Base property exemplification and mixed worlds: remarks on the Shafer-Landau/Mabrito exchange

In this essay I distinguish between a synchronic view of base property exemplification and a diachronic one. I argue that only a diachronic view of base property exemplification can substantiate a ban on morally mixed worlds. I then argue that one of Robert Mabrito’s recent criticisms of Russ Shafer-Landau’s moral realism fails on either a synchronic or a diachronic view.

Justice, Holism and Principles

Some moral theorists defend a holistic account of practical reasons and deny that the possibility of moral thought depends upon the existence of moral principles. This article explores the implications of this position for theorising about justice, which has often aspired to provide us with an ordered list of principles to govern our institutions and practices.

Some Thoughts on Terrorism, Moral Complaint, and the Self-Reflexive and Relational Nature of Morality

The contemporary discussion of terrorism has been dominated by deontological and consequentialist arguments. Building upon my previous work on a paradox concerning moral complaint, I try to broaden the perspectives through which we view the issues. The direction that seems to me as most promising is a self-reflexive, conditional, and, to some extent, relational emphasis. What one is permitted to do to others would depend not so much on some absolute code constraning actions or on the estimate of what would optimize overall the resulting well-being but on the precedents that the past actions of those others provided, on the relationships among the participants, on tacit or explicit offers and possible agreements among them, and on the reciprocity (or lack thereof) that ensues.

Terrorism,War, and The Killing of the Innocent

Commonsense moral thought holds that what makes terrorism particularly abhorrent is the fact that it tends to be directed toward innocent victims. Yet contemporary philosophers tend to doubt that the concept of innocence plays any significant role here, and to deny that prohibitions against targeting noncombatants can be justified through appeal to their moral innocence. I argue, however, that the arguments used to support these doubts are ultimately unsuccessful. Indeed, the philosophical positions in question tend to misunderstand the justification of both the prohibition against targeting noncombatants, and that of the permission to attack combatants, for which the paper offers a new account. Such misunderstandings make it all too easy to justify both terrorist actions and morally objectionable actions on the part of nations at war. Taking proper account of the role of innocence in the context of armed conflict will alter our ordinary ways of thinking about the ethics of war, with respect to both jus in bello and jus ad bellum.

Pragmatic Reflexivity in Self-defeating and Self-justifying Expressions

Self-defeating and self-justifying expressions are reflexive insofar as they pertain to themselves. However, the reflexivity involved is often pragmatic, i.e., does not entirely depend upon the logical properties of what is expressed but also upon the expressive act. In this paper I present a general account of pragmatic reflexivity and apply it to some familiar self-defeating and self-justifying expressions in epistemology. This application indicates some important, if often neglected features of the epistemological issues involved. The account I defend suggests that epistemology is particularly sensitive to pragmatic reflexivity since what epistemologists do, i.e., inquire, theorize, and defend theories, is also the subject of the inquiry and resultant theories.

Bodies against the law: Abu Ghraib and the war on terror

In this essay, I argue that the contemporary notion of law has been reduced to regulations and disciplinary codes that do not and cannot give meaning to our emotional lives and moral sensibilities. As a result, we have increasing numbers of what I call “abysmal individuals” who suffer from a split between law—broadly conceived as that which gives form and structure to social life—and personal embodied sensations of pain and pleasure. My attempt to understand the place of Abu Ghraib within American culture leads to an analysis of our valorization of innocence and ignorance that not only becomes the grounds on which we morally (if not legally) excuse abusive behavior as “fun,” but also becomes part of the justification for condoning some forms of violence while condemning others. In addition, I argue that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence trades on underlying assumptions about the relationship between culture and nature, technology and bodies, wherein bodies are imagined as natural and outside of the realm of law.

No Plaything: Ethical Issues Concerning Child-pornography

Academic discussion of pornography is generally restricted to issues arising from the depiction of adults. I argue that child-pornography is a more complex matter, and that generally accepted moral judgements concerning pornography in general have to be revised when children are involved. I look at the question of harm to the children involved, the consumers, and society in general, at the question of blame, and at the possibility of a morally acceptable form of child-pornography. My approach involves an objectivist meta-ethics and a utilitarian view of practical ethics, and I bring out the advantages of these theories to the consideration of moral issues such as this one.

