also reason to think that other people may need to be empathized with, even if their emotional outlooks are at least minorly vicious. Finally, I outline two different solutions to this puzzle. Both solutions hold some promise, but they also bring new challenges in their train. (shrink)

The different sorts of virtuous people who display various virtues to a remarkable degree have brought the issue of individualisation of moral character to the forefront. It signals a more personal dimension of character development which is notoriously ignored in the current discourse on character education. The case is made that since in practice, the individualisation of moral character must, by necessity, advance side by side with the cultivation of virtues, a full account of character education needs to (...) give consideration to both concerns. After analysing the specific ways which temperament, social roles, and occupations respectively contribute to the individualisation of moral character, some practical implications are drawn to shed new light on the common practice of the inculcation of virtues. Firstly, since the varieties of moral personality is the norm, it is appropriate to encourage the educated to become virtuous people of different sorts. Secondly, given the influence that temperament may exert on virtue, having good knowledge of each child’s temperament, identifying the specific difficulties possibly confronting him/her accordingly, and then providing more opportunities to strengthen the cultivation of the related virtues are crucial. Thirdly, since children with different temperaments are inclined to identify with different sorts of moral exemplars, it is valuable to present them a great variety of moral models, from which they can choose the kind of virtuous people they would want to emulate. Lastly, since assuming different occupations and social roles is liable to result in various moral characters, character formation cannot be confined to the family or school. Among others, workplaces and communities are also important variables. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s account of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” has been widely influential. In both that paper and in the contemporary literature, much attention has been paid to Strawson’s account of blame in terms of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation. The Strawsonian view of praise in terms of gratitude has received comparatively little attention. Some, however, have noticed something puzzling about gratitude and accountability. We typically understand accountability in terms of moral demands and expectations. Yet gratitude (...) does not express or enforce moral demands or expectations. So, how is it a way to hold an agent accountable? In a more general manner, we might ask if there is even sense to be made of the idea that agents can be accountable—i.e., “on the hook”—in a positive way. In this paper, I clarify the relationship between gratitude and moral accountability. I suggest that accountability is a matter of engaging with others in a way that is basically concerned with their feelings and attitudes rather than solely a matter of moral demands. Expressions of gratitude are a paradigmatic form of this concerned engagement. I conclude by defending my view from the objection that it leads to an overly generous conception of holding accountable and suggest in reply that moral responsibility skeptics may not help themselves to as many moral emotions as they might have thought. (shrink)

When characterizing the content of a subject’s perceptual experience, does their seeing an object entail that their visual experience represents it as being a certain way? If it does, are they thereby in a position to have perceptually-based thoughts about it? On one hand, representationalists are under pressure to answer these questions in the affirmative. On the other hand, it seems they cannot. This paper presents a puzzle to illustrate this tension within orthodox representationalism. We identify several interesting morals which (...) may be drawn in response, each of which teaches us something interesting and important about perceptual experience and its interface with cognition and related phenomena. (shrink)

In analytic moral philosophy it is standard to use unrealistic puzzles to set up moral dilemmas of a sort that I will call Lockean Puzzles. This paper will try to pinpoint just what is and what is not problematic about their use as a teaching tool or component part of philosophical arguments. I will try to flesh out the claim that what may be lost sight of in such Lockean puzzling is the personal dimension of (...) class='Hi'>moral deliberation—for example, moral problems differ from technical problems in the sense that they are non‐transferable, we cannot hand them over to others for solution. (shrink)

Rent seeking by lobbying for government favors is generally thought to be wasteful. In view of this wastefulness, it is puzzling that rent seeking by corporations has not been criticized as a failure to be socially responsible or even as an unethical business practice. This article examines the compatibility of rent seeking with corporate social responsibility by utilizing Thomas Dunfee's idea of a marketplace with morality. This idea is useful for solving this puzzle because in considering whether rent seeking is (...) compatible with corporate social responsibility, it is necessary, first, to define rent seeking, which this article argues is a normative concept, and, second, to find some principled way of identifying rent-seeking behavior. It also solves the puzzle about rent seeking by revealing that the concept of rent seeking itself is of little use in determining whether certain conduct is or is not socially responsible since rent seeking activity cannot be identified without first evaluating which activity is rent seeking. (shrink)

We argue for the existence of a moral dilemma– the ‘Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat’– which challenges those who would endorse the moral permissibility of eating lab-grown meat, such as lab-grown chicken. The puzzle is that it is unclear why the moral permissibility of eating lab-grown meat should not extend to all lab-grown meat, such as white rhino or human, yet intuitively, we consider such meat morally impermissible to consume. To reject this challenge forces an endorsement of one (...) of two implausibly strong positions: either that all lab-grown meat is morally impermissible to eat or that all lab-grown meat is morally permissible to eat. To accept this challenge, is to attempt to solve the puzzle by providing a morally relevant distinction between ‘fair-game’ and ‘off-limits’ lab-grown meat. We consider a range of solutions but argue that each fails to solve the puzzle. (shrink)

This paper presents a puzzle about moral responsibility. The problem is based upon the indeterminacy of relevant reference classes as applied to action. After discussing and rejecting a very tempting response I propose moral contextualism instead, that is, the idea that the truth value of judgments of the form S is morally responsible for x depends on and varies with the context of the attributor who makes that judgment. Even if this reply should not do all the expected (...) work it is a first step. (shrink)

Moral reasoning is individual or collective practical reasoning about what, morally, one ought to do. Philosophical examination of moral reasoning faces both distinctive puzzles — about how we recognize moral considerations and cope with conflicts among them and about how they move us to act — and distinctive opportunities for gleaning insight about what we ought to do from how we reason about what we ought to do.