The aim of this paper is to give an account of what it is to internalize a rule. I claim that internalization is the process of redistributing the burden of instruction from the teacher to the student. The process is complete when instruction is no longer needed, and the rule has reshaped perceptual classification of the circumstances in which it applies. Teaching a rule is the initiation of this process. We internalize rules by simulating instruction coming from someone else. Running (...) these simulations enables us to toggle between the perspective of the instructor and our own perspective. By doing this we coordinate our perspectives with that of the teacher. The account given here provides a deeper explanation of why internalizing a rule involves the dispositions and reactive attitudes proponents of Rule Consequentialism often say it does, why moral reflection is variably demanding, how intergenerational moral progress is made possible by our cognitive architectures, and why the adoption of a rule should be understood in terms of teaching that rule. (shrink)

The content and boundaries of moral education the state may require schools to offer is a matter of contention. This article investigates whether the state may obligate schools to promote the pursuit of moral ideals. Moral ideals refer to (a cluster of) characteristics of a person as well as to situations or states that are believed to be morally excellent or perfect and that are not yet realised. Having an ideal typically means that the person is dedicated to realising the (...) type of situation or person to which the ideal refers. Therefore generating student enthusiasm for moral ideals may be an effective way to realise a morally excellent society. This article defends the position that schools may be required to promote the recognition of ideals that all reasonable citizens endorse. Reasonable citizens will not, however, accept that the state obligates schools to promote the pursuit of moral ideals. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a prolegomenon to the philosophy of harm reduction. I begin with an overview of the philosophical literature on both harm and harm reduction, and a brief summary of harm reduction scholarship outside of philosophy in order to make the case that philosophers have something to contribute to understanding harm reduction, and moreover that engagement with harm reduction would improve philosophical scholarship. I then proceed to survey and assess the nascent and still modest philosophy of harm (...) reduction literature that has begun to emerge. I pay particular attention to two Canadian philosophers who have called for the expansion of harm reduction beyond the realm of so-called “vice”. Finally, I sketch some of the most interesting and important philosophical issues that I think the philosophy of harm reduction must grapple with going forward. (shrink)

We sometimes decide what to do by applying moral principles to cases, but this is harder than it looks. Principles are more general than cases, and sometimes it is hard to tell whether and how a principle applies to a given case. Sometimes two conflicting principles seem to apply to the same case. To handle these problems, we use a kind of judgment to ascertain whether and how a principle applies to a given case, or which principle to follow when (...) two principles seem to conflict. But what do we discern when we make such judgments—that is, what makes such judgments correct? The obvious answer is that they are made correct by whatever makes other moral judgments correct. However, that cannot be right, for a principle can be inconsistent with morality yet still apply in a particular way to a given case. If the principle is inconsistent with morality, then morality cannot be what we discern when we judge whether and how that principle applies to a given case. I offer an alternative account of what makes such judgments correct. (shrink)

Kantian moral theories must explain how their most basic moral values of dignity and autonomy should be interpreted and applied to human conditions. One place Kantians should look for inspiration is, surprisingly, the utilitarian tradition and its emphasis on generally accepted, informally enforced, publicly known moral rules of the sort that help us give assurances, coordinate our behavior, and overcome weak wills. Kantians have tended to ignore utilitarian discussions of such rules mostly because they regard basic moral principles as a (...) priori requirements that cannot be tailored to human foibles and limitations. I argue that Kantian moral theories should incorporate public moral rules as mid-level moral requirements for embodied and socially embedded human agents. I explain how certain specific moral judgments about how we ought to act are justified by public moral rules, which are themselves justified by more fundamental moral requirements. (shrink)

RésuméLa mort d'une personne peut-elle être intrinsèquement mauvaise pour la personne qui meurt? Et pourquoi est-il mal de tuer une autre personne? Je soutiens qu'une réponse adéquate à l'une ou l'autre de ces questions requiert d'apprécier l'importance morale de l'autonomie. J'examine ici la conception dominante de ce qui rend la mort mauvaise — la théorie de la dépossession —, ainsi que deux conceptions rivales de ce qui fait qu'il est mal de tuer — la théorie de la dépossession appliquée à (...) l'acte de tuer, et la thèse des droits liminaux de Judith Thomson. Bien que mon objectif principal dans cet article soit d'établir l'importance de l' autonomie pour expliquer à lafois que la mort est mauvaise et qu'il est mal de tuer, je pense également qu'une réflexion sur ce qui rend la mort mauvaise nous apprend quelque chose au sujet des droits et de leur force, et qu'une réflexion sur les droits nous apprend quelque chose quant à ce qui fait que la mort et l'immortalité sont toutes deux de mauvaises choses. (shrink)

