Autonomy,constraining options,and organ sales

Although there continues to be a chronic shortage of transplant organs the suggestion that we should try to alleviate it through allowing a current market in them continues to be morally condemned, usually on the grounds that such a market would undermine the autonomy of those who would participate in it as vendors. Against this objection Gerald Dworkin has argued that such markets would enhance the autonomy of the vendors through providing them with more options, thus enabling them to exercise a greater degree of control over their bodies. Paul Hughes and T. L. Zutlevics have recently criticized Dworkin's argument, arguing that the option to sell an organ is unusual in that it is an autonomy–undermining "constraining option" whose presence in a person's choice set is likely to undermine her autonomy rather than enhance it. I argue that although Hughes' and Zutlevics' arguments are both innovative and persuasive they are seriously flawed — and that allowing a market in human organs is more likely to enhance vendor autonomy than diminish it. Thus, given that autonomy is the preeminent value in contemporary medical ethics this provides a strong prima facie case for recognizing the moral legitimacy of such markets.     

Two (Weak) Cheers for Markets in Votes

This paper offers the first moral defense of markets in votes in a democratic electoral system based on majority rule where there are no moral restrictions on how votes can be cast. In Part 1 I outline the type of vote buying that I defend in this paper, and defend my methodological assumption. In Part 2 I criticize Freiman’s arguments for legalizing vote buying (arguments that do not address its morality). In Part 3 I outline and reply to some responses that could be made to my criticisms of Freiman’s arguments. In Part 4 I draw from the flaws in Freiman’s arguments to argue that vote buying is morally permissible and defend these arguments against objections.     

Murdoch,Moral Concepts,and the Universalizability of Moral Reasons

It is widely held that moral reasons are universalizable. On this view, when I give a moral reason for my action, I take this reason to apply with equal normative force to anyone placed in a relevantly similar situation. Here, I offer an interpretation and defense of Iris Murdoch's critique of the universalizability thesis, distinguishing her position from the contemporary versions of particularism with which she has often been mistakenly associated. Murdoch's argument relies upon the idea that moral concepts may take on idiosyncratic meanings that are unique to a particular individual. Consequently, an agent may conceptualize her situation in such a way that it would not make sense to imagine anyone else facing it. For such an agent, it would be meaningless to say that she took her reasons to apply to anyone other than herself. I defend Murdoch’s argument through an extended analysis of a literary example, and consider and reject four possible lines of objection. Finally, I consider the consequences of the argument for our understanding of the nature of moral reasoning and what Murdoch describes as the ‘endless task’ of love.     

Integration,Community, and the Medical Model of Social Injustice

I defend an empirically-oriented approach to the analysis and remediation of social injustice. My springboard for this argument is a debate – principally represented here between Tommie Shelby and Elizabeth Anderson, but with much deeper historical roots and many flowering branches – about whether racial-justice advocacy should prioritise integration (bringing different groups together) or community development (building wealth and political power within the black community). Although I incline toward something closer to Shelby's ‘egalitarian pluralist’ approach over Anderson's single-minded emphasis on integration, many of Shelby's criticisms of integrationism are misguided, and his handling of the empirical literature is profoundly unbalanced. In fact, while both Shelby and Anderson defend the importance of social science to their projects, I'll argue that each takes a decidedly unempirical approach, which ultimately obscures the full extent of our ignorance about what we can and ought to do going forward. A more authentically empirical tack would be more epistemically humble, more holistic, and less organised around what I'll call prematurely formulated ‘Grand Unified Theories of Social Change’. I defend a more ‘diversified experimentalist’ approach, which rigorously tests an array of smaller-scale interventions before trying to replicate and scale up the most promising results.     

