Consider a contemporary retrieval of Aristotle’s account of moral perception. Drawing from EN.VI.8, Martha Nussbaum argues that we perceive moral particulars prior to ethical principles. First, I explain her priority of the particular thesis. The virtuous person perceives value in the world, as part of her moral deliberation. This perceptual skill is an important aspect of her virtuous activity, and hence also part of her eudaimonia. Second, I present her priority thesis with a dilemma: our perception of moral particulars is (...) either non-inferential or it is inferential. If Nussbaum accepts a non-inferential interpretation, then she is committed to an unsavory view about moral epistemology –one that invites intuitionism and relativism. But if she accepts a non-inferential account, then the moral particular is no longer prior to the ethical principle. I suggest that her better option is to grab the second horn. This move avoids the problems of the first horn without sacrificing her neo-Aristotelian commitments or her overarching view that the perception of moral particulars is ineliminable to moral deliberation. At the same time, this move renders her priority thesis trivial. (shrink)

Most adult persons with anorexia satisfy the existing criteria widely used to assess decision-making capacity, meaning that incapacity typically cannot be used to justify coercive intervention. After rejecting two other approaches to justification, Professor Radden concludes that it is most likely not possible to justify coercive medical intervention for persons with anorexia in liberal terms, though she leaves it open whether some other framework might succeed. I shall assume here that the standard approach to assessing decisionmaking capacity is adequate.1 The (...) question then is whether we can justify—within a liberal framework—coercive intervention with the decision of a competent... (shrink)

If one sits in the stands for awhile at a local sporting contest, whether it is wrestling, soccer, baseball or particularly basketball, before long someone will exclaim toward a referee, ?That was a makeup call. You owe us one.? Everyone knows what this means but if an eight-year old beside you hears this screamed for the first time and asks, ?What does that mean?? An explanation given to her will be something like ?that's when an official makes a call and (...) immediately realizes it was a wrong call so at the first opportunity he can he makes a call against the team that has benefitted from the previous call; he is trying to even things out for his mistake.? The referee or umpire is attempting to be fair by ?giving back? the call with a ?makeup call.? A make-up call can be defined as the act of compensating for a questionable or bad officiating call by making a proportionally even call against the team that was aided by the first call. Usually these are immediate and obvious. They can also be conscious or subconscious, intentional or unintentional. The hope is that the two calls generally offset one another without either team being dramatically harmed. I will argue that the makeup call is prima facie immoral but if one were to attempt to find moral justification for it, this could best be done through a corrective theory of justice. But this presents a number of moral questions and ambiguities, most significantly, is a makeup call just and fair? Is it appropriate to understand the makeup call as an example of two wrongs making a right? A broader philosophic al question about officiating is whether each call in a contest should be viewed by as an independent single call with the goal of the official getting that one immediate call correct or should each call be understood as in a direct relationship with every other call in that game as a type of gestalt thus justifying makeup calls? This work will probe the depths of the highly suspect yet common moral puzzle, the makeup call. (shrink)

Recent scientific advances in the field of gene editing have led to a renewed discussion on the moral acceptability of human germline modifications. Gene editing methods can be used on human embryos and gametes in order to change DNA sequences that are associated with diseases. Modifying the human germline, however, is currently illegal in many countries but has been suggested as a ‘last resort’ option in some reports. In contrast, preimplantation genetic diagnosis is now a well-established practice within reproductive medicine. (...) Both methods can be used to prevent children from being born with severe genetic diseases. This paper focuses on four moral concerns raised in the debate about germline gene editing and applies them to the practice of PGD for comparison: Violation of human dignity, disrespect of the autonomy and the physical integrity of the future child, discrimination of people living with a disability and the fear of slippery slope towards immoral usage of the technology, e.g. designing children for specific third party interests. Our analysis did not reveal any fundamental differences with regard to the four concerns. We argue that with regard to the four arguments analyzed in this paper germline gene editing should be considered morally as acceptable as the selection of genomes on the basis of PGD. However, we also argue that any application of GGE in reproductive medicine should be put on hold until thorough and comprehensive laws have been implemented to prevent the abuse of GGE for non-medical enhancement. (shrink)

