In The Ethics of Care, Virginia Held explores what values of care might fulfil normative criteria for evaluating the moral worth of relations. Held identifies seven potential values: attentiveness, empathy, mutual concern, sensitivity, responsiveness, taking responsibility, and trustworthiness. Though Held’s work is helpful as a starting point for conceptualizing some normative criteria, two problems need addressing. First, Held does not provide sufficient justification for why these potential values ought to be considered genuine values in the care ethical framework. Second, Held (...) overlooks two other potential values cited in the care literature: competence and respect. This paper builds upon Held’s work to offer a more coherent understanding of the values of care. It does so by scrutinizing and conceptually organizing the above nine potential values. Of these nine, only four are considered genuine values: attentiveness, mutual concern, responsiveness, and trustworthiness. It is concluded that good caring relations are those that exemplify the four values of care in their deliverance of caring practices. (shrink)

A central focus of care ethics is on the compelling moral salience of attending to the needs of our particular others. However, there is no consensus within the care literature for how and when such partiality is morally justified. This article outlines and defends a novel justificatory argument that grounds partiality in the facts and values of the relation itself. Specifically, this article argues that partiality is justified when grounded in caring values exemplified in good caring relations. Hence, this justification (...) is termed the argument from good caring relations. This justification is promising for two reasons. First, the argument from good caring relations has the potential to spur engagement between care ethics and the broader partiality literature. In particular, the argument from good caring relations could enhance what Simon Keller has termed ‘the relationships view’. Second, the argument from good caring relations is more persuasive than the other major justificatory argument for partiality presently in the care literature: a distributive argument, which takes the form of a modified version of Robert Goodin’s assigned responsibility model of moral obligation. Indeed, where this distributive argument fails, the argument from good caring relation succeeds. This article thus concludes that the argument from good caring relations is preferable for justifying partiality in care ethics. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide a literary review of advancements in climate change ethics, primarily concerning the issue of climate justice. Through a close examination of three recent books written on this topic, I intend to identify which author’s approach has been the most successful in analyzing the various moral problems associated with climate justice, before elucidating what weaknesses and shortcomings need to be addressed in moving forward. The books examined are The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, (...) and Policy, by Darrel Moellendorf ; Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future, by Dale Jamieson ; and... (shrink)

Care ethics is often criticized for being incapable of outlining what responsibilities we have to persons beyond our personal relations, especially toward distant others. This criticism centres on care theorists’ claim that the concerns of morality emerge between people, generated through our relations of interdependent care: it is difficult to see how moral duties can be applied to those with whom we do not forge a relationship. In this article, I respond to this criticism by outlining a care ethical justification (...) for an interest theory of human rights. This theory will argue that the demands of global justice include various positive actions that aim toward ensuring the conditions for good caring relations to flourish, which in turn protect and promote the vital interests of all persons. In doing so, I aim to concurrently advance the sparse work on human rights within the care literature, systematizing the ideas of care theorists such as Daniel Engster, Virginia Held, and Fiona Robinson. (shrink)

The collection presents a variety of promising new directions in Royce scholarship from an international group of scholars, including historical reinterpretations, explorations of Royce's ethics of loyalty and religious philosophy, and contemporary applications of his ideas in psychology, the problem of reference, neo-pragmatism, and literary aesthetics.