Ethics in the 21st century is threatened by a split between practical philosophy as a full-blown academic discipline and applied ethics as pragmatic problem-solving inside the political process. The place of the professional philosopher sitting on medical and other 'ethics committees' as an 'ethical expert' is somewhere in between. But where exactly? How is his role defined? Is the expertise he brings to bear on practical decisions of a purely technical or of a substantially moral kind? These issues are discussed (...) both 'from the outside' and 'from the inside'. First, some of the theoretical controversies surrounding 'ethical expertise' are discussed on the background of a rapidly growing literature in the field. These are then related to the realities of commission work as they confront the academic ethicist in practice. (shrink)

Supporting the rational suicide of a patient with a terminal disease is opposed by a majority of German doctors, whereas assistance in such patients’ hastening their death by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking is predominantly judged to be acceptable. Are these two positions compatible? It is argued that the normative differentiation cannot be justified by the fact that the assistance in active suicide is itself active, whereas assistance in VSED is merely passive. Even in "letting die" a patient from hastening (...) death by refusing nutrition and hydration there is an active element in the doctor's/the palliative care team's assurance that they will provide palliative support in case of need. Nor can the difference in evaluation be justified by relevant differences in the causal situation. Enabling a patient to perform VSED and assisting a patient's active suicide under the same circumstances are, as far as causal relevance is concerned, on a par. This holds, at least, on a condition view of causality in the tradition of John Stuart Mill. Finally, the paper discusses whether there are other morally relevant dimensions by which actively and passively supporting a patient suicide under the relevant circumstances differ, again with a negative result. (shrink)

Julia Driver, Timm Triplett, and Kathleen Wallace challenge my account of moral arrogance, and Triplett and Wallace challenge its application to the problem of abortion. I try to show here that Driver's attempt to defend consequentialism from my charge that it promotes moral arrogance is successful only if consequentialism explicitly gives up what has been considered one of its major virtues. I acknowledge that Triplett has uncovered some unclarity in my claim that the moral acceptability of abortion is an unresolvable (...) moral issue. I also acknowledge that Wallace has uncovered some unclarity in my account of moral arrogance. After clarifying that account, I try to meet her challenge to defend my claim that it is not morally arrogant for a state to place some restrictions on abortions. (shrink)

The ability of machines to make truly independent and autonomous decisions is a goal of many, not least of military leaders who wish to take the human out of the loop as much as possible, claiming that autonomous military weaponry—most notably drones—can make decisions more quickly and with greater accuracy. However, there is no clear understanding of how autonomous weapons should be conceptualized and of the implications that their “autonomous” nature has on them as ethical agents. It will be argued (...) that autonomous weapons are not full ethical agents due to the restrictions of their coding. However, the highly complex machine-learning nature gives the impression that they are making their own decisions and creates the illusion that their human operators are protected from the responsibility of the harm they cause. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between autonomous AI weapons and an AI with autonomy, a distinction that creates two different ethical problems for their use. For autonomous weapons, their limited agency combined with machine-learning means their human counterparts are still responsible for their actions while having no ability to control or intercede in the actual decisions made. If, on the other hand, an AI could reach the point of autonomy, the level of critical reflection would make its decisions unpredictable and dangerous in a weapon. (shrink)

Drawing upon contemporary virtue ethics theory, The Model of The Principled Advocate and The Pathological Partisan is introduced. Profiles are developed of diametrically opposed archetypes of public relations and advertising practitioners. The Principled Advocate represents the advocacy virtues of humility, truth, transparency, respect, care, authenticity, equity, and social responsibility. The Pathological Partisan represents the opposing vices of arrogance, deceit, secrecy, manipulation, disregard, artifice, injustice, and raw self-interest. One becomes either a Principled Advocate or a Pathological Partisan by habitually enacting or (...) embodying the virtues or vices in the context of professional practices. (shrink)

The article presents the author's views concerning the philosophical views regarding ethical obligation. He emphasizes the general, moral, and practical skepticism of the moral obligation. He provides information on the notions about normative externalism. The conflicting ideas between egoistic and intrapersonal are also discussed.

