I contend that there are important moral reasons for individuals, organisations and states to aid others that have gone largely unrecognised in the literature. Most of the acknowledged reasons for acting beneficently in the absence of a promise to do so are either impartial and intrinsic, on the one hand, being grounded in properties internal to and universal among individuals, such as their pleasure or autonomy, or partial and extrinsic, on the other, being grounded in non-universal properties regarding an actual (...) relation to the agent, such as common membership in a family or culture. In contrast, I articulate and defend the existence of two unrecognised reasons for beneficence that can take the form of being impartial and extrinsic. One is that a being’s capacity to be part of a sharing relationship with us can provide some reason to help it, and another is that a sharing relationship qua relationship is an end-in-itself that can provide some reason to help another. I differentiate these considerations from one another and from the more standard reasons for beneficence, provide arguments for thinking that they are central to beneficence, and rebut objections that are likely to be offered by friends of the more standard reasons. (shrink)

The dominant conceptions of moral status in the English-speaking literature are either holist or individualist, neither of which accounts well for widespread judgments that: animals and humans both have moral status that is of the same kind but different in degree; even a severely mentally incapacitated human being has a greater moral status than an animal with identical internal properties; and a newborn infant has a greater moral status than a mid-to-late stage foetus. Holists accord no moral status to any (...) of these beings, assigning it only to groups to which they belong, while individualists such as welfarists grant an equal moral status to humans and many animals, and Kantians accord no moral status either to animals or severely mentally incapacitated humans. I argue that an underexplored, modal-relational perspective does a better job of accounting for degrees of moral status. According to modal-relationalism, something has moral status insofar as it capable of having a certain causal or intensional connection with another being. I articulate a novel instance of modal-relationalism grounded in salient sub-Saharan moral views, roughly according to which the greater a being's capacity to be part of a communal relationship with us, the greater its moral status. I then demonstrate that this new, African-based theory entails and plausibly explains the above judgments, among others, in a unified way. (shrink)

This paper presents a praxiological analysis of three everyday educational practices or strategies that can be considered as being directed at the moral formation of the emotions. The first consists in requests to imagine other's emotional reactions. The second comprises requests to imitate normative emotional reactions and the third to re-appraise the features of a situation that are relevant to an emotional response. The interest of these categories is not just that they help to organize and recognize the significance of (...) what might otherwise appear to be a disparate set of ordinary moral-educational interactions between children and educators. We suggest, further, that this analysis provides some new insight into what distinguishes the broad and recurrent conceptions of moral education from one another. Rather than being straightforwardly reducible to intractable differences over core normative or meta-ethical questions they can also be seen as correlating with different suppositions about the central role of the emotions in moral life and, correspondingly, different but to a large degree compatible interpretations of what the. (shrink)

Just how care moves us is the subject of Katherine Gardiner’s thesis. Gardiner wants to know how care moves us – or in philosophical terms, how it motivates us. She describes caring as a morally ‘necessary’ activity, which means that we cannot escape responding to the care appeal. However, Gardiner uses the example of ‘Pim’, who cannot care and feels really bad about it - not because he is incapable of caring, but who just can’t. She reviews several versions of (...) care ethics that might persuade him to care, containing concepts like ‘engrossment’, ‘responsibility’, ‘solidarity’, ‘virtue’ and ‘reason’. According to Gardiner, none will do, because they are not compelling enough. She concludes that we need to understand how morality has effect, how it works. Christine Korsgaard’s concept of ‘normativity’ does just this. Korsgaard makes necessary links between making moral decisions and having an identity and being human and argues that acting contrary to any of these will make one “feel worse than death”. Caring for and about others is an important human activity and for some people is a crucial part of their practical identity. Without Korsgaard, we would have to reject Pim as a moral deviant (someone insensible to moral reason); with Korsgaard we can understand Pim’s pain, according to Gardiner. (shrink)

