Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) maintain that “being conscious is a basic liberty,” and infer from this that without informed consent, deep sedation, by intruding upon one’s consciousness, is an in...

Moral particularism, on some interpretations, is committed to a shapeless thesis: the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. (Call this version of moral particularism ‘shapeless moral particularism’). In more detail, the shapeless thesis is that the actions a moral concept or predicate can be correctly applied to have no natural commonality (or shape) amongst them. Jackson et al. (Ethical particularism and patterns, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) argue, however, that the shapeless thesis violates the platitude ‘predication supervenes on (...) nature’—predicates or concepts apply because of how things are, and therefore ought to be rejected. I defend shapeless moral particularism by arguing that Jackson et al’s contention is less compelling than it firstly appears. My defense is limited in the sense that it does not prove shapeless moral particularism to be right and it leaves open the possibility that shapeless moral particularism might attract criticisms different from the ones advanced by Jackson et al. But at the very least, I hope to say enough to undermine Jackson et al’s powerful attack against it. The plan of this paper is as follows. Section 1 glosses the view of moral particularism and why it is taken to be essentially committed to the shapeless thesis. Section 2 examines a Wittgensteinian argument for the shapeless thesis. I shall argue that the Canberrans’ counter-arguments against it on grounds of disjunctive commonality and conceptual competence do not succeed. Section 3 explicates Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument against the shapeless thesis. Section 4 offers my criticisms of the Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument. In view of the above discussions, in Sect. 5, I conclude that there is no compelling argument (from the Canberrans) to believe that the shapeless thesis fails (as I have argued in Sect. 4). In fact, there is some good reason for us to believe it (as I have argued in Sect. 2). If so, I contend that moral particularism, when construed as essentially committed to the shapeless thesis, still remains as a live option. (shrink)

Moral perception, for the purposes of this article, is taken to be the perception of moral properties, unless contexts dictate otherwise. While both particularists and generalists agree that we can perceive the moral properties of an action or a feature, they disagree, however, over whether rules play any essential role in moral perception. The particularists argue for a ‘no’ answer, whereas the generalists say ‘yes’. In this paper, I provide a limited defense of particularism by rebutting several powerful generalist arguments. (...) It is hoped particularism can thus be made more attractive as a theory of moral perception. Positive arguments for particularism will also be provided along the way. (shrink)

I take the debate between the particularists and the principlists to be centered on the issue of whether there are true moral principles. One argument the principlists often appeal to in support of their claim that there are true moral principles is the argument from supervenience. Roughly, the argument is made up of the following three statements: (P1) If the thesis of moral supervenience holds, then there are true moral principles. (P2) The thesis of moral supervenience holds. (C) There are (...) true moral principles, and hence particularism is false. In this paper, I argue that the above argument is not sound by attacking (P1). I hold that no general supervenient/resultance base has a robust enough configuration of contextual features as to ground the existence of true moral principles. If I am right about this, I think it would be indicative of a reason to be less confident about the truth of principlism and more confident about the truth of particularism. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine the debate between the principlists and the particularists with special focus on the question of whether there is any true and coherent set of moral principles that codifies the moral landscape metaphysically speaking. My stance on this issue is an extreme sort of particularism which gives a ‘no’ answer to the above question. Yet it is significantly different from the positions of other extremists like John McDowell, Jonathan Dancy and Margaret Little. In section 2, (...) I will explain how my position is distinguished from theirs and why it is worth exploring. In section 3, I elucidate the meaning of ‘codify’. In section 4, I examine four types of principlism that claim to codify morality and argue that none of them succeeds. In section 5, I distinguish between four models of virtue and explore what implications the failure of principlism has for normative ethics and applied ethics. (shrink)