The question that this paper tries to answer is Q: “Can good academic bioethics be done without commitment to moral theory?” It is argued that the answer to Q is an unequivocal “Yes” for most of what we could call “critical bioethics,” that is, the kind of bioethics work that primarily criticizes positions or arguments already in the literature or put forward by policymakers. The answer is also “Yes” for much of empirical bioethics. The second part of the paper then (...) provides an analysis of Q in relation to “constructive bioethics,” that is, bioethics work aimed at providing an argument for a particular position. In this part, it is argued that a number of the approaches or methods used that initially look like they involve no commitment to moral theory, nevertheless, involve such a commitment. This is shown to be the case for reflective equilibrium, mid-level theory, the use of theory fragments, and argument by analogy. (shrink)

The most popular measure of corporate reputation is the ranking of the most admired companies. But what exactly do we admire in people and firms of good reputation? This article is about the ethical dimension of corporate reputation. It integrates the trait approach in personality psychology and philosophical ethics to the study of reputation and related concepts as a way to account for the discontinuities between reputation at the individual and corporate levels under conditions of uncertainty. Through an examination of (...) the distinction between perceptions and grounding of reputation, the article also sheds light on the explanatory power of reputation concepts and critically appraises the possibility of character and organizational virtue. (shrink)

We have two aims in this paper. The first is negative: to demonstrate the problems in Bernard Gert’s account of common morality, in particular as it applies to professional morality. The second is positive: to suggest a more satisfactory explanation of the moral basis of professional role morality, albeit one that is broadly consistent with Gert’s notion of common morality, but corrects and supplements Gert’s theory. The paper is in three sections. In the first, we sketch the main features of (...) Gert’s account of common morality in general. In the second, we outline Gert’s explanation of the source of professional moral rules and demonstrate its inadequacy. In the third section, we provide an account of our own collectivist needs-based view of the source of the role-moral obligations of many professional roles, including those of health care professionals. (shrink)

Thanks largely to the work of Robert Adams and Philip Quinn, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of interest in divine command theory as a viable position in normative theory and meta-ethics. More recently, however, there has been some dissatisfaction with divine command theory even among those philosophers who claim that normative properties are grounded in God, and as a result alternative views have begun to emerge, most notably divine intention theory (Murphy, Quinn) and divine motivation (...) theory (Zagzebski). My goal here is to outline a distinct theory, divine desire theory, and suggest that, even if it is not clearly superior to these extant views, it is at least worthy of serious consideration.1 As far as this paper is concerned, the discussion will be limited just to the deontic status of actions (obligatory, permissible, forbidden), and so no attempt will be made to also account for axiological properties such as goodness or evil. In order to get oriented to the range of deontological views in this area, consider the following three rough characterizations. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate and related issues concerning the relationship between normative reasons and moral principles.

My topic is the old debate between moral realists and moral expressivists. Although I will eventually adopt a Pyrrhonian position, as usual, my main goal is neither to argue for this position nor to resolve this debate but only to explore some new options that mix together realism and expressivism in various ways. Nothing that I say will be conclusive, but I hope that some of it will be suggestive.

Das Buch verschafft einen Überblick über die neuere Willensfreiheitsdebatte, wobei es auch die Konsequenzen der Hirnforschung für das Freiheitsproblem erörtert. Ferner entwickelt der Autor eine eigene Position, die er 'fähigkeitsbasierten Libertarismus' nennt. Er widerspricht dem breiten philosophischen Konsens, dass jedenfalls eine Art von Freiheit mit einem naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbild unverträglich sei, nämlich die Fähigkeit, sich unter gegebenen Bedingungen so oder anders zu entscheiden. Im Buch wird argumentiert, dass der libertarischen Freiheitsauffassung, die wir im Alltag alle teilen, bei näherer Betrachtung keine Tatschen (...) entgegenstehen, sondern nur philosophische Doktrinen. Zwar können wir durch unser Handeln keine Naturgesetze abändern und sind auch keine ersten Beweger, aber für ein So-oder-Anderskönnen bedarf es dessen nicht. (shrink)

This article provides an ethical analysis of the moral conflict over access to premium audio-visual online content, which is currently regulated by geo-blocking in the domain of digital film distri...

