If explicit cognition about morality promotes moral behavior then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional ethicists' behavior has never been empirically studied. The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% (...) more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Michele Moody-Adams’ critique of the ‘inability thesis’, according to which some cultures make the resources for criticizing injustice ‘unavailable’ to their members. I investigate Moody-Adams’ alternative ‘affected ignorance’ thesis. Using the example of slavery in ancient Greece, I consider two potential candidates for affected ignorance which involve, respectively, ‘unawareness’ and ‘mistaken moral weighing’; in neither, I hold, may one ascribe culpability to those involved.

Can an effective argument against scepticism about objective values be modelled on Donald Davidson’s familiar argument against scepticism about external things?

Defenders of Aboriginal rights such as James Tully have argued that members of majority populations should allow Aboriginal peoples to argue within their own preferred intellectual frameworks in seeking common moral ground. But how should non-Aboriginal academics react to claims that seem insufficiently critical or even incoherent? This essay argues that there are two reasons to be especially wary of attacking such errors given the historical injustices perpetrated by settler states against Aboriginal peoples. First, attempts to root out error will (...) often be misplaced, because they will fail to consider the full range of possible reasons for particular kinds of social practices. Second, such attempts will often have counterproductive social effects in disrupting conversations and prolonging Aboriginal alienation. This essay thus argues that non-Aboriginal academics should be willing to exercise considerable self-restraint toward apparent intellectual errors, because such a strategy will be most conducive to realizing justice over the long term. (shrink)

Quine's ethical views typify what might seem to be natural sympathies between empiricism and ethical noncognitivism. LikeAyer, he sees a case for noncognitivism rooted in an epistemic discontinuity between ethics and science. Quine argues that the absence of genuine moral observation sentences, and thus the absence of empirical checkpoints for the resolution of theoretical disputes, renders ethics, as he terms it, “methodologically infirm” However, recent papers in this journal make clear that Quine appears to be voicing mutually incompatible commitments to (...) both noncognitivism and cognitivism. Here I argue that Davidson's theory of interpretation offers promising ways to resolve these tensions. His constructive program fleshes out the implications of Quine's largely destructive critique of intensional semantics and contains a fairly well‐articulated account of evaluative semantics, one which seems to combine cognitivist and noncognitivist elements harmoniously. Moreover, it is argued that Davidson's long‐standing differences with Quine over the epistemological status Quine accords observation sentences with do not undermine Quine's metaethical critique. (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)

This article discusses explanatory theories of normative concepts and argues for a set of criteria of adequacy by which such theories may be evaluated. The criteria offered fall into four categories: ontological, theoretical, pragmatic, and moral. After defending the criteria and discussing their relative weighting, this article uses them to prune the set of available explanatory theories of oppression. Functionalist theories, including Hegelian recognition theory and Foucauldian social theory, are rejected, as are psychoanalytic theory and social dominance theory. Finally, the (...) article defends structural rational choice theory as the most promising methodology for explaining oppression. Key Words: oppression • explanation • rational choice theory. (shrink)

In ‘A Dialogue’, Hume offers an important reply to the moral skeptic. Skeptics traditionally point to instances of moral diversity in support of the claim that our core values are fixed by enculturation. Hume argues that the skeptic exaggerates the amount of variation in moral codes, however, and fails to adopt an indulgent stance toward attitudes different from ours. Hume proposes a charitable interpretation of moral disagreement, moreover, which traces it back to shared principles of human nature. Contemporary philosophers attempt (...) to locate examples of moral variability that cannot be accommodated in this way. But they are no more successful than their predecessors. Moral skeptics have not found a single case of moral diversity that is resistant to the Humean strategy. (shrink)

Intellectual humility can be broadly construed as being conscious of the limits of one’s existing knowledge and capable of acquiring more knowledge, which makes it a key virtue of the information age. However, the claim “I am humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. Therefore, measuring intellectual humility via self-report may be methodologically unsound. As a consequence, we suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantically, using a psycholexical approach that focuses on both (...) synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual humility’. We present a thesaurus-based methodology to map the semantic space of intellectual humility and the vices it opposes as a heuristic to support analysis and diagnosis of this disposition. We performed the mapping both in English and German in order to test for possible cultural differences in the understanding of intellectual humility. In both languages, we find basically the same three semantic dimensions of intellectual humility as well as three dimensions of its related vices. The resulting semantic clusters were validated in an empirical study with English and German participants. We find medium-to-high correlations between thesaurus similarity and perceived similarity, and we can validate the three dimensions identified in the study. But we also find limitations of the thesaurus methodology in terms of cluster plausibility. We conclude by discussing the importance of these findings for constructing psychometric measures of intellectual humility via self-report vs. computer models. (shrink)

In contemporary debates about the nature of bioethics there is a widespread view that bioethical decision making should involve certain knowledge of and respect for cultural diversity of persons to be affected. The aim of this article is to show that this view is untenable and misleading. It is argued that introducing the idea of respect for cultural diversity into bioethics encounters a series of conceptual and empirical constraints. While acknowledging that cultural diversity is something that decision makers in bioethical (...) contexts should try to understand and, when possible, respect, it is argued that this cultural turn ignores the typically normative role of bioethics and thus threatens to undermine its very foundations. (shrink)