Compared to our understanding of positive prediction error signals occurring due to unexpected reward outcomes, less is known about the neural circuitry in humans that drives negative prediction errors during omission of expected rewards. While classical learning theories such as Rescorla–Wagner or temporal difference learning suggest that both types of prediction errors result from a simple subtraction, there has been recent evidence suggesting that different brain regions provide input to dopamine neurons which contributes to specific components of this prediction error (...) computation. Here, we focus on the brain regions responding to negative prediction error signals, which has been well-established in animal studies to involve a distinct pathway through the lateral habenula. We examine the activity of this pathway in humans, using a conditioned inhibition paradigm with high-resolution functional MRI. First, participants learned to associate a sensory stimulus with reward delivery. Then, reward delivery was omitted whenever this stimulus was presented simultaneously with a different sensory stimulus, the conditioned inhibitor. Both reward presentation and the reward-predictive cue activated midbrain dopamine regions, insula and orbitofrontal cortex. While we found significant activity at an uncorrected threshold for the CI in the habenula, consistent with our predictions, it did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and awaits further replication. Additionally, the pallidum and putamen regions of the basal ganglia showed modulations of activity for the inhibitor that did not survive the corrected threshold. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Lewis E. HahnGeorge C. H. Sun, President, John Howie, Professor Emeritus, Thomas Alexander, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Kenneth W. Stikkers, Professor and Chair, Randall Auxier, Professor, Robert Hahn, Professor, Joseph Wu, Professor Emeritus, Elizabeth R. Eames, Professor Emeritus, Martin Lu, Professor of Philosophy, George Kimball Plochmann, Professor Emeritus, Matt Sronkoski, Philosophy Graduate and Academic Adviser, Dave Clarke, Professor Emeritus, Eugenie Gatens-Robinson, Professor Emerita, Hans (...) H. Rudnick, Professor Emeritus, Stephen Bickham, Professor EmeritusPresident, and Don Mikula (bio)The following testimonials were offered on the occasion of a memorial gathering for Dr. Lewis E. Hahn held on February 19, 2005, and were compiled for presentation here by Sharon (Hahn) Crowell.A Tribute to Dr. Lewis E. Hahn (1908-2004) from a Global PerspectiveGeorge C. H. Sun President, Thomé H. Fang Institute, Inc., Mobile, AlabamaAmong the philosophical community in both the East and the West, no word of introduction is needed for our beloved Master, who was the recipient of numerous distinctions and honors, with titles that included "Man of the Year in Philosophy" and "Award of Lifetime Achievement." The very name "Lewis E. Hahn" itself already stands now for genuineness, dedication, and fulfillment.A great work is a dialogue with eternity; a great person is such a work. In less than thirty years he succeeded in developing Carbondale from what had been a small college town in the Midwest into the Mecca of American philosophy. His most important achievements were the Dewey Center and the Pepper Archives that he helped install at SIUC These, among other such institutions, will remain a unique contribution, a glory of American philosophy, and a monument in the history of human thought.For posterity Lewis E. Hahn will remain an object of wonder and amazement. How is it possible for one human being to have accomplished so much, so well, and in so short a span of time—less than one century—in breadth, depth, and diversity? Some one hundred years ago, by bridging the gap between the New World and the Old, William James was hailed as the great genius of international friendship among philosophical thinkers, but we now find a greater genius in Lewis E. Hahn, who succeeded in bringing together the peoples of East and West from at least four continents: Europe, Australia, America (both North and Latin America), and Asia. To my knowledge, few of his predecessors and contemporaries have been half so widely read and liberal-minded as he was, in view of the range and scope of the Library of Living Philosophers that he helped continue after the passing of its founder, Dr. Paul A. Schilpp.What type of man was Hahn, our younger generation will wonder? Only a pluralist approach can help us understand the true character of such a legendary pluralist-contextualist. In short, he was "a full personality." As I recall, while working on my dissertation with him in the 1970s, we had a brief discussion on Confucius, the sage of ancient China. "A full personality!" was his laconic assessment. Suddenly I realized, to quote the Analects: "The Master is talking about himself!" For, as the Buddhists put it, only a Buddha can understand a Buddha. Or, as William James put it, only one who has philosophy can appreciate philosophy. Many friends [End Page 1] of my generation admire him so much; Te Chen of Hong Kong calls him "a great Confucian in America." Those who regret the loss of many precious Confucian virtues in China today have now rediscovered them in the person of Lewis E. Hahn! If Nietzsche called Kant "a great Chinese in Königsberg," it is simply because he had not encountered our own Master.A paradigm of academic leadership, Dr. Hahn is simply irreplaceable—this is a tribute I personally heard in Carbondale in the late 1960s. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was a superb administrator, and he could have been the best Secretary of the State we ever had, for he possessed more in the way of philosophical wisdom than all his predecessors put together! As a great teacher, he was no less "serene, good, learned, wise, and ardent" than... (shrink)

Thomas Reid has the unusual distinction of arriving at a metaethical position very much like G. E. Moore’s via a route very similar to that employed by the Kantians. That is, Reid embraces a version of nonnaturalist moral realism by appeal not to open question-style considerations but to a particular account of agency. In this essay, we reconstruct Reid’s agency-centered argument for his constitutivist version of moral nonnaturalism, highlighting its commitments. Having presented Reid’s argument, we close by considering a (...) prominent contemporary Kantian view, namely, Christine Korsgaard’s, and identifying where, despite their common commitments, Reid and Korsgaard part company. The comparison, we suggest, is instructive because it allows us to see more clearly why the link between agency-centered approaches to ethical theorizing and nonrealist, constitutivist views of morality, such as Korsgaard’s, is deeply contingent. (shrink)

