Mathematical knowledge and moral knowledge (or normative knowledge more generally) can seem intuitively puzzling in similar ways. For example, taking apparent human knowledge of either domain at face value can seem to require accepting that we benefited from some massive and mysterious coincidence. In the mathematical case, a pluralist partial response to access worries has been widely popular. In this paper, I will develop and address a worry, suggested by some works in the recent literature like (Clarke-Doane, 2020 ), that (...) connections between ought facts and action prevent us from giving a similarly pluralist response to moral access worries. (shrink)

The fact that our attitudes change poses well-known challenges for attitude-sensitive wellbeing theories. Suppose that in the past you favoured your adventurous youthful life more than the quiet and unassuming life you expected to live as an old person; now when you look back you favour your current life more than your youthful past life. Which period of your life is better for you? More generally, how can we find a stable attitude-sensitive standard of wellbeing, if the standard is in (...) part defined in terms of unstable attitudes? In this paper, I introduce an ‘attitudinal matrix’ framework that will help us clear up the problems posed by changing attitudes across time. In particular, it will help us see what is at stake, which principles that can or cannot be combined, and what might be the best solution. I defend a very plausible candidate constraint on a solution to the challenge of changing attitudes, which I call ‘diagonalism’. It is argued that among the three main forms of substantive attitude-sensitive wellbeing theories – the attitude-version, the object-version, and the satisfaction-version – it is the satisfaction-version that can both satisfy diagonalism and provide the best account of temporal and lifetime wellbeing. (shrink)

In this article I argue that we should understand some forms of hypocritical behaviour in terms of epistemic injustice; a type of injustice in which a person is wronged in their capacity as a knower. If each of us has an interest in knowing what morality requires of us, this can be undermined when hypocritical behaviour distorts our perception of the moral landscape by misrepresenting the demandingness of putative moral obligations. This suggests that a complete theory of the wrongness of (...) hypocrisy must account for hypocrisy as epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Many political realists endorse some notion of political normativity. They think that there are certain normative claims about politics that do not depend on moral premises. The most prominent moralist objections to political normativity have been metaethical: specifically, that political normativity is not genuinely normative; and that it is incapable of justifying normative claims. In this article, I criticize the latter metaethical objection. I argue that the objection presupposes a notion of ‘justification’ that renders it something that is no longer (...) necessarily valuable to realists. I then extend this argument to show that all metaethical objections to political normativity are unsuccessful. Furthermore, insofar as these metaethical objections purport to constrain the types of politics that realists endorse, realists should regard them as another expression of what Raymond Geuss calls ‘dead politics’. (shrink)

Should businesses engage in moral talk when it becomes profitable? Due to their particular position of visibility, it is reasonable to acknowledge that businesses have specific moral duties. Some might argue that companies ought to help abandon morally repugnant norms by providing examples of alternative behaviors through advertisements. However, the moral talk of businesses might unexpectedly reinforce repugnant norms and increase social tensions in a polarized society. Then, the duty of the companies is not fulfilled when they engage in moral (...) talk. In polarized societies, the positional duty of businesses implies decreasing the risk of social conflict. It is not clear how to do that, yet I argue that if businesses use moral talk with mass marketing strategies, they would strive to shape impartial moral messages aiming to find points of moral convergence among polarized moral positions, which might mitigate social polarization. I call this duty the imperative of doux commerce. (shrink)

Pro-life and pro-choice advocates battle for rational dominance in abortion debates. Yet, public polling (and general legal opinion) demonstrates the public’s preference for the middle ground: that abortions are acceptable in certain circumstances and during early pregnancy. Implicit in this, are two contradictory intuitions: (1) that we were all early fetuses, and (2) abortion kills no one. To hold these positions together, Harman and Räsänen have argued for the Actual Future Principle (AFP) which distinguishes between fetuses that will develop into (...) persons and those that will never develop into persons. However intellectually ingenious their solutions are, they fail to account for a third intuition: that the death of a wanted fetus – e.g. through termination or miscarriage – is of moral significance. Not only is this practically important, but it is also supported by public opinion. The authors of this paper argue that relational ontology can modify the AFP to better account for all three intuitions. Furthermore, it further emphasizes the pivotal role of the pregnant person who relates to their own fetus in either personal or impersonal ways. Addressing the fundamental challenges of relational ontology, the authors defend the position that human personal identity is ultimately relational. (shrink)