VALUES,DESIRES, AND LOVE: REFLECTIONS ON WOLLHEIM'S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

In The Thread of Life, Richard Wollheim argues that a person's sense of value is grounded in the power of love to generate certain favourable perceptions of an object. Following from his view is a psychoanalytic conception of valuing as constituted by the imaginative force of phantasy, rather than rational deliberation. In this paper, I shall defend this conception with a view to explaining the relation between values and desires. I suggest that valuing qua phantasy‐making can ‘tune up’ a person's desires to fit his perception of the good. Such power of phantasy is to be contrasted with various types of motivational failure in moral imagination. Finally, I argue that ‘effective valuing’, which makes us capable of desiring what we perceive to be good, requires an affective kind of imagination which assures us that we have the ability to love and to be loved.     

Electoral Quid Pro Quo: A Defence of Barter Markets in Votes

In this article I aim to provide the first normative discussion of barter voting markets, namely markets which allow the trading of votes on issues/elections for votes on other issues/elections. The article is framed within the wider literature on the legal permissibility of vote buying, with a particular focus on the recent debate between Christopher Freiman and James Stacey Taylor. I argue that while Taylor's objections successfully defeat Freiman's case in favour of standard voting markets, they are unable to also defeat the type of voting markets outlined here. Furthermore, I argue that there are at least two plausible prima facie reasons in favour of barter voting markets, grounded in their capacity to contribute to the alleviation of injustice for systematically disadvantaged socio‐economic groups and to their capacity to reduce one form of bad voting, i.e. voting from ignorance.     

Autonomy, Liberalism, and Anti-Perfectionism

John Christman has recently objected to substantive conceptions of autonomy on the grounds that they introduce unwanted perfectionism into political thinking. I defend substantive conceptions of autonomy against Christman’s critique on two fronts. First, I defend substantive conceptions of autonomy against the charge that their utilisation in political theory would result in the inappropriate exclusion from democratic respect of individuals in oppressive relations. Second, I defend substantive conceptions of autonomy from the charge that they fail the ‘endorsement constraint’, i.e. that incorporating a substantive conception of autonomy into the concept of the person at the heart of a political theory would be alienating for citizens.     

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.     

Welfare,Autonomy, and the Autonomy Fallacy

In this article, I subject the claim that autonomous choice is an intrinsic welfare benefit to critical scrutiny. My argument begins by discussing perhaps the most influential argument in favor of the intrinsic value of autonomy: the argument from deference. In response, I hold that this argument displays what I call the ‘Autonomy Fallacy’: the argument from deference has no power to support the intrinsic value of autonomy in comparison to the important evaluative significance of bare self‐direction (autonomous or not) or what I call ‘self‐direction tout court’. I defend the claim that the Autonomy Fallacy really is a fallacy, and show that my examination of the argument from deference has wider reverberations. Once we clearly distinguish between autonomy and self‐direction tout court, it becomes much less plausible to say that autonomy of itself is an intrinsic welfare benefit.     

AGENCY,AUTONOMY, AND SOCIAL INTELLIGIBILITY

Popular Frankfurt‐style theories of autonomy hold that (i) autonomy is motivation in action by psychological attitudes that have ‘authority’ to constitute the agent's perspective, and (ii) attitudes have this authority in virtue of their formal role in the individual's psychological system, rather than their substantive content. I pose a challenge to such ‘psychologistic’ views, taking Frankfurt's and Bratman's theories as my targets. I argue that motivation by attitudes that play the roles picked out by psychologistic theories is compatible with radically unintelligible behavior. Because of this, psychologistic views are committed to classifying certain agents as ‘autonomous’ whom we intuitively find to be dysfunctional. I then argue that a necessary condition for autonomy is that an agent's behavior is intelligible in a particular way: autonomy necessarily involves acting from a subjective practical perspective that is, in principle, minimally comprehensible to others – not simply in a causal sense, but in a substantive, socio‐cultural sense.     

