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  1. (1 other version)Does moral ignorance exculpate?Elizabeth Harman - 2011 - Ratio 24 (4):443-468.
    Non-moral ignorance can exculpate: if Anne spoons cyanide into Bill's coffee, but thinks she is spooning sugar, then Anne may be blameless for poisoning Bill. Gideon Rosen argues that moral ignorance can also exculpate: if one does not believe that one's action is wrong, and one has not mismanaged one's beliefs, then one is blameless for acting wrongly. On his view, many apparently blameworthy actions are blameless. I discuss several objections to Rosen. I then propose an alternative view on which (...)
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  2. The Irrelevance of Moral Uncertainty.Elizabeth Harman - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 10.
    Suppose you believe you’re morally required to φ‎ but that it’s not a big deal; and yet you think it might be deeply morally wrong to φ‎. You are in a state of moral uncertainty, holding high credence in one moral view of your situation, while having a small credence in a radically opposing moral view. A natural thought is that in such a case you should not φ‎, because φ‎ing would be too morally risky. The author argues that this (...)
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  3. Can we harm and benefit in creating?Elizabeth Harman - 2004 - Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1):89–113.
    The non-identity problem concerns actions that affect who exists in the future. If such an action is performed, certain people will exist in the future who would not otherwise have existed: they are not identical to any of the people who would have existed if the action had not been performed. Some of these actions seem to be wrong, and they seem to be wrong in virtue of harming the very future individuals whose existence is dependent on their having been (...)
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  4. Harming as causing harm.Elizabeth Harman - 2009 - In David Wasserman & Melinda Roberts (eds.), Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem. Springer. pp. 137--154.
    This paper argues that non-identity actions are wrong because they _cause_ harm to people. While non-identity actions also typically benefit people, failure to act would similarly benefit someone, so considerations of benefit are ineligible to justify the harm. However, in some non-identity cases, failure to act would not benefit anyone: cases where one is choosing whether to procreate at all. These are the _hard_ non-identity cases. Not all "different-number" cases are hard. In some cases, we don't know whether acting would (...)
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  5. Morally Permissible Moral Mistakes.Elizabeth Harman - 2016 - Ethics 126 (2):366-393.
    Does it ever happen that there are things we shouldn’t do and the reasons we shouldn’t do them are moral reasons, yet doing them is not morally wrong? Surprisingly, yes. I argue for a category that has not been recognized by moral theorists: morally permissible moral mistakes. Sometimes a supererogatory action is the thing a person should do; in failing to act, one makes a morally permissible moral mistake. Recognizing the category of morally permissible moral mistakes solves a puzzle about (...)
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  6. Transformative Experiences and Reliance on Moral Testimony.Elizabeth Harman - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):323-339.
    Some experiences are transformative in that it is impossible to imagine experiencing them until one experiences them. It has been argued that pregnancy and parenthood are like that, and that therefore one cannot make a rational decision whether to become a mother. I argue that pregnancy and parenthood are not like that; but that if even if they are, a woman can still make a rational decision by relying on testimony about the value of these experiences. I then discuss an (...)
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  7. Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion.Elizabeth Harman - 1999 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 28 (4):310-324.
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  8. The potentiality problem.Elizabeth Harman - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 114 (1-2):173 - 198.
    Many people face a problem about potentiality: their moral beliefs appear to dictate inconsistent views about the significance of the potentiality to become a healthy adult. Briefly, the problem arises as follows. Consider the following two claims. First, both human babies and cats have moral status, but harms to babies matter more, morally, than similar harms to cats. Second, early human embryos lack moral status. It appears that the first claim can only be true if human babies have more moral (...)
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  9. "I'll be glad I did it" reasoning and the significance of future desires.Elizabeth Harman - 2004 - In John Hawthorne (ed.), Ethics. Wiley Periodicals. pp. 177-199.
    We use “I’ll be glad I did it” reasoning all the time. For example, last night I was trying to decide whether to work on this paper or go out to a movie. I realized that if I worked on the paper, then today I would be glad I did it. Whereas, if I went out to the movie, today I would regret it. This enabled me to see that I should work on the paper rather than going out to (...)
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  10. The Moral Significance of Animal Pain and Animal Death.Elizabeth Harman - 2011 - In Beauchamp Tom & Frey R. G. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics,. Oxford University Press. pp. 726-737.
    This article addresses the question: “What follows from the claim that we have a certain kind of strong reason against animal cruelty?” It deals with the ethics of killing animals. It finds the following common assumption highly puzzling and problematic: despite our obligations not to commit animal cruelty, there is no comparably strong reason against painlessly killing animals in the prime of life. It argues that anyone who accepts this view is committed to the moral position that either we have (...)
     
