Some self-knowledge must be arrived at by the subject herself, rather than being transmitted by another’s testimony. Yet in many cases the subject interacts with an expert in part because she is likely to have the relevant knowledge of their mind. This raises a question: what is the expert’s knowledge like that there are barriers to simply transmitting it by testimony? I argue that the expert’s knowledge is, in some circumstances, proleptic, referring to attitudes the subject would hold were she (...) to reflect in certain ways. The expert’s knowledge cannot be transmitted by testimony because self-knowledge cannot be proleptic. (shrink)

Patrick D Walsh; Education: one concept in many uses, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 167–180, https://doi.org/10.111.

Patrick D Walsh; Education: one concept in many uses, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 167–180, https://doi.org/10.111.

Personal integrity is often seen as a core value for delivering ethical healthcare. This paper will explore what this might mean and particularly what place integrity has in a multi‐professional healthcare system. Two opposing arguments can be made: the first is that the multi‐professional nature of modern healthcare means that personal integrity is at best a futile luxury and at worst, an obstacle to delivering affordable high‐quality care to large populations. The converse is that without personal integrity healthcare loses its (...) humanity and becomes mere biological and social engineering. Part of the analysis rests on whether integrity is primarily a personally held moral framework or whether it is a social concept. Chester Calhoun's analysis, in which she identifies the integrated‐self, personal identity, and (morally) clean‐hands as three pictures of integrity, is used as the basis for suggesting that integrity is a rich and complex social virtue through which the individual is able to demonstrate their relationship with the values and mores of the communities of which they are members. In addition, I will argue that integrity is not a value itself, but is a framework through which one or more sets of those values that characterize the communities of which the person is a part, can be expressed. Because a person may belong to many communities – nation, gender, religion, family, profession, trade, sport, etc. – each individual has their own unique meta‐set of values that informs their personal sense of integrity. However, in specific circumstances, conflicts may arise between this personal global sense and the set of values associated with one community. (shrink)

As a response to what I see as the challenge posed by constructivist and narrative pedagogies, this paper seeks to sympathetically reconstruct Bernard Williams’ Absolute Conception from the scattered texts in which he briefly sketched it While ultimately defending the Absolute Conception or something close enough to it, the paper criticizes and distances itself from some aspects of Williams’ version, notably his conception of philosophy as insurmountably perspectival. Williams’ understanding of perspectival knowledge as contrasted to absolute knowledge is illustrated with (...) the concrete, if fictional case of the Dr Manhattan character from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009). Adrian Moore’s reading, and Hilary Putnam’s criticisms of Williams’ Absolute Conception are amongst the positions engaged with. (shrink)

Naturalism rejects a sui generis and fundamental realm of the evaluative or normative. Thought and talk about the good and the right must hence be understood without appeal to any such evaluative or normative concepts or properties. In Sections I and II, we see noncognitivism step forward with its account of evaluative and normative language as fundamentally optative or prescriptive. Prescriptivism falls afoul of several problems. Prominent among them below is the “problem of prima facie reasons”: the problem, namely that (...) prescriptions do not properly capture the character of defeasibility of the prima facie, featured by nearly all our moral convictions. We find in Section II that, ironically, emotivism, with its emphasis on optative rather than prescriptive language, though historically more primitive, is yet better attuned to that crucial prima facie aspect of the normative and the evaluative. But even emotivism still faces serious difficulties that beset noncognitivism generally, such as the problem of embedding in subordinate clauses, and the problem of normative fallibility. That takes us up to Section III. (shrink)

R J Royce; Process and Product in Moral Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 73–83, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1.

