Obligation as Self-Determination: A Critique of Hegel and Korsgaard

Abstract: In this paper I argue that both Hegel's and Korsgaard's attempts to ground moral obligation in the inherent necessity of committing to being a self-determining agent fall short of accounting for the full strength of our considered sense of moral obligation. I examine the differences between their accounts in order to show that their efforts suffer from a common inadequacy, namely, overlooking that there are two distinct ways we can value things as self-determining agents. I maintain that accounting for the actual stringency of moral judgment depends on explaining the superiority of one of these ways of valuing over the other.     

Reasons for Action and Psychological Capacities

Most moral philosophers agree that if a moral agent is incapable of performing some act ф because of a physical incapacity, then they do not have a reason to ф. Most also claim that if an agent is incapable of ф-ing due to a psychological incapacity, brought about by, for example, an obsession or phobia, then this does not preclude them from having a reason to ф. This is because the ‘ought implies can’ principle is usually interpreted as a claim about physical, rather than psychological, capacities. In this paper I argue for an opposing view: if we don’t have reasons to do things that we are physically incapable of doing, then neither do we have reasons to do things we are psychologically incapable of doing. I also argue that extending the ‘ought implies can’ principle to psychological capacities makes the principle more attractive.     

Everyday Morality

This essay explores the nexus between Buddhist discourse, moral reasoning, and aspects of indigenous ethnopsychology in a Shan community in northern Thailand. I suggest that these three strands of thought are routinely braided together in intricate ways and, furthermore, that some version of this conceptual arrangement is necessary in order for any moral thinking to take place. That is, all moral thought entails some conception of the way the world is structured (a conception that may or may not be based on religion) and some ethnotheory of human nature, both of which are culturally mediated. Finally, I discuss the implications of this view for our understanding of human agency and autonomy.     

Justice and care: The implications of the Kohlberg-Gilligan debate for medical ethics

Carol Gilligan has identified two orientations to moral understanding; the dominant ‘justice orientation’ and the under-valued ‘care orientation’. Based on her discernment of a ‘voice of care’, Gilligan challenges the adequacy of a deontological liberal framework for moral development and moral theory. This paper examines how the orientations of justice and care are played out in medical ethical theory. Specifically, I question whether the medical moral domain is adequately described by the norms of impartiality, universality, and equality that characterize the liberal ideal. My analysis of justice-oriented medical ethics, focuses on the libertarian theory of H.T. Engelhardt and the contractarian theory of R.M. Veatch. I suggest that in the work of E.D. Pellegrino and D.C. Thomasma we find not only a more authentic representation of medical morality but also a project that is compatible with the care orientation's emphasis on human need and responsiveness to particular others.     

Alone but together,autonomous but related: Self‐construal effects on happiness in social experiences

Communal tables and open workspaces have become popular servicescapes, that is, contemporary spaces for experiencing, dining, or working alone but together. Previous research demonstrates that experiencing with close others (e.g., with friends or family) increases happiness and satisfaction, but experiences shared with strangers in contexts such as communal tables or workshops have not yet been thoroughly analyzed. Addressing this research gap from a social–psychological perspective, we suggest that even though individuals are generally happier when they share experiences with loved ones, self‐construal plays a moderating role in the relationship. Individuals with high autonomy and high relatedness do not anticipate greater happiness from experiences shared with friends than with those shared with strangers. Three experimental studies (two online and one field) demonstrate this effect, using different operationalizations of autonomy relatedness. Managerial implications are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research.     

Porn Revisited

In this paper I will revisit the debate over pornography by doing three things: (a) I will suggest a more sophisticated, two-dimensional set of distinctions between positons in the debate; (b) I will then go on to attack both libertarians and the group I call "repressive feminists"; and (c) I will conclude by suggesting that by means of Hume's theory of sympathy we could support a limited form of censorship to bring women more fully into our moral and political community. I turn first to the labors of definition.     

