On the Duties of Commission in Commercial Life. A Kantian Criticism of Moral Institutionalism

In latter-day discussions on corporate morality, duties of commission are fiercely debated. Moral institutionalists argue that duties of commission—such as a duty of assistance—overstep the boundaries of moral duty owed by economic agents. “Moral institutionalism” is a newly coined term for a familiar position on market morality. It maintains that market morality ought to be restricted, excluding all duties of commission. Neo-Classical thinkers such as Baumol and Homann defend it most eloquently. They underpin their position with concerns that go to the core of liberalism—the dominant western political theory that sustains the ideals of both the free market and the free, rational person. Those authors claim that liberalism calls for a fully differentiated market because it resents the politicization of the market. Fully differentiated markets exclude duties of commission. They also claim that full differentiation of the market closes the troublesome gap between moral motivation and moral virtue. Full differentiation redeems the promise of “easy virtue”. In this paper moral institutionalism will be rejected from a Kantian point of view, mostly inspired by Herman’s thesis on the invisibility of morality. Liberalism may perhaps ban the politicization of the market; it does not forbid its moralization. The idea of a fully differentiated market must also be rejected because it is either morally over-demanding (to the morally autonomous person) or morally hazardous (to the person with failing moral motivation). Contrary to what the moral institutionalists claim, right action, morally, is actually quite difficult in fully differentiated markets.     

Rawls, Animals and Justice: New Literature, Same Response

This article seeks to revisit the relationship between Rawls’s contractarianism and the moral status of animals, paying particular attention to the recent literature. Despite Rawls’s own reluctance to include animals as recipients of justice, and my own initial scepticism, a number of scholars have argued that his theory does provide resources that are useful for the animal advocate. The first type takes Rawls’s exclusion of animals from his theory of justice at face value but argues that animals can still be protected within a moral realm independently of justice, or indirectly through the motivations of human contractors. The second type adapts his theory in a way that enables animals to be included within a contractarian theory of justice. It is argued, though, that none of the responses offered is successful in providing a sphere of protection for animals from within Rawls’s contractarian theory. It is doubtful if Rawls’s intention was for animals to receive a significant degree of protection within a moral realm independently of justice, and equally doubtful if the contractors in the original position would be motivated to act on behalf of animals. In the case of the second, whilst Rawlsian resources can be utilised to justify the attempt to amend the veil of ignorance so as to include animals, these are not dependent on a contractural agreement. Similarly, placing emphasis on social-co-operation as a means of incorporating animals into a theory of justice is flawed, not least because, paradoxically, it works for domesticated animals whilst they are being exploited.     

Reasonable Partiality and Animal Ethics

Moral psychology is often ignored in ethical theory, making applied ethics difficult to achieve in practice. This is particularly true in the new field of animal ethics. One key feature of moral psychology is recognition of the moral primacy of those with whom we enjoy relationships of love and friendship – philia in Aristotles term. Although a radically new ethic for animal treatment is emerging in society, its full expression is severely limited by our exploitative uses of animals. At this historical moment, only the animals with whom we enjoy philia – companion animals – can be treated with unrestricted moral concern. This ought to be accomplished, both for its own sake and as an ideal model for the future evolution of animal ethics.     

Seeking Perfection: A Kantian Look at Human Genetic Engineering

It is tempting to argue that Kantian moral philosophy justifies prohibiting both human germ-line genetic engineering and non-therapeutic genetic engineering because they fail to respect human dignity. There are, however, good reasons for resisting this temptation. In fact, Kant’s moral philosophy provides reasons that support genetic engineering—even germ-line and non-therapeutic. This is true of Kant’s imperfect duties to seek one’s own perfection and the happiness of others. It is also true of the categorical imperative. Kant’s moral philosophy does, however, provide limits to justifiable genetic engineering.     

A Royal Road to Consequentialism?

To consequentialise a moral theory means to account for moral phenomena usually described in nonconsequentialist terms, such as rights, duties, and virtues, in a consequentialist framework. This paper seeks to show that all moral theories can be consequentialised. The paper distinguishes between different interpretations of the consequentialiser’s thesis, and emphasises the need for a cardinal ranking of acts. The paper also offers a new answer as to why consequentialising moral theories is important: This yields crucial methodological insights about how to pursue ethical inquires.     

