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.     

A critical assessment of Pereboom’s Frankfurt-style example

In this paper, I assess Derk Pereboom’s argument for the thesis that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise. I argue that the Frankfurt-style example Pereboom develops presupposes a prior act or omission which the agent was able to avoid. This undermines his argument. I propose a way for Pereboom to revise his example and thereby undercut this objection. Along the way, I also argue that Pereboom should supplement his account of what counts as a robust alternative—an alternative of the sort that should matter to those who argue for an ability-to-do-otherwise condition on moral responsibility.     

Three Types of Self-Respect

According to John Rawls, self-respect is the most important of the primary goods and is essential for the construction of the just society. Self-respect, however, remains a concept which is inadequately theorised, being closely linked to other concepts such as dignity, shame, pride, autonomy and security. Most usually self-respect is considered to be just the self-reflection of the respect we receive from others. In this paper I argue that self-respect consists of both a self-evaluative and a social reflexive element. Using Darwall’s distinction between two types of respect as a building block, I argue that it is worth considering self-respect as having three dimensions. Broadly these are human recognition, status recognition and appraisal.     

Forgiveness and Moral Development

Forgiveness is clearly an important aspect of our moral lives, yet surprisingly Kant, one of the most important authors in the history of Western ethics, seems to have very little to say about it. Some authors explain this omission by noting that forgiveness sits uncomfortably in Kant’s moral thought: forgiveness seems to have an ineluctably ‘elective’ aspect which makes it to a certain extent arbitrary; thus it stands in tension with Kant’s claim that agents are autonomous beings, capable of determining their own moral status through rational reflection and choice. Other authors recognise that forgiveness plays a role in Kant’s philosophy but fail to appreciate the nature of this duty and misrepresent the Kantian argument in support of it. This paper argues that there is space in Kant’s philosophy for a genuine theory of forgiveness and hopes to lay the grounds for a correct interpretation of this theory. I argue that from a Kantian perspective, forgiveness is not ‘elective’ but, at least in some cases, morally required. I claim that, for Kant, we have an imperfect duty of virtue to forgive repentant wrongdoers that have embarked on a project of self-reflection and self-reform. I develop a novel argument in support of this duty by drawing on Kant’s theory of rational agency, the thesis of radical evil, Kant’s theory of moral development, and the formula of humanity. However, it must be noted that this is a conditional duty and Kant’s position also entails that absence of repentance on the part of the wrongdoer should be taken as evidence of a lack of commitment to a project of self-reflection and self-reform. In such cases, Kant claims, we have a perfect duty to ourselves not to forgive unrepentant wrongdoers. I argue that this duty should be understood as one of the duties of self-esteem, which involves the duty to respect and recognise our own dignity as rational beings.     

Self-Respect or Self-Delusion? Tomasi and Rawls on the Basic Liberties

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional (and important) ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument (the ‘greater wealth thesis’) in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when (and why) citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect.     

An Argument for Compulsory Vaccination: The Taxation Analogy

I argue that there are significant moral reasons in addition to harm prevention for making vaccination against certain common infectious diseases compulsory. My argument is based on an analogy between vaccine refusal and tax evasion. First, I discuss some of the arguments for compulsory vaccination that are based on considerations of the risk of harm that the non-vaccinated would pose on others; I will suggest that the strength of such arguments is contingent upon circumstances and that in order to provide the strongest defence possible of compulsory vaccination, such arguments need to be supplemented by additional arguments. I will then offer my additional argument for compulsory vaccination: I will argue that in both cases of vaccine refusal and of tax evasion individuals fail to make their fair contribution to important social and public goods, regardless of whether each individual contribution ‘makes a difference’. While fairness considerations have sometimes been used to support a moral duty to vaccinate, they have not been appealed to in order to argue for a legal duty to vaccinate. I will suggest that this is due, among other things, to a misapplication of the principle of the least restrictive alternative in public health. Finally, I will address nine possible objections to my argument.     

Incentives, Inequality and Self-Respect

Rawls argues that ‘Parties in the original position would wish to avoid at almost any cost the social conditions that undermine self-respect’. But what are these social conditions that we should so urgently avoid? One evident candidate might be conditions of material inequality. Yet Rawls seems confident that his account of justice can endorse such inequalities without jeopardising citizens’ self-respect. In this article I argue that this confidence is misplaced. Unequalising incentives, I claim, jeopardise the self-respect of those least advantaged—at least under a Rawlsian schema—by undermining the very processes by which Rawls hopes to make distributional inequalities and self-respect compatible. I begin by setting out Rawls’s distinct account of self-respect before moving to describe how Rawls expects the difference principle to support citizens’ in this regard. I then draw upon GA Cohen’s distinction between ‘strict’ and ‘lax’ interpretations of the difference principle to argue that the presence of unequalising incentives undermines both the direct and indirect support that the difference principle can offer to citizens’ self-respect. As such, I claim that Rawls must either weaken his endorsement of unequalising incentives, or risk violating his ‘prior commitment’ to avoiding social conditions harmful to citizens’ self-respect.     