The unprecedented growth and demand for Applied Ethics since the last quarter of the previous century, has opened up a range of new opportunities for the discipline of Philosophy. While these new opportunities have been enthusiastically seized upon by some philosophers, others have frowned upon them or rejected them outright. In order to make sense of this demand for Applied Ethics training, I will first explore in general why this demand for Applied Ethics developed. I will then use the example (...) of Business Ethics to demonstrate and discuss some of the suspicions contemplated by philosophers who regard Applied Ethics as a dangerous and deceitful temptation that potentially can corrupt Philosophy, and that philosophers should at best avoid or at least be very careful of. I will assess the legitimacy and seriousness of these concerns and objections with regard to Business Ethics and then outline an Aristotelian approach to Business Ethics that I believe can be practised with philosophical integrity. (shrink)

The unprecedented growth and demand for Applied Ethics (Business Ethics, Medical Ethics, Information Ethics, Engineering Ethics, etc.) since the last quarter of the previous century, has opened up a range of new opportunities for the discipline of Philosophy. While these new opportunities have been enthusiastically seized upon by some philosophers, others have frowned upon them or rejected them outright. In order to make sense of this demand for Applied Ethics training, I will first explore in general why this demand for (...) Applied Ethics developed. I will then use the example of Business Ethics to demonstrate and discuss some of the suspicions contemplated by philosophers who regard Applied Ethics as a dangerous and deceitful temptation that potentially can corrupt Philosophy, and that philosophers should at best avoid or at least be very careful of. I will assess the legitimacy and seriousness of these concerns and objections with regard to Business Ethics and then outline an Aristotelian approach to Business Ethics that I believe can be practised with philosophical integrity. (shrink)

Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon, and a plane over Pennsylvania, many in the West, but particularly the United States of America, felt urgently the pain of the question ‘Why do they hate us?’ in relation both to those who directly perpetrated those dreadful events and to those who sympathised with their perpetrators. In this paper, I will offer an account of some of the conceptual issues at stake in addressing (...) seriously such a question as an opportunity for self-examination. I will argue that questions of this kind are the very warp and weft of international relations at their most serious levels and that the often glib demonisation of ‘them’ who hate us serves us badly in coming to terms with the problems the West faces in its relations with the Muslim world. I use this most pressing of international relations issues as a test of the prospects of Utilitarianism as a viable ‘ethics of international relations’ arguing that its notions of the good and its resources for criticism of desires and preferences are a cause for scandal in our inter-cultural negotiations with other traditions of civilization, particularly the Muslim civilization. In many ways, rather than being part of the solution, Utilitarianism is part of the problem. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt's conception of care and love has largely been considered a seductive theory of personality, but an untenable and irresponsible theory of moral normativity. Contrary to that interpretation, this article aims at showing that it is possible to remain faithful to Frankfurt's metaphysical premises while not falling into some moral relativism. First, by comparing Frankfurt's and Heidegger's conceptions of care, I show that Frankfurt's subordination of ethics to carology apparently commits him to a neutral foundationalism. In the next step, (...) I argue that his calling into question of the relation between rationality and morality does indeed subject moral normativity to some subjective and contingent limits. And finally, I show that the objections raised against such a conclusion can be answered by shifting Frankfurt's frontier between contingency and necessity and by exploiting his concept of wholeheartedness. (shrink)

One of the central tasks of meta-ethical inquiry is to accommodate the common-sense assumptions deeply embedded in our moral discourse. A comparison of the potential of secular and theistic ethics shows that, in the end, theists have a greater facility in achieving this accommodation task; it is easier to appreciate the action-guiding authority and binding nature of morality in a theistic rather than in a secular context. Theistic ethics has a further advantage in being able to accommodate not only this (...) essential conceptual feature of morality, but also the existence of moral requirements and their source of normativity. (shrink)

Richard Cumberland, the Anglican divine, concludes his anti-Hobbesian work, Treatise of the Laws of Nature, with the following remarkable observation: ‘Hobbes, whilst he pretends with one hand to bestow gifts upon princes, does with the other treacherously strike a dagger to their hearts.’ This remark sums up a dominant theme of seventeenth-century reactions to Hobbes's political theory; a host of similar complaints could be marshalled from among the ranks of secondary figures such as Clarendon, Filmer and Pufendorf. Today, however, Cumberland's (...) criticism has a relatively unfamiliar ring. Following the lead famously given by John Locke, we are much more likely to be impressed by the totalitarian features of Hobbes's political philosophy than by its subversive character. To preclude initial objections, there is of course a relatively uncontroversial sense in which Hobbes's thought is subversive; in metaphysics, ethics and theology Hobbes's daggers are deliberately aimed at the hearts of the Schoolmen and the Puritans. But Cumberland's concern in the quotation is with Hobbes's theory of sovereignty: the thrust of his criticism is that the theory is top-heavy, and this issue has not received much attention in recent years. One notable exception is David Gauthier who writes that ‘from unlimited individualism only anarchy follows. The theory is a failure.’ Gauthier, however, argues tht Hobbes's presentation of his theory in Leviathan marks a major advance over the earlier De Cive, and if our criterion of success is the strength of the sovereign's position, then this claim seems highly suspect. In the first part of this paper I shall argue that the sovereign of Leviathan is a more vulnerable figure than the sovereign of the earlier De Cive. In the second part of the paper I take up the problem posed by military service for a Hobbesian theory of political obligation. Employing a distinction between act- and rule-prudentialism, I shall argue that here again the position of Leviathan is in some ways less satisfactory than that of the earlier works. (shrink)