The idea of moral reform requires that morality be more than a description of what people do value, for there has to be some measure against which to assess progress. Otherwise, any change is not reform, but simply difference. Therefore, I discuss moral reform in relation to two prescriptive approaches to common morality, which I distinguish as the foundational and the pragmatic. A foundational approach to common morality (e.g., Bernard Gert’s) suggests that there is no reform of morality , but (...) of beliefs, values, customs, and practices so as to conform with an unchanging, foundational morality. If, however, there were revision in its foundation (e.g., in rationality), then reform in morality itself would be possible. On a pragmatic view, on the other hand, common morality is relative to human flourishing, and its justification consists in its effectiveness in promoting flourishing. Morality is dependent on what in fact does promote human flourishing and therefore, could be reformed. However, a pragmatic approach, which appears more open to the possibility of moral reform, would need a more robust account of norms by which reform is measured. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate in ethics.

Bernard Gert argues that, while the moral system contains a procedure for resolving most moral disagreements, it does not allow for such resolution in all cases. For example, it does not allow for the resolution of disputes about whether animals and human fetuses should be included within the scope of those to whom the moral rules apply. I agree with Gert that not all moral debates can be resolved, but I believe that Gert does not use all the argumentative resources (...) available to philosophers to resolve them. I argue that considerations outside the moral system proper can be used to provide argumentative support favoring some positions over their rivals in moral controversies that Gert regards as intractable. I illustrate this with reference to the abortion debate. I also argue that reaching such conclusions about the superiority of one position over rivals need not result in moral arrogance. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to determinewhat exactly is meant by the claimcomputer ethics is unique, a position thatwill henceforth be referred to as the CEIUthesis. A brief sketch of the CEIU debate is provided,and an empirical case involving a recentincident of cyberstalking is briefly consideredin order to illustrate some controversialpoints of contention in that debate. To gain aclearer understanding of what exactly isasserted in the various claims about theuniqueness of computer ethics, and to avoidmany of the confusions currently (...) associatedwith the term ``unique'', a precise definition ofthat term is proposed. We then differentiatetwo distinct and radically differentinterpretations of the CEIU thesis, based onarguments that can be found in the relevantcomputer ethics literature. The twointerpretations are critically analyzed andboth are shown to be inadequate in establishingthe CEIU thesis. We then examine and reject twoassumptions implicit in arguments advanced bothby CEIU advocates and their opponents. Inexposing and rejecting these assumptions, wesee why it is not necessary to accept theconclusions reached by either side in thisdebate. Finally, we defend the view thatcomputer ethics issues are both philosophicallyinteresting and deserving of our attention,regardless of whether those issues might alsohappen to be unique ethical issues. (shrink)

There are two primary traditions in philosophical theorizing about moral standing—one emphasizing Experience (the capacity to feel pain and pleasure) and one emphasizing Agency (complexity of cognition and lifestyle). In this article we offer an explanation for this divide: Lay judgments about moral standing depend importantly on two independent cues (Experience and Agency), and the two philosophical traditions reflect this aspect of folk moral cognition. In support of this two-source hypothesis, we present the results of a series of new experiments (...) providing evidence for our account of lay judgments about moral standing, and argue that these results lend plausibility to the proposed causal link between folk moral cognition and the philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Various theories have been put forward in an attempt to explain what makes moral judgments justifiable. One of the main theories currently advocated in bioethics is a form of coherentism known as wide reflective equilibrium. In this paper, I argue that wide reflective equilibrium is not a satisfactory approach for justifying moral beliefs and propositions. A long-standing theoretical problem for reflective equilibrium has not been adequately resolved, and, as a result, the main arguments for wide reflective equilibrium are unsuccessful. Moreover, (...) practical problems that arise in using the method of wide reflective equilibrium undermine the idea that it is a viable approach for justifying moral judgments about cases and policies. Given that wide reflective equilibrium is the most prominent version of coherentism, these considerations call into question the coherentist approach to justification in bioethics. (shrink)

