Some commentators have condemned Kant’s moral project from a feminist perspective based on Kant’s apparently dim view of women as being innately morally deficient. Here I will argue that although his remarks concerning women are unsettling at first glance, a more detailed and closer examination shows that Kant’s view of women is actually far more complex and less unsettling than that attributed to him by various feminist critics. My argument, then, undercuts the justification for the severe feminist critique of Kant’s (...) moral project. (shrink)

Joshua Greene and Peter Singer argue, on the basis of empirical evidence, that deontological moral judgments result from emotional reactions while dispassionate reasoning leads to consequentialist judgments. Given that there are good reasons to doubt these emotionally driven intuitions, they argue that we should reject Kantian ethics. I argue that the evidence does not support the claim that consequentialism is inherently more reason-based or less emotion-based than Kantian ethics. This is partly because the experiments employ a functional definition of ‘deontological’ (...) that is so broad as to include any non-consequentialist theory, including virtue ethics, divine command theory, and even rule-utilitarianism. Thus the experiments failed to capture the reasons behind the judgments. Also, the results of the experiments are partly due to the extensive use of moral dilemmas like the footbridge version of the trolley scenario. The options in these dilemmas involve different levels of moral thinking. The consequ.. (shrink)

The work contained within this dissertation is a textual exegesis of Abelard’s ethics. The goal is to elucidate Abelard’s sort of intentionalism given his use of “intention” within his wider corpus, the grammatical and syntactical patterns in his prose, and Abelard’s own interests, biography, and situation as a twelfth-century monastic figure. As a result, this project should be understood as a history of philosophy dissertation. I am not attempting to build upon Abelard’s ideas but to clarify them. This is not (...) to say that building upon Abelard’s ideas is not a worthwhile project. It is merely to say that doing so is beyond the scope of this project. I found it necessary to clarify Abelard’s ideas about ethics because I found that many interpretations of his ethical work were either lacking or wildly incorrect. This has much to do, I think, with the history of Abelard’s reception as a theologian. When Abelard’s ethic was first received, it was understood to be dangerously subjectivist. In other words, he was understood to be advocating a sort of subjective relativism. In response to this gross misinterpretation of his work, contemporary readers resolved that Abelard maintained a rather explicit observance of objective moral truth. Now, neither the subjectivist account nor the objectivist account gives the full story of what, exactly, Abelard is up to in his Scito te Ipsum. Though some have delivered fairly mitigated assessments of Abelard’s ethic, there is a larger theological story that serves as the foundational lens through which his work must be understood—one that, I argue, has not been sufficiently considered. In this dissertation I contextualize Abelard’s Scito te Ipsum within his theological commitments and arrive at a very nuanced account of his ethical contributions to the history of philosophy. In short, Abelard contends that caritas renders a subject morally praiseworthy. This is a claim that is rather orthodox within the scope of the Christian ethical tradition and the twelfth century more specifically. (shrink)