Moral Realism, Normative Reasons, and Rational Intelligibility

This paper concerns a prima facie tension between the claims that (a) agents have normative reasons obtaining in virtue of the nature of the options that confront them, and (b) there is a non-trivial connection between the grounds of normative reasons and the upshots of sound practical reasoning. Joint commitment to these claims is shown to give rise to a dilemma. I argue that the dilemma is avoidable on a response dependent account of normative reasons accommodating both (a) and (b) by yielding (a) as a substantial constraint on sound practical reasoning. This fact is shown to have significance for the contemporary dialectic between moral realists and their opponents.     

Losing Hope: Injustice and Moral Bitterness

In this article, I defend a conception of bitterness as a moral emotion and offer an evaluative framework for assessing when instances of bitterness are morally justified. I argue that bitterness is a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that an injustice or other moral wrong will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. Orienting the discussion around instances of bitterness in response to social and political injustices, I argue that bitterness is sometimes morally justified even if it is ultimately undesirable to bear. I then suggest that focusing only on the harms and risks of bitterness can distract from its positive role as a moral reminder about a past or persistent injustice, indicating that there is still moral and often political work left to do. Finally, I address the concern that bearing bitterness may lead to despair and inaction. I respond by arguing that moral agents can and do persist in their moral and political struggles with bitterness, and without hope that their efforts will be successful.     

The Moral Taintedness of Benefiting from Injustice

It is common to focus on the duties of the wrongdoer in cases that involve injustice. Presumably, the wrongdoer owes her victim an apology for having wronged her and perhaps compensation for having harmed her. But, these are not the only duties that may arise. Are other beneficiaries of an injustice permitted to retain the fruits of the injustice? If not, who becomes entitled to those funds? In recent years, the Connection Account has emerged as an influential account that purports to explain cases such as Embezzlement. This account holds that benefiting from injustice can give rise to a corrective duty - that is, a duty of compensation - owed specifically to the victim of the injustice from which the recipient benefits. This duty is grounded in the connection between the victim and the beneficiary of a given injustice. This paper has two aims. First, I show that we must reject the Connection Account on the grounds that it risks failing correctly to identify those who become entitled to the fruits of injustice. I achieve this by developing and defending the fairness objection. Second, I offer an alternative account: the Moral Taintedness Account. This account states that, when identifying who is entitled to the fruits of injustice, the cause and the degree of the harm suffered by a victim are both relevant considerations, though it does not matter whether the victim is the victim of the injustice that gave rise to the fruits in question. This account avoids the problem associated with the Connection Account, and yields intuitive conclusions in an important range of test cases.     

Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory

Abstract

It is the persistence of social suffering in a world in which it could be eliminated that for Adorno is the source of the need for critical reflection, for philosophy. Philosophy continues and gains its cultural place because an as yet unbridgeable abyss separates the social potential for the relief of unnecessary human suffering and its emphatic continuance. Philosophy now is the culturally bound repository for the systematic acknowledgement and articulation of the meaning of the expanse of human suffering within technologically advanced societies that are already committed to liberal ideals of freedom and equality.     

Performative Force,Convention, and Discursive Injustice

I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages.     

Equality, Envy, and the Sense of Injustice

This paper attempts to defend the value of equality against the accusation that it is an expression of irrational and disreputable feelings of envy of those who are better off. It draws on Rawls' account of the sense of justice to suggest that resentment of inequalities may be a proper resentment of injustice. The case of resentment of 'free riders' is taken as one plausible example of a justified resentment of those who benefit unfairly from a scheme of cooperation. Further examples then link the case of the free rider to other cases of unjust inequalities which are the appropriate objects of resentment and indignation.     

Heidegger,Dreyfus, and the Intelligibility of Practical Comportment

Most scholars agree that meaning and intelligibility are central to Heidegger’s account of Dasein and Being-in-the-world, but there is some confusion about the nature of this intelligibility. In his debate with McDowell, Dreyfus draws on phenomenologists like Heidegger to argue that there are two kinds of intelligibility: a basic, nonconceptual, practical intelligibility found in practical comportment and a conceptual, discursive intelligibility. I explore two possible ways that Dreyfus might ground this twofold account of intelligibility in Heidegger: first in the distinction between the hermeneutic and apophantic “as”, and second in the presence and absence of the as-structure. I argue that neither approach succeeds because practical intelligibility is always already discursive and discursive articulation is a condition of practical comportment.     

National Injustice,Caring Institutions and Cosmopolitan Motivation

Res Publica - This paper examines the relationship between strategies of cosmopolitan education intended to motivate citizens of affluent countries to care about distant others facing injustice,...     

Testimonial Injustice and Mindreading

Miranda Fricker maintains that testimonial responsibility is the proper corrective to testimonial injustice. She proposes a perceptual‐like “testimonial sensibility” to explain the transmission of knowledge through testimony. This sensibility is the means by which a hearer perceives an interlocutor's credibility level. When prejudice causes a hearer to inappropriately deflate the credibility attributed to a speaker, the sensibility may have functioned unreliably. Testimonial responsibility, she claims, will make the capacity reliable by reinflating credibility levels to their proper degree. I argue that testimonial sensitivity may be or involve “mindreading,” the cognitive capacity by which we predict human behavior and explain it in terms of mental states. Further, I claim that, if testimonial sensibility is or involves mindreading, and mindreading is a function of brain processes (as claimed by cognitive neuroscientists), testimonial injustice cannot be corrected by testimonial responsibility. This is because 1) it appears to rely on conscious awareness of prejudice, whereas much bias occurs implicitly, and 2) it works at the individual level, whereas testimonial injustice occurs both individually and socially. I argue that the remedy for testimonial injustice is, instead, engaging in social efforts that work below the level of consciousness.