A dominant area of inquiry within intergenerational ethics concerns how goods ought to be justly distributed between noncontemporaries. Contractualist theories of justice that have broached these discussions have often centered on the concepts of mutual advantage and reciprocal cooperation between rational, self‐interested beings. However, another prominent reason that many in the present feel that they have obligations toward future generations is not due to self‐interested reciprocity, but simply because they care about what happens to them. Care ethics promises to be (...) conceptually well‐suited for articulating this latter reason: given that future generations are in a perpetual condition of dependency on present‐day people's actions, this is precisely the kind of relational structure that care theorists should be interested in morally evaluating. Unfortunately, the care literature has been largely silent on intergenerational ethics. This article aims to advance this literature, offering the blueprints of what a care ethic concerning future generations—a “future care ethic”—should look like. The resultant ethic defends a sufficientarian theory of obligation: people in the present ought to ensure the conditions needed to encourage and sustain a world that enables good caring relations to flourish. (shrink)

Care theorists have yet to outline an account of how the concept of toleration should function in their normative framework. This lack of outline is a notable gap in the literature, particularly for demonstrating whether care ethics can appropriately address cases of moral disagreement within contemporary pluralistic societies; in other words, does care ethics have the conceptual resources to recognize the disapproval that is inherent in an act of toleration while simultaneously upholding the positive values of care without contradiction? By (...) engaging care ethics with John Locke’s influential corpus on toleration, I answer the above question by building the bases for a novel theory of toleration as care. Specifically, I argue that care theorists can home in on an oft-overlooked aspect of Locke’s later thought: that the possibility of a tolerant society is dependent on a societal ethos of trustworthiness and civility, to the point where Locke sets out positive ethical demands on both persons and the state to ensure this ethos can grow and be sustained. By leveraging and augmenting Locke’s thought within the care ethical framework, I clarify how care ethics can provide meaningful solutions to moral disagreement within contemporary pluralistic societies in ways preferable to the capability of a liberal state. (shrink)

In Justice, Care, and Value Thomas Randall advances the radical potential of care ethics as a distinct (and preferable) theory of distributive justice. Advancing the care ethical literature this book defends a vision of society that can best enable such relations to flourish. Specifically, Randall uses breakthrough arguments to propose a values-driven theory of care ethics that identifies good caring relations through classifying the values of care. He argues that such a theory gives us unique and meaningful (...) solutions to contemporary questions and encourages us to think about distributive justice across personal, political, global, and intergenerational domains. Through this the book makes significant strides to engage care ethics with the broader moral and political philosophy literature. Topical and interdisciplinary, Randall demonstrates that care ethics has the conceptual resources to ground distributive theories of socialism, territorial and natural resource rights, obligations to future generations, and historic redress. The book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and students in feminist philosophy, but also in liberalism, global and intergenerational theories of justice, and political economy. (shrink)

Thomas Hill, a leading figure in the recent development of Kantian moral philosophy, presents a set of essays exploring the implications of basic Kantian ideas for practical issues. The first part of the book provides background in central themes in Kant's ethics; the second part discusses questions regarding human welfare; the third focuses on moral worth -- the nature and grounds of moral assessment of persons as deserving esteem or blame. Hill shows moral, political, and social philosophers just how (...) valuable moral theory can be in addressing practical matters. (shrink)

The philosophy of patient-centred care has become widely embraced but its implementation is dependent on interrelated factors. A factor that has received limited attention is the role of policy tools. In Ontario, one method government can use to promote healthcare priorities is through health regulatory colleges, which set the standard of practice for health professionals. The degree to which government policy in support of patient-centered care has influenced the direction provided by health regulatory colleges to their members, and ultimately impacted (...) actual patient care, remains unclear. This study investigates the extent to which Ontario’s health regulatory colleges have provided explicit written guidance to members related to the importance of patient-centred care. It also explores applied and theoretical explanations that may further our understanding of why patient-centred care has not been more fully embraced. Findings reveal that guidance provided by Ontario’s health regulatory colleges varies widely. Institutional barriers and the choice of policy tools for disseminating government preferences may hinder full implementation of the principles of patient-centred care. More fully understanding the role health regulatory colleges’ play in facilitating the implementation of health policy will contribute positively to dialogue and to efforts to achieve positive health system reforms. (shrink)

