Sidgwick's ‘Dualism of Practical Reason’ has attracted the attention of many interpreters, and the Dualism itself seems to be an historically important version of the view, recently defended by Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf, and others, that there exists a fundamental fragmentation of value – that the ‘cosmos of duty is reduced to chaos,’ in Sidgwick's words. In this paper, I consider and reject the leading interpretations of Sidgwick's Dualism, and propose an alternative reading. I conclude by offering what I hope (...) is a plausible but Sidgwickian way out of the Dualism. (shrink)

Women tend to earn less than their male colleagues. Furthermore, women tend to earn less than men who hold jobs that are nominally different but relevantly similar to their own. Advocates of ‘comparable worth’ protest these facts. Their protest sometimes takes this form: Those differences in pay between men and women are undeserved . The argument for this claim is simple. Some facts are relevant to the wage one deserves for performing a given job; some are not. In the vast (...) majority of cases, the argument continues, gender is not relevant to the wage one deserves; relevant are, say, the skill, responsibility, and working conditions required by the job. When jobs are comparable with respect to these facts, those who work in them deserve equal pay. Therefore, women and men who work the very same jobs deserve equal pay; likewise for women and men whose jobs are nominally different but relevantly similar. (shrink)

Is there any sense to the idea of an ``ought''''that is not relative to any particularnormative framework? This ``ought'''' would not bea moral, prudential, legal, aesthetic, orreligious ``ought,'''' but rather an unqualified or just plain ``ought.'''' Thispaper (i) argues for the existence andusefulness of just plain ``ought''''; (ii) locatesthe concept of just plain ``ought'''' within amajor strand in the history of ethics (namely,the perennial attempt to demonstrate thatmorality and prudence are in harmony); and(iii) challenges David Copp''s recent attempt toshow that (...) in fact there is no such thing asjust plain ``ought.'''' A theory of just plain``ought'''' emerges along the way. (shrink)

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.

Sidgwick's ‘Dualism of Practical Reason’ has attracted the attention of many interpreters, and the Dualism itself seems to be an historically important version of the view, recently defended by Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf, and others, that there exists a fundamental fragmentation of value – that the ‘cosmos of duty is reduced to chaos,’ in Sidgwick's words. In this paper, I consider and reject the leading interpretations of Sidgwick's Dualism, and propose an alternative reading. I conclude by offering what I hope (...) is a plausible but Sidgwickian way out of the Dualism. (shrink)

The concept of desert, which once enjoyed a central place in political and ethical theory, has been relegated to the margins of much of contemporary theory, if not excluded altogether. Recently a renewed interest in the topic has emerged, and several philosophers have argued that the notion merits a more central place in political and ethical theory. Some of these philosophers contend that justice exists to the extent that people receive exactly what they deserve, while others argue that desert should (...) replace such considerations as rights, need, and equality as the basis for distributions. Still others argue that morality involves a fitting match between one's moral character and a degree of happiness. All of these positions have encountered opposition from egalitarians, libertarians, and those who are skeptical about the coherence of the concept of desert. The first anthology of its kind, What Do We Deserve? is a balanced collection of readings that brings sharply opposing positions and arguments together and stimulates debate over the meaning and significance of desert in current thought. The book begins with eight classical readings on desert (by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Smith, Kant, Mill, Sidgwick, and Ross), and later turns to contemporary interpretations of the issue. The selections examine the concept itself, analyze its relationship to the ideas of freedom and responsibility, engage in the debate between John Rawls and his critics on the merits of desert, and, finally, study the wider role and significance of desert in political and ethical theory. (shrink)

A widespread view among theists is that there is a moral obligation to obey God’s commands. In this paper, four arguments for this view are considered: the argument from beneficence; the argument from property rights; the argument from justice; and the argument from omnipotence and moral perfection. It is argued that none of these arguments succeeds in showing that there is a moral obligation to obey God’s commands. The paper concludes with the suggestion that there might be, nevertheless, weighty and (...) specifically religious (as distinct from moral) reasons to obey God. (shrink)

According to hyper-Humeanism, the world of “fact” is utterly distinct from the realm of “value”-that is, the realm of morality and religion.This is a well-known philosophical position, and it more or less follows from some well-known philosophical doctrines (e.g., logical positivism, and neo-Wittgensteinianism), but its appeal is not limited to philosophers. Indeed, an acceptance of hyper-Humeanism seems to be at the root of Stephen Jay Gould’s recent defense of the thesis that science and religion are utterly distinct. Gould’s stated aim (...) in defending this thesis is to settle, or perhaps reveal as illusory, various conflicts between science and religion. However, I arguenot only that Gould’s version of this thesis is defective, but also that hyper-Humeanism itself is false. If I am right, then “facts” and “values”-science and religion in particular-can overlap in philosophically interesting ways. (shrink)