Skeptical Theism and God’s Commands

According to Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy, adherents of skeptical theism will find their sense of moral obligation undermined in a potentially ‘appalling’ way. Michael Bergmann and Michael Rea disagree, claiming that God’s commands provide skeptical theists with a source of moral obligation that withstands the skepticism in skeptical theism. I argue that Bergmann and Rea are mistaken: skeptical theists cannot consistently rely on what they take to be God’s commands.

The catechism of the citizen: politics,law and religion in,after, with and against Rousseau

As a way of thinking through the bleakness of the political present through which we are all too precipitously moving, this essay attempts to demonstrate the interconnections between three concepts: politics, law and religion. By way of a detailed reading of Rousseau, I try to show how any conception of legitimate politics and law requires a conception of religion at its base and as its basis. In my view, this is highly problematic and in the conclusion an argument is presented for a politics of the supreme fiction, which attempts to show how poetry might take the place of religion.

Being Unimpressed with Ourselves: Reconceiving Humility

I first sketch an account of humility as a character trait in which we are unimpressed with our good, envied, or admired features, achievements, etc., where these lack significant salience for our image of ourselves, because of the greater prominence of our limitations and flaws. I situate this view among several other recent conceptions of humility (also called modesty), dividing them between the inward-directed and outward-directed, distinguish mine from them, pose problems for each alternative account, and show how my understanding of humility captures truths present but exaggerated in several of them. Responding to some problems for my view, including what I call “Driver’s Paradox”(i.e., the strangeness of someone’s proclaiming ‘I’m humble!’), I suggest that some over-ambitious claims about our moral responsibilities may indicate a lack of proper humility. I discuss the relationship of the character trait of humility both to what humiliates and to what humbles, concluding with consideration of the background assumptions against which, and the circumstances in which, humility may reasonably be classified as a moral virtue.

Ethics, Speculation, and Values

Some writers claim that ethicists involved in assessing future technologies like nanotechnology and human enhancement devote too much time to debating issues that may or may not arise, at the expense of addressing more urgent, current issues. This practice has been claimed to squander the scarce and valuable resource of ethical concern. I assess this view, and consider some alternatives to ‘speculative ethics’ that have been put forward. I argue that attempting to restrict ethical debate so as to avoid considering unacceptably speculative scenarios would not only leave scientific progress devoid of ethical guidance, but would also rule out some of our most important ethical projects. I conclude that the issue of speculation is a red herring: what is most important is not that ethicists concentrate on current issues or those that are most likely to arise; but that ethicists, scientists, and others focus on maximising what is most valuable.

Piercing the Veil: Ethical Issues in Ethnographic Research

It is not unusual for researchers in ethnography (and sometimes Institutional Review Boards) to assume that research of “public” behavior is morally unproblematic. I examine an historical case of ethnographic research and the sustained moral outrage to the research expressed by the subjects of that research. I suggest that the moral outrage was legitimate and articulate some of the ethical issues underlying that outrage. I argue that morally problematic Ethnographic research of public behavior can derive from research practice that includes a tendency to collapse the distinction between harm and moral wrong, a failure to take account of recent work on ethical issues in privacy; failure to appreciate the deception involved in ethnographers’ failure to reveal their role as researchers to subjects and finally a failure to appropriately weigh the moral significance of issues of invasion of privacy and inflicted insight in both the research process and subsequent publication of research.

Foucault, Ethical Self-concern and the Other

In his later writings on ethics Foucault argues that rapport à soi – the relationship to oneself – is what gives meaning to our commitment to ‘moral behaviour’. In the absence of rapport à soi, Foucault believes, ethical adherence collapses into obedience to rules (‘an authoritarian structure’). I make a case, in broadly Levinasian terms, for saying that the call of ‘the other’ is fundamental to ethics. This prompts the question whether rapport à soi fashions an ethical subject who is unduly self-concerned. Here we confront two apparently irreconcilable pictures of the source of moral demands. I describe one way of trying to reconcile them from a Foucaultian perspective, and I note the limitations in the attempt. I also try to clear away what I think to be a misunderstanding on Foucault’s part about what is at stake in the choice between these pictures. To clarify my critique of Foucault, I also relate it to a similar recent critique of virtue ethics by Thomas Hurka.