Against the reason holists (e.g. Dancy 2014), it has been contended by many reason atomists that while many features might well change their reason statuses or valences in different contexts in the way suggested by reason holists, they are merely secondary rather than primary reasons. In these atomists’ scheme of things, there are features that function as primary reasons whose reason statuses remain invariant across contexts. Moreover, these features provide the ultimate source of explanations for why some features, qua secondary (...) reasons, are variable in their reason statuses. Against the background of reason holism, this two-level picture of moral reason has been highly influential as an alternative theory of how moral reasons behave, and has been championed by several eminent philosophers such as Roger Crisp, Brad Hooker, David McNaughton and Piers Rawling. Call this theory ‘primary reason atomism’ (or PRA). Since its advancement, it has been met with lots of challenges, yet most, if not all, of these challenges remain unaddressed, insofar as I could see. This article will pick up the slack, and argues that none of its existing powerful criticisms works that can be derived from Swanton’s target-center view of the virtues, Stangl’s virtue variabilism, Dancy’s bottom-up holism, and coverage challenge, McKeever & Ridge, and Väyrynen’s double-counting objection, and Scanlon’s buck-passing account of values. This may not prove PRA to be right, but at least shows PRA to be a serious contender for the right theory of how moral reason behaves. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 61-62, July 2012.

Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, and Philip Pettit contend in their 2000 paper that an argument from supervenience deals a fatal blow to shapeless moral particularism, the view that the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. A decade has passed since the Canberrans advanced their highly influential supervenience argument. Yet, there has not been any compelling counter-argument against it, as far as I can see. My aim in this paper is to fill in this void and defend SMP against (...) the Canberrans’ supervenience argument. Such being the case, I will firstly re-construct the Canberrans’ supervenience argument in detail and push it as far as it can go. In fact, I will defend it against a number of existing objections respectively from Garfield, Dancy, and McDowell. Next, I will argue, however, that the supervenience argument, despite its initial plausibility, has one major pitfall: it hinges on an overly permissive conception of ‘shape’ such that it does not generate the right kind of moral principles the shapeless moral particularists are concerned to refute. I thus conclude that the seemingly scathing supervenience argument turns out to be toothless against SMP. Although this would not prove SMP to be right, for it might attract criticisms from other fronts, yet, until they come up, SMP, contrary to prevalent conceptions, remains alive and kicking. (shrink)

The original version of this article unfortunately contained an error. The acknowledgement of the funding sources was inadvertently omitted by the author. The funding statement is shown below.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 6, Page 45-46, June 2011.

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 57-59.

Contemporary analytic aesthetics has seen a heated debate about whether there are general critical principles that determine the merits/demerits of an artwork. The so-called generalists say ‘yes’, whereas the so-called particularists say ‘no’. On the particularists’ view, a feature that is a merit in one artwork might well turn out to be a defect in another, so critical principles purporting to define merits and defects are pretty much in vain. Against this, the generalists argue that while some features change their (...) status in the way suggested by the particularists not all features do; there are still some features that remain merits or defects across different contexts; these are what the generalists call ‘primary features’. If so, the generalists maintain that there are still general critical principles generated by these primary features. In this article, I provide a limited defence of particularism by critically assessing three arguments for the existence of such primary features. I first argue that Beardsley’s invariable and explanatory conception of primary features is too strong, such that there is no compelling reason for us to believe in their existence. I then argue that Sibley’s prima facie conception and Dickie’s isolation conception of primary features are both too weak—in other words, even if primary features of these kinds exist, they do not generate the sort of critical principles that the particularists reject. Finally, I argue that Connolly and Haydar’s recent attempt to revive the Beardsleyan conception fails. As a result, I contend that there is reason to believe that particularism remains as a live option. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to promote what I call ‘the embedded thesis’ as a general constraint on how moral reasons behave. Dancy’s reason holism will be used as a foil to illustrate the thesis. According to Dancy’s reason holism, moral reasons behave in a holistic way; that is, a feature that is a moral reason in one context might not be so in another or might even be an opposite reason. The way a feature manages to switch its (...) reason status is by the help of a so-called enabler/disabler. The enabler in itself is not part of the reason, according to Dancy’s reason holism, for it can be either present or absent while the reason feature is present. To put the idea somewhat differently, Dancy’s reason holism presupposes what I call ‘reason individuation’, the view that features that function as reasons can be individuated from those that function as enablers. Yet, reason individuation cannot hold, or so I will argue, due to what I call ‘the embedded thesis’. According to the embedded thesis, the feature that serves as a moral reason in a context cannot be individuated independently from its embedded context while still retaining its reason status. If I am right about the embedded thesis, this will take the wind out of the sails of Dancy’s reason holism. More importantly, it will constitute, I argue, a general constraint on how moral reasons behave. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 41-42, December 2011.