This book is part of the “particularist” trend in modern moral philosophy. But a casual reader might conclude that Wallace endorses a crude form of moral conventionalism—the view that one morally ought to do just what conventional morality demands. Consider some passages: “The proposal is to view morality as a body of practical knowledge, a social artifact that has resulted from what people have learned over time from their efforts to cope with certain practical problems encountered over the course of (...) their lives”. “The position I have been defending implies that our actual practice, in a way, determines what is right and wrong”. (shrink)

We characterize, more precisely than before, what Rawls calls the “analytical” method of drawing up a list of basic liberties. This method employs one or more general conditions that, under any just social order whatever, putative entitlements must meet for them to be among the basic liberties encompassed, within some just social order, by Rawls’s first principle of justice (i.e., the liberty principle). We argue that the general conditions that feature in Rawls’s own account of the analytical method, which employ (...) the notion of necessity, are too stringent. They ultimately fail to deliver as basic certain particular liberties that should be encompassed within any fully adequate scheme of liberties. To address this under-generation problem, we provide an amended general condition. This replaces Rawls’s necessity condition with a probabilistic condition and it appeals to the standard liberal prohibition on arbitrary coercion by the state. We defend our new approach both as apt to feature in applications of the analytical method and as adequately grounded in justice as fairness as Rawls articulates the theory’s fundamental ideas. (shrink)

This is the first critical edition of a fascinating medieval work on music, written in Iraq in the tenth century. It is accompanied by an English translation and full annotation. The Epistle examines not just the technical, scientific, and mathematical aspects of music, but its cosmic, psychological, and spiritual dimensions.

In Morality Bernard Williams confronts the problems of writing moral philosophy, and offers a stimulating alternative to more systematic accounts which seem nevertheless to have left all the important issues somewhere off the page.

The process of adopting a child is “not for the faint of heart.” This is what we were told the first time we, as a couple, began this process. Part of the challenge lies in fulfilling the licensing requirements for adoption, which, beyond the usual home study, can include mandatory participation in parenting classes. The question naturally arises for many people who are subjected to these requirements whether they are morally justified. We tackle this question in this paper. In our (...) view, while strong reasons exist in favour of licensing adoptive parents, these reasons support the licensing not only of adoptive parents, but of all or some subset of so-called “natural” parents as well. We therefore conclude that the status quo with respect to parental licensing, according to which only adoptive parents need to be licensed, is morally unjustified. (shrink)

Some bioethicists argue that conscientious objectors in health care should have to justify themselves, just as objectors in the military do. They should have to provide reasons that explain why they should be exempt from offering the services that they find offensive. There are two versions of this view in the literature, each giving different standards of justification. We show these views are each either too permissive (i.e. would result in problematic exemptions based on conscience) or too restrictive (i.e. would (...) produce problematic denials of exemption). We then develop a middle ground position that we believe better combines respect for the conscience of healthcare professionals with concern for the duties that they owe to patients. Our claim, in short, is that insofar as objectors should have to justify themselves, they should have to do it according to the standard that we defend rather than according to the standards that others have developed. (shrink)

Stem cells are likely to be used as an alternate source of biological material for neural transplantation to treat Parkinson’s disease in the not too distant future. Among the several ethical criteria that must be fulfilled before proceeding with clinical research, a favourable benefit to risk ratio must be obtained. The potential benefits to the participant and to society are evaluated relative to the risks in an attempt to offer the participants a reasonable choice. Through examination of preclinical studies transplanting (...) stem cells in animals and the transplantation of fetal tissue in patients with Parkinson’s disease, a current set of potential benefits and risks for neural transplantation of stem cells in clinical research of Parkinson’s disease are derived. The potential benefits to research participants undergoing stem cell transplantation are relief of parkinsonian symptoms and decreasing doses of parkinsonian drugs. Transplantation of stem cells as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease may benefit society by providing knowledge that can be used to help determine better treatments in the future. The risks to research participants undergoing stem cell transplantation include tumour formation, inappropriate stem cell migration, immune rejection of transplanted stem cells, haemorrhage during neurosurgery and postoperative infection. Although some of these risks are general to neurosurgical transplantation and may not be reduced for participants, the potential risk of tumour formation and inappropriate stem cell migration must be minimised before obtaining a favourable potential benefit to risk calculus and to provide participants with a reasonable choice before they enrol in clinical studies. (shrink)