Korsgaard’s Other Argument for Interpersonal Morality: the Argument from the Sufficiency of Agency

Christine Korsgaard’s (1996, 2009) argument for the claim that one should not only value one’s own humanity but also the humanity of all other persons, ‘the publicity of reasons argument’, has been heavily criticized and I believe rightly so. However, both in an early paper (1986) and in her most recent work (forthcoming), Korsgaard does not rely on controversial, Wittgensteinian ideas regarding the publicity of reasons, but instead she uses a different argument to justify interpersonal morality, which I will refer to as ‘the argument from the sufficiency of agency’. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the argument from the sufficiency of agency can succeed where the publicity of reasons argument fails. I will argue that although the argument from the sufficiency of agency is potentially more promising, it fails to justify a categorical and universal principle of interpersonal morality. I argue, however, that this failure has less to do with the argument from the sufficiency of agency itself and more with Korsgaard’s specific version of it. This leaves open the possibility that other Kantian constructivist arguments from the sufficiency of agency might be more successful.     

Moral Fetishism Revisited

In this paper the 'moral fetishism' argument originally presented by Michael Smith against moral judgment externalism is defended. I argue that only the internalist views on the relation of moral judgment and motivation can combine two attractive theses: first, that the morally admirable are motivated to act on the reasons they take to ground actions' being right, and second, that their virtuousness need not be diminished by their acting on their thinking something right. Lastly, some possibilities are envisaged for internalists in light of a worry to the effect that the argument, if successful, undermines the internalist theories, too.     

The Evolution of the Moral Sentiments and the Metaphysics of Morals

So-called evolutionary error theorists, such as Michael Ruse and Richard Joyce, have argued that naturalistic accounts of the moral sentiments lead us to adopt an error theory approach to morality. Roughly, the argument is that an appreciation of the etiology of those sentiments undermines any reason to think that they track moral truth and, furthermore, undermines any reason to think that moral truth actually exists. I argue that this approach offers us a false dichotomy between error theory and some form of moral realism. While accepting the presuppositions of the evolutionary error theorist, I argue that contract-based approaches to morality can be sensitive to those presuppositions while still vindicating morality. Invoking Stephen Darwall’s distinction between contractualism and contractarianism, I go on to offer an evolutionary-based contractarianism.     

MAXIMALITY,DUPLICATION, AND INTRINSIC VALUE

In this paper, I develop an argument for the thesis that ‘maximality is extrinsic’, on which a whole physical object is not a whole of its kind in virtue of its intrinsic properties. Theodore Sider has a number of arguments that depend on his own simple argument that maximality is extrinsic. However, Peter van Inwagen has an argument in defence of his Duplication Principle that, I will argue, can be extended to show that Sider's simple argument fails. However, van Inwagen's argument fails against a more complex, sophisticated argument that maximality is extrinsic. I use van Inwagen's own commitments to various forms of causation and metaphysical possibility to argue that maximality is indeed extrinsic, although not for the mundane reasons that Sider suggests. I then argue that moral properties are extrinsic properties. Two physically identical things can have different moral properties in a physical world. This argument is a counterexample to a classical ethical supervenience idea (often attributed to G.E. Moore) that if there is identity of physical properties in a physical world, then there is identity in moral properties as well. I argue moral value is ‘border sensitive’ and extrinsic for Kantians, utilitarians, and Aristotelians.     

Social Conceptions of Moral Agency in Hegel and Sellars

This essay contributes to our understanding of the relation between the philosophies of Hegel and Sellars. While most treatments of this relation have focused on metaphysics or epistemology, I focus on ethics, and in particular on the formulation of moral agency. I argue that Hegel and Sellars arrive at a similar metaphilosophical rejection of individual moral agency in favor of conceptions of moral agency as the outcome of social mediation. To demonstrate this, I trace how Hegel and Sellars offer parallel resolutions of the ‘Kantian paradox’: the apparent problem that, in Kantian ethics, moral agents must both freely self-legislate the moral law unto themselves and stand in a dutiful relation to the moral law as a necessary function of practical reason. Drawing Hegel and Sellars together in this way casts new light on Sellars’s understudied ethical theory and further evidences the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s moral philosophy.     