Is personal moral inconsistency a challenge to overcome or embrace? This paper opts for the latter and argues for the Virtue of Encompassing the Contrary (VEC). According to VEC, an individual can balance and realize opposite values or virtues through time virtuously. This paper discusses critically various explanations given for moral inconsistency: Circumstantial Relativism, Moral Opportunism, the Consequentialist Solution, Moral Ambivalence, Kant’s Imperfect Duty and Dancy’s Moral Particularism. The paper argues that VEC fares better in answering the moral challenge of (...) inconsistent behavior. (shrink)

. Trust-building has implicitly been characterized in epistemology as necessitating the adoption of shared belief. If this is so, such models of trust-building appear at odds with a metaphysical commitment to pluralist realism. In this article I offer the first steps in modeling how a pluralist realist might understand trust building. I argue that entertaining pluralist realism as a possibility may actually be more fruitful for trust building than a monist conception because each side is given an important concession: the (...) possibility that their knowledge claims might be correct. The case of polar bear conservation in the Canadian arctic illustrates that trust-building without shared belief is possible. I wish the members of these round-table discussions success in the future. (shrink)

Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists, has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the (...) like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high, and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it. Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory. (shrink)

Innate emotional bases of ethics have been proposed by authors in evolutionary psychology, following Darwin and his sources in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Philosophers often tend to view such theories as irrelevant to, or even as tending to undermine, the project of moral philosophy. But the importance of emotions to early moral learning gives them a role to play in determining the content of morality. I argue, first, that research on neural circuits indicates that the basic elements or components of emotions (...) need not be limited to what psychologists think of as basic emotions. But in that case, innate mechanisms of social transfer of emotion, such as infants’ tendency to facial imitation, gaze-following, and emotional contagion or empathy, provide a source of plasticity in developing the basic elements that lets emotions incorporate cultural influence from early on. This leaves room later for cognitive components of adult human emotions and hence for the further role of language in conveying cultural influence. We can thus see how moral judgment might depend on innate emotional capacities that are both modifiable by culture and capable of registering objective values. I use Rawls’s treatment of the development of moral sentiments to illustrate the kind of supportive role that emotions can play in a principle-based account – though my own account involves modifications I go on to indicate. (shrink)

Personal Information Management Systems (PIMS) aim to facilitate the sharing of personal information and protect privacy. Efforts to enhance privacy management, aligned with established privacy policies, have led to guidelines for integrating transparent notices and meaningful choices within these systems. Although discussions have revolved around the design of privacy-friendly systems that comply with legal requirements, there has been relatively limited philosophical discourse on incorporating the value of privacy into these systems. Exploring the connection between privacy and personal autonomy illuminates the (...) instrumental value of privacy and highlights the importance of intentionally embedding the value of privacy into these systems. To translate the value of privacy into concrete design requirements, this study constructs a values hierarchy consisting of values, norms, and design requirements. After analyzing the relationships between privacy and autonomy and identifying norms, the design requirements translated from the norms associated with the components of personal autonomy are specified at the lowest layer. These requirements include a design to prevent unauthorized access and dark patterns and to provide effective and efficient notices and choices. The findings contribute to expanding the requirements for designing the aspect of privacy as a legal requirement to incorporate the value of privacy into systems. (shrink)

Drawing on unpublished and published sources from 1926-1932, this chapter builds on John Dewey’s naturalistic pragmatic pluralism in ethical theory. A primary focus is “Three Independent Factors in Morals,” which analyzes good, duty, and virtue as distinct categories that in many cases express different experiential origins. The chapter suggests that a vital role for contemporary theorizing is to lay bare and analyze the sorts of conflicts that constantly underlie moral and political action. Instead of reinforcing moral fundamentalism via an outdated (...) quest for the central and basic source of normative justification, we should foster theories with a range of idioms and emphases which, while accommodating monistic insights, better inform decision-making by opening communication across diverse elements of moral and political life, placing these elements in a wider context in which norms gain practical traction in non-ideal conditions, and expanding prospects for social inquiry and convergence on policy and action. (shrink)