Better Living Through Chemistry? A Reply to Savulescu and Persson on ‘Moral Enhancement’

In ‘Moral Enhancement, Freedom, and the God Machine’, Savulescu and Persson argue that recent scientific findings suggest that there is a realistic prospect of achieving ‘moral enhancement’ and respond to Harris's criticism that this would threaten individual freedom and autonomy. I argue that although some pharmaceutical and neuro‐scientific interventions may influence behaviour and emotions in ways that we may be inclined to evaluate positively, describing this as ‘moral enhancement’ presupposes a particular, contested account, of what it is to act morally and implies that entirely familiar drugs such as alcohol, ecstasy, and marijuana are also capable of making people ‘more moral’. Moreover, while Savulescu and Persson establish the theoretical possibility of using drugs to promote autonomy, the real threat posed to freedom by ‘moral bioenhancement’ is that the ‘enhancers’ will be wielding power over the ‘enhanced’. Drawing on Pettit's notion of ‘freedom as non‐domination’, I argue that individuals may be rendered unfree even by a hypothetical technology such as Savulescu and Persson's ‘God machine’, which would only intervene if they chose to act immorally. While it is impossible to rule out the theoretical possibility that moral enhancement might be all‐things‐considered justified even where it did threaten freedom and autonomy, I argue that any technology for biomedical shaping of behaviour and dispositions is much more likely to be used for ill rather than good.     

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT ‘HOW DO YOU KNOW?’ CHALLENGES A SPEAKER'S KNOWLEDGE?

It is often argued that the general propriety of challenging an assertion with ‘How do you know?’ counts as evidence for the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA). Part of the argument is that this challenge seems to directly challenge whether a speaker knows what she asserts. In this article I argue for a re‐interpretation of the data, the upshot of which is that we need not interpret ‘How do you know?’ as directly challenging a speaker's knowledge; instead, it's better understood as challenging a speaker's reasons. Consequently, I argue that reasons‐based norms can equally well explain this data.     

If You Can't Change What You Believe,You Don't Believe It

I develop and defend the view that subjects are necessarily psychologically able to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Specifically, subjects can revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence, given their current psychological mechanisms and skills. If a subject lacks this ability, then the mental state in question is not a belief, though it may be some other kind of cognitive attitude, such as a supposition, an entertained thought, or a pretense. The result is a moderately revisionary view of belief: while most mental states we thought were beliefs are beliefs, some mental states which we thought were beliefs are not beliefs. The argument for this view draws on two key claims: First, subjects are rationally obligated to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Second, if some subject is rationally obligated to revise one of her mental states, then that subject can revise that mental state, given her current psychological mechanisms and skills. Along the way to defending these claims, I argue that rational obligations can govern activities which reflect on one's rational character, whether or not those activities are under one's voluntary control. I also show how the relevant version of epistemic ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ survives an objection which plagues other variants of the principle.     

Philo’s Argument from Evil in Hume’s Dialogues X: A Semantic Interpretation

Philo's argument from evil in a much-discussed passage in Part X of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) has been interpreted in three main ways: as a logical argument from evil, as an evidential argument from evil, and as an argument against natural theology's inference of a benevolent and merciful God from the course of the world. I argue that Philo is not offering an argument of any of these sorts, but is arguing that there is a radical disanalogy between the meanings of terms like ‘merciful’ and ‘benevolent’ when applied to God and human beings respectively. Drawing on the new ‘Irreligious Interpretation’ of Hume's philosophy developed by Paul Russell (2002, 2008), I suggest that the underlying aim of Philo's argument appears to be to show, in opposition to Christian teaching, that these terms, when applied to God, are in effect meaningless.     

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.     

Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single,Objective World

Christina Lafont has argued that the early Heidegger's reflections on truth and understanding are incompatible with ‘the supposition of a single objective world’. This paper presents her argument, reviews some responses that the existing Heidegger literature suggests (focusing, in particular, on work by John Haugeland), and offers what I argue is a superior response. Building on a deeper exploration of just what the above ‘supposition’ demands (an exploration informed by the work of Bernard Williams and Adrian Moore), I argue that a crucial assumption that Lafont and Haugeland both accept must be rejected, namely, that different ‘understandings of Being’ can be viewed as offering ‘rival perspectives’ on a common subject‐matter. I develop this case by drawing on an alternative account of what a Heideggerian ‘understanding of Being’ might be like.     