ANIMAL PASSIONS AND BEASTLY VIRTUES: COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY AS THE UNIFYING SCIENCE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE SUBJECTIVE,EMOTIONAL, EMPATHIC,AND MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS

Abstract. In this essay, my response to four papers that were presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in a session devoted to my research on animal behavior and cognitive ethology, I stress the importance of interdisciplinary research and collaboration for coming to terms with various aspects of animal behavior and animal cognition. I argue that we have much to learn from other animals concerning a set of “big” questions including who we are in the grand scheme of things, the role science (“science sense”) plays in our understanding of the world in which we live, what it means to “know” something, what some other ways of knowing are and how they compare to what we call “science,” and the use of anecdotes and anthropomorphism to inform studies of animal behavior. I ask, Are other minds really all that private and inaccessible? Can a nonhuman animal be called a person? What does the future hold if we continue to dismantle the only planet we live on and persecute the other animal beings with whom we are supposed to coexist? I argue that cognitive ethology is the unifying science for understanding the subjective, emotional, empathic, and moral lives of animals, because it is essential to know what animals do, think, and feel as they go about their daily routines in the company of their friends and when they are alone. It is also important to learn why both the similarities and differences between humans and other animals have evolved. The more we come to understand other animals, the more we will appreciate them as the amazing beings they are, and the more we will come to understand ourselves.     

Revisiting the need for virtue in medical practice: a reflection upon the teaching of Edmund Pellegrino

Edmund Pellegrino considered medicine as a skill, art, and perhaps most importantly, a moral enterprise. In this essay, I attempt to exemplify how the legacy and contributions of Edmund Pellegrino, as a teacher and a physician, could allow for a renaissance of medical practice in which physicians engage intellectual and moral virtue to both effect sound care, and do so in a humanitarian way, rather than in simple accordance with a business model of medicine. The virtues are viewed in a renewed light as being key characteristics of physicians, and important to patient centered care.     

Interpreting delusions

This paper explores the phenomenology of the Capgras and Cotard delusions. The former is generally characterised as the belief that relatives or friends have been replaced by impostors, and the latter as the conviction that one is dead or has ceased to exist. A commonly reported feature of these delusions is an experienced 'defamiliarisation' or even 'derealisation' of things, which is associated with an absence or distortion of affect. I suggest that the importance attributed to affect by current explanations of delusional experience can serve to make explicit the manner in which we ordinarily experience the world under a taken-for-granted aspect of affective familiarity. This implicit feeling is, I argue, partly constitutive of our sense of reality. However, so-called 'folk psychology,' which is generally adopted by philosophers as an initial interpretive backdrop for delusional beliefs and for beliefs more generally, fails to accommodate it. As a consequence, some pervasive philosophical assumptions concerning the manner in which we experience and understand the world, ourselves, and each other are called into question.     

Grounding medical ethics in philosophy of medicine: problematic and potential

After considering two of Pellegrino’s papers that address the relation between philosophy of medicine and medical ethics, I identify several overarching problems in his account that revolve around his self-described essentialism and the lack of a systematic attempt to relate clinical medicine to biomedicine and public health. I address these from the critical realist position of Bernard Lonergan, who grounds both metaphysics and ethics on the normative structure of human inquiry and seeks to understand historical development, such as we are witnessing in health science and health care, in terms of the dynamic structure of the human good. I conclude that Lonergan’s generalized empirical method and hierarchical account of world order provide a potentially dynamic framework on which to build a more comprehensive philosophy of medicine than one whose foundations rest primarily on a phenomenology of the clinical encounter and the telos of medicine.

     

BUDDHIST ETHICS: A Review Essay

I argue that three recent studies (Imagining the Life Course, by Nancy Eberhardt; Sensory Biographies, by Robert Desjarlais; and How to Behave, by Anne Hansen) advance the field of Buddhist Ethics in the direction of the empirical study of morality. I situate their work within a larger context of moral anthropology, that is, the study of human nature in its limits and capacities for moral agency. Each of these books offers a finely grained account of particular and local Buddhist ways of interpreting human life and morality, and each explores complex conceptions of moral agency. I suggest that these three studies share similar interests in moral psychology, the human being across time, the intersubjective dimensions of moral experience, and what life within a karmic framework looks like. I propose that their contributions offer some of the most refreshing and interesting work generated in Buddhist ethics in the last decade.     

