Many philosophers think that we can identify, e.g., a weather expert by checking if she has a track record of making accurate weather predictions but that there isn’t an analogous way for laypeople to verify the judgement of a putative moral expert. The weather is an independent check for weather expertise but there is no independent check for moral expertise, and the only way for laypeople to identify moral experts is to engage in first-order moral reasoning of one’s own. But (...) if one can do that, one would not need to rely on a moral expert in the first place. This paper provides an account of Feedback as an independent check for moral expertise in the form of certain positive and negative changes in the lives of advisees after they started acting in accordance with an advisor’s advice whilst nothing else of significance changed in their lives in that period. Given our folk background theories, and some specific information about the advisee’s situation, Feedback suggests that the advisor’s advice was correct. Laypeople would identify moral experts by inferring that the best explanation of the correctness of the advisor’s advice in a high proportion of cases in which she dispensed advice is that the advisor had moral knowledge. Identifying moral experts in this way involves the use of some moral reasoning of one’s own but it is too elementary to make moral experts redundant. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that we can identify, e.g., a weather expert by checking if she has a track record of making accurate weather predictions but that there isn’t an analogous way for laypeople to verify the judgement of a putative moral expert. The weather is an independent check for weather expertise but there is no independent check for moral expertise, and the only way for laypeople to identify moral experts is to engage in first-order moral reasoning of one’s own. But (...) if one can do that, one would not need to rely on a moral expert in the first place. This paper provides an account of Feedback as an independent check for moral expertise in the form of certain positive and negative changes in the lives of advisees after they started acting in accordance with an advisor’s advice whilst nothing else of significance changed in their lives in that period. Given our folk background theories, and some specific information about the advisee’s situation, Feedback suggests that the advisor’s advice was correct. Laypeople would identify moral experts by inferring that the best explanation of the correctness of the advisor’s advice in a high proportion of cases in which she dispensed advice is that the advisor had moral knowledge. Identifying moral experts in this way involves the use of some moral reasoning of one’s own but it is too elementary to make moral experts redundant. (shrink)

The gap between economic rationality, as embedded in utility maximization, and ethical rationality, identified with a set of rules that prescribe the right course of action, has been a challenging issue for economists, philosophers, and business ethicists. Despite the difference and the noncompetition between a scientific economic approach of economics and business ethics, and a behavioral and philosophical one, we highlight the importance of the Aristotelian concept of prudence or phronesis applied to business activity. Phronesis allows for a conceptualization of (...) rationality that can be simultaneously applied to economics and ethics. It also allows conceiving the intrinsically ethical nature of economic rationality. This relationship requires an appropriate education and the intervention of the state. (shrink)

This article reassesses Hobbes’s place in the history of ethics based on the first systematic analysis of his various classifications of formal goodness. The good was traditionally divided into three: profitably good, pleasurably good, and morally good. Across his works, Hobbes replaced the last with pulchrum—a decidedly non-moral form of goodness on his account. I argue that Hobbes’s dismissal of moral goodness was informed by his hedonist conception of the good and accompanied by reinterpretations of right reason and natural law. (...) By dispensing moral goodness and insisting on the hedonist and relational nature of the good, Hobbes moreover recast and rendered more urgent the question of why we should be moral. Hobbes is commonly thought to have raised this question so starkly because of his general insensitivity to the demands of justice. My analysis suggests that it may also, or rather, have been due to his restrictive conception of the good. A comparison with other moral philosophers from the period—including Suárez, Gassendi, Locke, and Pufendorf—indicates how unusual Hobbes’s jettisoning of moral goodness was. (shrink)

Cet article prend pour point de départ une critique souvent adressée au minimalisme moral de Ruwen Ogien : il y a bien de la normativité dans le rapport à soi, nous avons des obligations vis-à-vis de nous-même. Après avoir rappelé cette objection (en la reformulant et en la renforçant), l’on se demande si une forme de minimalisme peut malgré tout lui survivre. Cet article répond par la positive, en proposant une reformulation radicale de la thèse minimaliste, qui parvienne à maintenir (...) le rejet du paternalisme tout en prenant en compte l’existence d’une normativité dans le rapport à soi. Il explique en quel sens une telle thèse peut encore être considérée comme minimaliste, puis entreprend d’examiner ses principales conséquences. (shrink)

This paper begins from the context of virtue ethics theory as applied to business ethics. We note that the concept of a practice therein lacks the full richness of the Aristotelian concept of virtue. In essence, when applied to business in the virtue ethics literature, the practice loses its reflective quality. It becomes beholden to, and irredeemably interdependent with, the economic institution (i.e., the for-profit firm) that houses the practice. Furthermore, the conventional practice of virtue ethics lacks the self-reflective ability (...) to challenge and overcome this interdependence. As a solution to this problem, we suggest tapping into a relatively recent stream in the business ethics literature, namely the application of aesthetics. We integrate aesthetics into virtue ethics in the form of a reflective practice. This reflective practice can be defined as one which embraces the firm as pure phenomenon. It opens a space or clearing that enables business practitioners to reflect and act within a broadened perceptual and conceptual understanding of the ‘true’ nature and purpose of business. (shrink)

In recent decades "virtue ethics" has become an accepted theoretical structure for thinking about normative ethical principles. However, few contemporary virtue ethicists endorse the commitments of the first virtue theorists---the ancient Greeks, who developed their virtue theories within a commitment to eudaimonism. Why? I believe the objections of modern theorists boil down to concerns that eudaimonist theories cannot properly account for two prominent moral requirements on our treatment of others. ;First, we think that the interests and welfare of at least (...) some others ought to give us non-instrumental reason for acting---that is, reason independent of consideration of our own welfare. Second, we think others are entitled to what we might call respect, just in virtue of their being persons. Eudaimonist accounts either cannot account for these intuitions at all, or they give the wrong sort of account. ;My dissertation assesses the resources of eudaimonism to meet these lines of criticism. Chapter 2, 3, and 4 survey the views of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, to discover insights that are important for a successful response. In Chapters 5 and 6, I offer my own account, based on what I call empathic identification. This is the habit or disposition of seeing things, in effect, through the eyes of others. Empathic identification is a process through which the interpersonal transmission of reasons for actions between persons becomes possible. I argue first that our interest in our own eudaimonia justifies us in identifying empathically with others as a general habit or disposition. Second, I argue that empathic identification explains our intuitions about the respect others are due. So empathic identification generates the right sort of explanation of our intuitions about the constraints others and their interests impose upon us after all, and renders eudaimonist virtue ethics a viable form of ethical theory. (shrink)