Moral inertia

I argue that, according to ordinary morality, there is moral inertia, that is, moral pressure to fail to intervene in certain circumstances. Moral inertia is manifested in scenarios with a particular causal structure: deflection scenarios, where a threatening or benefiting process is diverted from a group of people to another. I explain why the deflection structure is essential for moral inertia to be manifested. I argue that there are two different manifestations of moral inertia: strict prohibitions on interventions, and constraints on interventions. Finally, I discuss the connection between moral inertia and the distinction between killing and letting die (or doing and allowing harm).

The Metaphysical Morality of Francis Hutcheson: A Consideration of Hutcheson’s Critique of Moral Fitness Theory

Hutcheson’s theory of morality shares far more common ground with Clarke’s morality than is generally acknowledged. In fact, Hutcheson’s own view of his innovations in moral theory suggest that he understood moral sense theory more as an elaboration and partial correction to Clarkean fitness theory than as an outright rejection of it. My aim in this paper will be to illuminate what I take to be Hutcheson’s grounds for adopting this attitude toward Clarkean fitness theory. In so doing, I hope to bring to light an otherwise unexpected continuity between moral sense theory and the moral rationalism to which it is usually opposed, and, in so doing, draw attention to the anti-sceptical realism that lies at the heart of both accounts.

The Problem of Moral Luck: An Argument Against its Epistemic Reduction

Whom I call ‘epistemic reductionists’ in this article are critics of the notion of ‘moral luck’ that maintain that all supposed cases of moral luck are illusory; they are in fact cases of what I describe as a special form of epistemic luck, the only difference lying in what we get to know about someone, rather than in what (s)he deserves in terms of praise or blame. I argue that epistemic reductionists are mistaken. They implausibly separate judgements of character from judgements concerning acts, and they assume a conception of character that is untenable both from a common sense perspective and with a view to findings from social psychology. I use especially the example of Scobie, the protagonist of Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter, to show that moral luck is real—that there are cases of moral luck that cannot be reduced to epistemic luck. The reality of moral luck, in this example at least, lies in its impact on character and personal and moral identity.

Acceptance,Belief, and Descartes’s Provisional Morality

This paper explores Descartes’s work with an eye towards abiding issues in moral epistemology. In so doing, I focus on the role played by the so-called provisional morality that surfaces in “Discourse on the Method”. What I argue is that despite the tenuousness with which it seems to be held, Descartes remained committed to the truth of this morality even in the midst of his most strenuous philosophical reflections. Put in the contemporary epistemological terms which provide the context of my discussion, I argue that Descartes believed in the goodness of his provisional morality as opposed to merely accepting its maxims.

How is Moral Disagreement a Problem for Realism?

Moral disagreement is widely held to pose a threat for metaethical realism and objectivity. In this paper I attempt to understand how it is that moral disagreement is supposed to present a problem for metaethical realism. I do this by going through several distinct (though often related) arguments from disagreement, carefully distinguishing between them, and critically evaluating their merits. My conclusions are rather skeptical: Some of the arguments I discuss fail rather clearly. Others supply with a challenge to realism, but not one we have any reason to believe realism cannot address successfully. Others beg the question against the moral realist, and yet others raise serious objections to realism, but ones that—when carefully stated—can be seen not to be essentially related to moral disagreement. Arguments based on moral disagreement itself have almost no weight, I conclude, against moral realism.

Building a Better WarBot: Ethical Issues in the Design of Unmanned Systems for Military Applications

Unmanned systems in military applications will often play a role in determining the success or failure of combat missions and thus in determining who lives and dies in times of war. Designers of UMS must therefore consider ethical, as well as operational, requirements and limits when developing UMS. I group the ethical issues involved in UMS design under two broad headings, Building Safe Systems and Designing for the Law of Armed Conflict, and identify and discuss a number of issues under each of these headings. As well as identifying issues, I offer some analysis of their implications and how they might be addressed.