Interventions designed to promote perspective taking are increasingly prevalent in educational settings, and are also being considered for applications in other domains. Thus far, these perspective-taking interventions (PTIs) have largely escaped philosophical attention, however they are sometimes _prima facie_ morally problematic in at least two respects: they are neither transparent nor easy to resist. Nontransparent or hard-to-resist PTIs call for a moral defense and our primary aim in this paper is to provide such a defense. We offer two arguments for (...) the view that an exemplar PTI is morally permissible even though it is plausibly neither transparent nor easy to resist. The first argument appeals to an analogy between PTIs and permissible deceptive research practices. The second appeals to the way in which PTIs draw participants’ attention to their reasons for action. We also respond to the objection that, by imposing a particular conception of the good, PTIs violate liberal neutrality. (shrink)

It is a common thought that our experience of self in time plays a crucial role in living a good human life. This idea is seen both in views that say we must think of our lives as temporally extended wholes to live well and those that say living well requires living in the moment. These opposing views share the assumption that a person’s interests must be identified with either a temporally extended or temporally local perspective. David Velleman has argued (...) that both perspectives are necessary parts of human experience, and each has its own independent interests. I agree with Velleman that our experience is inherently multi-perspectival but argue that there are more than two relevant perspectives and reject the claim that these perspectives have independent interests. Expanding his metaphor of narrative, I describe the way in which these perspectives continuously influence and affect one another, and suggest that living well can be understood in terms of skillful management of the perspectives that make up this complex form of temporal self-experience. (shrink)

Well-being depends not only on _what_ happens but also on _when_ it happens. There are temporal aspects of well-being, and to a large extent those aspects are about relative timing—about being “in-tact.” On the one hand, there is a perspectival aspect about being in-tact with one’s past, present, and future or, in a less involved sense, with one’s life as a whole. On the other hand, there is a synchronization aspect of being in-tact; and this aspect occurs on different levels: (...) It might be about the alignment between different temporal domains—such as time as individually perceived and physical or intersubjective time. Or it might be about a single domain, especially the inner dynamics of individual time. The danger of not experiencing and acknowledging the relational character of these different timings likely leads to a substantial loss in the variety of human experience. Important aspects of subjective and intersubjective experience might fade away. The present paper discusses these aspects of well-being along the lines of distinctions and concepts prominently used in the metaphysics and the phenomenology of time. Thus, the paper also aims to complement the existing literature by bringing together important strands of current philosophical research. (shrink)

How we live our lives depends on how we relate to our past, present and future. The article focusses on the relation to our future. The target of my critique is a “planning conception” that imagines the future as a realm that we can rationally plan and form in light of our ends. In the first section I present an outline of the planning conception, building on Bratman’s planning theory and Rawls’ idea of a life plan. The second section highlights (...) the attractions of the planning conception. I argue that this conception offers a prima facie intriguing view of the temporality of human life. It promises a life in which we can control the passage of time. The third section reveals severe limitations of the planning conception. I question the claim that plans are central to our self-understanding and to a good life. The planning conception tends to distort the temporality of human life with respect to past, present and future. Given this diagnosis, I sketch an alternative in the last section of the paper. I explore the temporal specifics of ways of understanding oneself as a person and argue that both the formation and the very form of these ‘ways of being’ do not follow the logic of planning. (shrink)

According to the relational egalitarian theory of justice, justice requires that people relate as equals. To relate as equals, many relational egalitarians argue, people must (i) regard each other as equals, and (ii) treat each other as equals. In this paper, we argue that, under conditions of background injustice, such relational egalitarians should endorse affirmative action in the ways in which (dis)esteem is attributed to people as part of the regard-requirement for relating as equals.

Suppose that a patient is receiving treatment options from her doctor. In one case, the doctor says, “the surgery has a 90% survival rate.” Now, suppose the doctor instead said, “the procedure has a 10% mortality rate.” Predictably, the patient is more likely to consent on the first description and more likely to dissent on the second. This is an example of a framing effect. A framing effect occurs when “the description of [logically-equivalent] options in terms of gains (positive frame) (...) rather than losses (negative frame) elicits systematically different choices.” Framing effects are ubiquitous, but they are particularly troublesome in medicine. Many worry that there is tension between valuing informed consent and using framing effects in clinical settings. In this paper, I answer this question: if an individual is subject to a framing effect when she gives her consent, does this undermine the validity of her consent? I argue that framing effects do not undermine consent in general. (shrink)