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  11. Eating Meat as a Morally Permissible Mistake.Elizabeth Harman - 2016 - In Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo & Matthew C. Halteman (eds.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments on the Ethics of Eating. Routledge. pp. 215-231.
    Many people who are vegetarians for moral reasons nevertheless accommodate the buying and eating of meat in many ways. They go to certain restaurants in deference to their friends’ meat eating preferences; they split restaurant checks, subsidizing the purchase of meat; and they allow money they share with their spouses to be spent on meat. This behavior is puzzling. If someone is a moral vegetarian—that is, a vegetarian for moral reasons—then it seems that the person must believe that buying and (...)
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  12. "I'll be glad I did it" reasoning and the significance of future desires.Elizabeth Harman - 2004 - In John Hawthorne (ed.), Ethics. Wiley Periodicals. pp. 177-199.
    We use “I’ll be glad I did it” reasoning all the time. For example, last night I was trying to decide whether to work on this paper or go out to a movie. I realized that if I worked on the paper, then today I would be glad I did it. Whereas, if I went out to the movie, today I would regret it. This enabled me to see that I should work on the paper rather than going out to (...)
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  13. Fischer and Lamenting Nonexistence.Elizabeth Harman - 2011 - Social Theory and Practice 37 (1):129-142.
    Why do we wish to die later but do not wish to have been created earlier? There is no puzzle here. It is false that if we had been created earlier we would have lived longer lives. Why don’t we wish to have been created earlier but with our actual times of death? That wish simply is not mandated by the more general wish to have lived a longer life. Furthermore, one might prefer one’s actual life to the better, but (...)
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  14. Moral Testimony Goes Only So Far.Elizabeth Harman - 2019 - Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility 6:165-185.
    This paper argues for answers to two questions, and then identifies a tension between the two answers. First, regarding the implications of moral ignorance for moral responsibility: “Do false moral views exculpate?” Does believing that one is acting morally permissibly render one blameless? It does not. Second, in moral epistemology: “Can moral testimony provide moral knowledge?” It can (even granting some worries about moral deference). The tension: If moral testimony can provide moral knowledge, then surely it can provide justified false (...)
     
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  15. When is Failure to Realize Something Exculpatory?Elizabeth Harman - 2017 - In Philip Robichaud & Jan Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 117-126.
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  16. There is No Moral Ought and No Prudential Ought.Elizabeth Harman - 2020 - In Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 438-456.
    It may seem that there are a number of different _oughts_. There is a moral _ought_, there is a prudential _ought_, etc. Furthermore, it may seem that each _ought_ is such that one ought to do the best thing one could do, where the sense of best at issue varies with the kind of _ought_ it is. Thus, it seems that morally, a person ought to do the morally best thing she could do; and prudentially, a person ought to do (...)
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  17. Sacred mountains and beloved fetuses: can loving or worshipping something give it moral status?Elizabeth Harman - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 133 (1):55-81.
    Part One addresses the question whether the fact that some persons love something, worship it, or deeply care about it, can endow moral status on that thing. I argue that the answer is “no.” While some cases lend great plausibility to the view that love or worship can endow moral status, there are other cases in which love or worship clearly fails to endow moral status. Furthermore, there is no principled way to distinguish these two types of cases, so we (...)
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  18. How is the ethics of stem cell research different from the ethics of abortion?Elizabeth Harman - 2007 - Metaphilosophy 38 (2-3):207–225.
    It seems that if abortion is permissible, then stem cell research must be as well: it involves the death of a less significant thing (an embryo rather than a fetus) for a greater good (lives saved rather than nine months of physical imposition avoided). However, I argue in this essay that this natural thought is mistaken. In particular, on the assumption that embryos and fetuses have the full moral status of persons, abortion is permissible but one form of stem cell (...)
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  19. Moral Status.Elizabeth Harman - 2003 - Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    Chapters One through Three present the following view: I explain moral status as follows: something has moral status just in case we have, reasons not to cause harms to it simply in virtue of the badness of the harms for it. Moral status is not a matter of degree. A living thing has moral status just in case it is ever conscious. If something has moral status, then the strength of a moral reason not to harm it is proportional to (...)
     
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  20. Morality Within the Realm of the Morally Permissible.Elizabeth Harman - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 5:221-244.
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  21. Discussion of Nomy Arpaly’s Unprincipled Virtue for Philosophical studies.Elizabeth Harman - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 134 (3):433-439.
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  22. Abortion and the Non-Identity Problem.Elizabeth Harman - 2022 - In Jeff McMahan, Timothy Campbell, Ketan Ramakrishnan & Jimmy Goodrich (eds.), Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    How is the ethics of abortion related to the non-identity problem? Some cases of deciding whether to abort turn out to raise the non-identity problem: for the same reasons that it is morally required to wait to conceive in some temporary condition non-identity cases, it is also morally required to abort some pregnancies. This implies that the following surprising claim is true: sometimes it is morally required to kill a being for its own sake, although continuing to live would be (...)
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  23. Ethics is Hard! What Follows?Elizabeth Harman - 2022 - In Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press.
    When someone acts morally wrongly because they are caught in the grip of a false moral view, although they have thought a reasonable amount about morality, are they thereby blameless for so acting? Recently, a number of philosophers have embraced the view that moral ignorance does exculpate in such cases. This paper outlines an attractive line of thought according to which moral ignorance exculpates. This line of thought is mistaken: being caught in the grip of a false moral view is (...)
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  24. Is It Reasonable to ‘Rely on Intuitions’ in Ethics?Elizabeth Harman - 2015 - In Gideon A. Rosen, Alex Byrne, Joshua Cohen & Seana Valentine Shiffrin (eds.), The Norton Introduction to Philosophy. New York: W. W. Norton.
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  25. David Benatar. Better never to have been: The harm of coming into existence (oxford: Oxford university press, 2006). [REVIEW]Elizabeth Harman - 2009 - Noûs 43 (4):776-785.
    In this book, David Benatar argues that every person is severely harmed by being brought into existence, and that in bringing any person into existence one impermissibly harms that person. His conclusion is not merely that by bringing a person into existence, one harms him. That claim is compatible with the claim that by bringing a person into existence, one also greatly benefits him, and even with the claim that one never impermissibly harms someone by bringing him into existence. His (...)
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    Hare, Caspar. The Limits of Kindness.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 229. $40.00. [REVIEW]Elizabeth Harman - 2015 - Ethics 125 (3):868-872.
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