The Ethics of Putting Things Into Perspective

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (forthcoming)
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Abstract

This paper looks into the ethics of positive perspective-taking. Positive perspective-taking is, roughly, an attitudinal orientation toward an object that treats that object as sufficiently good, or in other words, as meeting one’s normative expectations. Sometimes, positive perspective-taking is both prudent and virtuous. But sometimes, positive perspective-taking–especially about injustices done to others–seems morally suspicious. When is positive perspective-taking actually morally problematic, and in those cases, what is the nature of the moral problem? I argue that a complete answer to this question should appeal to moral rights: on my view, we sometimes have moral rights against others’ putting our problems into a positive perspective. A central advantage of this proposal is its ability to account for the moral asymmetry between positive perspective-taking about injustices done to oneself and positive perspective-taking about injustices done to others.

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James Fritz
Virginia Commonwealth University

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References found in this work

On Virtue Ethics.Rosalind Hursthouse - 1999 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Doxastic Wronging.Rima Basu & Mark Schroeder - 2018 - In Brian Kim & Matthew McGrath (eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 181-205.
In Praise of Desire.Nomy Arpaly & Timothy Schroeder - 2013 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Timothy Schroeder.
Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding.Olivia Bailey - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1):50-65.
When Beliefs Wrong.Mark Schroeder - 2018 - Philosophical Topics 46 (1):115-127.

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