Philippa Foot’s virtue ethics remains an intriguing but divisive position in normative ethics. For some, the promise of grounding human virtue in natural facts is a useful method of establishing normative content. For others, the natural facts on which the virtues are established appear naively uninformed when it comes to the empirical details of our species. In response to this criticism, a new cohort of neo-Aristotelians like John Hacker-Wright attempt to defend Foot by reminding critics that the facts at stake (...) are not claimed to be explanatory descriptions of the kind provided by empirical science. Instead, they are derived from a logical form that is presupposed when we categorize something as a living organism. Neo-Aristotelian naturalism is therefore said to be immune to the empirical defeaters put forward as criticism of the theory. I argue that neo-Aristotelians like Hacker-Wright can only rescue Foot’s naturalism from being uninformed by exposing it to an indeterminacy objection: if claim.. (shrink)

A key objection to naturalistic versions of moral realism is that the (meta)semantics to which they are committed yields incorrect semantic verdicts about so-called Moral Twin Earth cases. Recently, it has been proposed that the Moral Twin Earth challenge can be answered by adopting a neo-Aristotelian semantics for moral expressions. In this paper, I argue that this proposal fails. First, however attractive the central claims of neo-Aristotelianism are, they do not for us have the status of analytic constraints on the (...) use of ethical expressions, as they must if they are to block Moral Twin Earth counterexamples. Second, even when the neo-Aristotelian’s claims are taken as non-negotiable analytic constraints, the semantics faces a dilemma: if characteristic human functioning is understood in an ethically neutral way, the semantics yields an incorrect intension for ‘good human.’ If human functioning is understood in an ethically partisan way, the semantics fails to avoid problematic Moral Twin Earth counterexamples. (shrink)

The neo-Aristotelian virtue theory of Philippa Foot is presented here as an alternative framework that is arguably more useful than deontological approaches and that relies less on the assertions of moral claims about the intrinsic goodness of foundational principles. Instead, this project focuses more on cultivating a true ethic; that is, a set of tools and propositions to enable individuals to negotiate inevitable conflicts among moral values and challenges posed by cultural contexts and technology use. Foot's ?natural normativity? connects the (...) conditions of human flourishing and objective reasons for acting morally, providing a framework for a digital media ethic to address three critical categories: virtuality and authenticity, privacy and autonomy, and exchange and discourse. (shrink)

It is known that people have been getting distressed for a long‐time and healthcare workers, like the military, seem to fit criteria for being at particular risk. Fairly recently a term of art, moral distress, has been added to types of distress at work, though not restricted to work, they can suffer. There are recognized scales that measure psychological distress such as the General Health Questionnaire and the Kessler scales but moral distress it is claimed is different warranting its own (...) scale. This seems to be because of both the intensity and nature of moral problems encountered at work that is so powerful and so destructive of moral agency and integrity. This paper will focus on how, if at all, moral distress is different by examining the idea of moral normativity. Moral normativity is understood as roughly the sort of thing that all rational persons would endorse regardless of his interests, having an “automatic reason giving force” and is likely to also require an overriding force. Specifically, it will examine how this force of moral claims seems to be needed for moral distress to be so destructive of healthcare professional's moral agency and integrity. This is related to the idea of warrantedness of the reaction of distress. Even if morality had such a strong normativity, one can still ask is distress the correct or warranted reaction? It seems plausible that if distress is a correct response for it to be both moral and warranted it needs a strong account of moral normativity. The idea of a distinct form of distress as moral distress may be true in theory but is too contested both ontologically and epistemologically for a useful practice of measurement at present. (shrink)

Scott Woodcock has levied a number of objections against Aristotelian naturalism which claims that ethical norms are grounded by reason and biology. His most recent “membership objection” is a synthesis of earlier objections and consists in a trilemma. If Aristotelian naturalists answer the first horn of the trilemma by stipulating that determinations of species-membership are grounded non-empirically, and the second horn of the trilemma by stipulating rationality is species-specific, then they are confronted by a moral outsider—someone who claims that they (...) have non-empirically determined their species membership and are thus guided by different norms of rationality than the rest of us. This permits the moral outsider to act heinously without moral sanction from Aristotelian naturalism. Critics have neglected Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian naturalism. And he has faced moral-outsider-type counterexamples before. I develop a new response to counterexamples MacIntyre’s account has faced and argue that MacIntyre’s Aristotelian naturalism is able to answer Woodcock’s membership objection. I do this by developing an empirical taxonomy-based approach that enables us to justify the moral outsider’s responsibilities while preserving the best of Aristotelian naturalism. (shrink)

