Autonomy,life as an intrinsic value,and the right to die in dignity

This paper examines two models of thinking relating to the issue of the right to die in dignity: one takes into consideration the rights and interests of the individual; the other supposes that human life is inherently valuable. I contend that preference should be given to the first model, and further assert that the second model may be justified in moral terms only as long as it does not resort to paternalism. The view that holds that certain patients are not able to comprehend their own interests in a fully rational manner, and therefore ‘we’ know what is good for these patients better than ‘they’ do, is morally unjustifiable. I proceed by refuting the ‘quality of life’ argument, asserting that each person is entitled to decide for herself when it is worth living and when it is not. In this connection, a caveat will be made regarding the role of the family. The author’s research interests include bioethics, free speech, tolerance and ethics in the media.     

Equality,its Basis and Moral Status: Challenging the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests

The principle of equal consideration of interests (ECOI) is a very popular principle in animal ethics. Peter Singer employs it to ground equal treatment and solve the problem of the basis of equality, namely the problem of why we should grant equal treatment despite the variability of people’s features. In this paper, I challenge Singer’s argument because ECOI does not provide plausible grounds to presume that the interests of diverse individuals are actually equal. Analyzing the case of pain and the interest in not suffering in particular, I contend that there are some insurmountable epistemic and axiological problems in accounting for the equality of interests. Besides criticizing ECOI as a basis of equality, I argue that we need to rely on an equality of moral status. I conclude by providing some considerations on the relation between equality and the principle of proportionality.     

Virtue Ethics,Applied Ethics and Rationality twenty-three years after After Virtue

Abstract

In evaluating the merits and shortcomings of virtue ethics I focus on some central differences between virtue ethics and rival theories such as deontology and utilitarianism. Virtue ethics does not prescribe strict rules of conduct. Instead, the virtue ethical approach can be understood as an invitation to search for standards, as opposed to strict rules, that ought to guide the conduct of our individual lives. This requires a particular method. The importance of this approach in present times will become clear when we investigate the relation between virtue ethics and postmodernity. In our postmodem age moral concepts are no longer perceived as deriving their meaning from larger frameworks. Instead, their meanings are perceived as being derived from the contingencies that define our particular existences. Thus ongoing grassroots moral engagement is required, and virtue ethics is the appropriate moral framework for doing this. This results in a broadening of rationality insofar as the full richness of our situated lives are factored into our accounts of rationality. At the same time virtue ethics prevents relativism, mainly because it does justice to the social embeddedness of human activities. In order to illustrate the virtue ethical approach I will discuss two key concepts in our moral vocabulary: responsibility and integrity. We will see how these basic concepts can be properly understood only if one takes into consideration the contingencies, inherent paradoxes and tensions in human life.     

Procreation,Adoption and the Contours of Obligation

The goal of this article is to evaluate the defensibility of wide‐spread beliefs concerning the moral value of procreating. Very many of us are ‘pro‐natal’ — that is, we have a positive moral view of making more people — but pro‐natalism is under serious threat. In particular, I argue that combining several arguments in procreative ethics generates a powerful case for the Anti‐Natal Pro‐Adoption View (ANPA), or the view that we are obligated not to procreate, but instead to satisfy any parenting desires through adoption. Although this article ultimately serves as a defence against ANPA, it does so in a very limited way: while it is false that we are obligated to adopt‐rather‐than‐procreate, I contend, this does not mean that we are off the moral hook altogether. Failing in our obligations is only one way to fail morality. Our procreative acts may yet be bad, dishonourable, selfish, and open to multiple other criticisms. And indeed, I'm afraid many of them are.     

Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals

In this essay I show that while Levinas himself was clearly reluctant to extend to nonhuman animals the same kind of moral consideration he gave to humans, his ethics of alterity is one of the best equipped to mount a strong challenge to the traditional view of animals as beings of limited, if any, moral status. I argue that the logic of Levinas's own arguments concerning the otherness of the Other militates against interpreting ethics exclusively in terms of human interests and values, and, furthermore, that Levinas's phenomenology of the face applies to all beings that can suffer and are capable of expressing that suffering to me. Insofar as an animal has a face in Levinas's sense through which it is able to express its suffering to me, then there is no moral justification for refusing to extend to it moral consideration. ¹ 1. I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.      