This thesis examines some of the contested meanings of what it is to be a self, person and individual. The law of obligations sets the context for this examination. One of the important aspects of contemporary feminist philosophy has been its move beyond highlighting inconsistencies in political and legal theory, in which theoretical frameworks can be shown to rely upon an ambiguous treatment of women. The feminist theorists whose work is considered use these theoretical weaknesses as a point of departure (...) to propose different conceptual frameworks. I start by analysing contemporary work on the self from within both philosophy of science and feminist metaphysics to draw out common approaches from these diverse positions. These themes are then discussed in the context of the law. I then critically examine the concept of legal personhood in the work of Drucilla Cornell and her proposals for the amendment of tort law. This is juxtaposed with an analysis of the practical operation of tort law by adapting François Ewald's work on risk and insurance to English law. I concentrate on women's ambiguous position with regard to both risk and to the image of the individual that is the subject of Ewald's critique. This is followed by an examination of the changing position of women with regard to 'possessive individualism', 'self-ownership' or 'property in the person' in relation to contract law and social contract theory. There are a number of different social contracts discussed in the thesis: Cornell's reworking of John Rawls and the stories of Thomas Hobbes and of Carole Pateman. The final 'social contract' to be discussed is that of 'new contractualism', the employment of contract as a technique of government. I argue that Pateman's critique of possessive individualism continues to be relevant at a time when the breadwinner/housewife model has broken down. (shrink)

In this article I discuss one of the most significant areas of bioethical interest, which is the problem of moral enhancement. Since I claim that the crucial issue in the current debate on human bioenhancement is the problem of agency, I bring out and examine the conditions of possibility of self-understanding, acting subjects attributing responsible authorship for their actions to themselves. I shall argue that the very idea of moral enhancement, properly understood, fails to justify the claims that enhancing the (...) “biological” factor that plays a part in the process of making moral choices, whether through biomedical or genetic interventions, will actually increase the probability of having “morally better future motives”. (shrink)

The central question for this dissertation is, how do we do moral philosophy well from within a broadly naturalist framework? Its main goal is to lay the groundwork for a methodological approach to moral philosophy that integrates traditional, intuition-driven approaches to ethics with empirical approaches that employ empirical data from biology and cognitive science. Specifically, it explores what restrictions are placed on our moral theorizing by findings in evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, and other fields, and how we can integrate this (...) data while still offering a fully normative account of ethics. To that end, the dissertation explores the methodological assumptions behind both traditional and more empirical or experimental approaches to ethics, to find where these assumptions cannot be properly supported and need to be re-examined. Chapter 1 explores the science-based objections that have been raised to traditional approaches, with a particular focus on questions concerning the reliability of moral intuitions. Chapter 2 examines three fundamental assumptions supporting the empirical approach to moral philosophy, and how those assumptions ultimately do not fit with how we ought to understand the project of ethics. In chapter 3, I discuss the fact/value distinction, and the restrictions that are placed on our moral theorizing by our commitment to this distinction. Chapter 4 offers a defense of ‘companions in guilt’ arguments, and uses these arguments to draw an analogy between moral philosophy and epistemology that will be used to help defend moral philosophy against empirical debunking arguments. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which epistemologists’ methods of incorporating empirical data into their research while maintaining the normativity of their accounts can be adapted to allow moral philosophers to do the same, and brings together the various methodological concerns addressed up to this point to lay out a methodological approach I call empirically-informed moral philosophy. (shrink)

In the aftermath of national or international tragedies, appeals for action such as, “Never Forget” or “Never Again” are ubiquitous. Theodor Adorno makes a similar call in the wake of the Holocaust, proclaiming that all education should be focused on the prevention of another genocide. While most would agree with such a statement, practically how do we respond to such a call, specifically in light of Adorno’s work? Answering this question is at the heart of this project and I argue (...) that imaginative memorials can fulfill Adorno’s criteria for post-Auschwitz education. I first present a theory of moral imagination by relying on contemporary accounts of the theory and then show how it complements Adorno’s work, specifically by offering an explanatory foundation to a number of his claims. I reveal that many of Adorno’s observations about the world are supported by recent advancements in the understanding of imagination and I argue that the combination of contemporary accounts of moral imagination and Adorno’s thought are mutually beneficial. After the two theories have been sufficiently discussed and integrated, I focus on Adorno’s arguments regarding education following Auschwitz. Adorno argues that we should investigate how such a horror could occur, and the people who committed the acts of genocide. Such information will be helpful for the prevention of another Auschwitz because we can attempt to overcome the values and ideas of those who perpetrated genocide. This dissertation is unique and of philosophical importance because it fleshes out Adorno’s discussion of the characteristics that led to the Holocaust and argues for a specific form of education that meets all of the criteria of Adorno’s post-Auschwitz education: memorials that stimulate the visitor’s imagination. In order to make this point, I highlight specific Holocaust memorials that are imaginative and argue for their efficacy. My goal for the project is to actualize Adorno’s post-Auschwitz education initiative through imaginative memorials. (shrink)

