The Relation Between Ethical Codes and Moral Principles

We describe the application of fundamental moral principles, with particular emphasis on prima facie duties, to formal codes of ethics that regulate the conduct of forensic psychologists who act as expert witnesses. Then we discuss the American Psychological Association's (1992) "Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct" and the Committee on Ethical Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists's "Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists" (1991 ) and critically appraise how these documents translate basic moral principles. We conclude that, in many ways, the documents exemplify ethical obligations such as nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice, but they fall short in many other ways, particularly with regard to autonomy and fidelity.     

A Reconsideration of Indirect Duties Regarding Non-Human Organisms

According to indirect duty views, human beings lack direct moral duties to non-human organisms, but our direct duties to ourselves and other humans give rise to indirect duties regarding non-humans. On the orthodox interpretation of Kant’s account of indirect duties, one should abstain from treating organisms in ways that render one more likely to violate direct duties to humans. This indirect duty view is subject to several damaging objections, such as that it misidentifies the moral reasons we have to treat non-humans in certain ways and that it sanctions only weak obligations vis-à-vis organisms. I develop an alternative indirect duty view: given a direct duty to oneself to cultivate virtuous dispositions, one has an indirect duty to abstain from treating organisms in ways that erode one’s virtues or develop vices. I argue that this indirect duty view strictly proscribes knowingly causing unnecessary harm to organisms, and I show that it is not subject to the damaging objections directed against the indirect duty view attributed to Kant by the orthodox interpretation. This suggests that indirect duty views are more worthy of consideration than is often supposed.     

How Should We Discharge Our Responsibilities to Eradicate Poverty?

In this article I present four central challenges for Hennie Lötter’s book Poverty, Ethics and Justice. The first criticism takes issue with Lötter’s focus on social rather than global justice. Though he seems to be concerned with poverty everywhere, he takes social rather than global justice as the primary unit of analysis and this leads to a certain blindness to the ways in which discharging duties to the poor is a global not just society or state level project. My alternative perspective also gives us more insights into the nature of our duties to one another and can accommodate a wider range of duties. A second set of concerns revolves around what we must do to discharge our duties to the poor and what we need to know to help effectively. We come to appreciate that helping effectively is no easy matter and supplying more guidance would be helpful. Third, after discussing some relevant empirical research, I also discuss the kinds of initiatives that deserve support, that can act as rough guidelines for would-be assisters. These more simplified guidelines do not place such heavy epistemic demands on those aiming to help. Fourth, I explore whether we can offer some more guidelines for determining which of many plausible policy initiatives we should support, given that there are many good ideas and limited resources. I offer one guideline for choosing among what appear to be plausible policies to support.     

Relationships as Indirect Intensifiers: Solving the Puzzle of Partiality

Two intuitions are important to commonsense morality: the claim that all persons have equal moral worth and the claim that persons have associative duties. These intuitions seem to contradict each other, and there has been extensive discussion concerning their reconciliation. The most widely held view claims that associative duties arise because relationships generate moral reasons to benefit our loved ones. However, such a view cannot account for the phenomenon that some acts are supererogatory when performed on behalf of a stranger but obligatory when performed on behalf of a loved one. This paper offers a novel view of associative duties, according to which such duties arise because relationships serve as indirect intensifiers of moral reasons: they decrease the cost to the agent that certain acts imply, and this increases the relative weight of the reasons that speak in favour of the act in an all‐things‐considered judgement. This reconciles moral egalitarianism and associative duties in a promising way: the moral worth of a person always generates the same moral reasons, but due to differences in the cost to the agent, these reasons sometimes amount to obligations and sometimes do not.     

Reasoning about rights and duties: mental models,world knowledge and pragmatic interpretation

We address the way verb-based and rule-content knowledge are combined in understanding institutional deontics. Study 1 showed that the institutional regulations used in our studies were readily categorised into one of two content groups: rights or duties. Participants perceived rights as benefiting the addressees identified by the rule, whereas they perceived duties as benefiting the collective that imposed the rule. Studies 2, 3, and 4 showed that rule content (rights vs. duties) had clear effects on perceptions of violations and relevance of cases for explaining the rule, even when controlling for deontic verb, phrasing of the action permitted by a right, or the formality of the deontic verb. These effects are incompatible with a simple pragmatic disambiguation approach to pragmatic modulation, as they often induce permissibility judgments that contradict the core semantic meanings of the deontic verbs. Other ways of reconciling verb meaning with rule content should be considered in a fuller theory of the interpretation of institutional rules.     