More is known about the pervasiveness of college cheating than reasons why students cheat. This article reports the results of a study that applied the theory of reasoned action and partial least squares methodology to analyze the responses of 144 students to a survey on cheating behavior. Approximately 60% of the business students and 64% of the non-business students admitted to such behavior. Among cheaters, a "desire to get ahead" was the most important motivating factor - a surprising result given (...) the comprehensive set of factors tested in the study. Among non-cheaters, the presence of a "moral anchor" such as an ethical professor was most important. The article also includes a set of important caveats that might limit this study and suggests some avenues for further study. (shrink)

We address the ethics of scenarios in which one party entraps, intentionally tempts or intentionally tests the virtue of another. We classify, in a new manner, three distinct types of acts that are of concern, namely acts of entrapment, of intentional temptation and of virtue testing. Our classification is, for each kind of scenario, of itself neutral concerning the question whether the agent acts permissibly. We explain why acts of entrapment are more ethically objectionable than like acts of intentional temptation (...) and why these, in turn, are more ethically objectionable than like acts of virtue testing. Along the way, we scrutinize, and eventually reject, the view that acts of entrapment are ethically unacceptable because intentional temptation is involved in entrapment. (shrink)

Over the past decade, feminist philosophers have gone a long way toward identifying and explaining the phenomenon that has come to be known as epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is injustice occurring within the domain of knowledge (e.g., knowledge production and transmission), which typically impacts structurally marginalized social groups. In this paper, we argue that, as they currently work, algorithms on social media exacerbate the problem of epistemic injustice and related problems of social distrust. In other words, we argue that algorithms (...) on social media recreate and reify the conditions that lead to some groups being systematically denied the full status of knowers, thereby corrupting the epistemic terrain and, with it, systems of social trust and cooperation. We argue that algorithms do this in two ways—namely, via what we are calling algorithmic targeting and algorithmic sorting. (shrink)

Under a ‘dirty hands’ model of undercover policing, it inevitably involves situations where whatever the state agent does is morally problematic. Christopher Nathan argues against this model. Nathan’s criticism of the model is predicated on the contention that it entails the view, which he considers objectionable, that morally wrongful acts are central to undercover policing. We address this criticism, and some other aspects of Nathan’s discussion of the ‘dirty hands’ model, specifically in relation to state entrapment to commit a crime. (...) Using János Kis’s work on political morality, we explain three dilemmatic versions of the ‘dirty hands’ model. We show that, while two of these are inapplicable to state entrapment, the third has better prospects. We then pursue our main aim, which is to argue that, since the third model precludes Nathan’s criticism, a viable ‘dirty hands’ model of state entrapment remains an open possibility. Finally, we generalize this result, showing that the case of state entrapment is not special: the result holds good for policing practices more generally, including such routine practices as arrest, detention, and restraint. (shrink)

In the fourth book of Achilles Tatius' romance the young and beautiful heroine Leucippe collapses suddenly. When she is approached by the hero Clitophon she leaps to her feet, strikes his face, kicks his friend, and has to be overpowered and tied up. Several chapters later we learn that this behaviour had in fact been caused by an overdose of an unnamed aphrodisiac. In the meantime, however, bystanders, consisting of members of an Egyptian military force, have decided thatμανία τιςis the (...) trouble, and proceed to diagnose with all the confidence of laymen the cause of her madness.Their diagnosis takes the form of an ostensibly straightforward physiological explanation in carefully ordered phrases and employing technical terms. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

This article argues that a person’s well-being at a time and the goodness of her life are two distinct values. It is commonly accepted as platitudinous that well-being is what makes a life good for the person who lives it. Even philosophers who distinguish between well-being at a time and the goodness of a life still typically assume that increasing a person’s well-being at some particular moment, all else equal, necessarily improves her life on the whole. I develop a precise (...) statement of this standard assumption, and then show that it is subject to counterexamples. The possibility of such counterexamples depends only on premises similar to those sometimes invoked to argue that a person’s well-being over a long period is not simply the aggregate well-being of the shorter periods that compose the long period. The refutation of the standard assumption linking well-being and life-goodness entails that these are distinct and sometimes divergent values. As an alternative to the standard assumption, it is proposed that well-being is best understood as an ingredient in a good life. (shrink)

