Online research in philosophy

Why should we deliberate? I discuss a Kantian response to this query and argue that we cannot as rational beings avoid deliberation in principle; and that we have good reasons to consider the value and strength of Kant's philosophical investigations concerning fundamental moral issues and their relevance for the question of why we ought to deliberate. I also argue that deliberation is a wide duty. This means that it has to be set as an end, that it is meritorious, and that we cannot specify exactly what acts can be identified with it or are required for its realization. I begin by discussing why we cannot avoid deliberation in principle, that deliberation is a wide duty and why we ought to set it as an end. In the second part I argue how deliberation can be acknowledged in cosmopolitan education, and how we can inquire into the quality of communication in terms of deliberation in such an education or elsewhere.

I argue that any theory of moral obligation must be able toexplain two things: why we cannot be thrust into a moraldilemma through no fault of our own, and why we can get intoa moral dilemma through our own negligence. The most intuitivetheory of moral obligation cannot do so. However, I offer atheory of moral obligation that satisfies both of these criteria,one that is founded on the principle that if you are required todo something, then you would be blameworthy for failing to do it.I conclude by relating these results to the current literatureon moral dilemmas.

Moral obligation is a demand of reason—a demanding kind of rational justification. How to understand this rational demand? Much recent philosophy, as in the work of Scanlon, takes obligatoriness to be a reason-giving feature of an action. But the paper argues that moral obligatoriness should instead be understood as a mode of justificatory support—as a distinctive justificatory force of demand. The paper argues that this second model of obligation, the Force model, was central to the natural law tradition in ethics, is truer to everyday intuition about obligation, and also changes our understanding of the problem of moral rationality. A new account is given of why it might be irrational to breach moral obligations. The Force model also sheds new light on moral responsibility, our responsibility for meeting moral obligations. Moral obligation is a standard of reason; but moral responsibility is shown to involve far more than ordinary rational appraisability, precisely because moral obligation involves a distinctive justificatory force of demand—one which specifically governs how we act. Key Words: blame • moral responsibility • natural law • normativity • obligation • reason.

What is the role of drama in moral education? This article aims to illustrate how watching and responding to plays is a useful pedagogical exercise by which to enhance moral consciousness, so that students can appreciate the value of context in moral reflection. I argue that plays contain compelling studies of moral subjects caught in complex dilemmas, through which the often ambiguous and paradoxical dimensions of moral conduct are exposed. I also suggest that class discussions that involve students in critical assessments of ethical issues addressed in a play are valuable for guiding students to develop a kind of moral reasoning that is based on identifying and evaluating the contextual variables underlying moral choices, before judging moral responses. This is the kind of moral deliberation that is useful for assessing moral agency in daily life. Furthermore, I demonstrate that contemporary Canadian drama offers useful fictional contexts to illuminate the intricate processes of moral response, and I cite concrete examples to illustrate the kinds of moral scenarios recent Canadian plays offer for critical deliberation.

This essay develops a new account of the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. Imaginative resistance is best conceived of as a limited phenomenon. It occurs when we try to engage imaginatively with different moral worlds that are insufficiently articulated so that they do not allow us either to quarantine our imaginative engagement from our normal moral attitudes or to agree with the expressed moral judgment from the perspective of moral deliberation. Imaginative resistance thus reveals the central epistemic importance that empathy plays for our understanding of rational agents in a context where we try to make sense of the moral appropriateness of their reasons for acting. Reflecting on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance allows us to recognize important features of the relationship between imaginative perspective taking and ordinary moral deliberation.

Our lives are such that moral wrongdoing is sometimes inescapable for us. We have moral responsibilities to persons which may conflict and which it is wrong to violate even when they do conflict. Christopher W. Gowans argues that we must accept this conclusion if we are to make sense of our moral experience and the way in which persons are valuable to us. In defending this position, he critically examines the recent moral dilemmas debate. He maintains that what is important in this debate is not whether there are irresolvable moral conflicts, but whether there are moral conflicts in which wrongdoing is unavoidable. Though it would be incoherent to conclude moral deliberation by deciding to perform incompatible actions, he argues that there is nothing incoherent in supposing that we have conflicting moral responsibilities. In this way, he shows that it is possible to capture the intuitions of those who have defended the idea of moral dilemmas while meeting the objections of those who have rejected this idea. Gowans carefully evaluates utilitarian and Kantian analyses of moral dilemmas. He argues that these approaches eliminate genuine moral conflict only by displacing persons as direct objects of moral concern. As an alternative, he develops a more concrete account in which moral responsibilities to persons are central. The book also includes discussions of Melville's Billy Budd, methodology in moral philosophy, moral pluralism, moral tragedy, and "dirty hands" in politics.

Beginning from an analysis of moral obligation's form that I defend in The Second-Person Standpoint as what we are answerable for as beings with the necessary capacities to enter into relations of mutual accountability, I argue that this analysis has implications for moral obligation's substance. Given what it is to take responsibility for oneself and hold oneself answerable, I argue, it follows that if there are any moral obligations at all, then there must exist a basic pro tanto obligation not to undermine one another's moral autonomy.

Israel Scheffler views moral education as having two major objectives: inculcating minimum standards of decent conduct and developing rationality in moral deliberation and judgment. The latter is to be achieved by engaging students in discussions of moral issues in such a way that they come to appreciate and follow standards of rational deliberation and judgment – standards that Scheffler explicates primarily in terms of impartiality. This paper argues that the conception of rational moral deliberation and discussion underlying Scheffler's approach to moral education is inadequate, and suggests an alternative conception that gives far more prominence to the problem of interpreting the meaning of substantive moral concepts and determining how they apply to particular cases.

Advocates of particularism in moral philosophy (e.g. Prichard, Dancy, McDowell) hold that moral theory contributes little if anything to moral deliberation, claiming that we do best in moral judgement by relying on our intuitive moral sensitivities to situations rather than on general principles. In this paper I argue that particularism lacks the resources to provide a preferable account of moral deliberation and justification.

Sunstein represents moral heuristics as rigid rules that lead us to jump to moral conclusions, and contrasts them with reflective moral deliberation, which he represents as independent of heuristics and capable of supplanting them. Following John Dewey's psychology of moral judgment, I argue that successful moral deliberation does not supplant moral heuristics but uses them flexibly as inputs to deliberation. Many of the flaws in moral judgment that Sunstein attributes to heuristics reflect instead the limitations of the deliberative context in which people are asked to render judgments.