I argue that Alasdair MacIntyre has important resources to provide in the debate over the moral status of severely disabled people. In contrast, Gregory Poore suggests that MacIntyre’s virtue theory cannot account for our responsibilities to severely disabled people. Given that MacIntyre bases his theory around community membership, this charge is made especially severe in the case of severely disabled strangers. I present an interpretation of MacIntyre that accounts for responsibilities to severely disabled strangers. I then argue that Poore is (...) wrong to conclude that MacIntyre does not include severely disabled people in communities. (shrink)

The central claim of Aristotelian naturalism is that moral goodness is a kind of species-specific natural goodness. Aristotelian naturalism has recently enjoyed a resurgence in the work of philosophers such as Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Thompson. However, any view that takes moral goodness to be a type of natural goodness faces a challenge: Granting that moral goodness is natural goodness for human beings, why should we care about being good human beings? Given that we are rational creatures who (...) can ‘step back’ from our nature, why should we see human nature as authoritative for us? This is the authority-of-nature challenge. In this essay, I state this challenge clearly, identify its deep motivation, and distinguish it from other criticisms of Aristotelian naturalism. I also articulate what I consider the best response, which I term the practical reason response. This response, however, exposes Aristotelian naturalism to a new criticism – that it has abandoned the naturalist claim that moral goodness is species-specific natural goodness. Thus, I argue, Aristotelian naturalists appear to face a dilemma: Either they cannot answer the authority-of-nature challenge, or in meeting the challenge they must abandon naturalism. Aristotelian naturalists might overcome this dilemma, but doing so is harder than some Aristotelians have supposed. In the final sections of the paper, I examine the difficulties in overcoming the dilemma, and I suggest ways that Aristotelians might answer the authority-of-nature challenge while preserving naturalism. (shrink)

This article responds to a common criticism of Aristotelian naturalism known as the Pollyanna Problem, the objection that Aristotelian naturalism, when combined with recent empirical research, generates morally unacceptable conclusions. In developing a reply to this objection, I draw upon the conception of human nature developed by the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius, and build up an account of ethical naturalism that provides a satisfying response to the Pollyanna Problem while also preserving what is most attractive about Aristotelian naturalism.

Recent defenders of Philippa Foot, such as Michael Thompson and John Hacker-Wright, have argued that it is a mistake to think that Ft aims to justify a substantive conception of human soundness and defect. instead, she relies on the acceptance of certain groundless moral norms to underwrite her views about what is characteristically human. I maintain that this is a weakness and that the Footian-style proponent of natural normativity needs to provide a story about how we might achieve justified self-confidence (...) regarding moral norms. In this paper, I offer a coherentist model for doing so, thereby addressing the justification gap. (shrink)

Prima facie the norms of natural-teleology conflict with norms of morality and rationality. Morality often rejects behaviours that can promote natural-success, and we can have reasons to act in ways that conflict with natural-imperatives. That’s a problem for Attributivism, which dictates that what one ought to do is exhausted in satisfying the standards of one’s kind, and thus that members of natural-kinds ought ultimately to do that which is naturally good. I argue that standard responses are inadequate. I argue further (...) however that the impression of conflict owes to a failure to appreciate the context-sensitivity and holistic interdependence of natural-norms. Natural-norms fluctuate relative to circumstance and to the needs of overall flourishing; once that’s clearly understood, not only does the impression of conflict between natural and moral/rational norms resolve, but we find Attributivism plausibly explains many rational/moral practices/intuitions. (shrink)

A basic challenge to naturalistic moral realism is that, even if moral properties existed, there would be no way to naturalistically represent or track them. Here, the basic structure for a tracking account of moral epistemology is given in empirically respectable terms, based on a eudaimonist conception of morality. The goal is to show how this form of moral realism can be seen as consistent with the details of evolutionary biology as well as being amenable to the most current understanding (...) of representationalist or correspondence theories of truth. (shrink)