Since the early 20th century, advocates of public relations professionalism have mandated that practitioners serve the public interest making it an ethical standard for evaluating the morality of public relations practice. However, the field has devoted little research to determining just what it means for practitioners to serve the public interest. Most research suggests practice-oriented solutions. This article focuses what practitioners must do to serve the public interest. It reviews theories of the social contract and the public interest to identify (...) an approach to serving the public interest that will help practitioners reconcile moral obligations to themselves, their client organizations, and the public. It concludes that combining superior individual interests with John Dewey's public philosophy will contribute to the moral development and improvement of practitioners and the public. (shrink)

A growing number of professional associations and occupational groups are creating codes of ethics with the goal of guiding their members, protecting service users, and safeguarding the reputation of the profession. There is a great deal of literature dealing with the question to what extent ethical codes can achieve their desired objectives. The present paper does not contribute to this debate. Its aim is rather to investigate how rational it is to comply with codes of conduct. It is natural and (...) virtually inevitable for a reflective person to ask why one should pay any attention to ethical codes, in particular if following a code is not in one’s own interest. In order to achieve the aim of this paper, I shall discuss reasons that only appear to be reasons for complying with a code. In “Code-independent reasons” section, I shall present genuine practical reasons that, however, turn out to be reasons of the wrong kind. In “Code-dependent reasons” section finally presents the most important reasons for complying with ethical codes. The paper argues that while ethical codes do not necessarily yield reasons for action, professionals can have genuine reasons for complying with a code, which may, however, be rather weak and easily overridden by reasons for deviating from the code. (shrink)

What exactly is Cyberethics? How did the field develop? What are some of the central issues and themes in this field, and what methodologies are used by those working in this area of applied ethics? These and related questions are considered in the readings included in Chapter 1. It is perhaps important to note at the outset that the field that many are now beginning to refer to as "cyberethics" has until quite recently been referred to by the more general (...) label "computer ethics." Other expressions that are also now used to refer to ethical issues involving computing and Internet technologies are "information ethics," "information technology ethics," "information and communication technology ethics," "global information ethics," and "Internet ethics." As in the case of "Internet ethics," "cyberethics" is intended to refer to ethical concerns involving the Internet, in particular. And it is primarily with ethical issues involving that particular medium that we will be concerned in this textbook of readings. It is also important to note that the expression "computer ethics" describes better the impact that computing technology in general has had for ethics as well as for our social and political institutions. Although our main concern will be with those ethical issues involving the Internet, many of the readings included in Chapter 1 are also concerned with ethical issues in a broader sense of computing technologies. Hence, the expressions "cyberethics" and "computer ethics" may, at times, be used interchangeably in this chapter. (shrink)

With the increasing degrees A.I.s and machines are applied across different social contexts, the need for implementing ethics in A.I.s is pressing. In this paper, we argue for a pluralist hybrid model for the implementation of moral A.I.s. We first survey current approaches to moral A.I.s and their inherent limitations. Then we propose the pluralist hybrid approach and show how these limitations of moral A.I.s can be partly alleviated by the pluralist hybrid approach. The core ethical decision-making capacity of an (...) A.I. based on the pluralist hybrid approach consists of two systems. The first is a deterministic algorithm system that incorporates different moral rules for making explicit moral decisions. The second is a machine learning system that calculates the value of the variables required by the application of moral principles. The pluralist hybrid system is better than the existing proposals as (i) it better addresses the moral disagreement problem of the top-down approach by including different moral principles, while (ii) it reduces the opacity of ethical decision-making compared with a bottom-up system by implementing explicit moral principles for moral decision making. (shrink)

Using tombstoning (jumping from a height into water) as an example, this article claims that public health policies and health promotion tend to assess the moral status of activities following a version of health maximizing rule utilitarianism, but this does not represent common moral experience, not least because it fails to take into account the enjoyment that various health effecting habits brings and the contribution that this makes to a good life, variously defined. It is proposed that the moral status (...) of health threatening activities should instead be defined by a version of act utilitarianism where both maximizing value and method of calculation are decided by individuals. In this account personal responsibility for health is reduced to the obligation to undertake calculations effectively, comprising of two duties; epistemic and reflective. If there is an individual epistemic duty, it is plausible to suggest that health promotion should present information in a way which facilitates it, but despite the prevalent language of autonomous choice, discussion of health promotion messages, for example, related to drinking and smoking demonstrates that this currently does not happen. Health promotion strategies should seek to encourage reflection about the harm our health effecting behaviour causes others. (shrink)