In this dissertation I examine the topics of ethics, religion, and their relationship in the work of Charles Taylor. I take Taylor's attempt to confront modern disenchantment by seeking a kind of re-enchantment as my guiding thread. Seeking re-enchantment means, first of all, defending an `engaged realist' account of strong evaluation, i.e., qualitative distinctions of value that are seen as normative for our desires. Secondly, it means overcoming self-enclosure and achieving self-transcendence, which I argue should be understood in terms of (...) transcending a `lower' mode of selfhood for a `higher' one in concern for `strong goods'. One of the main issues that Taylor raises is whether re-enchantment requires theism for its full adequacy. He advances - often as `hunches' - controversial claims regarding the significance of theism (1) for defending strong evaluative realism and (2) for motivating an ethic of universal human concern. I seek to fill out his hunches in terms of a theistic teleological perspective that is centered on the `telos of communion'. I argue that such a view is important for overcoming the problem of what Bernard Williams calls the `radical contingency' of ethical beliefs, which seems to undermine their normative authority. However, I argue that if a non-theistic view of cosmic purpose (e.g., Thomas Nagel's view) can be regarded as a viable option, then it could also help to address this problem and support a kind of re-enchantment. Taylor also advances the controversial view that (3) there is an ineradicable draw to `transcendence' in human life in connection to the quest for the meaning of life. Here he opposes certain mainstream theories of secularization that see it as a process involving the ineluctable fading away of the relevance of religion. I seek to fill out and defend Taylor's view in this matter. Besides providing a reading of Taylor's work as a whole and advancing further some of the issues he raises, I also examine his general evaluative framework based on his account of strong evaluation. In doing so I show how he provides a distinct and important perspective among contemporary moral philosophers. (shrink)

Der Verfasser dieses Artikels vergleicht Kants Begriff des kosmopolitischen Rechts mit dem zeitgenössischen liberalen Kosmopolitanismus der Theoretiker wie James Bohman und David Held . Diese zwei Theoretiker greifen Kants kosmopolitisches Recht auf und umformen es, indem sie auf den Globalisierungsprozess sowie das Faktum des Pluralismus Rücksicht nehmen. Erforderlich ist es zu erkunden, wie beträchtlich diese Autoren die Einsicht in Kants kosmopolitisches Recht und dessen Implikationen modifiziert und ebenfalls inwieweit sie das klassische liberal-politische Vokabular umgebildet haben.

The author of this paper compares Kant’s notion of cosmopolitan right with contemporary liberal cosmopolitanism of such theorists like James Bohman (Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University) and David Held (Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science). These two theorists bring Kant’s cosmopolitan right and reshape it by taking into consideration the process of globalization and the fact of pluralism. It is necessary to investigate how far these authors have changed the insight into Kant’s cosmopolitan right (...) and its implications as well as how deeply the authors reshape the classical liberal political vocabulary. (shrink)