The Constitutive Approach to Kantian Rigorism

Critics often charge that Kantian ethics is implausibly rigoristic: that Kantianism recognizes a set of perfect duties, encapsulated in rules such as ‘don’t lie,’ ‘keep one’s promises,’ etc., and that these rules apply without exception. Though a number of Kantians have plausibly argued that Kantianism can acknowledge exceptions to perfect duties, this acknowledgment alone does not indicate how and when such exceptions ought to be made. This article critiques a recent attempt to motivate how such exceptions are to be made, namely, the constitutive approach developed by Tamar Schapiro. I argue that the constitutive approach is vulnerable to the objection that it is too permissive, justifying many morally dubious exceptions to perfect duties. I conclude by briefly outlining an alternative ‘fine print’ approach to the rigorism objection that appears to avoid the objection leveled at Schapiro’s approach, focusing on how modifying the constituents of agents’ maxims can change the deontic status of an act of a generally impermissible kind.     

Identification,Meaning, and the Normativity of Social Roles

Abstract: We are all familiar with the way in which social roles, such as mother, father, professor, club football coach, citizen, and so on, confront us with clusters of duties that purport to bind us. Though we generally experience these role‐duties as normatively binding, we might question this. What reason do role‐occupants have for conforming to the duties that define their roles? I argue that the agent who identifies with her role thereby has a weighty and important justificatory reason for conforming to the role's defining duties: namely, the identifying agent realizes the fundamental goods of meaning and self‐determination by doing so. This is an important normative ground of role‐duties because it, unlike the grounds of natural duty or voluntary assumption, ensures that the duties it grounds are not alien impositions but rather are elements of the identifying agent's wellbeing. I also argue that role‐identification provides a reason that shares many of the characteristics of a moral reason, and I argue that role‐identification in tandem with the principle of fair play grounds a moral duty to conform to one's role‐duties.     

Issues in the Pharmacological Induction of Emotions

abstract   In this paper, we examine issues raised by the possibility of regulating emotions through pharmacological means. We argue that emotions induced through these means can be authentic phenomenologically, and that the manner of inducing them need not make them any less our own than emotions arising 'naturally'. We recognize that in taking drugs to induce emotions, one may lose opportunities for self-knowledge; act narcissistically; or treat oneself as a mere means. But we propose that there are circumstances in which none of these concerns arise. Finally, we consider how the possibility of drug-regulation might affect duties to feel emotions.     

Beneficence and procreation

Consider a duty of beneficence towards a particular individual, S, and call a reason that is grounded in that duty a “beneficence reason towards S.” Call a person who will be brought into existence by an act of procreation the “resultant person.” Is there ever a beneficence reason towards the resultant person for an agent to procreate? In this paper, I argue for such a reason by appealing to two main premises. First, we owe a pro tanto duty of beneficence to future persons; and second, some of us can benefit some of those persons by procreating. In support of the first premise I reject the presentist account of time in favor of the view that future persons are just as real as presently existing persons. I then argue that future persons are like us in all the morally relevant ways, and since we owe duties of beneficence to each other, we also owe duties of beneficence to future persons. In support of the second premise I offer an account of benefiting according to which an individual can be benefited by an action even if it makes her no better off than she would have been, had the action not been performed. This account of benefiting solves what I call the “non-identity benefit problem.” Finally, I argue that having a life worth living is a benefit, and some of us can cause some persons that benefit by causing them to exist.     

WITHOUT CONSENT: PRINCIPLES OF JUSTIFIED ACQUISITION AND DUTY-IMPOSING POWERS

A controversy in political philosophy and applied ethics concerns the validity of duty-imposing powers, that is, rights entitling one person to impose new duties on others without their consent. Many philosophers have criticized as unplausible any such moral right, in particular that of appropriating private property unilaterally. Some, finding duty-imposing powers weird, unfamiliar or baseless, have argued that principles of justified acquisition should be rejected; others have required them to satisfy exacting criteria. I investigate the many ways in which we regularly impose duties on one another without prior consent. I show that doing so is not weird, and I offer criteria which demarcate the reasonable from the worrisome aspects of duty-imposing powers.     