Imagine you are casually browsing an online bookstore, looking for an interesting novel. Suppose the store predicts you will want to buy a particular novel: the one most chosen by people of your same age, gender, location, and occupational status. The store recommends the book, it appeals to you, and so you choose it. Central to this scenario is an automated prediction of what you desire. This article raises moral concerns about such predictions. More generally, this article examines the ethics (...) of artificial social cognition—the ethical dimensions of attribution of mental states to humans by artificial systems. The focus is presumptuous aim attributions, which are defined here as aim attributions based crucially on the premise that the person in question will have aims like superficially similar people. Several everyday examples demonstrate that this sort of presumptuousness is already a familiar moral concern. The scope of this moral concern is extended by new technologies. In particular, recommender systems based on collaborative filtering are now commonly used to automatically recommend products and information to humans. Examination of these systems demonstrates that they naturally attribute aims presumptuously. This article presents two reservations about the widespread adoption of such systems. First, the severity of our antecedent moral concern about presumptuousness increases when aim attribution processes are automated and accelerated. Second, a foreseeable consequence of reliance on these systems is an unwarranted inducement of interpersonal conformity. (shrink)

This article addresses three questions about well-being. First, is well-being future-sensitive? I.e., can present well-being depend on future events? Second, is well-being recursively dependent? I.e., can present well-being depend on itself? Third, can present and future well-being be interdependent? The third question combines the first two, in the sense that a yes to it is equivalent to yeses to both the first and second. To do justice to the diverse ways we contemplate well-being, I consider our thought and discourse about (...) well-being in three domains: everyday conversation, social science, and philosophy. This article’s main conclusion is that we must answer the third question with no. Present and future well-being cannot be interdependent. The reason, in short, is that a theory of well-being that countenances both future-sensitivity and recursive dependence would have us understand a person’s well-being at a time as so intricately tied to her well-being at other times that it would not make sense to consider her well-being an aspect of her state at particular times. It follows that we must reject either future-sensitivity or recursive dependence. I ultimately suggest, especially in light of arguments based on assumptions of empirical research on well-being, that the balance of reasons favors rejecting future-sensitivity. (shrink)

Owen Flanagan argues that we are on the way to understanding consciousness and its place in the natural order.

Just as humans can draw conclusions responsibly or irresponsibly, so too can computers. Machine learning systems that have been trained on data sets that include irresponsible judgments are likely to yield irresponsible predictions as outputs. In this paper I focus on a particular kind of inference a computer system might make: identification of the intentions with which a person acted on the basis of photographic evidence. Such inferences are liable to be morally objectionable, because of a way in which they (...) are presumptuous. After elaborating this moral concern, I explore the possibility that carefully procuring the training data for image recognition systems could ensure that the systems avoid the problem. The lesson of this paper extends beyond just the particular case of image recognition systems and the challenge of responsibly identifying a person’s intentions. Reflection on this particular case demonstrates the importance (as well as the difficulty) of evaluating machine learning systems and their training data from the standpoint of moral considerations that are not encompassed by ordinary assessments of predictive accuracy. (shrink)

I begin by reviewing some recent work on the status of the geodesic principle in general relativity and the geometrized formulation of Newtonian gravitation. I then turn to the question of whether either of these theories might be said to ``explain'' inertial motion. I argue that there is a sense in which both theories may be understood to explain inertial motion, but that the sense of ``explain'' is rather different from what one might have expected. This sense of explanation is (...) connected with a view of theories---I call it the ``puzzleball view''---on which the foundations of a physical theory are best understood as a network of mutually interdependent principles and assumptions. (shrink)

Background: Visual technologies are central to youth culture and are often the preferred communication means of adolescents. Although these tools can be beneficial in fostering relations, adolescents’ use of visual technologies and social media also raises ethical concerns. Aims: We explored how school public health nurses identify and resolve the ethical challenges involved in the use of visual technologies in health dialogues with adolescents. Research design: This is a qualitative study utilizing data from focus group discussions. Participants and research context: (...) We conducted focus group discussions using two semi-structured discussion guides with seven groups of public health nurses working in Norwegian school health services. The data were collected during January and October 2016. Discussions were audio recorded, transcribed, and coded into themes and subthemes using systematic text condensation. Ethical considerations: The leader of the public health nursing service who agreed to provide access for the study and the Norwegian Center for Research Data that reviewed and approved the study. All participants gave informed consent. Findings: In adolescents’ use of visual materials with public health nurses, ethical concerns were raised regarding suicide ideations, socially unacceptable content, violation of privacy, and presentations of possible child neglect. The nurses utilized their professional knowledge and experience when identifying and navigating these ethical dilemmas; they resolved ethical uncertainties through peer discussion and collaboration with fellow nurses and other professionals. Discussion: We discussed the findings in light of Annemarie Mol’s interpretation of the ethics of care. Mol expands the notion of ethical care to include the action of technologies. Conclusion: Although the increasing use of visual technologies offered benefits, school nurses faced ethical challenges in health dialogues with adolescents. To address and navigate these ethical issues, they relied on their experience and caring practices based on their professional ethics. Uncertainties were resolved through peer dialogue and guidance. (shrink)

