Do intuitions about Frankfurt-style cases rest on an internalist prejudice?

“Frankfurt-style cases” (FSCs) are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy has recently argued that FSCs fail because (i) our intuitions about cases involving counterfactual interveners (CIs) are inconsistent (we accept that the mere presence of CIs is enough to make us gain but not lose responsibility-underwriting capacities), and (ii) this inconsistency is best explained by the fact that our intuitions about such cases are grounded in an internalist prejudice about the location of mental states and capacities. In response to this challenge, we argue that (i) there is no inconsistency in our intuitions about cases involving CIs, as soon as we draw the comparison properly, and that (ii) intuitions about such cases do not rest on an internalist prejudice, but on a more basic distinction between two kinds of dispositions. Additionally, we discuss some methodological issues that arise when comparing intuitions about thought experiments and end with a discussion of the implications of our argument for the reliability of intuitions about FSCs.     

Aboriginal Health Care and Bioethics: A Reflection on the Teaching of the Seven Grandfathers

Contemporary bioethics recognizes the importance of the culture in shaping ethical issues, yet in practice, a process for ethical analysis and decision making is rarely adjusted to the culture and ethnicity of involved parties. This is of a particular concern in a health care system that is caring for a growing Aboriginal population. We raise the possibility of constructing a bioethics grounded in traditional Aboriginal knowledge. As an example of an element of traditional knowledge that contains strong ethical guidance, we present the story of the Gifts of the Seven Grandfathers. We note a resemblance of this Ojibway teaching to virtue ethics in European traditions, but we suggest that there are also important differences in how these two traditions are currently presented. We hope that further engagement with a variety of indigenous moral teachings and traditions could improve health care involving Aboriginal patients and communities, and enrich the discipline of bioethics.     

Vision and abstraction: an empirical refutation of Nico Orlandi’s non-cognitivism

This article argues against the non-cognitivist theory of vision that has been formulated in the work of Nico Orlandi. It shows that, if we understand ‘representation’ in the way Orlandi recommends, then the visual system’s response to abstract regularities must involve the formation of representations. Recent experiments show that those representations must be used by the visual system in the production of visual experiences. Their effects cannot be explained by taking them to be non-visual effects involving attention or memory. This contradicts Orlandi’s version of the non-cognitivist hypothesis, but does so while vindicating her methodological position.     

Moral objectivism across the lifespan

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general.     

Evil and moral detachment: further reflections on The Mirror Thesis

A commonly accepted claim by philosophers investigating the nature of evil is that the evil person is, in some way, the mirror image of the moral saint. In this paper I will defend a new version of this thesis. I will argue that both the moral saint and the morally evil person are characterized by a lack of conflict between moral and non-moral concerns. However, while the saint achieves this unity through a reconciliation of the two, the evil person does so by eliminating moral concerns from her character.     

Not Just “Study Drugs” for the Rich: Stimulants as Moral Tools for Creating Opportunities for Socially Disadvantaged Students

An argument in the cognitive enhancement literature is that using stimulants in populations of healthy but socially disadvantaged individuals mistakenly attributes pathology to nonpathological individuals who experience social inequalities. As the argument goes, using stimulants as cognitive-enhancing drugs to solve the social problem of poorly educated students in inadequate schools misattributes the problem as an individual medical problem, when it is really a collective sociopolitical problem. I challenge this argument on the grounds that not all types of enhancement have to be explained in medical terms, but rather at least one conception of enhancement can be explained in social terms—opportunity maintenance. Therefore, I propose that as a moral requirement we ought to explore whether stimulants could be a means of remedying underprivileged children's experiences of social inequalities that are borne from inadequate schools for the sake of increasing their chances for opportunities and well-being.     

A Broader Understanding of Moral Distress

On the traditional view, moral distress arises only in cases where an individual believes she knows the morally right thing to do but fails to perform that action due to various constraints. We seek to motivate a broader understanding of moral distress. We begin by presenting six types of distress that fall outside the bounds of the traditional definition and explaining why they should be recognized as forms of moral distress. We then propose and defend a new and more expansive definition of moral distress and examine how it can enable the development of a taxonomy of moral distress.     

Fetal Risks,Relative Risks,and Relatives' Risks

Several factors related to fetal risk render it more or less acceptable in justifying constraints on the behavior of pregnant women. Risk is an unavoidable part of pregnancy and childbirth, one that women must balance against other vital personal and family interests. Two particular issues relate to the fairness of claims that pregnant women are never entitled to put their fetuses at risk: relative risks and relatives' risks. The former have been used—often spuriously—to advance arguments against activities, such as home birth, that may incur risk; the latter implicate the nature of relationships in determining the acceptability of coercing or precluding activities. Motivated reasoning by clinicians and judges leads to inaccurate risk assessments, and judgments based on false claims to objectivity. Such judgments undermine the moral and legal standing of pregnant women and do not advance the interests of fetuses, pregnant women, families, or states.     

The denial of moral dilemmas as a regulative ideal

The traditional debate about moral dilemmas concerns whether there are circumstances in which an agent is subject to two obligations that cannot both be fulfilled. Realists maintain there are. Irrealists deny this. Here I defend an alternative, methodologically-oriented position wherein the denial of genuine moral dilemmas functions as a regulative ideal for moral deliberation and practice. That is, moral inquiry and deliberation operate on the implicit assumption that there are no genuine moral dilemmas. This view is superior to both realism and irrealism in accounting for moral residue and other crucial phenomenological dimensions of our experience of moral dilemmas.     

Psychopathy and internalism

Do psychopaths make moral judgments but lack motivation? Or are psychopaths’ judgments are not genuinely moral? Both sides of this debate seem to assume either externalist or internalist criteria for the presence of moral judgment. However, if moral judgment is a natural kind, we can arrive at a theory-neutral criterion for moral judgment. A leading naturalistic criterion suggests that psychopaths have an impaired capacity for moral judgment; the capacity is neither fully present nor fully absent. Psychopaths are therefore not counterexamples to internalism. Nonetheless, internalism is empirically problematic because it is unable to explain psychopaths’ moral deficits.