Empathy, Shared Intentionality, and Motivation by Moral Reasons

Internalists about reasons generally insist that if a putative reason, R, is to count as a genuine normative reason for a particular agent to do something, then R must make a rational connection to some desire or interest of the agent in question. If internalism is true, but moral reasons purport to apply to agents independently of the particular desires, interests, and commitments they have, then we may be forced to conclude that moral reasons are incoherent. Richard Joyce (2001) develops an argument along these lines. Against this view, I argue that we can make sense of moral reasons as reasons that apply to, and are capable of motivating, agents independently of their prior interests and desires. More specifically, I argue that moral agents, in virtue of their capacities for empathy and shared intentionality, are sensitive to reasons that do not directly link up with their pre-existing ends. In particular, they are sensitive to, and hence can be motivated by, reasons grounded in the desires, projects, commitments, concerns, and interests of others. Moral reasons are a subset of this class of reasons to which moral agents are sensitive. Thus, moral agents can be motivated by moral reasons, even where such reasons fail to link up to their own pre-existing ends.     

Virtue Ethics, Theory, and Warrant

Are there good grounds for thinking that the moral values of action are to be derived from those of character? This ‘virtue ethical’ claim is sometimes thought of as a kind of normative ethical theory; sometimes as form of opposition to any such theory. However, the best case to be made for it supports neither of these claims. Rather, it leads us to a distinctive view in moral epistemology: the view that my warrant for a particular moral judgement derives from my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge. This view seems to confront a regress-problem. For the belief that I am a good moral judge is itself a particular moral judgement. So it seems that, on this view, I need to derive my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge from my warrant for believing that I am a good judge of moral judges; and so on. I show how this worry can be met, and trace the implications of the resulting view for warranted moral judgement.     

Why Speciesism is Wrong: A Response to Kagan

In Animal Liberation I argued that we commonly ignore or discount the interests of sentient members of other species merely because they are not human, and that this bias in favour of members of our own species is, in important respects, parallel to the biases that lie behind racism and sexism. Shelly Kagan, in ‘What's Wrong With Speciesism’ misconstrues this argument, as well as the principle of equal consideration of interests, which I offer as an alternative to speciesism. Kagan also offers, as an alternative explanation of, and possible justification for, our discounting the interests of nonhuman animals, the suggestion that your interests count more if you are a member of a species whose typical adult members are persons. Although this view is not a form of speciesism, Kagan seems not to be aware of the fact that it is a view commonly defended by advocates of natural law ethics, on which there is already an extensive critical literature.     

Integrating justice and care in animal ethics

In this paper I argue that the standoff between justice and care approaches to animal ethics presents us with a false dilemma. We should take justice's focus on reasoning from principles, and care's use of sympathetic awareness, as two integrated deliberative capacities necessary for the consideration of arguments for extending moral concern to animals. Such an integrated approach rests on a plausible account of the psychology of moral deliberation. I develop my argument as follows. Section I summarizes the nature of the debate between justice and care approaches to animal ethics, focusing on Brian Luke's arguments against justice approaches. Section II provides pro-justice rebuttals to Luke's objections. These rebuttals, while largely successful against Luke's objections, do not account for the intuition that sympathy does play a central epistemological role in animal ethics. Section III explains how sympathy cognitively simulates the perspective of the other, and thus can play an epistemological role in animal ethics. I argue that the abilities to simulate the perspective of the other and to reason from moral principles can complement each other. In section IV, I argue that though it may not be desirable to use both sympathy and reasoning from principles in all moral deliberation, it is a desirable aim when offering, and considering, moral arguments for what I will term the "extensionist project" of extending over moral concern to animals. I make this idea plausible by elucidating the claim that arguments for this project are best thought of as second-order deliberations about our first-order deliberative life.     

Love,Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics

I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see that respect in the virtuous person cannot be blind to the individual, as critics of Kantian ethics contend. My approach contrasts recent efforts (Velleman and Bagnoli) to assimilate Kantian respect to Murdochian love, which overlook Murdoch's distinctive claims about the singularity of moral activity. This idea is not as un‐Kantian as it seems, and it should inform any Kantian ethics that aims to address the charge about individuals.     