This paper discusses the pluralist theory of reparations for historical injustice offered by Daniel Butt (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24(5):1161–75, 2021). Butt attempts to vindicate purely past-regarding corrective duties in response to Alasia Nuti’s historical-structural model of reparations. I agree with Butt that reparative justice requires both past-regarding and future-looking structural duties. And I agree with him that Nuti’s model leaves out purely past-regarding duties. I argue, however, that Butt does not offer a genuinely pluralist account. I present minimal (...) necessary conditions for past-regarding (corrective) justice and demonstrate that the past-regarding duties Butt advocates do not meet these conditions. The past-regarding duties Butt offers collapse into the kinds of distributive (structural) duties from which he attempts to separate them. Yet, I suggest these shortcomings are instructive and sketch a path forward for a genuinely pluralist account of reparations. A genuinely pluralist account must follow this path in order to vindicate the intuitions that motivate both past-regarding duties and the structural injustice model. (shrink)

Care exploitation is a pervasive yet undertheorized injustice that emerges in both our interpersonal and structural relationships. Among those that are particularly vulnerable to this injustice are activists, those invested in bringing about positive change precisely because of how deeply they care about a given cause. Care exploitation occurs when an individual with caring attitudes is called to aid in the flourishing of a subject (e.g., LGBTQ + rights, anti-racism, conservation) by another that presumes they will answer said call simply (...) because they care. In this work I offer an account of what it takes to prevent care exploitation in the narrow context of activism. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young, I argue that we have a political responsibility to (at the very least) adopt a stance of solidarity with activists by virtue of our structural relationships with them. This demands two things of us: (i) being sensitive to activists’ well-being and (ii) supporting their capacity for self-authorship. (shrink)

Are police officers morally justified in issuing unsolicited personal safety advice to women? Such advice often attracts accusations of ‘victim blaming’, although prevention advice remains a common tool used by police to address many crime and safety risks. While some examples of police advice are clearly outrageous, this article considers whether there is a place for ‘sound’ advice, i.e., advice that is proportionate, easy to follow, empirically justified, and objectively likely to reduce harm. To explore this, the article proposes a (...) thought experiment that compares safety advice dealing with threats to women from human sources with safety advice issued in response to natural phenomena, such as flooding. It argues that, despite apparent differences, safety advice addressing risks from humans and natural phenomena are relevantly similar. Consequently, if advice dealing with natural phenomena is morally justified then advice to women about human threats is also morally justifiable. Nevertheless, the article also considers whether the purported prevalence of sexism in policing may make safety advice for women morally problematic. While levels of sexism in policing may vary across time and location, it is argued that safety advice would be morally justified even if sexism was widespread among police officers. Finally, the article considers whether crime prevention advice may backfire by effectively curtailing women’s freedoms. Rather than curtailing freedom, however, it is argued that sound advice may actually enable women to flourish by helping them overcome fear of crime and achieve non-instrumental goals that they have set for themselves. (shrink)

Health institutions recommend that young infants be exclusively breastfed on demand, and it is widely held that parents who can breastfeed have an obligation to do so. This has been challenged in recent philosophical work, especially by Fiona Woollard. Woollard’s work critically engages with two distinct views of parental obligation that might ground such an obligation—based on maximal benefit and avoidance of significant harm—to reject an obligation to breastfeed. While agreeing with Woollard’s substantive conclusion, this paper (drawing on philosophical discussion (...) of the ‘right to rear’) argues that there are several more moderate views of parental obligation which might also be thought to ground parental obligation. We first show that an obligation to breastfeed might result not from a general obligation to maximally benefit one’s child, but from what we call ‘choice-specific’ obligations to maximise benefit within particular activities. We then develop this idea through two views of parental obligation—the Dual Interest view, and the Best Custodian view—to ground an obligation to exclusively breastfeed on demand, before showing how both these more moderate views fail. Finally, we argue that not only is there no general obligation to breastfeed children, but that it is often morally right not to do so. Since much advice from health institutions on this issue implies that exclusive breastfeeding on demand is the best option for all families, our argument drives the feeding debate forward by showing that this advice often misrepresents parents’ moral obligations in potentially harmful ways. (shrink)

