MORAL DELIBERATION AND OPERATIVE RIGHTS: A RESPONSE TO MARY MAGADA‐WARD AND CYNTHIA GAYMAN

Abstract: The aim of this article is to show how intimately connected Beth J. Singer's theory of operative rights is with her understanding of the deliberative process. I thus argue against Cynthia Gayman's effort to set in contrast Singer's theory of rights and Dewey's characteristic emphasis on reflective morality. Since I take the value of Singer's approach to be most evident in its relevance to the abortion debate as an ongoing deliberation, I question whether Mary Magada‐Ward sufficiently appreciates the dialogical and deliberative emphases of Singer's stance. My goal, however, is not so much to argue against either Gayman or Magada‐Ward as it is to argue for taking Singer's position even more seriously than either author does. In particular, I want to highlight the finely nuanced character of Singer's philosophical intervention in the debate regarding abortion, especially stressing certain features that Gayman and Magada‐Ward overlook.     

WHOSE RIGHTS,AND WHAT's THE DIFFERENCE? A CRITIQUE OF BETH SINGER'S “HUMAN RIGHTS: SOME CURRENT ISSUES”

Abstract: In this article I argue against the rights‐based framework defining the abortion debate, and do so by considering the views of Beth Singer, a philosopher whose work conveys a broadly pragmatist formulation of traditional rights‐based language. Although Singer's schema presents a fruitful vantage point from which to consider the abortion question through the discourse of rights, even Singer's use of the language of rights ultimately fails adequately to address the subject. I challenge Singer's view by taking up John Dewey's concept of reflective morality, elucidated in his 1932 Ethics.     

Ethical Embodiment and Moral Reasoning: A Challenge to Peter Singer

This paper addresses Peter Singer's claim that cognitive ability can function as a universal criterion for measuring moral worth. I argue that Singer fails to adequately represent cognitive capacity as the object of moral knowledge at stake in his theory. He thus fails to put forth credible knowledge claims, which undermines both the trustworthiness of his moral theories and the morality of the actions called for by these theories. I situate Singer's methods within feminist critiques of moral reasoning and moral epistemology, and argue that Singer's methods are problematic for moral reasoning because they abstract from their object valuable contextual features. I further develop this claim by showing the importance of embodiment for the construal of objects of moral knowledge. Finally, I develop the moral and scholarly implications of this critique. By showing that the abstract, universal methods of reasoning Singer employs cannot credibly construe the objects of ethical inquiry, I call into question the validity of these methods as a means to moral knowledge in general. Furthermore, since moral reasoning takes place within an embodied moral landscape, it is itself a moral enterprise. Singer's moral reasoning, and ours, must be held accountable for its knowledge claims as well as its concrete effects in the world.     

The Problem with “Caring” Human Rights

Although Daniel Engster's “caring” human rights are, on the surface, a compelling way to bring the concept of care into the international political realm, I argue they actually serve to perpetuate some of the same problems of mainstream human‐rights discourses. The problem is twofold. First, Engster's particular care theory relies on an uncritical acceptance of our dependence relations. It can, therefore, not only overlook how local and global institutions, norms, and the marketplace shape our relations of (inter)dependence, but also serve to further naturalize our current dependence relations. Second, Engster's caring human rights are only minimally feminist, which means that they do not pay attention to the way in which women's full and equal political participation is a necessary component to challenging and overcoming the oppression, marginalization, and exploitation of women and their caring labor worldwide. Although I am sympathetic to Engster's goals and some of his proposed policy solutions, I argue that we should not abandon the critical, feminist lens of care ethics in favor of “caring” human rights that cannot overcome the care critique of mainstream human‐rights discourses.     

What's Wrong with Speciesism? (Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Lecture 2015)

Peter Singer famously argued in Animal Liberation that almost all of us are speciesists, unjustifiably favoring the interests of humans over the similar interests of other animals. Although I long found that charge compelling, I now find myself having doubts. This article starts by trying to get clear about the nature of speciesism, and then argues that Singer's attempt to show that speciesism is a mere prejudice is unsuccessful. I also argue that most of us are not actually speciesists at all, but rather accept a view I call modal personism. Although I am not confident that modal personism can be adequately defended, it is, at the very least, a philosophical view worthy of further consideration.     

On Pornography,Representation and Sexual Agency

I argue that Alisa Carse's call for antipornography legislation sets a potentially dangerous legal move that could threaten to shut off the dialogue women need to redefine the meanings and terms of our sexualities. I also argue that the terms of legitimacy need to be re-examined outside a legal system that systematically fails to protect the rights of sexual minorities.     