Ancient moral philosophers, especially Aristotle and his followers, typically shared the assumption that ethics is primarily concerned with how to achieve the final end for human beings, a life of “happiness” or “human flourishing.” This final end was not a subjective condition, such as contentment or the satisfaction of our preferences, but a life that could be objectively determined to be appropriate to our nature as human beings. Character traits were treated as moral virtues because they contributed well toward this (...) ideal life, either as means to it or as constitutive aspects of it. Traits that tended to prevent a “happy” life were considered vices, even if they contributed to a life that was pleasant and what a person most wanted. The idea of “happiness” was central, then, in philosophical efforts to specify what we ought to do, what sort of persons we should try to become, and what sort of life a wise person would hope for. (shrink)

Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy is an accessible and thought-provoking examination of the way films raise and explore complex philosophical ideas. Written in a clear and engaging style, Thomas Wartenberg examines films' ability to discuss, and even criticize ideas that have intrigued and puzzled philosophers over the centuries such as the nature of personhood, the basis of morality, and epistemological skepticism. Beginning with a demonstration of how specific forms of philosophical discourse are presented cinematically, Wartenberg moves on to (...) offer a systematic account of the ways in which specific films undertake the task of philosophy. Focusing on the films The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Modern Times, The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Third Man, The Flicker, and Empire, Wartenberg shows how these films express meaningful and pertinent philosophical ideas. This book is essential reading for students of philosophy with an interest in film, aesthetics, and film theory. It will also be of interest to film enthusiasts intrigued by the philosophical implications of film. (shrink)

Philosophers have debated for millennia about whether moral requirements are always rational to follow. The background for these debates is often what I shall call “the self-interest model.” The guiding assumption here is that the basic demand of reason, to each person, is that one must, above all, advance one's self-interest. Alternatively, debate may be framed by a related, but significantly different, assumption: the idea that the basic rational requirement is to develop and pursue a set of personal ends in (...) an informed, efficient, and coherent way, whether one's choice of ends is based on self-interested desires or not. For brevity I refer to this as “the coherence-and-efficiency model.” Advocates of both models tend to think that, while it is sufficiently clear in principle what the rational thing to do is, what remains in doubt is whether it is always rational to be moral. They typically assume that morality is concerned, entirely or primarily, with our relations to others, especially with obligations that appear to require some sacrifice or compromise with the pursuit of self-interest. (shrink)

What, if anything, are we morally required to do on behalf of others besides respecting their rights? And why is such regard for others a reasonable moral requirement? These two questions have long been major concerns of ethical theory, but the answers that philosophers give tend to vary with their beliefs about human nature. More specifically, their answers typically depend on the position they take on a third-question: To what extent, if any, is it possible for us to act altruistically?

To examine Heidegger's pedagogy is to be invited into a particular era and cultural reality—starting in Weimar Germany and progressing into the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In his attempt to reform the German university in a strictly hierarchical, authoritarian and nationalistic mold, Heidegger addressed one group of students and professors and not another. The petit‐bourgeois student and the future philosophers he invited with his ‘logic of recruitment’ into the corps of instructors, would share his coded language with (...) its built‐in taboos and censorship. The result was a rhetoric of absolute self‐reference and a semiotic of pure propaganda, based on the evocation of the ancient Greeks in which the philosopher meant to project all that was properly Germanic. Heidegger's rhetoric is exclusionary; its politics and its philosophy are interpenetrating. His lecture courses grew increasingly poeticized, and thus mired in ambiguity, evasion, elision, avoidance, grandiloquence. Parallels are drawn in this essay between Heidegger and our time. Is Heidegger's insistence on autocratic controls within the German university comparable to the corporate positions taken today by some educators? How does the shifting relation between disciplines affect the role of the specialist? How might the sciences morales or humanities, along with the much maligned ‘humanism’, be redefined morally and holistically? (shrink)

Affirmative action programs remain controversial, I suspect, partly because the familiar arguments for and against them start from significantly different moral perspectives. Thus I want to step back for a while from the details of debate about particular programs and give attention to the moral viewpoints presupposed in differenttypesof argument. My aim, more specifically, is to compare the “messages” expressed when affirmative action is defended from different moral perspectives. Exclusively forward-looking (for example, utilitarian) arguments, I suggest, tend to express the (...) wrong message, but this is also true of exclusively backward-looking (for example, reparation-based) arguments. However, a moral outlook that focuses on cross-temporal narrative values (such as mutually respectful social relations) suggests a more appropriate account of what affirmative action should try to express. Assessment of the message, admittedly, is only one aspect of a complex issue, but it is a relatively neglected one. My discussion takes for granted some common-sense ideas about the communicative function of action, and so I begin with these.Actions, as the saying goes, oftenspeaklouder than words. There are times, too, when only actions can effectively communicate the message we want to convey and times when giving a message is a central part of the purpose of action. What our actions say to others depends largely, though not entirely, upon our avowed reasons for acting; and this is a matter for reflective decision, not something we discover later by looking back at what we did and its effects. The decision is important because “the same act” can have very different consequences, depending upon how we choose to justify it. (shrink)