Why the Concept of Moral Status Should be Abandoned

The use of the concept of moral status is commonplace today in debates about the moral consideration of entities lacking certain special capacities, such as nonhuman animals. This concept has been typically used to defend the view that adult human beings have a status higher than all those entities. However, even those who disagree with this claim have often accepted the idea of moral status as if it were part of an undisputed received way of thinking in ethics. This paper argues that the use of this concept, however common, distorts our understanding of how to behave towards different individuals in different circumstances. When moral status is identified with the interest in living or the capacity for well-being, it becomes an arbitrary and irrelevant criterion. When it is used as a synonym of moral consideration or considerability, in a way that is compatible with the principle of equal consideration, it becomes trivial and confusing. When used, instead, to defend the unequal moral consideration of interests of equal weight, it has several implausible implications. In particular, the claim that unequal status is justified because of the value (either final or intrinsic, or instrumental) of cognitive capacities implausibly entails that our exercising those capacities should have priority over the promotion of our wellbeing. The idea of full moral status is also problematic as it implies the possibility of status monsters. In addition, its use is based in a misconceived way of what it would really entail to have a full status by virtue of having rational capacities. The paper concludes that we have strong reasons to abandon the concept of moral status altogether.     

Wittgenstein,Ethics and Basic Moral Certainty

Alice Crary claims that “the standard view of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics” is dominated by “inviolability interpretations”, which often underlie conservative readings of Wittgenstein. Crary says that such interpretations are “especially marked in connection with On Certainty”, where Wittgenstein is represented as holding that “our linguistic practices are immune to rational criticism, or inviolable”. Crary's own conception of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics, which I call the “intrinsically‐ethical reading”, derives from the influential New Wittgenstein school of exegesis, and is also espoused by James Edwards, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall. To my eyes, intrinsically‐ethical readings present a peculiar picture of ethics, which I endeavour to expose in Part I of the paper. In Part II I present a reading of On Certainty that Crary would call an “inviolability interpretation”, defend it against New Wittgensteinian critiques, and show that this kind of reading has nothing to do with ethical or political conservatism. I go on to show how Wittgenstein's observations on the manner in which we can neither question nor affirm certain states of affairs that are fundamental to our epistemic practices can be fruitfully extended to ethics. Doing so sheds light on the phenomenon that I call “basic moral certainty”, which constitutes the foundation of our ethical practices, and the scaffolding or framework of moral perception, inquiry, and judgement. The nature and significance of basic moral certainty will be illustrated through consideration of the strangeness of philosophers' attempts at explaining the wrongness of killing.     

Ethics education or moral persuasion?

The question, "What is virtue and how can it be taught?" has been with us for quite a while. H. Steven Moffic, John Coverdale, and Timothy Bayer address it in a particular setting -- psychiatric practice -- with a particular group of students -- GY-III residents -- and employ a particular strategy -- a seminar... The course sounds like a good one -- wide ranging, open minded, and relevant to students' interests and experiences. I am less convinced than they are that education in ethics leads to moral behavior, but nonetheless I share their belief that it belongs in the curriculum... The authors are right to emphasize that ethical issues go beyond the doctor-patient relationship and include the profession-society interface as well.     

Is equal moral consideration really compatible with unequal moral status?

The issue of moral considerability, or how much moral importance a being's interests deserve, is one of the most important in animal ethics. Some leading theorists--most notably David DeGrazia--have argued that a principle of "equal moral consideration" is compatible with "unequal moral status." Such a position would reconcile the egalitarian force of equal consideration with more stringent obligations to humans than animals. The article presents arguments that equal consideration is not compatible with unequal moral status, thereby forcing those who would justify significantly different moral protections for humans and animals to argue for unequal consideration.     

Five Elements of Normative Ethics - A General Theory of Normative Individualism

The article tries to inquire a third way in normative ethics between consequentialism or utilitarianism and deontology or Kantianism. To find such a third way in normative ethics, one has to analyze the elements of these classical theories and to look if they are justified. In this article it is argued that an adequate normative ethics has to contain the following five elements: (1) normative individualism, i. e., the view that in the last instance moral norms and values can only be justified by reference to the individuals concerned, as its basis; (2) consideration of the individuals’ concerns and interests—aims, desires, needs, strivings—insofar as they have a justificatory function; (3) a pluralism of references of these concerns and hence of moral norms and values to all possible elements of actions; (4) the necessity of a principle of aggregation and weighing with regard to these concerns; (5) finally, as a central principle of aggregation and weighing, the principle of relative reference to self and others, operating as a generalizing meta-principle that guides the application of concrete principles and decisions.     