In this article, I want to demonstrate the possibility of a normative theory which, if true, would make it impossible to think of God as morally good and therefore would “disqualify” him as God. I call this theory negative altruism (NA) and regard it as the true basis of social morality, as well as the appropriate normative foundation of antitheism. The article is structured as follows: first, I clarify some basic notions I proceed from (such as antitheism, axiological atheism and (...) normative pluralism), second, I describe the normative logic of NA, and then I show why it makes impossible to present any theoretically conceivable creator of this universe as morally good. Lastly, after some remarks on why I find NA preferable to alternative normative theories, I explain in which sense it leads to antitheism. (shrink)

One natural way to argue for the existence of some subjective constraint on agents’ obligations is to maintain that without that particular constraint, agents will sometimes be obligated to do that which they lack the ability to do. In this paper, I maintain that while such a strategy appears promising, it is fraught with pitfalls. Specifically, I argue that because the truth of an ability ascription depends on an (almost always implicit) characterization of the relevant possibility space, different metaethical accounts (...) take obligation to be constrained by different senses of ability. As a result, what initially looks to be a point of consensus—that ability constrains obligation—turns out to be a point of contention, and arguments with this at the foundation are much more likely to obscure, rather than resolve, metaethical disputes. Despite this, appeals to ability in metaethics aren’t doomed to be fruitless. On the contrary, if we can independently establish a particular sense of ability as the normatively relevant one, then we have good grounds for ruling out metaethical accounts that are inconsistent with it. In the final section, I make just such an argument. What seems right about the thought that ability constrains obligation is that an agent cannot be obligated to do that which her circumstances prevent her from doing. I argue that only a sense of ability that is both epistemically and motivationally restricted adequately respects the limits of agential control. (shrink)

This paper argues that for the purposes of any sort of serious discussion about immoral conduct in sport very little is illuminated by claiming that the conduct in question is cheating. In fact, describing some behavior as cheating is typically little more than expressing strong, but thoroughly vague and imprecise, moral disapproval or condemnation of another person or institution about a wide and ill-defined range of improper advantage-seeking behavior. Such expressions of disapproval fail to distinguish cheating from many other types (...) of immoral conduct. The discussion shows that we should set the concept aside and assess the moral disapproval implied by claims of cheating by reference to the moral and other principles that underlie the practice of sport. This allows us to consider carefully the complexity of the issues that are raised when allegations of cheating are made and not be distracted by the emotionally loaded, conversation-stopping tendency of the concept. This means that some types of disputes in sport will be messy and demand more effort to resolve, but the payoff will be better informed and more thoughtful discussions and greater awareness of the moral complexity of sport and of its principled underpinnings. (shrink)

One of the most important issues in moral philosophy is whether morality can be justified by rationality. The purpose of this study is to examine Gauthier’s moral theory, focusing on the disposition of constrained maximization, which is the main thrust of his project to justify morality rationally. First of all, I shall investigate Gauthier’s assumption and condition for the rationality of the disposition of constrained maximization so as to disclose that the disposition of constrained maximization is not necessarily chosen by (...) rational agents. Then I shall explore his other arguments including ones for the reinterpretation of rationality and the self-critical reflection of rational beings, which can be considered as his further efforts to make the disposition of constrained maximization a rational choice. By exploring them, I shall attempt to indicate that those arguments are not valid so long as he clings to the maximizing conception of rationality and thereby this conception of rationality itself is not enough to provide morality with a basis. (shrink)

