Amenable to reason: Aristotle's rhetoric and the moral psychology of practical ethics.

An Aristotelian conception of practical ethics can be derived from the account of practical reasoning that Aristotle articulates in is Rhetoric and this has important implications for the way we understand the nature and limits of practical ethics. an important feature of this conception of practical ethics is its responsiveness to the complex ways in which agents form and maintain moral commitments, and this has important implications for the debate concerning methods of ethics in applied ethics. In particular, this feature enables us to understand casuistry, narrative, and principlism as mutually supportive modes of moral inquiry, rather than divergent and mutually exclusive methods of ethics. As a result, an Aristotelian conception of practical ethics clears the conceptual common ground upon which practical ethicists can forge a stable and realistic self-understanding.     

A reason to be rational

This essay argues that in spite of the powerful arguments by Kolodny and Broome there is a reason to be rational. The suggested reason to be rational is that if an agent complies with rational requirements the people around him, as well as he himself, will be able to explain and predict his attitudes. Rationality allows us to make sense of an agent’s attitudes in terms of his other attitudes. This form of explainability is valuable, because it provides us with greater comprehension as regards an agent’s attitudes. Thus, I argue that there is an instrumental reason to be rational.     

A fallacious argument against moral absolutes

The denial of moral absolutes rests, I think, on a seductive but fallacious argument, which I shall attempt both to expound and to refute here. Human beings are highly complex creatures living in a highly complex world. Every human being is different from every other, every interaction or relationship between or among human beings is unique. Hence also every occasion for moral choice is also unique, and all those action kinds - be theyadultery, murder, rape, theft, ortorture on which moralists are accustomed to pass judgment include an enormous variety of differing transactions, which ideally ought to be evaluated one by one. Moreover, each proposed action has a variety of different aspects: intention, foreseen consequence, conventional meaning, and symbolic significance for example, which bear on moral choice in a wide variety of ways. Moral rules are therefore rules of thumb, open to exceptions whenever persuasive arguments for making them are provided.     

Why there might be a moral faculty: A reply to Johnson

Is there a cognitive faculty dedicated to the moral domain? Mark Johnson has developed a number of arguments against the existence of such a faculty. I claim that these arguments are not persuasive and that there may be a moral faculty.     

The knowledge argument,the open question argument,and the moral problem

Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical nature could, apparently, suffer from ignorance about various aspects of conscious experience. Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical and mental nature could, apparently, suffer from moral ignorance. Does it follow that there are ways the world is, over and above the way it is physically or psychophysically? This paper defends a negative answer, based on a distinction between knowing the fact that p and knowing that p. This distinction is made intelligible by reference to criterial connections between the possession of moral or phenomenal knowledge, and the satisfaction of cognitively neutral conditions of desire and experiential history. The existence of such connections in the moral case makes for an efficient dissolution of the so-called moral problem.     

Defending psychopathy: an argument from values and moral responsibility

How psychopaths and their capacity for moral action are viewed is not only philosophically interesting but is also important and relevant for policy. The philosophical discussion of psychopathy has focussed upon the psychological faculties that are prerequisites for moral responsibility and empirical findings regarding psychopathy that are relevant to philosophical accounts of moral understanding and motivation. However, there are legitimate worries about whether psychopathy is a robust scientific construct, and there are risks attached to reifying psychopathy or other psychiatric constructs. We defend the concept of psychopathy by pointing out the relevance of empirical studies about it for our ordinary practices of ascribing moral responsibility and folk psychological accounts of moral understanding and motivation.     

Selective humanitarian intervention: moral reason and collective agents

This paper examines four interpretations of the observation that humanitarian intervention might be used ‘selectively’ or ‘inconsistently’ in order to elucidate the normative commitments of the deliberative process in international relations. The paper argues that there are several types of concerns that are implicit in the accusation of inconsistency, and only some of them amount to objections to humanitarian intervention as a whole. The paradox of humanitarian intervention is that intervention is prohibited except where the intervention is humanitarian, yet humanitarian reasons never exist in isolation, and it is nearly impossible to determine the real reason for intervention (or any other collective action) in the international arena. The problems revealed by an examination of inconsistency in the example of humanitarian intervention turn out to be general problems with applying the norms of practical reasoning to moral questions dealing with collective agents.     

Instrumentalism about practical reason: not by default

Instrumentalism is the view that all requirements of practical reason can be derived from the instrumental principle, that is, from the claim that one ought to take the suitable means to one's ends. Rationalists, by contrast, hold that there are requirements of practical reason that concern the normative acceptability of ends. To the extent that rationalists put forward these requirements in addition to the instrumental principle, rationalism might seem to go beyond instrumentalism in its normative commitments. This is why it is sometimes thought that rationalism is stronger than instrumentalism in a way that entails that instrumentalism is the default view, while rationalists carry the burden of proof. In this paper, I explore and discuss different ways of spelling out this idea. I argue that rationalism is not stronger than instrumentalism in a way that has implications for matters of justification and differences in prima facie defensibility of the two sorts of views.     

The argument from agreement: How universal values undermine moral realism

The most popular argument against moral realism is the argument from disagreement: if there are mind‐independent moral facts, then we would not expect to find as much moral disagreement as we in fact do; therefore, moral realism is false. In this paper, I develop the flipside of this argument. According to this argument from agreement, we would expect to find lots of moral disagreement if there were mind‐independent moral facts. But we do not, in fact, find much moral disagreement; therefore, moral realism is false. I defend the argument, explain the empirical evidence that supports it, and show what makes this challenge novel and powerful.     

论康德对道德律有效性证明的演变

康德确信道德律是理性自我立法的结果,且对一切有限的理性存在者都有效。可如何证明之一直困扰着康德,并为之付出诸多了的努力。康德对道德律有效性的证明先后经历了先天演绎、事实确证、实践归谬和理性启示这四种方式,最终把上帝存在与道德律的有效性联系起来,试图以前者来证明后者。这表明:康德对道德律的确信隐藏着神学的前提。