Looking at two well-known discussions of Kant’s discourse on friendship, namely, the second half of Doctrine of Virtue and his Lecture on Friendship, this paper traces the points of overlap and separation whereby, through the paradigm of friendship, the morals and politics of Kant’s discourse are reconsidered. In what follows, I will show first, how Kant’s theory of friendship plays a role in his conception of social relations and morality and second, how the nature of his concerns with friendship reveals (...) both an insistence on moral duties and, in the spirit of Derrida, a difficult, if not paradoxical, politicization of these same duties. In doing so, I argue that Kant’s ideas on friendship are part of a necessary yet irreconcilable tension between political and ethical obligations. Friendship is thought necessary for the well-being of political states at the same time that its instrumentalization undermines the heterogeneous nature of ethical responsibilities and the call to particularity which distinguishes it from other forms of associations. In the end, I argue that Kant’s theory of friendship is characterized by a fundamental ambivalence whose contradictions do not pave the way for new possibilities for association, community, nationhood etc., but only highlight its aporetic underpinnings. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of human rights accept that all persons have human rights. Typically, ‘personhood’ is understood as unitary and binary. It is unitary because there is generally supposed to be a single threshold property required for personhood. It is binary because it is all-or-nothing: you are either a person or you are not. A difficulty with binary views is that there will typically be subjects, like children and those with dementia, who do not meet the threshold, and so who (...) are not persons with human rights, on these accounts. It is consequently unclear how we ought to treat these subjects. This is the problem of marginal cases. I argue that we cannot resolve the problem of marginal cases if we accept a unitary, binary view of personhood. Instead, I develop a new non-binary personhood account of human rights, and defend two main claims. First, there are many, scalar properties, the having of which are conducive to personhood. Second, different subjects have different human rights depending on which of these properties they have, and what threats apply to them. On my view, and contra most existing accounts, most marginal cases have some degree of personhood and are entitled to some human rights. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false ES-CO X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In this paper we study the Kantian conception of punishment in the Metaphysics of Morals. We look at Foucault’s reformulation of the right to punish which is mostly a critique of the kantian conception. Then we introduce the conception of restorative justice grounded on the social ideal of recognition, which corrects certain aspects of the Kantian conception, but gives to justice its status of an institution rather than being a critique (...) of it. (shrink)

There is a dominant perception of liberty among most contemporary liberals. It is one close to empiricism’s portrayal of freedom as a natural right of every person to advance her interests. According to this view, there are no demanding conditions under which people can be regarded as free agents but their unfettered behaviour from external inhibitions. It is widely thought that Mill’s liberalism does not deviate considerably from this tradition. The present text suggests a different reading of the gist of (...) Mill’s political rationale. Highlighting the positive – in Berlin’s sense – aspects of his politically demanding concept of liberty which successfully combines facets of different traditions serves the purpose to stress the alternative features of his approach. Underlining the active political intervention Mill is instructing by implicating the state to preserve the essence of freedom and induce it in society, manifests how his position diverges from that of mainstream neutralist liberals. (shrink)

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel back in (...) time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments. (shrink)

This article aims to examine the main tenets of Merleau-Ponty’s political thought. To this end, his early Marxism and his later support for Liberalism are contextualised within Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work, put into relation and both criticised. The focus of the discussion is shifted onto the role and locus of the political thinker in order to evaluate the scope of a political project such as Marxism might have. It is divided into three sections. The first explores the themes of the philosophy (...) developed until the early 1950s. The two sections that follow aim to critique his later work and to integrate and relate its arguments to earlier writings. (shrink)

This essay seeks to explicate several strands of Environmental Philosophy by applying them to agenuine example of environmental conflict. The recent invasion of the Tasmanian wilderness bythe European Fox, threatens several critically endangered mammals, not to mention the ecosystem as a whole. The DPIW has begun placing poisoned bait in the Tasmanian wilderness in an attempt to rid it of the fox. Rather than prescribing a solution to this complex problem, this essay tests the capacity of pre-existing ethics to protect (...) the endangered mammals of Tasmania. In elucidating the Utilitarian and Rights Based approaches to ethics, it becomes clear that they harbour highly problematic elements. Following this, the essay explores the benefits of holistic ethics, and ethics based on difference. Ultimately, this essay seeks to discover what an ethical response to the Tasmanian situation would look like. (shrink)