The Concept of Responsibility and Determinants of Responsibility Judgment in the Japanese Context

As in the case of the English word responsibility, the Japanese equivalent sekinin is an over-used term with multiple meanings. At least two distinctive usages are noted for the Japanese concept of responsibility: 1) to describe duties or obligations pertaining to a person's role or position; and 2) to assign blame or sanction to someone when an untoward occurrence is observed. By utilizing a number of peculiar incidents that resulted in some harm, the present study has found that subjects' responsibility judgments in terms of the second type of usage were largely determined by the following two factors: 1) the causal relationship of the agent's act to the harm that ensued; and 2) the morality of the act itself without regard to consequences. In the cases where these two aspects contradicted, especially where the blameworthy act was not directly connected to the harm, judgments about the agent's responsibility were found to diverge among subjects. It was also shown that subjects most often referred to these aspects in elucidating the reasons for attributing responsibility to, or negating the responsibility of, the agent.     

With infinite utility,more needn't be better

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties: only groups with sufficient structure—call them ‘collectives’—have the necessary agency. Moreover, if duties imply ability then moral agents (of both the individual and collectives varieties) can bear duties only over actions they are able to perform. It is thus doubtful that individual agents can bear duties to perform actions that only a collective could perform. This appears to leave us at a loss when assigning duties in circumstances where only a collective could perform some morally desirable action and no collective exists. But, I argue, we are not at a loss. This article outlines a new way of assigning duties over collective acts when there is no collective. Specifically, we should assign collectivization duties to individuals. These are individual duties to take steps towards forming a collective, which then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivization duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers.     

Conservation,Foresight, and the Future Generations Problem

The practice of conservation assumes that current persons have some obligations to future generations, but these obligations are complicated by a number of philosophical problems, chief among which is what Derek Parfit calls the Non‐Identity Problem. Because our actions now will affect the identities of persons to be born in the distant future, we cannot say that those actions either benefit or harm those persons. Thus, a causal link between our acts and their consequences for particular persons is severed, and the justification for conservation duties toward future generations undermined. I argue for an alternative justification for conservation in the capacity of foresight, which requires us to act not only upon duties that we have now, but also upon those that we will predictably have in the future. In this way, the future generations problem, at least as applied to conservation issues, is overcome.     

World Poverty as a Problem of Justice? A Critical Comparison of Three Approaches

With regard to the problem of world poverty, libertarian theories of corrective justice emphasize negative duties and the idea of responsibility whereas utilitarian theories of help concentrate on positive duties based on the capacity of the helper. Thomas Pogge has developed a revised model of compensation that entails positive obligations that are generated by negative duties. He intends to show that the affluent are violating their negative duties to ensure that their conduct will not harm others: They are contributing to and profiting from an unjust global order. But the claim that negative duty generated positive obligations are more acceptable than positive duties is contestable. I examine whether Henry Shue’s model that is integrating negative duties and positive duties is more convincing concerning the foundation of positive duties to protect others. I defend the idea that there are positive duties of justice. This approach can integrate an allocation of positive duties via responsibility and maintain the advantage of an independent foundation of positive duties.

The good engineer

Conclusion So why be a good engineer? There are basically three reasons: 1) possible detection and the harm that dishonorable acts might cause, 2) a common responsibility to the professional engineering community, and 3) a negative impact on one’s own integrity when one behaves badly. But what if, in the face of these arguments, one is still not convinced? I must admit that there appears to be no knock-down ethical argument available to change the mind of a person set on behaving badly. There remains the option to act in whatever way one may wish. Engineers must realize however that bad manners and/or immorality and/or illegality, even if undetected, will most likely result in harm to themselves and thus rational behavior should result in honorable conduct of professional duties. While the Viking society of northern Europe was in many ways cruel and crude, they had a very simple code of honor. Their goal was to live life so that when they died, others would say “He was a good man”. The definition of what they meant by a “good man” might be quite different by contemporary standards but the principle is important. If engineers conduct their professional lives so as to uphold the exemplary values of engineering, the greatest professional honor would be to be remembered as a good engineer.     

