While it is well recognized that many everyday consumer behaviors, such as purchases of sweatshop goods, come at a cost to the global poor, it has proven difficult to argue that even knowing, repeat contributors are somehow morally complicit in those outcomes. Some recent approaches contend that marginal contributions to distant harms are consequences that consumers straightforwardly should have born in mind, which would make consumers seem reckless or negligent. Critics reasonably reply that the bad luck that my innocent purchase (...) contributes distantly to harm provides insufficient grounds for moral blame; moreover, such distant and seemingly inevitable collective effects are not by themselves obvious reasons for agents to refrain from acting. Granting these criticisms, I argue that the harm that agents do through knowing contributions to distant collective harm actually builds on the morally sparse agential phenomenology of everyday purchases and decisions: contributors who knowingly disregard distant harms, rather than being reckless or negligent about consequences they should have foreseen, very directly perpetuate the moral invisibility and the lack of recognition from which the global poor generally suffer. This provides agents with clearer moral reasons to refrain from knowing participation in unstructured collective harms, and clearer reason to bear them in mind in acting. (shrink)

In the eyes of many “classical” phenomenologists, Kantianism has seemed to invite individuals to leave the rich, complexly motivated environment of lived experience in favor of a shadowy, formal kingdom of abstract duties and rights. Yet there have been notable attempts within the phenomenological tradition to articulate a richer vision of Kantian moral consciousness and to exhibit, from a first-person perspective, the shape of mental life and the standing dispositions that befit membership in a Kantian kingdom of ends. Here I (...) offer two such competing paradigms of Kantian moral consciousness: on the one hand, the responsive, situational Kantian moral consciousness that recent commentators have reconstructed from Martin Heidegger’s work, and on the other hand, the very different, explicitly cosmopolitan Kantian moral consciousness traced in Hannah Arendt’s conception of an “enlarged mentality.” While each is arguably a legitimately Kantian view, these alternative models of moral consciousness offer considerably different spirits of Kantianism with different benefits and detriments, and each places very different cognitive and moral burdens on agents. (shrink)

There has been considerable recent interest in the “collective moral autonomy” thesis (CMA), that is, the notion that we can predicate moral successes, failures, and duties of collectives even if there are no comparable successes, failures, and duties among members. One reason why this position looks appealing is because the opposing individualist position seems to have what we might call an accounting problem. Individualists maintain that only individuals can be subjects of moral success, failure, or duty; however, many reasonable judgments (...) about collective actions include moral information on a scale and of a stringency that it does not seem possible to predicate even of the duties of members who have steering power in the actions of the collective. Here I offer a paradigm for thinking about responsibility judgments in organized collective cases to help individualism solve its accounting problem, and allow us to account within a strict individualist perspective for moral information that ostensibly favors CMA. (shrink)

Recent reconstructions of Heidegger's thoughts on ethics have a curious paradoxical feature. On the one hand, Heidegger, particularly in his Aristotle lectures of the 1920s, offers a view of practical reason on which Dasein has its “moral knowledge” in a fully perceptual, non-cognitive way. This generally sets Heidegger in opposition to the whole business of principled moral justification before the fact. On the other hand, the literature is peppered with what appear to be principled denunciations of immorality—particularly violations of other (...) Dasein—grounded in the analytic of Dasein. To see human life as having a stable ergon (“business” or “function”), with certain broad tasks to pursue and vices to avoid, is not necessarily counter-Aristotelian; on the contrary, it is basic to the kind of Aristotelianism Husserl pursued in his own lectures on ethics. Here I set Heidegger's Aristotelian model of practical reason amid the competing, though similar, Aristotelianisms of John McDowell and Husserl, which differ on their handling of the human ergon. I conclude that Heidegger's views on practical reason and moral knowledge certainly constrain and very much alter the business of moral justification, but they do not precisely rule it out. (shrink)

Dilthey’s moral writings have received scant attention over the years, perhaps due to his apparent tendency toward relativism. This essay offers a unified look at Dilthey’s moral writings in the context of his Kantian-styled “Critique of Historical Reason.” I present the Dilthey of the moral writings as an observer of reason in the spirit of Kant, watching practical reason devolve into error when it applies itself beyond the bounds of possible experience. Drawing on moral writings from across Dilthey’s corpus, I (...) retrace Dilthey’s argument that moral theories from Kantianism and utilitarianism to natural law theory suffer significant motivational problems because of the way they transcend the “synthesis” of moral perception. Dilthey’s argument suggests that abstract moral theory is always bound to seem unmotivating and unreal from the standpoint of lived experience, and perhaps that, to avoid this, moral philosophy should confine itself to more situated, case-specific judgments. (shrink)

This essay offers a new reading of Heidegger’s early “formally indicative” view of religious life as a broad critique of popular representations of religious life in the human sciences and public discourse. While it has frequently been understood that Heidegger’s work aims at the “enactment” of religious life, the logic and implications of this have been rather unclear to most readers. Presenting that logic, I argue that Heidegger’s point parallels that of Alfred Schutz in suggesting that typical academic discussions of (...) religion constitute a determinate, deficient way of relating to religious individuals and groups and their concerns. Those concerns appear to the researcher herself in a way that they would not if the theorist were actually entertaining them as states of affairs in the real world, leading her to attribute beliefs to a hypothetical “nobody.” Heidegger’s early notion of formal indication explains the logic behind our lack of “realism” toward certain topics of research, and his comments on the study of religious life are a paradigm case for the descriptive fallacies that phenomenology can help to address. (shrink)