Negotiation Teamwork: The Impact of Information Distribution and Accountability on Performance Depends on the Relationship among Team Members

We examined how the distribution of information among team members and accountability pressures affected the quality of negotiated settlements reached among teams of friends negotiating against teams of strangers. The main conclusions of the experiment may be summarized by the following findings: (1) Teams of strangers reaped a greater share of the joint profit than did teams of friends when teammates were accountable to a supervisor as opposed to negotiating strictly on their own behalf. (2) Teams of strangers also reaped a marginally greater share of the joint profit than did teams of friends when teammates possessed unique, as opposed to common, information about their own team's preferences. (3) Not surprisingly, teams of friends were more cohesive than were teams of strangers; however, teams of friends were also more concerned about maintaining their relationship than were teams of strangers. (4) Teams of friends felt least cohesive when they were accountable to a supervisor, whereas teams of strangers felt most cohesive when they were accountable. Similarly, friends indicated greater relationship concerns when having to deal with distributed information, whereas information distribution had no effect on the relationship concerns of strangers. (5) For teams of strangers, greater team cohesiveness was positively correlated with better performance. (6) Moreover, when teams of strangers felt more cohesive than their opponents, they earned more than teams of strangers who felt less cohesive.     

In Defense of the Moral Significance of Empathy

It is commonly suggested that empathy is a morally important quality to possess and that a failure to properly empathize with others is a kind of moral failure. This suggestion assumes that empathy involves caring for others’ well-being. Skeptics challenge the moral importance of empathy by arguing that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient to care for others’ well-being. This challenge is misguided. Although some forms of empathy may not be morally important, empathy with another’s basic well-being concerns is both necessary and sufficient to care for another’s well-being, provided that one’s empathy is both cognitive and affective. I further defend the idea that empathy of this form is a moral virtue. In doing so, I address three challenges to empathy’s status as a virtue: (1) that empathy is unnecessary for being ethical, (2) that it is not useful for promoting ethical behavior, and (3) that an empathetic person can lack other traits central to being virtuous, such as being motivated by the moral good and being disposed to do virtuous things whenever appropriate opportunities arise. I argue that these challenges are mistaken.     

Freedom and forgiveness

In the history of philosophy and political thought freedom has meant a number of different things. The author considers several of these meanings and their relevance to psychoanalytic theory. The general argument against freedom that has been mounted in the history of thought, and echoed by Freud, is the thesis of causal determinism; but it is urged here that this in itself is no threat to freedom in the sense of the word required for moral agency: a free choice is one that is caused to some extent by reasons and that is relatively unconstrained both by 'external' and 'internal' forces. Yet because agents are embedded in a causal nexus that includes both the physical world and other people, agency and freedom can be compromised in innumerable ways. Neither freedom nor agency is a condition which we absolutely have or lack, but a matter of degree. Psychoanalytic therapy works toward expanding the capacity for agency and diminishing the constraints of certain internal forces. In the sense defined here, objectivity is an attitude that accepts our embeddedness in the world. With objectivity may come both forgiveness and self-forgiveness, which in turn promote agency.     

MORAL RELEVANCE AND CETERIS PARIBUS PRINCIPLES

My goal in this paper is twofold: to provide an account of what makes properties morally relevant, and to indicate the role such properties have in our moral thinking. I suppose that a property is morally relevant just in case it must, ceteris paribus, determine the moral status (the rightness or wrongness) of actions having it. The main part of the paper concerns the conditions under which the ceteris paribus caveat is satisfied, that is, when other things are equal. I argue that the caveat is satisfied when, with respect to a proposed set of morally relevant properties, an act differs from its alternatives at most in the degree to which it has one of those properties. Since other things are seldom equal, it is natural to wonder why what is true when they are equal should be important when they are not. That is, why is moral relevance, as I characterize it, a useful moral notion? I suggest that it is only by recognizing the moral relevance of properties that we are able to engage in useful moral thinking about the future.     