牟宗三先生以"自律道德"的理论诠释儒学之蠡测

Mou Zongsan uses the highest moral principle “autonomy” to interpret Confucius’ benevolence and Mencius’ “inherent benevolence and righteousness”, focuses on the self-rule of the will. It does not do any harm to Mencius’ learning, on the contrary, it is conducive to the communication between Chinese and Western philosophies. If we stick to Kant’s moral self autonomy and apply it to interpreting Zhu Xi’s moral theory, similarly we will discover the implications of Zhu Xi’s “autonomy” in his moral learning. Therefore, it is inappropriate for Mou Zongsan to say that Zhu Xi’s ethics belongs to the autonomous one. __________ Translated from Zhexue Yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches), 2005, (6): 33–39     

‘Acting in the Children’s Best Interest?’: Examining Victims’ Responses to Intimate Partner Violence

Victims’ responses to violent experiences within intimate relationships are highly diverse and can range from remaining silent, at least temporarily, to disclosing the abuse to informal and formal sources of support. Decisions to remain silent or to reach out for support are influenced by a complex range of factors, including situational circumstances, such as the presence of children. Using data from in-depth interviews with victims of IPV (N = 29) in Southeast Queensland, Australia, I examined victims’ responses to IPV when children are present in the abusive household. Victims, who accessed general formal support sources, including the criminal justice systems and Child Protection Services (CPS), frequently faced stereotypical and victim-blaming attitudes along with a lack of understanding of the dynamics of IPV and the circumstances surrounding victims’ help-seeking decisions. The presence of children in abuse relationships complicated victims’ help-seeking decisions because fear of harm and loss of custody often delayed or hindered the disclosure of IPV to formal support sources. Once disclosing the abuse victims often found themselves trapped between CPS expectations to protect their children by leaving the abusive partner and a reluctance on behalf of judges and magistrates to offer the necessary protection by including children on granted Domestic Violence Orders (DVO). These findings highlight the ongoing need for specialized training of CPS personnel, judges and magistrates along with an ongoing collaboration with the women’s sector to ensure the safety of victims and their children throughout the help-seeking process and to improve victims’ confidence in disclosing IPV.     

The Nature and Disvalue of Injury

This paper explicates a conception of injury as right-violation, which allows us to distinguish between setbacks to interests that should, and should not, be the concern of theories of justice. It begins by introducing a hybrid theory of rights, grounded in (a) the mobilisation of our moral equality to (b) protect our most important interests, and shows how violations of rights are the concern of justice, while setbacks where one of the twin grounds of rights is defeated are not. It then looks more closely at the substantive moral components of injury, namely harm—damage to one’s interests—and wrong—disrespect for one’s moral equality. It argues that, on the hybrid conception of rights, harm and wrong are individually necessary and jointly sufficient components of injury, and the disvalue of neither is reducible to the other—in particular, it is a mistake to construe the disrespect identified by wrong as another damaged interest. Finally, it distinguishes between the public and private dimensions of harm and wrong, and makes some preliminary suggestions as to whether the remedy for these different dimensions should lie in criminal, distributive, or corrective justice.     

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.     

Comparing Fixed-Point and Revision Theories of Truth

In response to the liar’s paradox, Kripke developed the fixed-point semantics for languages expressing their own truth concepts. (Martin and Woodruff independently developed this semantics, but not to the same extent as Kripke.) Kripke’s work suggests a number of related fixed-point theories of truth for such languages. Gupta and Belnap develop their revision theory of truth in contrast to the fixed-point theories. The current paper considers three natural ways to compare the various resulting theories of truth, and establishes the resulting relationships among these theories. The point is to get a sense of the lay of the land amid a variety of options. Our results will also provide technical fodder for the methodological remarks of the companion paper to this one.     

Conscience: Aquinas — With a hint of aristotle

The paper presents Aquinas’s account of conscience, and argues that key elements of this account are key elements too of Aristotle’s moral theory. The paper’s purpose is to encourage debate over conscience as not only a Stoic/Christian concept but one with deeper— and more widespread—roots in western ethical tradition.     

Ground zero for a post-moral ethics in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Julia Kristeva’s melancholic

Perhaps no other novel has received as much attention from moral philosophers as South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. The novel is ethically compelling and yet no moral theory explains its force. Despite clear Kantian moments, neither rationalism nor self-respect can account for the strange ethical task that the protagonist sets for himself. Calling himself the dog man, like the ancient Cynics, this shamelessly cynical protagonist takes his cues for ethics not from humans but from animals. He does not however claim much in the way of empathy or understanding of animals, and his own odd motives remain a puzzle throughout the stages of his ethical transformation. Many scholars approach Coetzee’s text through an ethics of alterity, and even argue that Disgrace is exemplary in this regard. Kristeva’s rendition of alterity ethics brings us close to the novel’s vision, and yet the novel points towards a more primordial basis for ethics in the search for meaning through the human encounter with other animal species.     

Ethics and the generous ontology

According to a view attractive to both metaphysicians and ethicists, every period in a person’s life is the life of a being just like that person except that it exists only during that period. These “subpeople” appear to have moral status, and their interests seem to clash with ours: though it may be in some person’s interests to sacrifice for tomorrow, it is not in the interests of a subperson coinciding with him only today, who will never benefit from it. Or perhaps there is no clash, and a subperson’s interests derive from those of the person it coincides with. But this makes it likely that our own interests derive from those of other beings coinciding with us.     