Ethical disputes arise over differences in the content of the ethical beliefs people hold on either side of an issue. One person may believe that it is wrong to have an abortion for financial reasons, whereas another may believe it to be permissible. But, the magnitude and difficulty of such disputes may also depend on other properties of the ethical beliefs in question—in particular, how objective they are perceived to be. As a psychological property of moral belief, objectivity is relatively (...) unexplored, and we argue that it merits more attention. We review recent psychological evidence which demonstrates that individuals differ in the extent to which they perceive ethical beliefs to be objective, that some ethical beliefs are perceived to be more objective than others, and that both these sources of variance are somewhat systematic. This evidence also shows that differences in perceptions of objectivity underpin quite different psychological reactions to ethical disagreement. Apart from reviewing this evidence, our aim in this paper is to draw attention to unanswered psychological questions about moral objectivity, and to discuss the relevance of moral objectivity to two issues of public policy. (shrink)

Bernard Williams proposed his relativism of distance based on the recognition “that others are at varying distances from us”. Recent work in moral psychology and experimental philosophy highlights the prevalence of folk relativism in relation to spatial and temporal distance. However, Williams’ relativism of distance as well as recent empirical findings which seem to support some of Williams’ main ideas on this issue have received scant attention. In this article, we would like to focus on the phenomenon of moral relativism (...) regarding spatiotemporal distance as an entry point to the nature of folk moral relativism and the methodology of meta-ethics. To do so, we first introduce Williams’ relativism of distance. Then we compare Williams’ approach on this matter to recent experimental approaches on folk relativism. On this score the main result is that Williams’ proposal is consistent with several well-established insights on the experimental study of folk relativism. Williams’ relativism of distance is not only empirically plausible, but it is also of relevance for shaping the methodology of an empirically informed meta-ethics. We close this paper by stressing this methodological contribution. (shrink)

This article builds on David Velleman’s recent work on moral relativism to argue that Kant’s account of moral judgement is best read in a contextualist manner. More specifically, I argue that while for Kant the form of moral judgement is invariant, substantive moral judgements are nonetheless context-dependent. The same form of moral willing can give rise to divergent substantive judgements. To some limited extent, Kantian contextualism is a development out of Rawlsian constructivism. Yet while for constructivists the primary concern is (...) with the derivation of generally valid principles of morality, Velleman’s Kant-inspired form of moral relativism demonstrates the indispensability to a Kantian approach of indexical reasons for action. I argue in turn that Velleman’s focus on the indexical nature of reasons for action must be supplemented by an account of agential reflexivity. The latter divides Kantian contextualism from Kantian relativism. (shrink)

Despite the fact that business people and business students often cast doubt on the relevance of universal moral principles in business, the rejection of relativism is a precondition for business ethics to get off the ground. This paper proposes an educational strategy to overcome the philosophical confusions about relativism in which business people and students are often trapped. First, the paper provides some conceptual distinctions and clarifications related to moral relativism, particularism, and virtue ethics. More particularly, it revisits arguments demonstrating (...) that virtues in business are not in contradiction with the relevance of universal principles, despite the fact that virtue ethics is often identified with particular relationships and contexts. It goes on to show how students and managers, but also researchers, often mix up radically different conceptions of moral relativism. It is also argued that this confusion is in part created by the cross-cultural management literature in which the methodological stance of the value-freedom of the social sciences is, in a perplexingly mistaken way, transformed into a rejection of all normative discussion and a plea for relativism. The remainder of the paper presents some tools that may be helpful in steering people toward less simplistic views about moral relativism and virtue ethics. It further argues that it is equally important to spell out that moral universalism can be understood in a humble way, without implying either arrogant ethnocentrism or omniscience, as part of an ongoing debate that progresses gradually. (shrink)

Integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) has been an influential theory in normative business ethics for well over a decade, drawing attention both as an object of criticism and as a source of inspiration. In this paper I argue that, despite this attention, the fact that it is a genuinely pluralistic theory, in the tradition of pluralistic theories of political philosophy, is often overlooked. It is in the notion of moral free space that this pluralism is most clearly expressed. This oversight (...) is unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly, it prevents the potential of ISCT, as a normative theory of business ethics, from being appreciated fully; secondly, it leads us to ignore resources that could help tackle its most problematic flaws. In this second respect, I show how some of these flaws could be addressed by paying closer attention to the similarities between ISCT and John Rawls' theory of Political Liberalism. (shrink)

The central question addressed in this paper is about the ethics of engaging with educational development in countries perceived as undemocratic or as failing to respect human rights. More particularly, it examines the nature of the arguments that are brought to bear on this issue. It suggests that these are essentially consequentialist in character and hence fall prey to many of the limitations of such consequentialism, including the unpredictability of what will unfold, the indeterminacy of the consequences and the complex (...) balance sheet of benefits and loss that might be anticipated. The paper also suggests some unease about the way judgements of the acceptability or otherwise of political processes are made across international boundaries and the presumptions of a ‘democratic’ western perspective. The observation of these complexities of principle and fact take the argument into the territory of case-based ethical judgement and the world of casuistry. (shrink)

Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.” Extrinsic value is value that is not intrinsic.

This dissertation is a study of the relation between Aristotle’s ethics and the crafts (or technai). My thesis is that Aristotle’s argument is at key points shaped by models proper to the crafts, this shaping being deeper than is generally acknowledged, and philosophically more problematic. Despite this, I conclude that the arguments I examine can, if revised, be upheld. The plan of the dissertation is as follows – Preface: The relation of my study to the extant secondary literature; Introduction: The (...) pre-Platonic concept of technē, as evidenced in Greek philosophical and literary sources, in particular the early Hippocratic corpus; Chapter one: The Platonic concept of technē, followed by an investigation of whether Plato affirms a virtue-technē in the Protagoras and Republic; Chapter two: Aristotle’s concept of technē, followed by scrutiny of his arguments in NE VI.5 against a virtue-technē, and of his analyses of slavery and deliberation; Chapter three: An exposition of Aristotle’s function argument, followed by a dominantist interpretation of it, and an explanation of dominantism as in part a technē-influenced doctrine; Chapter four: An examination of Aristotle’s ethical mean and its problems, with a diagnosis of these in terms of influence by the Philebus, and by paradigms derived from the crafts; Chapter five: Argument that Aristotle’s theory of habituation suffers from two significant opacities, these being a function of influence both by the Republic, and by models of craft-learning; Conclusion: Response to key objection; Aristotle’s ethics revised, defended. (shrink)

The Aristotelian Society’s Virtual Issue is a free, online publication, made publically available on the Aristotelian Society website. Each volume is theme-based, collecting together papers from the archives of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume that address the chosen theme. This year's Virtual Issue includes a selection of papers from across the Society’s fourteen decades, each accompanied by a specially commissioned present-day response. The aim of the volume is to aid reflection (...) on how to go about doing moral and political philosophy, by bringing together papers that bear on their epistemology and methodology. In some cases this involves pieces whose declared focus is on one of those areas, as is the case with Margaret MacDonald’s 1941 essay ‘The Language of Political Theory’ and Mary Midgley’s 1974 article ‘The Neutrality of the Moral Philosopher’. In other cases the editor, Ben Colburn, selected papers whose primary focus is elsewhere, but which include some interesting epistemological or methodological reflections or implications along the way. The contributions from our present-day commentators vary similarly in how far their explicit attention is methodological. Nevertheless, there is throughout a concern on how to ‘be an honest reasoner’, to borrow a phrase from the late Dudley Knowles. (shrink)