Testimony of oppression is testimony that something constitutes or contributes to a form of oppression, such as, for example, “The stranger’s comment was sexist.” Testimony of oppression that is given by members of the relevant oppressed group has the potential to play an important role in fostering a shared understanding of oppression. Yet, it is frequently dismissed out of hand. Against the background of a recent debate on moral testimony, this paper discusses the following question: How should privileged hearers approach (...) testimony of oppression if they aim to do so in an ethically and epistemically sound way? Should they defer or try to understand? Both strategies constitute ways of learning from testimony of oppression. However, they differ in important respects and exclude each other. Because testimony of oppression is often based on personal experience, empathizing with the speaker can play an important role in trying to understand testimony of oppression. While the fact that empathy can change your mind and the advantages of understanding over knowledge support trying to understand as the right approach to testimony of oppression, considerations of the “limits of empathy” and the value of deference support deferring. I argue that, on balance, these contrasting arguments allow for a limited defense of the role of empathy in learning from testimony of oppression. We should try to understand testimony of oppression by empathizing with the speaker, but not treat our ability to understand as a condition on accepting a speaker’s claim. (shrink)

It has become increasingly common to endorse and implement anonymous grading as a way of promoting fairness or equality of opportunity in the classroom. The American Philosophical Association currently recommends anonymous grading, as do the Canadian Philosophical Association, the British Philosophical Association, the Society for Women in Philosophy, and Minorities and Philosophy. Despite its increasing prevalence, the practice has received surprisingly little attention in applied ethics. This paper begins filling this gap. I start by clarifying the ‘Standard Argument’ from fairness (...) or equality of opportunity for anonymous grading. I then argue that the Standard Argument fails to support current models for anonymous grading. The issue: current models for anonymous grading are practically self-undermining if the aim is to reduce violations of equality of opportunity or fairness. So, if we want to address bias in grading because we care about equality of opportunity or fairness, we need to change how we do it. (shrink)

In today’s highly dynamic societies, moral norms and values are subject to change. Moral change is partly driven by technological developments. For instance, the introduction of robots in elderly care practices requires caregivers to share moral responsibility with a robot (see van Wynsberghe 2013 ). Since we do not know what elements of morality will change and how they will change (see van der Burg 2003 ), moral education should aim at fostering what has been called “moral resilience” (Swierstra 2013 (...) ). We seek to fill two gaps in the existing literature: (i) research on moral education has not paid enough attention to the development of moral resilience; (ii) the very limited literature on moral resilience does not conceptualise moral resilience in relation to new technological developments. We argue that philosophical accounts of moral education need to do justice to the importance of moral resilience, and that a specific form of moral resilience should be conceptualised as “technomoral resilience” to underline the added value of cultivating moral resilience in relation to technomoral change. We illustrate the role of technomoral resilience in practice by looking at the context of elderly care. To make the first step towards an account of how technomoral resilience can be fostered in moral education, we propose that moral education shall focus on a triangle of capacities: (1) moral imagination, (2) a capacity for critical reflection, and (3) a capacity for maintaining one’s moral agency in the face of disturbances. (shrink)

In this paper, findings from research in neuroscience of morality will be reviewed to consider the purposes of moral education. Particularly, I will focus on two main themes in neuroscience, novel neuroimaging and experimental investigations, and Bayesian learning mechanism. First, I will examine how neuroimaging and experimental studies contributed to our understanding of psychological mechanisms associated with moral functioning while addressing methodological concerns. Second, Bayesian learning mechanism will be introduced to acquire insights about how moral learning occurs in human brains. (...) Based on the reviewed neuroscientific research on morality, I will examine how evidence can support the model of moral education proposed by virtue ethics, Neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy in particular. Particularly, two main aims of virtue ethics-based moral education, the habituation of virtues and the cultivation of phronesis, will be discussed as the important purposes of moral education based on neuroscientific evidence. (shrink)

The development of reasoning skills is often regarded as a central goal of ethics and philosophy classes in school education. In light of recent studies from the field of moral psychology, however, it could be objected that the promotion of such skills might fail to meet another important objective, namely the moral education of students. In this paper, I will argue against such pessimism by suggesting that the fostering of reasoning skills can still contribute to the aims of moral education. (...) To do so, I will engage with the concept of moral education, point out different ways in which reasoning skills play an essential role in it, and support these considerations by appealing to further empirical studies. My conclusion will be that the promotion of ethical reasoning skills fulfils two important aims of moral education: First, it enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs. Second, it allows them to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others. Lastly, I will refer to education in the field of sustainable development in order to exemplify the importance of these abilities. (shrink)