FOUR THEORIES OF FILIAL DUTY

Children have special duties to their parents: there are things that we ought to do for our parents, but not for just anyone. Three competing accounts of filial duty appear in the literature: the debt theory, the gratitude theory and the friendship theory. Each is unsatisfactory: each tries to assimilate the moral relationship between parent and child to some independently understood conception of duty, but this relationship is different in structure and content from any that we are likely to share with anyone apart from a parent. A more promising account will concentrate on what is unique about the parent-child relationship. I articulate and defend the 'special goods theory', according to which filial duties arise from the distinctive kinds of goods that healthy parent-child relationships typically involve.     

After Moral Error Theory,After Moral Realism

Moral abolitionists recommend that we get rid of moral discourse and moral judgement. At first glance this seems repugnant, but abolitionists think that we have overestimated the practical value of our moral framework and that eliminating it would be in our interests. I argue that abolitionism has a surprising amount going for it. Traditionally, abolitionism has been treated as an option available to moral error theorists. Error theorists say that moral discourse and judgement are committed to the existence of moral properties, and that no such properties exist. After error theory is established, abolitionism is one potential way to proceed. However, many error theorists suggest that we retain moral discourse as a sort of fiction. I evaluate some attractions of both fictionalism and abolitionism, arguing that abolitionism is a plausible position. No one doubts that error theorists can be abolitionists. However, what has gone largely undiscussed is that it is open to others to be abolitionists as well. I argue that moral realists of a metaphysically robust sort can and perhaps should be abolitionists. ‘Realist abolitionism’ makes for a surprisingly neat theoretical package, and I conclude that it represents an interesting new option in the theoretical landscape.     

Well-Being and the Capability of Health

In this paper, I argue that health plays a special role in the promotion of well-being within the capabilities approach framework. I do this by first presenting a scenario involving two individuals, both of whom lack access to only one capability. The first cannot secure the capability of bodily health due to an unhealthy lifestyle, whilst the second lacks access to bodily integrity due to a life of celibacy. Second, I explore these scenarios by assessing the nature of disadvantage suffered in both instances. I suggest that corrosive disadvantage (or the type of disadvantage that adversely impacts one’s ability to secure other valuable things) is what leads us to conclude that health is of special moral importance in the promotion of justice and the endorsing of well-being.     

The Hypothetical Syllogism

The hypothetical syllogism is invalid in standard interpretations of conditional sentences. Many arguments of this sort are quite compelling, though, and you can wonder what makes them so. I shall argue that it is our parsimony in regard to connections among events and states of affairs. All manner of things just might, for all we know, be bound up with one another in all sorts of ways. But ordinarily it is better, being simpler, to assume they are unconnected. In so doing, we jump to the conclusions of some compelling but invalid arguments.     

Between Realism and Relativism: Moral Certainty as a Third Option

This paper is an attempt to lay out a meta-ethical position that is inspired by the framework of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. To achieve this goal, this paper is divided into two parts. First, I explore recent attempts to tie Wittgenstein's epistemology in On Certainty to moral epistemology. I argue that there can be a meaningful parallel drawn between the epistemic certainties discussed in On Certainty and what I consider to be moral certainties. These moral certainties are unjustified fundamental moral attitudes that underlie our moral practices. Then, I show how the debate over moral certainty has branched into two directions. One direction presents the concept of moral certainty as a naturalistic concept. On this reading, moral certainties transcend time and place since they are rooted in our natural tendencies to act or not act in certain ways. The other direction presents moral certainty as a distinctly relativistic concept. On this reading, we have our moral certainties because we belong to communities that agree on these certainties. In the second section, I argue that we have both natural, universal certainties and localized, relative certainties. I also argue that our localized certainties are constrained by non-moral facts about ourselves and about the world. To make this argument, I rely on Wittgenstein's concept of “general facts of nature.” The result of the paper is a meta-ethical position that can be located in between moral relativism and moral realism.