In this paper, I join the so-called voluntarism debate on Descartes’s theory of will and judgment, arguing for an indirect doxastic voluntarism reading of Descartes, as opposed to a classic, or direct doxastic voluntarism. More specifically, I examine the question whether Descartes thinks the will can have a direct and full control over one’s suspension of judgment. Descartes was a doxastic voluntarist, maintaining that the will has some kind of control over one’s doxastic states, such as belief and doubt. According (...) to a long-held reading, the control that the will has over doxastic states in Descartes’s theory is direct; the doxastic states are affected by the mere act of will. This reading is called direct doxastic voluntarism (DDV), or direct voluntarism (DV) for short, and it states that we are capable of assenting, rejecting and suspending a judgment based only on our will to do so. Thus, these actions would be utterly and merely volitional. DV can be divided into two further positions, direct positive voluntarism (+DV) and direct negative voluntarism (-DV). Direct positive voluntarism deals with the act of forming judgments, maintaining that one can accept or deny a proposition wilfully and either merely believe or not believe something voluntarily. Direct negative voluntarism deals with the suspension of judgment, maintaining that it can likewise be accomplished by a simple act of will. However, I support an alternate account of Descartes’s voluntarism, which is called indirect doxastic voluntarism (IDV), or indirect voluntarism (IV) for short. By this account, the will is capable of affecting a doxastic state indirectly by making one concentrate on essential tasks for forming that state, such as gathering up and paying attention to strong reasons and evidence. IV is also possible to divide into indirect positive voluntarism (+IV) and indirect negative voluntarism (-IV). Per indirect positive voluntarism the will needs to pay attention to reasons for accepting or denying some proposition. Likewise, by indirect negative voluntarism, in order to suspend judgment the will needs to direct this attention to the reasons for doubt. By attending to these reasons, the will also comes face-to-face with its own freedom. This feeling of freedom can be described as affectivity of the reasons for belief (assent) and doubt (suspension). (shrink)

Spinoza rarely refers to art. However, there are extensive resources for a Spinozist aesthetics in his discussion of health in the Ethics and of social affects in his political works. There have been recently been a few essays linking Spinoza and art, but this essay additionally fuses Spinoza’s politics to an affective aesthetics. Spinoza’s statements that art makes us healthier (Ethics 4p54Sch; Emendation section 17) form the foundation of an aesthetics. In Spinoza’s definition, “health” is caused by external objects that (...) maintain our power to act in a variety of ways. Humans need such objects because our complex bodies constantly lose or consume many parts necessary to our overall functioning. Notably, Spinoza defines humans’ bodies through this complexity (2p13Sch), so health as maintenance of complexity is a distinctly human endeavor. Further, while art is not the only healthy activity, I argue that art is a particularly potent cure, which explains Spinoza’s otherwise opaque comment that music can cure melancholy (by which he meant a near-total inability to act, akin to death). Rather than only causing frivolous pleasures, art may be as essential to human flourishing as are other human beings in general; other people are “most useful” because of the variety of actions they make possible (4p35Cor & Sch1). Art’s production of a dizzying variety of affects is likewise most useful for health. -/- Having established how art in general affects the individual, I then explain the role of artists in shaping social groups. Artists use vivid and highly charged affective techniques, as do political sovereigns and religious prophets (TTP chapters 1-2 & 15-16). However, sovereigns and prophets are concerned exclusively with “morality,” defined by Spinoza as the use of affects (primarily based on fear and hope) to produce “obedience” in the generic multitude or people at large. An artist, however, rarely causes affects in the whole nation, affecting instead only a smaller niche or “sub-genre” of people. The affects produced in this group are also not identical to those used by sovereigns, since artists do not primarily deploy sad affects of hope and fear but instead use a wide variety of joyful affects. Further, in Spinoza’s analysis of ceremonies (TTP chapter 5), we see how small groups exposed to repeated ceremonies or social practices eventually develop new strengths which they lacked before. Repeated exposure to shared aesthetic “ceremonies” (e.g., live music performances) of the same sub-genre will over time create the capacity of new powers in the sub-genre of people, which distinguishes them from the masses. Spinoza says sovereigns forge a “second nature” for the generic people through affects; we can then affirm that smaller groups exposed to a distinct sub-genre of art can acquire a new “third nature” which will contain unique powers extending beyond healthy maintenance of their existing bodies. That is, art in general is necessary to flourish and remain whole (maintaining health), but it can also occasionally expand what one is to unforeseen heights (through specific artistic sub-genres). (shrink)