Evolutionary Skepticism about Morality and Prudential Normativity

Debunking arguments aim at defeating the justification of a belief by revealing the belief to have a dubious genealogy. One prominent example of such a debunking argument is Richard Joyce’s evolutionary debunking explanation of morality. Joyce’s argument targets only our belief in moral facts, while our belief in prudential facts is exempt from his evolutionary critique. In this paper, I suggest that our belief in prudential facts falls victim to evolutionary debunking, too. Just as our moral sense can be explained in evolutionary terms, so presumably can our tendency to judge our actions in prudential terms. And if the evolutionary explanation of our moral sense has an undermining effect, then so does the evolutionary explanation of our belief in prudential facts. This also undermines moral fictionalism, the view that we have prudential reasons to maintain moral discourse as a fiction. I consider and refute four possible objections to the suggested debunking of our belief in prudential normativity.     

The value of dignity in and for bioethics: rethinking the terms of the debate

The discussion of the nature and value of dignity in and for bioethics concerns not only the importance of the concept but also the aims of bioethics itself. Here, I challenge the claim that the concept of dignity is useless by challenging the implicit conception of usefulness involved. I argue that the conception of usefulness that both opponents and proponents of dignity in bioethics adopt is rooted in a narrow understanding of the role of normative theory in practical ethical thinking. I then offer an alternate understanding of the nature and value of dignity. I begin by recognizing that claims that one’s dignity has been violated point to an important difference between “respect for autonomy” and “respect for persons.” I then suggest three different conceptions of how dignity can be normatively guiding for bioethics, and conclude that, ultimately, understanding dignity as the cornerstone of a reflective perspective that frames moral reflection and deliberation is valuable for doing bioethics well.     

Self-validation and internalism in Velleman’s constitutivism

Metaethical constitutivists explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is (putatively) constitutive of agency. In Velleman’s paradigmatic constitutivist theory, that is the aim of self-understanding. The best-known objection to constitutivism is Enoch’s shmagency objection: constitutivism cannot explain normativity because a constitutive aim of agency lacks normative significance unless one has reason to be an agent rather than a “shmagent”. In response, Velleman argues that the constitutive aim is self-validating. I argue that this claim is false. If the constitutive aim of self-understanding structures an agent’s practical deliberation as Velleman describes, then some correctly deliberating agents will regard that aim as normatively arbitrary or unjustified. Moreover, I argue that the self-invalidation of the constitutive aim undermines or significantly qualifies Velleman’s claim that his constitutivism reconciles internalism with a kind of objectivity about reasons. Internalists typically hold that motives from which an agent is alienated do not generate reasons, but in cases of self-invalidation, agents are alienated from the aim of self-understanding in just this way. Thus, the larger cost of the constitutive aim’s possible self-invalidation is that Velleman’s constitutivism does not satisfy a plausible and widely accepted constraint on an internalist account of reasons.     

Bad Faith,Bad Behaviour,and Role Models

I argue that athletes should neither be taken as role models nor present themselves as such. Indeed, they should resist any attempt to take them as such on the grounds that seeing athletes (or other celebrities) as role models abrogates the existential and ethical responsibilities of both parties. Whether one takes on the role of being a model to others or whether one chooses to model one’s own behaviour on that of another, except in respect of the development of technical skill, one engages in bad faith and fails to act in an existentially ethical way. To this end, I consider the inclination to influence and admiration, as well as self-respect, agency, motivation, and envy. I argue that while celebrity sportspersons and similar others do not have duties that others do not have just by virtue of their notoriety alone, they may have situational responsibilities commensurate with their social reach. More importantly, however, since social influence is not a transformation of inert matter, there are also responsibilities belonging to their audiences, those who merely observe and those who choose to imitate     

Choice, Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities

Is choice necessary for moral responsibility? And does choice imply alternative possibilities of some significant sort? This paper will relate these questions to the argument initiated by Harry Frankfurt that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility, and to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza's extension of that argument in terms of guidance control in a causally determined world. I argue that attending to Frankfurt's core conceptual distinction between the circumstances that make an action unavoidable and those that bring it about that the action is performed – a distinction emphasised in his recent restatement – provides a new route into an analysis of Frankfurt's argument by showing how it depends on a person's ‘decision to act’ involving the exercise of choice. The implicit reliance of Frankfurt's argument on this notion of choice, however, undermines his claim that the example of the counterfactual intervener strengthens the compatibilist case by providing a counter-example to the principle of alternative possibilities. I also argue that Frankfurt's reliance on the exercise of choice for moral responsibility is also evident in the Fischer/Ravizza argument, and that a close analysis of both arguments shows that such exercise of choice is not available if causal determinism is true.