Kant on Acting from Juridical Duty

ABSTRACT

A much debated passage in the Metaphysics of Morals often leads commentators to believe that it is not possible to act from juridical duty. On the one hand, Kant says that all lawgiving includes an incentive ‘which connects a ground to determining choice to this action subjectively with the representation of the law’ (MM: 218). On the other hand, he claims that juridical lawgiving ‘does not include the incentive of duty in the law’ (MM: 219). The first claim seems to entail that agents can perform a juridical duty for the sake of that duty; the second seems to entail that agents cannot perform a juridical duty for the sake of that duty. This paper shows that it is possible to reconcile both passages and to claim that one can act from juridical duty in Kant’s terms. First, it gives an account of what can be called the paradox of juridical duties. Second, it discusses briefly how responses to the paradox remain somewhat unsatisfactory. Finally, it clarifies how agents can act with no other incentive but the actual juridical duty without endangering the Kantian morality-law divide.     

Kant's Ethics and Duties to Oneself

Abstract: This paper investigates the nature and foundation of duties to oneself in Kant's moral theory. Duties to oneself embody the requirement of the formula of humanity that agents respect rational nature in them-selves as well as in others. So understood, duties to oneself are not subject to the sorts of conceptual objections often raised against duties to oneself; nor do these duties support objections that Kant's moral theory is overly demanding or produces agents who are preoccupied with their own virtue. Duties to oneself emerge as an essential and compelling part of Kant's moral theory.     

Is Patriotism an Associative Duty?

Associative duties—duties inherent to some of our relationships—are most commonly discussed in terms of intimate associations such as of families, friends, or lovers. In this essay I ask whether impersonal associations such as state or nation can also give rise to genuinely associative duties, i.e., duties of patriotism or nationalism. I distinguish between the two in terms of their objects: the object of patriotism is an institutionalized political community, whereas the object of nationalism is a group of people who share a common identity, often grounded in a belief in shared history, and an aspiration for collective self-government together. I explore three arguments for the thesis that a special concern for one’s polity and fellow-citizens, or one’s nation and co-nationals, is an associative duty: from reciprocity, from collective self-determination, and from the well-being of compatriots or co-nationals. I argue that the relationship among compatriots is a more plausible contender for generating associative duties than the relationship among co-nationals, although even in this case there are questions whether these are genuinely associative duties, or simply special duties. Although the relationship among co-nationals is a less plausible contender for associative duties, the well-being argument does apply to the relationship among both co-nationals and compatriots. I also suggest that there is a certain privileging of the status quo in the way that associative duties arguments work, because they tend to operate from existing relations and associations.     

Flexible moral theories: Complexity,domination, and indeterminacy

In this article we identify three previously unnoticed problems with flexible moral theories, i.e., theories according to which different moral rules apply when there is full compliance and when there is partial compliance. The first problem is that flexible theories are necessarily very complex, which undermines their ability to motivate and guide action. The second problem is that flexible theories allow for a troubling kind of (moral) domination: the duties an agent has depend on other agents' willingness to comply. Finally, flexible theories introduce indeterminacy: it is sometimes impossible to determine which moral rules apply. When agents stand at the threshold—i.e., when a different rule would apply if a single additional act of noncompliance took place—it is impossible to determine which rule should apply.     

Workforce Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap: Is “Women's” Work Valued as Highly as “Men's”?1

This study focuses on gender segregation and its implications for the salaries assigned to male‐ and female‐typed jobs. We used a between‐subjects design to examine whether participants would assign different pay to 3 types of jobs wherein the actual responsibilities and duties carried out by men and women were the same, but the job was situated in either a traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine domain. We found pay differentials between jobs defined as “male” and “female,” which suggest that gender‐based discrimination, arising from occupational stereotyping and the devaluation of the work typically done by women, influences salary allocation. The ways in which the results fit with contemporary theorizing about sexism and with the shifting standards model ( Biernat, 1995, 2003 ) are discussed.