ON HELPING ONE'S NEIGHBOR

Few people doubt that severe poverty is a pressing moral issue. But what sorts of obligations, if any, do affluent people have toward the severely poor? If one accepts the idea that one has some obligations to the severely poor there still remains disagreement about the magnitude of this obligation and when it obtains. I consider Peter Singer's influential “shallow pond” argument, which holds that affluent people have greater obligations toward the severely poor than ordinary moral judgments suggest. Critics hold that Singer's view is excessively demanding and therefore untenable. I thus turn to the parable of the Good Samaritan and Christian accounts of neighbor‐love to help attenuate this criticism. Drawing from Christian conversations on neighbor‐love, I attempt to demonstrate that accepting an obligation to assist does not necessarily result in one abandoning one's special relations, abnegating self‐regard, or no longer pursuing other non‐moral strivings.     

Nishida,Agency, and the ‘Self-Contradictory’ Body

In this essay, I investigate Kitarō Nishida's characterization of what he refers to as the ‘self-contradictory’ body. First, I clarify the conceptual relation between the self-contradictory body and Nishida's notion of ‘acting-intuition’. I next look at Nishida's analysis of acting-intuition and the self-contradictory body as it pertains to our personal, sensorimotor engagement with the world and things in it, as well as to our bodily immersion within the intersubjective and social world. Along the way, I argue that Nishida develops a rich and exceedingly current way of thinking through different facets of embodiment and interpersonal relatedness. I further argue that Nishida's work provides compelling reasons to foreground the mutually implicative, co-emergent nature of embodied self and world in our theorizing about the nature of self and experience.     

The Consequences of Individual Consumption: A Defence of Threshold Arguments for Vegetarianism and Consumer Ethics

As a moral foundation for vegetarianism and other consumer choices, act consequentialism can be appealing. When we justify our consumer and dietary choices this way, however, we face the problem that our individual actions rarely actually precipitate more just agricultural and economic practices. This threshold or individual impotence problem engaged by consequentialist vegetarians and their critics extends to morally motivated consumer decision‐making more generally, anywhere a lag persists between individual moral actions taken and systemic moral progress made. Regan and others press just this point against Singer's utilitarian basis for vegetarianism; recently Chartier criticizes act‐consequentialist vegetarianism by identifying many factors weakening the connection between individual meat purchases and changes in animal production. While such factors are relevant to act‐consequentialist moral reasoning, I argue, they need not defeat the act‐consequentialist case for vegetarianism and consumer ethics. This is shown by offering a probabilistic account of the threshold issue and discussing the positive and negative role‐modelling effects of our morally motivated dietary and consumer choices.     

Reply to Ellis and to Handfield on essentialism,laws, and counterfactuals

Peter Singer has argued that there are good utilitarian reasons for rejecting the prospect of superlongevity: developing technology to double (or more) the average human lifespan. I argue against Singer's view on two fronts. First, empirical research on happiness indicates that the later years of life are (on average) the happiest, and there is no reason to suppose that this trend would not continue if superlongevity were realized. Second, it is argued that there are good reasons to suppose that there will be a certain amount of self-selection: the happiest are more likely to adopt superlongevity technology. This means that the adoption of superlongevity technology will have the effect of raising the level of aggregate utility.     

Intransitivity and Future Generations: Debunking Parfit's Mere Addition Paradox

ABSTRACT Duties to future persons contribute critically to many important contemporaneous ethical dilemmas, such as environmental protection, contraception, abortion, and population policy. Yet this area of ethics is mired in paradoxes. It appeared that any principle for dealing with future persons encountered Kavka's paradox of future individuals, Parfit's repugnant conclusion, or an indefensible asymmetry. In 1976, Singer proposed a utilitarian solution that seemed to avoid the above trio of obstacles, but Parfit so successfully demonstrated the unacceptability of this position that Singer abandoned it. Indeed, the apparently intransitivity of Singer's solution contributed to Temkin's argument that the notion of “all things considered better than” may be intransitive. In this paper, I demonstrate that a time‐extended view of Singer's solution avoids the intransitivity that allows Parfit's mere addition paradox to lead to the repugnant conclusion. However, the heart of the mere addition paradox remains: the time‐extended view still yields intransitive judgments. I discuss a general theory for dealing with intransitivity (Transitivity by Transformation) that was inspired by Temkin's sports analogy, and demonstrate that such a solution is more palatable than Temkin suspected. When a pair‐wise comparison also requires consideration of a small number of relevant external alternatives, we can avoid intransitivity and the mere addition paradox without infinite comparisons or rejecting the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Principle     

Adorno on Kant,Freedom and Determinism

Abstract: In this paper I argue that Adorno's metacritique of freedom in Negative Dialectics and related texts remains fruitful today. I begin with some background on Adorno's conception of ‘metacritique’ and on Kant's conception of freedom, as I understand it. Next, I discuss Adorno's analysis of the experiential content of Kantian freedom, according to which Kant has reified the particular social experience of the early modern bourgeoisie in his conception of unconditioned freedom. Adorno argues against this conception of freedom and suggests that freedom is always conditioned by our embodiment and by our social and historical situation. Finally, I turn to Adorno's criticism of Kant's discussion of freedom and determinism in the Critique of Pure Reason and argue that while his philosophical argument against Kant fails, his metacritical argument remains suggestive. Scepticism about freedom arises when the standpoint of theoretical reason encroaches upon the standpoint of practical reason and assimilates persons to things.     