Saying and Doing: Speech Actions,Speech Acts and Related Events

The question which this paper examines is that of the correct scope of the claim that extra‐linguistic factors (such as gender and social status) can block the proper workings of natural language. The claim that this is possible has been put forward under the apt label of silencing in the context of Austinian speech act theory. The ‘silencing’ label is apt insofar as when one's ability to exploit the inherent dynamic of language is ‘blocked’ by one's gender or social status then one might justly be said to be silenced. The notion that factors independent of any person's linguistic competence might block her ability to exploit the inherent dynamic of language is of considerable social as well as theoretical significance. I shall defend the claim that factors independent of a person's linguistic competence can indeed block her ability to do things with words but I will show that the cases that have been previously considered to be cases of illocutionary failure are instances of rhetic or locutionary act failure instead. I shall refine the silencing claim as previously advanced in the debate in at least one fundamental respect. I also show that considering the metaphysics of speech acts clarifies many of the issues previously appearing as thorny bones of contention between those who hold that the only notion of silencing that is coherent is that of physically preventing someone from speaking or writing and those who hold the opposite sort of claim sketched above.     

Obstetric Autonomy and Informed Consent

I argue that public officials and health workers ought to respect and protect women’s rights to make risky choices during childbirth. Women’s rights to make treatment decisions ought to be respected even if their decisions expose their unborn children to unnecessary risks, and even if it is wrong to put unborn children at risk. I first defend a presumption of medical autonomy in the context of childbirth. I then draw on women’s birth stories to show that women’s medical autonomy is often ignored during labor. Medical interventions are performed during childbirth without women’s consent. Childbirth is risky and some coercive medical interventions may be understood as attempts to protect children and to prevent mothers from acting impermissibly. However, even if it is wrong to make risky choices during childbirth, women have rights to do wrong in these cases. Therefore, coercive medical interventions are impermissible during childbirth and institutions should adopt specific protections for obstetric autonomy.     

Maximalism and Moral Harmony

Maximalism is the view that an agent is permitted to perform a certain type of action (say, baking) if and only if she is permitted to perform some instance of this type (say, baking a pie), where φ‐ing is an instance of ψ‐ing if and only if φ‐ing entails ψ‐ing but not vice versa. Now, the aim of this paper is not to defend maximalism, but to defend a certain account of our options that when combined with maximalism results in a theory that accommodates the idea that a moral theory ought to be morally harmonious—that is, ought to be such that the agents who satisfy the theory, whoever and however numerous they may be, are guaranteed to produce the morally best world that they have the option of producing. I argue that, for something to count as an option for an agent, it must, in the relevant sense, be under her control. And I argue that the relevant sort of control is the sort that we exercise over our reasons‐responsive attitudes (e.g., our beliefs, desires, and intentions) by being both receptive and reactive to reasons. I call this sort of control rational control, and I call the view that φ‐ing is an option for a subject if and only if she has rational control over whether she φs rationalism. When we combine this view with maximalism, we get rationalist maximalism, which I argue is a promising moral theory.     

On Aristotelianism and Structures as Parts

Aristotelian substance theory tells us that substances have structures (read: forms) as proper parts. This claim has recently been defended by Kathrin Koslicki who dubbed it the ‘Neo‐Aristotelian Thesis.’ Strangely, Aristotelianism has not yet been universally embraced by philosophers – partly because some of its claims, such as the Neo‐Aristotelian Thesis – are viewed by some as counterintuitive at best. In this paper, I argue for Aristotelianism by showing its philosophical usefulness: specifically, I put it to use in saving the metaphysical doctrine of endurantism and some central mereological doctrines (such as Transitivity) from recent attacks. This utility gives us reason to endorse Aristotelianism. Along the way, I defend Koslicki's argument for the Neo‐Aristotelian Thesis from a recent criticism, thus helping provide still more reason to endorse Aristotelianism: namely, Koslicki's vindicated argument.