A self-fulfilling prophecy is, roughly, a prediction that brings about its own truth. Although true predictions are hard to fault, self-fulfilling prophecies are often regarded with suspicion. In this article, we vindicate this suspicion by explaining what self-fulfilling prophecies are and what is problematic about them, paying special attention to how their problems are exacerbated through automated prediction. Our descriptive account of self-fulfilling prophecies articulates the four elements that define them. Based on this account, we begin our critique by showing (...) that typical self-fulfilling prophecies arise due to mistakes about the relationship between a prediction and its object. Such mistakes—along with other mistakes in predicting or in the larger practical endeavor—are easily overlooked when the predictions turn out true. Thus we note that self-fulfilling prophecies prompt no error signals; truth shrouds their mistakes from humans and machines alike. Consequently, self-fulfilling prophecies create several obstacles to accountability for the outcomes they produce. We conclude our critique by showing how failures of accountability, and the associated failures to make corrections, explain the connection between self-fulfilling prophecies and feedback loops. By analyzing the complex relationships between accuracy and other evaluatively significant features of predictions, this article sheds light both on the special case of self-fulfilling prophecies and on the ethics of prediction more generally. (shrink)

A model policy for conscientious objection in medicine.

Consciousness emerges as the key topic in this second edition of Owen Flanagan's popular introduction to cognitive science and the philosophy of psychology....

In this collection of essays we hear from an international array of computer and brain scientists who are actively working from both the machine and human ends...

Owen Flanagan argues in this book for a more psychologically realistic ethical reflection and spells out the ways in which psychology can enrich moral philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of such "moral saints" as Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Oskar Shindler, Flanagan charts a middle course between an ethics that is too realistic and socially parochial and one that is too idealistic, giving no weight to our natures.

Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason is the claim that everything has a sufficient reason. But is Leibniz committed to the necessity or to the contingency of his great principle? I argue that Leibniz is committed to its contingency, given that he allows for the absolute possibility of entities that he claims violate the PSR. These are all cases of qualitatively indiscernible entities, such as indiscernible atoms, vacua, and bodies. However, Leibniz's commitment to the contingency of the PSR seems to stand (...) in tension with his inference of the PSR from his theory of truth. I argue that this apparent tension can be resolved satisfactorily. When it comes to his modal views on the PSR, Leibniz's position is entirely consistent. (shrink)

Our question is this: What makes an act one of entrapment? We make a standard distinction between legal entrapment, which is carried out by parties acting in their capacities as (or as deputies of) law- enforcement agents, and civil entrapment, which is not. We aim to provide a definition of entrapment that covers both and which, for reasons we explain, does not settle questions of permissibility and culpability. We explain, compare, and contrast two existing definitions of legal entrapment to commit (...) a crime that possess this neutrality. We point out some problems with the extensional correctness of these definitions and propose a new definition that resolves these problems. We then extend our definition to provide a more general definition of entrapment, encompassing both civil and legal cases. Our definition is, we believe, closer to being extensionally correct and will, we hope, provide a clearer basis for future discussions about the ethics of entrapment than do the definitions upon which it improves. (shrink)

Introduction Financial incentive schemes have been commonly used by the hearing aid industry as a way of encouraging device sales. These schemes can lead to a conflict of interest as the hearing device dispenser is torn between personal reward over the best interests of their client. This conflict of interest has the potential for the dispenser to develop “moral distress”, a negative state of mind when an individual’s ethical values contrast with those of the employing organization. The purpose of this (...) study was to investigate if there was a relationship between financial incentives and moral distress in Australian audiologists and audiometrists. Methods An online survey was distributed to all members of Audiology Australia and the Australian College of Audiology via email. Participants rated their perceived moral distress from 0 to 10 on the Moral Distress Thermometer and answered four questions about financial incentives in their respective workplace. Results A total of 65 participants, 42 females and 23 males, completed the online survey. A quarter of participants rated their moral distress corresponding to levels of uncomfortable or above. A statistically significant association was found between financial incentives, sales target setting, and higher perceived moral distress in participants. Conclusions For our sample, the implementation of financial incentives created ethical challenges for practicing audiologists and audiometrists. Modifications to employee rewards programs as well as a regulation of device sales are recommended. (shrink)