Agency and Human Rights

What grounds human rights? How do we determine that something is a human right? James Griffin has persuasively argued that the notion of agency should determine the content of human rights. However, Griffin's agency account faces the question of why agency should be the sole ground for human rights. For example, can Griffin's notion of agency by itself adequately explain such human rights as that against torture? Or, has Griffin offered a plausible explanation as to why one should not broaden the ground for human rights to include other elements of a good life such as freedom from great pain, understanding, deep personal relations, and so on? These concerns have been raised regarding Griffin's agency account, but in his new book, On Human Rights, Griffin has offered new arguments in support of his view that agency is the sole ground for human rights. In this paper, I examine these new arguments, and I argue that Griffin's arguments are ultimately unsuccessful.     

TWO CONCEPTIONS OF LIBERALISM: Theology,Creation, and Politics in the Thought of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke1

Constitutional liberal practices are capable of being normatively grounded by a number of different metaphysical positions. Kant provides one such grounding, in terms of the autonomously derived moral law. I argue that the work of Edmund Burke provides a resource for an alternative construal of constitutional liberalism, compatible with, and illumined by, a broadly Thomistic natural law worldview. I contrast Burke's treatment of the relationship between truth and cognition, prudence and rights, with that of his contemporary, Kant. We find that in each case where Kant's system is constructed from the first principle of autonomy, Burke's thought is oriented toward an end that is not of our making. Readings of Burke as a natural law thinker are currently out of fashion among Burke commentators; without relying, for the main thesis, on historical claims about Burke's “Thomism,” I nonetheless explore and challenge some of the assumptions that underlie the current orthodoxy.     

Human Rights and the Defense of Liberal Democracy

In recent issues of the Journal of Religious Ethics (2006, 2007), David Little has defended the contemporary regime of international human rights against what he thinks of as the relativizing influences of the genealogical “just‐so” story told by Jeffrey Stout in his Democracy and Tradition (2004). I argue that Stout is correct about just‐so stories, and that Little does not go far enough in his reclamation of liberalism against Stout's “new traditionalists.” The main weaknesses of Little's approach are his insistence on the idea that human rights are to be thought of as natural rights, and that these in turn are to be thought of as self‐evident and self‐justifying. I argue that they are neither: they come to us via a Stoutian just‐so story, and that as part of a broader reclamation of liberalism, they can continue to serve as the basis for the kind of international liberal constitutionalism that Little advocates.     

Liberal Rights Theory and Social Inequality: A Feminist Critique

Liberal rights theory can be used either to challenge or to support social hierarchies of power. Focusing on Ronald Dworkin's theory of rights and Catharine MacKinnon's feminist critique of liberalism, I identify a number of problems with the way that liberal theorists conceptualize rights. 1 argue that rights can be used to challenge oppressive practices and structures only if they are defined and employed with an awareness and critique of social relations of power.     

‘Everyone’, consequences,and generalization arguments

This paper addresses issues raised by recent discussion in normative ethics which concern relations between properties of individual actions and of certain groups of actions. First, an ambiguity common to ‘everyone can’ and ‘everyone ought’ is examined. Next, a similar ambiguity in talk about consequences is studied; here several procedures for identifying and evaluating consequences are compared. Then a notation that untangles the ambiguities is presented. Next, this notation is employed in an analysis of Marcus Singer's deduction of his generalization argument. Finally, there is a study of the question as to whether or not conflicts are possible between Singer's generalization argument and the dictates of consequences of individual actions. The findings are that such conflicts are or are not possible depending upon how a certain restriction on generalization arguments is interpreted, and that in either case the proponent of generalization arguments is faced with problems.     

Commodification or Compensation: A Reply to Ketchum

I defend the permissibility of paid surrogacy arrangements against the arguments Sara Ketchum advances in “Selling Babies and Selling Bodies.” I argue that the arrangements cannot be prohibited out of hand on the grounds that they treat persons as objects of sale, because it is possible to view the payments made in these arrangements as compensation for the woman's services. I also argue that the arguments based on exploitation and parental custodial rights fail to provide adequate grounds for prohibiting the arrangements.