Deontology defended

Empirical research into moral decision-making is often taken to have normative implications. For instance, in his recent book, Greene (2013) relies on empirical findings to establish utilitarianism as a superior normative ethical theory. Kantian ethics, and deontological ethics more generally, is a rival view that Greene attacks. At the heart of Greene’s argument against deontology is the claim that deontological moral judgments are the product of certain emotions and not of reason. Deontological ethics is a mere rationalization of these emotions. Accordingly Greene maintains that deontology should be abandoned. This paper is a defense of deontological ethical theory. It argues that Greene’s argument against deontology needs further support. Greene’s empirical evidence is open to alternative interpretations. In particular, it is not clear that Greene’s characterization of alarm-like emotions that are relative to culture and personal experience is empirically tenable. Moreover, it is implausible that such emotions produce specifically deontological judgments. A rival sentimentalist view, according to which all moral judgments are determined by emotion, is at least as plausible given the empirical evidence and independently supported by philosophical theory. I therefore call for an improvement of Greene’s argument.     

Commands as Divine Attributes

Theories of ethics that attempt to incorporate divine speech or commands as necessary elements in the construction of moral obligations are often viewed as vulnerable to a challenge based on the so‐called Euthyphro dilemma. According to this challenge, opponents of theistic ethics suppose that divine speech either informs one of a preexisting set of values and obligations, which makes it inconsequential, or is entirely arbitrary, which makes it irrational. This essay analyzes some of the debates on the nature of divine commands in eleventh‐century works of Islamic jurisprudence (u?ūl al‐fiqh). I show that Mu?tazilī jurisprudents advanced the view that divine commands were actions performed in time that had concrete manifestations, while Ash?arīs argued that divine speech in general, and commands in particular, were eternal divine attributes. After exposing certain weaknesses in the Euthyphro‐inspired objections to theistic ethics, I argue that the Ash?arī idea of commands as divine attributes is a promising move for scholars interested in defending a divine command view of moral obligation.     

Moral Lumps

Can all goods or bads be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces? Can all goods or bads be added together with some other good or bad to get a larger amount? Further, how does moral significance track the disaggregation and the aggregation of moral goods and bads? In Part 1, I examine the limits placed on aggregation by moderate deontological moral theories. This paper focuses in particular on the work of Judith Thomson and T.M. Scanlon as well as on some of my own past work on the question of aggregation in the context of overriding rights. In Part 2, I examine consequentialist criticism that harms and benefits can be broken down into smaller pieces than the deontological theory allows and the argument that the moderate deontological view is too permissive since it allows aggregation of benefits within a single person's life. In Part 3 I suggest how a moderate deontological moral theory might respond to the criticisms. I cast my answer in terms of the existence of lumpy goods and bads. I argue that consequentialist critics of deontology are wrong to insist that all goods and bads can be disaggregated and aggregated at will. Instead, I offer the suggestion that most, or many, goods and bads come in morally significant lumps. That said, it will not always be obvious what those lumps are. Determining the texture of moral value is a substantive project in normative ethics. All I have hoped to do in this paper is suggest that two standard positions on how to group moral value are mistaken and give hope that we need not adopt one of the two. Part 4 of the paper responds to an objection and sets the stage for further work in value theory.     

On Reasons,Evidence of Oughts,and Morally Fitting Motives

In a series of papers, Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star defend the following general account of reasons: R: Necessarily, a fact F is a reason for an agent A to Φ iff F is evidence that an agent ought to Φ. In this paper, I argue that the reasons as evidence view will run afoul of a motivational constraint on moral reasons, and that this is a powerful reason to reject the reasons as evidence view. The motivational constraint is as follows: M: For some consideration C to be a moral reason for an agent to Φ it must be possible for C to figure as part of the agent’s motivation for Φing without thereby undercutting (either partially or wholly) the positive moral evaluation of the agent in acting as she does. M presents a problem for Kearns and Star’s view because there will be cases where some consideration is evidence that an agent ought to Φ, but where if an agent was motivated by that consideration the agent’s action would thereby be worse from a moral perspective for that very reason. Further, I argue that this problem will likely arise on any moral theory that evaluates the motivation of an agent as a component of assessing the moral status of acts.     

What We Can Intend: Recognition and Collective Intentionality

The concept of recognition has played a role in two debates. In political philosophy, it is part of a communitarian response to liberal theories of distributive justice. It describes what it means to respect others’ right to self‐determination. In ethics, Stephen Darwall argues that it comprises our judgment that we owe others moral consideration. I present a competing account of recognition on the grounds that most accounts answer the question of why others deserve recognition without answering the question of what is involved in recognizing them. This paper answers the latter. I argue that, in general, recognition is something that we do to others rather than something that we think about others. In particular, recognition is an intentional action to treat another individual as a legitimate, self‐determining agent. I then show that recognition's realizability requires that agents understand their intentions as dependent on others for their satisfaction. Thus, relations of recognition are instances of collective intentionality.