The focus of this special issue is on moral psychology and the goals of moral education. My focus will be considerably narrower in addressing the following question: In light of the situationist movement in psychology and philosophy, what should be the goal(s) of character education? The main conclusion will be that the central goal of character education should be modified in a certain way to make it more empirically informed. But not to worry, as this modification should be amenable to (...) most contemporary supporters of character education. (shrink)

Many believe that moral education can cause moral progress. At first glance, this makes sense. A major goal of moral education is the improvement of the moral beliefs, values and behaviors of young people. Most would also consider all of these improvements to be important instances of moral progress. Moreover, moral education is a form of social learning, and there are good reasons to think that social learning processes shape episodes of progressive moral change. Despite this, we argue that instead (...) of being a cause of moral change, the main effect of moral education is often to provide stability or continuity. In addition, we will argue that even when the conditions are right for moral education to contribute to moral change, it is far from clear that the resulting changes will always, or even most of the time, end up being progressive. (shrink)

As the normative literature on immigration has matured over the last twenty plus years, it’s become increasingly hard to make interesting, plausible, and original claims. Most issues have been discussed, and most plausible positions staked out. Valeria Ottonelli and Tiziana Torresi’s book is, then, a pleasant surprise. In a brisk 173 pages they make important tech- nical contributions and argue for an insightful approach to thinking about some problems relating to migration. I will suggest worries about both their conclusions and (...) the approach, but anyone interested in normative migration theory should read the book. (shrink)

Advances in science and technology have added to our insights into the vulnerabilities of human agency as well as to the methods of exploiting them. This has raised the stakes for efforts to clarify the concept and ethics of manipulation. Among these efforts, Robert Noggle’s influencer-centered account of manipulation has been most significant. He defines manipulative acts as those whereby an agent intentionally influences a recipient’s attitudes so that they do not conform as closely as they otherwise would to the (...) pertinent norms and ideals endorsed by the influencer. This provides a relatively simple and in many ways clear definition of manipulation. It sidesteps thorny debates about autonomy, freedom, or practical rationality. It also promises to reveal a conceptual parallel between manipulating and lying, and thus to explain why manipulation is pro tanto wrong. In one respect, however, the account remains ambiguous: It remains unclear whether, and to what extent, it requires that influencers’ beliefs about what is ideal for their recipients to be grounded in some effort on the part of the influencer to identify with or take on the role of her recipient. This paper explains this ambiguity. It argues that influencer-centrism cannot remain indifferent to the validity of an agent’s beliefs about the ideal state of the recipient and provide an identification requirement that would render the whole account plausible and sufficiently determinate. (shrink)

Instrumentalism about need suggests that the significance of an agent's need for x depends on the end for which x is needed. Instrumental accounts have, however, been vague about the transfer or transmission of normative significance supposed to be occurring from ends to needs. How should such transmission be understood, and how can we assess the amount or degree of significance being transmitted in particular cases? The Relational Account (RA) combines work on normative transmission principles and the strength of reasons (...) in order to clarify these issues. RA, it is argued, both (1) improves the instrumental view on need and (2) can be used to analyze and assess a large range of needs and arguments from need-including 'basic needs', which some argue require non-instrumental explanation. While the paper develops an instrumental view, the analysis of the normativity of the needs-end relation will also be helpful for clarifying instrumental relations between different kinds of need in non-instrumentalist theories-such as relations between 'absolute' and intermediate needs. (shrink)

The debate around epistemic partiality in friendship presents us with several tough philosophical puzzles. One of these has been articulated in two objections to the view that friendship can require epistemic partiality on the grounds it is incompatible with the nature of friendship. The first, owed to Crawford, argues that you should not treat your friends with epistemic partiality because your beliefs about your friends should be responsive to the facts about them, and epistemic partiality is incompatible with this demand. (...) The second, owed to Mason, draws on a Murdochian account of love to argue that loving relationships—such as friendship—are ‘epistemically rich states’, which means that they are constituted by a drive towards ever greater and more intimate knowledge of our loved ones. In this paper, I shall argue that epistemic partiality may indeed limit what we know about our friends, but not in ways that diminish the quality of our love for them, and certainly not in ways that block us from being friends with them. (shrink)