Moore’s Paradox and Moral Motivation

Assertions of statements such as ‘it’s raining, but I don’t believe it’ are standard examples of what is known as Moore’s paradox. Here I consider moral equivalents of such statements, statements wherein individuals affirm moral judgments while also expressing motivational indifference to those judgments (such as ‘hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don’t care’). I argue for four main conclusions concerning such statements: 1. Such statements are genuinely paradoxical, even if not contradictory. 2. This paradoxicality can be traced to a form of epistemic self-defeat that also explains the paradoxicality of ordinary Moore-paradoxical statements. 3. Although a simple form of internalism about moral judgment and motivation can explain the paradoxicality of these moral equivalents, a more plausible explanation can be provided that does not rely on this simple form of internalism. 4. The paradoxicality of such statements suggests a more credible understanding of the thesis that those who are not motivated by their moral judgments are irrational.     

Hursthouse’s Virtue Ethics and Abortion: Abortion Ethics without Metaphysics?

This essay explicates and evaluates the roles that fetal metaphysics and moral status play in Rosalind Hursthouse’s abortion ethics. It is motivated by Hursthouse’s puzzling claim in her widely anthologized paper “Virtue Ethics and Abortion” that fetal moral status and (by implication) its underlying metaphysics are “in a way, fundamentally irrelevant” to her position. The essay clarifies the roles that fetal ontology and moral status do in fact play in her abortion ethics. To this end, it presents and then develops her fetal metaphysics of the potential and actual human being, which she merely adumbrates in her more extensive treatment of abortion ethics in her book Beginning Lives. The essay then evaluates her fetal ontology in light of relevant research on fetal neural and psychological development. It concludes that her implied view that the late-stage fetus is an actual human being is defensible. The essay then turns to the analysis of late-stage abortions in her paper and argues that it is importantly incomplete.     

A Professor’s Moral Thinking at the Abstract Level Versus The Professor’s Moral Thinking in the Real Life Situation (Consistency Problem)

We conducted an on-line survey to investigate the professor’s idea of “morality” and then to compare their moral thinking at the abstract level with their moral thinking in the real life situations by sampling 257 professors from the University of Novi Sad. We constructed questionnaire based on related theoretical ethical concepts. Our results show (after we performed exploratory factor analysis) that the professor’s idea of “morality” consists of the three moral thinking patterns which are simultaneously activated during the process of their abstract moral thinking. We have identified these patterns in the following manner: deontological, formal and subjective pattern. In addition, our results show that of the three, the subjective pattern is more activated than the other two during their process of the moral thinking at the abstract level. We also discovered that there is a statistically significant difference between professor’s moral thinking patterns activation level at the abstract level and their moral thinking patterns activation level in the real life situation.     

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.     

On morality of speech: Cavell’s critique of Derrida

This article tries to bring out the implication of Cavell’s critical comments on Derrida, clustered around Cavell’s charge that deconstruction entails a flight from the ordinary. Cavell’s and Derrida’s different readings of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy provide a common ground for elaborating their respective positions. Their writings are at once the closest but also the most divergent when addressing the moral implication of speech, or more precisely, when addressing their understanding of responsibility and voice. Employing Derrida’s so-called ‘double reading’ as a leitmotif will not only shed light on the moral dimension of deconstruction, but also bring the central target of Cavell’s critique into the open.     

Ethics and Intuitions: A Reply to Singer

In a recent paper, Peter Singer suggests that some interesting new findings in experimental moral psychology support what he has contended all along—namely that intuitions should play little or no role in adequate justifications of normative ethical positions. Not only this but, according to Singer, these findings point to a central flaw in the method (or epistemological theory) of reflective equilibrium used by many contemporary moral philosophers. In this paper, we try to defend reflective equilibrium from Singer’s attack and, in part, we do this by discussing Singer’s own favoured moral methodology as outlined in his Practical Ethics. Although basing ethics solely on (certain kinds of) intuitions certainly is problematic, we argue, basing it solely on ‘reason’ gives rise to similar problems. The best solution would arguably be one which could strike a balance between the two—but, we suggest, this is precisely what reflective equilibrium is all about.     

Introduction: Egoism,Altruism and Impartiality

The distinction between egoistic and altruistic motivation is firmly embedded in contemporary moral discourse, but harks back too to early modern attempts to found morality on an egoistic basis. Rejecting that latter premise means accepting that others’ interests have intrinsic value, but it remains far from clear what altruism demands of us and what its relationship is with the rest of morality. While informing our duties, altruism seems also to urge us to transcend them and embrace the other-regarding values and virtues constitutive of a good life. This rather wide conception of morality may strike us today as too demanding. At the same time, however, currently popular impartialist accounts of morality can disrupt much everyday altruism in their insistence that each person’s interests are weighed precisely equally. Having sketched this problematic of altruism, the second half of this Introduction outlines the arguments of the four papers and review essay in this collection, each of which, in a different way, negotiates the difficult relationships between egoism, altruism, morality and impartiality. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.