Empathy,Respect, and Vulnerability

ABSTRACT

This paper reconsiders Heather Battaly’s argument that empathy is not a virtue. Like Battaly, I argue that empathy is a disposition that includes elements of virtue acquisition, but is not in itself a virtue in the Aristotelian sense. Unlike Battaly, however, I propose a distinction between care and respect. Drawing on Darwall’s view of recognition respect as well as on phenomenologically inspired views of empathy, I argue that respect can be regarded as the moral feeling that is distinctive of empathy. In my view, the feeling of respect towards another’s situated experience grants epistemic dignity, which is the recognition of the intrinsic significance of subjective experience. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the relation between empathy and respect can be relevant for an account of vulnerability that is not opposed to autonomy.     

On the Moral Agency of Computers

Can computer systems ever be considered moral agents? This paper considers two factors that are explored in the recent philosophical literature. First, there are the important domains in which computers are allowed to act, made possible by their greater functional capacities. Second, there is the claim that these functional capacities appear to embody relevant human abilities, such as autonomy and responsibility. I argue that neither the first (Doman-Function) factor nor the second (Simulacrum) factor gets at the central issue in the case for computer moral agency: whether they can have the kinds of intentional states that cause their decisions and actions. I give an account that builds on traditional action theory and allows us to conceive of computers as genuine moral agents in virtue of their own causally efficacious intentional states. These states can cause harm or benefit to moral patients, but do not depend on computer consciousness or intelligence.     

Autonomy,Reciprocity, and Responsibility: Darwall and Levinas on the Second Person

Abstract

Stephen Darwall’s The Second‐Person Standpoint converges with Emmanuel Levinas’s concern about the role of the second‐person relationship in ethics. This paper contrasts their methodologies (regressive analysis of presuppositions versus phenomenology) to explain Darwall’s narrower view of ethical experience in terms of expressed reactive attitudes. It delineates Darwall’s overall justificatory strategy and the centrality of autonomy and reciprocity within it, in contrast to Levinas’s emphasis on the experience of responsibility. Asymmetrical responsibility plays a more foundational role as a critical counterpoint to ‘mean‐spirited’ reciprocity than Darwall’s laudable distinction between accountability and revenge, and responsibility even founds this distinction. The experience of being summoned to asymmetrical responsibility amplifies the meaning of ‘authority’, which is a presupposition for Darwall. Finally, asymmetrical responsibility helps develop decentred reasoning, invites risk beyond the boundaries of reciprocity at moments when autonomy appears endangered, reconciles respect and care at the experiential level, and presses to extend the scope of moral obligation.     

Ethics in Long-Term Care: Are the Principles Different?

It has become common in medical ethics to discuss difficult cases in terms of the principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. These moral concepts or principles serve as maxims that are suggestive of appropriate clinical behavior. Because this language evolved primarily in the acute care setting, I consider whether it is in need of supplementation in order to be useful in the long-term care setting. Through analysis of two typical cases involving residents of long-term care facilities, I argue for the additional principles of candor and responsibility for narrative integrity.     

III—Moral Obligation: Form and Substance

Beginning from an analysis of moral obligation's form that I defend in The Second-Person Standpoint as what we are answerable for as beings with the necessary capacities to enter into relations of mutual accountability, I argue that this analysis has implications for moral obligation's substance . Given what it is to take responsibility for oneself and hold oneself answerable, I argue, it follows that if there are any moral obligations at all, then there must exist a basic pro tanto obligation not to undermine one another's moral autonomy.     

The importance of what they care about

Many forms of contemporary morality treat the individual as the fundamental unit of moral importance. Perhaps the most striking example of this moral vision of the individual is the contemporary global human rights regime, which treats the individual as, for all intents and purposes, sacrosanct. This essay attempts to explore one feature of this contemporary understanding of the moral status of the individual, namely the moral significance of a subject’s actual affective states, and in particular her cares and commitments. I argue that in virtue of the moral significance of actual individuals, we should take actual cares and values very seriously—even if those cares and values are not expressions of the person’s autonomy—as partially constituting that individual as a concrete subject who is the proper object of our moral attention. In particular, I argue that a person’s actual cares and values have non-derivative moral significance. Simply because someone cares about something, that care is morally significant. In virtue of this non-derivative moral significance of cares, we ought to adopt of a commitment to accommodate others’ cares and a commitment not to frustrate their cares.     

Emotional and behavioural reactions to moral transgressions: cross-cultural and individual variations in India and Britain

Reactions to moral transgressions are subject to influence at both the cultural and individual levels. Transgressions against an individual's rights or against social conventions of hierarchy may elicit different reactions in individualistic and collectivistic cultures. In the current study, affective and behavioural reactions to transgressions of autonomy (rights) and community (hierarchy) were examined in India and Britain. Results revealed that although reactions to autonomy transgressions are similar in India and Britain, Indian participants express more moral outrage than do Britons in response to transgressions of community. Results also supported the contention of emotion‐specificity in affective moral reaction: Participants in both India and Britain reported anger in response to autonomy transgressions, but contempt in response to violations of community. Importantly, these results extend previous research by demonstrating the importance of emotion specificity in moral reactions, as opposed to categorization or dilemma resolution. In addition, an individual difference measure of respect for persons was shown to moderate reactions to moral transgressions. Specifically, participants with high respect for persons were less negative to violators of the community ethic, but not the autonomy ethic. These findings highlight the importance of examining emotion‐specific responses in the moral domain and introduce a significant individual difference variable, respect for persons, into the psychology of morality.     