The notion of common morality plays a prominent role in some of the most influential theories of biomedical ethics. Here, I focus on Beauchamp and Childress’s models in the fourth and fifth edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics as well as on a revision that Beauchamp proposed in a recent article. Although there are significant differences in these works that require separate analysis, all include a role for common morality as starting point and normative framework for theory construction in combination (...) with a coherence theory of moral justification. I defend to some extent the existence and empirical significance of common morality, as delineated by Beauchamp and Childress in different versions, but criticize its normative role. It is neither convincing as a moral foundation nor well compatible with a standard coherentist justification. I suggest that the authors should give up the foundational account for a more modest account of common morality as resource of well-established moral insights and experiences, which have proved generally valid but neither sufficient nor infallible. Beauchamp’s latest proposal appears as a step in this direction; indeed, it may be the beginning of the end of his common-morality theory. (shrink)

The article traces origins of the contradiction that calls into being the polemics on the moral status of duties to close persons. Special obligations are created by the unique life narrative of an actor that makes different recipients of her actions more or less distant. Those who are less distant are “close ones.” Those who are more distant are “strangers.” The basis of this distance can be different: individual sympathy, consanguinity, belonging to cultural, territorial and political communities. Special obligations presuppose (...) that the preferential treatment of “close ones” is not only permissible but obligatory. This feature of moral duties to close persons makes moral philosophers suspicious because they are prone to endow moral requirements with two interrelated properties: universality and the high level of generality. The main reason for this is that the typical moral duty is a duty of every human being to another human being without any further qualifications. Against the background of such duties, any preference to close persons looks like the breach of moral equality and manifestation of impermissible partiality. Though, common moral beliefs persistently include special obligations in the whole system of moral duty. R. Goodin thinks that they have a priority over positive general duties and yield to negative general duties. The empirical researches of moral evaluations which reviewed in this article in general confirm this conclusion. The ethical theory cannot ignore fundamental features of common moral beliefs. That is why it is doomed to look for ways of reconciling the moral equality and impartiality with the preferential treatment of close persons embedded into special obligations. (shrink)

Virtuous actions seem to be both habitual and rational. But if we combine an intuitive understanding of habituality with the currently predominant paradigm of rational action, these two features of virtuous actions are hard to reconcile. Intuitively, acting habitually is acting as one has before in similar contexts, and automatically, that is, without thinking about it. Meanwhile, contemporary philosophers tend to assume the truth of what I call the reasons theory of rational action, which states that all rational actions are (...) actions for reasons. Whilst interpretations of this phrase are disputed, I argue that neither of the two leading views – which I call reasons internalism and reasons externalism – makes room for habitual actions to count as actions for reasons; by the reasons theory, they cannot be rational either. I suggest one way of effecting the reconciliation which, whilst it allows us to keep the reasons theory, requires us to conceive of reasons as even more radically external than current externalists believe them to be. (shrink)

Traditional rule consequentialism faces a problem sometimes called the ideal world objection—the worry that by looking only at the consequences in worlds where rules are universally adhered to, the theory fails to account for problems that arise because adherence to rules in the real world is inevitably imperfect. In response, recent theorists have defended sophisticated versions of rule consequentialism which are sensitive to the consequences in worlds with less utopian levels of adherence. In this paper, I argue that these attempts (...) underestimate the problem they are designed to avoid—the worry about ideal worlds is only one manifestation of a deeper and more general problem, the distant world objection, which threatens not only the sophisticated revisions of rule consequentialism, but any view which determines what we ought to do by evaluating worlds that differ from ours in more than what is up to us. (shrink)

In order to establish that judgments about practical reasons can be objective, it is necessary to show that the applicable standards provide an adequate account of truth and error. This in turn requires that these standards yield an extensive set of substantive, publicly accessible judgments that are presumptively true. This output requirement is not satisfied by the standards of universalizability, consistency, coherence, and caution alone. But it is satisfied if we supplement them with the principle that desire is a source (...) of minimal reasons. This principle is justified despite currently fashionable arguments against the claims of desire. (shrink)

Crucible experiences are essential in the development of leaders. Crucibles refer to trials and challenges that test and mold the character, values and behavior of leaders. Through in-depth interviews with 32 public relations leaders, we examined how crucible experiences specifically shaped them to practice servant leadership. Through the narratives they constructed about these experiences, we were able to learn specific details about these experiences, the lessons they gleaned and how they shaped and transformed their character, virtues and leadership style. These (...) insights matter, because public relations leaders have the potential to serve as ethical role models for their employees and colleagues. (shrink)