This Dissertation argues for a care-centrically grounded account of relational personhood and widely realized diachronic personal identity. The moral distinction between persons and non-persons is arguably one of the most salient ethical lines we can draw since many of our most fundamental rights are delineated via the bounds of personhood. The problem with drawing such morally salient lines is that the orthodox, rationalistic definition of personhood, which is widespread within philosophical, medical, and colloquial spheres, excludes, and thereby de-personifies, a large (...) number and a great variety of human beings such as neonates, young children, the elderly who suffer from dementia, individuals with severe cognitive disabilities, and patients in vegetative states. The reconceptualization of personhood necessary for a more inclusive definition ought to originate with an appropriate moral grounding. To this end, this Dissertation grounds the notion of personhood in the care ethical sphere, thereby emphasizing the role of care relations in the maintenance of the moral consideration of vulnerable individuals. This Dissertation argues that grounding the concept of a person in care relations entails a relational account of personhood, which, along with the insights of the Extended Mind and Social Manifestation Theses, leads to an extended and externalized understanding of diachronic identity, which allows fragile people to be held in their personal identities even if they themselves lack the capacities usually associated with moral personhood. As we trace a person’s identity through time, we track the various relational properties, which constitute personal narratives and thus act as a glue that binds such dynamic and often unique properties into stable, trackable narratives. Since care relations are morally relevant on a care-centric account of personhood, what is lost in cases where such care relating ceases is not merely of sentimental value, but of great moral importance as well. Morally meaningful care relations are not replaceable, and, by extension, neither are the narratives that are constituted by such unique and irreplaceable instances of relating. This Dissertation argues that the constitutive care relational nature of personal narratives makes such narratives irreplaceable and is precisely what makes persons so morally precious. (shrink)

My discussion below is an highly abbreviated version of a paper in preparation for a conference on innateness . I allow for both types of influence but suggest that more attention should be paid to mechanisms of social transfer of emotions, as a possible innate source of plasticity in moral learning via emotions - and hence of cultural variation in moral codes.

In contemporary philosophy about justice, a contrast between empirical and transcendental approaches can be identified. Hillel Steiner represents an empirical approach: he argues for building an account of justice-as-rights out of the minimal inductive material of psychological linguistic and moral intuitions. From this opening, he ultimately concludes that persons have original rights to self-ownership and to an initially equal share of natural resources. Emmanuel Levinas represents a transcendental approach: he argues that justice arises from a transcendent ethical relation of responsibility-for-the-Other. (...) This relation underpins all subjective cognition, and makes rationality, reasoning, and rights possible.Analysis of each of these positions reveals certain problems. On the one hand, Steiner’s argument contains a number of latent methodological, conceptual, and structural presuppositions. These include the pretheoretical concepts of “person”, “equality”, and “consistency”. These presuppositions prefigure and condition the conclusions which Steiner reaches. On the other hand, Levinas fails to provide a convincing account of how the self comes to be an object of my own deliberations about morality and justice. This amounts to an annihilation of the subject which undermines his argument for the subject as a site of responsible action. As Steiner identifies, justice encompasses equal moral agents. Levinas’s hyperbolic description of the ethical relation’s asymmetry must therefore be revised.Nevertheless, what remains is the strength of Levinas’s argument for the priority of the ethical relation over thematization, rationality, and consciousness. The hidden presuppositions supporting Steiner’s work are evidence of Levinas’s plausibility in this respect. Steiner’s account of justice-as-rights requires a prior ethical relation in which we recognise one another as separate persons, each possessing an ethical status of their own; an attitude of justice motivates Steiner’s description of justice. This attitude is evident in language, which is communication before it is thought. In that individual rights can be conceived only on the basis of a relation of responsibility, rights are primordially the rights of the Other. (shrink)

The Mahabharata, an Indian epic poem, describes a legendary war between two sides of a royal family. The epic’s plot involves numerous moral dilemmas that have intrigued and perplexed scholars of Indian literature. Many of these dilemmas revolve around a character named Krsna. Krsna is a divine incarnation and a self-proclaimed upholder of dharma, a system of social and religious duties central to Hindu ethics. Yet, during the war, Krsna repeatedly encourages his allies to use tactics that violate dharma. In (...) this paper, I try to make sense of Krsna’s actions by analyzing them in terms of categories from Western moral philosophy. I show that Krsna seems to embrace an ethical approach called consequentialism, but that his version of consequentialism differs from Western theories of consequentialism by seeing adherence to dharma as an intrinsic good. (shrink)