The Importance of Pleasure in the Moral for Kant's Ethics

I argue for a new reading of Kant's claim that respect is the moral incentive; this reading accommodates the central insights of the affectivist and intellectualist readings of respect, while avoiding shortcomings of each. I show that within Kant's ethical system, the feeling of respect should be understood as paradigmatic of a kind of pleasure, pleasure in the moral. The motivational power of respect arises from its nature as pleasurable feeling, but the feeling does not directly motivate individual dutiful actions. Rather, the feeling is motivational in the sense that, after an agent has acted in a morally good way, the pleasure that results from that action contributes to the cultivation of virtue in the agent and, consequently, morally good actions in the future. Understanding the feeling of respect to be moral pleasure not only gives us insight into how finite rational beings develop virtue, but also a new way of understanding respect as an incentive.     

Virtue Ethics,Applied Ethics and Rationality twenty-three years after After Virtue

Abstract

In evaluating the merits and shortcomings of virtue ethics I focus on some central differences between virtue ethics and rival theories such as deontology and utilitarianism. Virtue ethics does not prescribe strict rules of conduct. Instead, the virtue ethical approach can be understood as an invitation to search for standards, as opposed to strict rules, that ought to guide the conduct of our individual lives. This requires a particular method. The importance of this approach in present times will become clear when we investigate the relation between virtue ethics and postmodernity. In our postmodem age moral concepts are no longer perceived as deriving their meaning from larger frameworks. Instead, their meanings are perceived as being derived from the contingencies that define our particular existences. Thus ongoing grassroots moral engagement is required, and virtue ethics is the appropriate moral framework for doing this. This results in a broadening of rationality insofar as the full richness of our situated lives are factored into our accounts of rationality. At the same time virtue ethics prevents relativism, mainly because it does justice to the social embeddedness of human activities. In order to illustrate the virtue ethical approach I will discuss two key concepts in our moral vocabulary: responsibility and integrity. We will see how these basic concepts can be properly understood only if one takes into consideration the contingencies, inherent paradoxes and tensions in human life.     

Dependence and a Kantian conception of dignity as a value

Kantian moral concepts concerning respect for human dignity have played a central role in articulating ethical guidelines for medical practice and research, and for articulating some central positions within bioethical debates more generally. The most common of these Kantian moral concepts is the obligation to respect the dignity of patients and of human research subjects as autonomous, self-determining individuals. This article describes Kant’s conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values, and draws on the work of several contemporary Kantian philosophers who employ the distinction to make sense of some common moral intuitions, feelings, and norms. Drawing on this work, the article argues that the conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values is indispensable in the context of considering our obligations to those who are dependent and vulnerable.     

Responsibility as a Virtue

Philosophers usually discuss responsibility in terms of responsibility for past actions or as a question about the nature of moral agency. Yet the word responsibility is fairly modern, whereas these topics arguably represent timeless concerns about human agency. This paper investigates another use of responsibility, that is particularly important to modern liberal societies: responsibility as a virtue that can be demonstrated by individuals and organisations. The paper notes its initial importance in political contexts, and seeks to explain why we now demand responsibility in all spheres of life. In reply, I highlight the distinctively institutional character of modern liberal societies: institutions specify many of the particular responsibilities each of us must fulfil, but also require responsibility to sustain them and address their failings. My overall argument is that the virtue of responsibility occupies a distinctive place in the moral needs, and moral achievements, of liberal societies; and this, in turn, explains why it now occupies such a prominent place in our moral discourse.

The Misguided Marriage of Responsibility and Autonomy

Much of the literature devoted to the topics of agent autonomy and agent responsibility suggests strong conceptual overlaps between the two, although few explore these overlaps explicitly. Beliefs of this sort are commonplace, but they mistakenly conflate the global state of being autonomous with the local condition of acting autonomously or exhibiting autonomy in respect to some act or decision. Because the latter, local phenomenon of autonomy seems closely tied to the condition of being responsible for an act, we tend to think of the former, global phenomenon as a condition of responsibility as well. But one can act autonomously, or manifest autonomy with respect to some occurrent state, without satisfying the conditions for autonomous agency. Autonomous agency and responsible agency are logically distinct in part due to the varient conceptions of rationality each calls for. Both agent responsibility and holding a person responsible imply a fairly ``thick' form of rationality, where rationality embodies a normative component and is a matter of satisfying criteria that are objective in the sense that they are independent of what a person happens to want or to value. But autonomous agency calls for a quite different, ``thin' conception of instrumental rationality.     