Epistemology, as I understand it, is a branch of philosophy especially concerned with general questions about how we can know various things or at least justify our beliefs about them. It questions what counts as evidence and what are reasonable sources of doubt. Traditionally, episte-mology focuses on pervasive and apparently basic assumptions covering a wide range of claims to knowledge or justified belief rather than very specific, practical puzzles. For example, traditional epistemologists ask “How do we know there are material (...) objects?” and not “How do you know which are the female beetles?” Similarly,moralepistemology, as I understand it, is concerned with general questions about how we can know or justify our beliefs about moral matters. Its focus, again, is on quite general, pervasive, and apparently basic assumptions about what counts as evidence, what are reasonable sources of doubt, and what are the appropriate procedures for justifying particular moral claims. (shrink)

This essay first distinguishes different questions regarding moral objectivity and relativism and then sketches a broadly Kantian position on two of these questions. First, how, if at all, can we derive, justify, or support specific moral principles and judgments from more basic moral standards and values? Second, how, if at all, can the basic standards such as my broadly Kantian perspective, be defended? Regarding the first question, the broadly Kantian position is that from ideas in Kant's later formulations of the (...) Categorical Imperative, especially human dignity and rational autonomous law-making, we can develop an appropriate moral perspective for identifying and supporting more specific principles. Both the deliberative perspective and the derivative principles can be viewed as “constructed,” but in different senses. In response to the second question, the essay examines two of Kant's strategies for defending his basic perspective and the important background of his arguments against previous moral theories. (shrink)

These 13 essays by noted American and German scholars provide a focused discussion of many of the issues raised by the integration of philosophical and psychological theories of moral development. The essays pivot around two key contributions, by Lawrence Kohlberg and his associates and by JA1⁄4rgen Habermas. Kohlberg's major work was a description of the stages of development of moral understanding in children. This book contains the final formulation of his view of the end point of moral development (Stage 6). (...) Habermas's insightful response to that formulation, which seeks to fit Kohlberg's perceptions into the framework of a communicative ethics, is an important extension of his own moral theory. In three parts, the essays map out the relationship between philosophy and psychology in the study of the moral domain, explore the way the moral point of view is understood within Kohlberg's cognitive-developmental model, and discuss the place of moral development in terms of various models of personality and decision making. The contributors are Augusto Blasi, Dwight R. Boyd, Rainer Dobert, Wolfgang Edelstein, JA1⁄4rgen Habermas, Helen Haste, Monika Keller, Lawrence Kohlberg, Charles Levine, Mordecai Nisan, Gil G. Noam, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, Bill Puka, Ernst Tugendhat, and Thomas E. Wren. Thomas E. Wren is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago. The Moral Domain is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

A lively introduction to this celebrated philosophical tradition. -/- Existentialism pervades modern culture, yet if you ask most people what it means, they won’t be able to tell you. In this lively and topical introduction, Wartenberg reveals a vibrant mode of philosophical inquiry that addresses concerns at the heart of the existence of every human being. Wartenberg uses classic films, novels, and plays to present the ideas of now-legendary Existentialist thinkers from Nietzsche and Camus to Sartre and Heidegger and to (...) explore central concepts, including Freedom, Anxiety, and the Absurd. Special attention is paid to the views of Simone de Beauvoir and Franz Fanon, who use the theories of Existentialism to address gender and colonial oppression. (shrink)

David Ekdahl (2023), in a constructive and thoughtful commentary, outlines both points of agreement with and suggestions for further research arising from our paper ‘Crossing the Fictional Line: Moral Graveness, the Gamer’s Dilemma, and the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far’ (Montefiore & Formosa, 2023).

Examining the ways in which philosophers from Plato onwards have used the concept of power, this work develops a field theory of power that rejects many of the reigning assumptions made about power. Incorporating the insights of feminist theorists, it argues that power has a positive as well as a negative role to play in social relations.

Abstract:Romeo and Juliet is one of the first works to emphasize the important place that romantic love holds in the lives of two individuals. Less frequently acknowledged is the role of romantic love in the play's criticism of feudal society. Using the notion of an unlikely couple, I explore the play's critique of feudal society for allowing the antagonism between the two lovers' noble households to undermine the possibility of their finding true love. The play argues for the importance of (...) a strong, centralized state in securing the welfare of its citizens. (shrink)