Biomedical moral enhancement, or BME for short, aims to improve people’s moral behaviors through augmenting, via biomedical means, their virtuous dispositions such as sympathy, honesty, courage, or generosity. Recently, it has been challenged, on particularist grounds, however, that the manifestations of the virtuous dispositions can be morally wrong. For instance, being generous in terrorist financing is one such case. If so, biomedical moral enhancement, by enhancing people’s virtues, might turn out to be counterproductive in terms of people’s moral behaviors. In (...) this paper, we argue, via a comparison with moral education, that the case for the practice of biomedical moral enhancement is not weakened by the particularists’ stress on the variable moral statuses of the manifestations of our virtues. The real challenge from the particularists, we argue, lies elsewhere. It is that practical wisdom, being essentially context-sensitive, cannot be enhanced via biomedical means. On the basis of this, we further argue that BME ought to be used with great caution, for it may wrongly enhance, for instance, a terrorist financier’s generosity, a robber’s courage, or an undercover detective’s honesty. Finally, we sketch how boundaries can be set on the use of BME, and address some potential objections to our position. (shrink)

The difficulties of philosophy reflects the nature of reality. Here it is proposed that the inability of scholastic philosophers to solve philosophical problems is a clear indication that neither philosophy nor reality is as complicated as they believe, but that its conceptual simplification cannot be achieved when we reject nondualism and endorse extreme and partial world-theories.

There are in fact two questions to be discussed. Is the importance of a philosophical thesis relative to language? Is the validity of a philosophical thesis relative to language? The answer to both questions is "yes." It can be shown that two well-known philosophical theses--the logical distinction between numerals and adjectives drawn by Frege, and the distinction between tasks and achievements drawn by Ryle--are true but trivial when stated in Chinese. This is the program for the first part of this (...) paper. In the second part, I will try to show that Mrs. Daitz's statement "a sentence states, but its parts cannot state" and Strawson's grammatical criterion for the subject-predicate distinction are both invalidated by Chinese grammar. (shrink)

As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical caxc. The suffering and death that are occurring there now axe not inevitable, 1101; unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond Lhe capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to (...) very small proportions. The decisions arid actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level, people have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation in any signihczmt way. Generally speaking, people have not given large sums to relief funds; they have not written t0 their parliamentaxy representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing thc refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs. At thc government level, no govcrmmcnt has given the sort of massive aid that would enable the refugees to survive fm: more than a few days. Britain, for instance, has given rather more than most countries. It has, to date, given £14,750,000. For comparative purposes, B1~itain’s share of thc nonreccverabla development costs of the Anglo-French Concorde project is already in excess of £275,000,000, and on present estimates will reach £440,000,¤00. The implication is that the British government values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as.. (shrink)

This paper argues that a set of questioning attitudes are among the foundations of human and animal minds. While both verbal questioning and states of curiosity are generally explained in terms of metacognitive desires for knowledge or true belief, I argue that each is better explained by a prelinguistic sui generis type of mental attitude of questioning. I review a range of considerations in support of such a proposal and improve on previous characterizations of the nature of these attitudes. I (...) then broaden their explanatory scope to include a number of forms of exploratory search. The paper has three main goals: to characterize the nature of the questioning attitudes, outlining their causal role and type of content; to argue that they are fundamental components of the mind, being widespread among animals and not constructed during ontogeny out of other attitudes; and to suggest that they explain a great deal more behavior than one might think. (shrink)