Ethics Beyond Moral Theory

I develop an anti‐theory view of ethics. Moral theory (Kantian, utilitarian, virtue ethical, etc.) is the dominant approach to ethics among academic philosophers. But moral theory's hunt for a single Master Factor (utility, universalisability, virtue . . .) is implausibly systematising and reductionist. Perhaps scientism drives the approach? But good science always insists on respect for the data, even messy data: I criticise Singer's remarks on infanticide as a clear instance of moral theory failing to respect the data of moral perceptions and moral intuitions. Moral theory also fails to provide a coherent basis for real‐world motivation, justification, explanation, and prediction of good and bad, right and wrong. Consider for instance the marginal place of love in moral theory, compared with its central place in people's actual ethical outlooks and decision making. Hence, moral theory typically fails to ground any adequate ethical outlook. I propose that it is the notion of an ethical outlook that philosophical ethicists should pursue, not the unfruitful and distorting notion of a moral theory.     

Respect and Membership in the Moral Community

Some philosophers object that Kant’s respect cannot express mutual recognition because it is an attitude owed to persons in virtue of an abstract notion of autonomy and invite us to integrate the vocabulary of respect with other persons-concepts or to replace it with a social conception of recognition. This paper argues for a dialogical interpretation of respect as the key-mode of recognition of membership in the moral community. This interpretation highlights the relational and practical nature of respect, and accounts for its governing role over other persons-regarding concepts.

THE COLLECTIVIST APPROACH TO COLLECTIVE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

Abstract: In this article we critique the collectivist approach to collective moral responsibility. According to philosophers of a collectivist persuasion, a central notion of collective moral responsibility is moral responsibility assigned to a collective as a single entity. In our critique, we proceed by way of discussing the accounts and arguments of three prominent representatives of the collectivist approach with respect to collective responsibility: Margaret Gilbert, Russell Hardin, and Philip Pettit. Our aims are mainly critical; however, this should not be taken to imply that we do not ourselves support an alternative account of collective responsibility. We advocate an individualist account of collective responsibility. On this view of collective responsibility as joint responsibility, collective responsibility is ascribed to individuals. Each member of the group is individually morally responsible for the outcome of the joint action, but each is individually responsible jointly with the others.     

Warren, Plumwood, a Rock and a Snake: Some Doubts about Critical Ecological Feminism

In this paper I expound and criticise the arguments of two leading exponents of critical ecological feminism. According to critical ecological feminism responsibility for the oppressions of the natural world and the oppressions of racism and sexism can be traced to a logic of domination that is based on suspect value dualities and presupposes an unacceptable 'moral extensionism'(the view that moral status depends on membership of a specified class). I argue firstly that critical ecological feminism's critique of value dualism presupposes the truth of the thesis that humans and non-humans are morally equal, a thesis for which it offers no persuasive arguments (indeed critical ecological feminism advocates a kind of virtue ethic which is itself incompatible with such supposed equality). Secondly I maintain that moral extensionism, contrary to the claims of critical ecological feminism, can support a genuine respect for the natural world. Finally I suggest that the arguments for one version of critical ecological feminism, in order to be made convincing, themselves require the truth of moral extensionism.     

Sterilizations reconsidered?

Cowdin and Tuohey argue for a rethinking of Catholic bioethical principles and the Church's moral authority. Citing the Second Vatican Council for support, they argue that if the Church were to respect the proper autonomy of medicine, it would allow sterilizations. In this essay I argue against Cowdin and Tuohey's understanding that the Church has derived its moral laws independent of consultation with medicine and that it treats medicine simply as a source of technical expertise. I also argue that they misunderstand that nature of autonomy as well as the Church's position regarding the type of autonomy they request for medicine. I will especially argue against their understanding of the principles of totality and double effect as "dispensations" from the moral order. I conclude that they have provided no grounds to cause the Church to reconsider its condemnation of all sterilizations.     

Rationality and moral autonomy: An essay in moral psychology

Although there are many variations on the theme, so much is made of the good of moral autonomy that it is difficult not to suppose that there is everything to be said for being morally autonomous and nothing at all to be said for being morally nonautonomous. However, this view of moral autonomy cannot be made to square with the well-received fact that most people are morally nonautonomous — not, at any rate, unless one is prepared to maintain that most people are irrational in this respect. I am not. Thus, I reject what I take to be the prevailing view of moral autonomy. I argue that it is false that (1) moral autonomy is such that it is rational for every person to prefer being morally autonomous to being morally nonautonomous, but true that (2) moral autonomy is such that if anyone is morally autonomous, then it is rational for him to prefer being morally autonomous to being morally nonautonomous.     

Philosophical foundations of respect for autonomy

Understanding the philosophical foundations of the principle of respect for autonomy is essential for its proper application within medical ethics. The foundations provided by Immanuel Kant's principle of humanity and John Stuart Mill's principle of liberty share substantial areas of agreement including: the grounding of respect for autonomy in the capacity for rational agency, the restriction of this principle to rational agents, and the important distinction between influence and control. Their work helps to clarify the scope and role of the principle of respect for autonomy in health care delivery; its implications for truth telling, informed consent, and confidentiality; and its relationship to other moral principles, such as beneficence and distributive justice.