The Emotional Construction of Morals is a book about moral judgements – the kinds of mental states we might express by sentences such as, ‘It's bad to flash your neighbors’, or ‘You ought not eat your pets’. There are three basic questions that get addressed: what are the psychological states that constitute such judgements? What kinds of properties do such judgements refer to? And, where do these judgements come from? The first question concerns moral psychology, the second metaethics and the (...) third is best construed as belonging to a domain that has been neglected in analytic value theory: the genealogy of morals. These are all separate branches of ethics, but they are interconnected. The thesis of the book is that moral judgements are emotional attitudes that refer to response-dependent properties, and that these responses have been shaped by cultural history. I call the view Constructive Sentimentalism. The first half of the book deals with sentiments, and the second half with construction. The second half also deals with relativism, because I argue that moral values are constructed differently across cultures and across individuals.Thus described, The Emotional Construction of Morals is a conventional contribution to analytic moral philosophy, taking on some of the core questions in that field and defending positions that have a long philosophical pedigree. Indeed, the theory I defend has roots in Hume and Nietzsche, though it departs from both in various ways. What makes the book somewhat unusual is that it seeks to defend traditional theories by appeal to recent work in psychology, neuroscience, anthropology and related fields. It is an exercise in methodological naturalism and committed to the view that we can answer traditional philosophical questions while treating ethics as a social science. Ethics and naturalism are hard to reconcile because ethics is a normative domain, …. (shrink)

The fact of moral disagreement when conjoined with Conciliationism, an independently attractive view about the epistemic significance disagreement, seems to entail moral skepticism. This worries those who like Conciliationism, the independently attractive view, but dislike moral skepticism. Others, equally inclined against moral skepticism, think this is a reductio of Conciliationism. I argue that they are both wrong. There is no reductio and nothing to worry about.

In this paper, I argue that in order to explain our own moral reliability, we must provide a theory of error for those who disagree with us. Any story that seeks to vindicate our own reliability must also explain how so many others have gone wrong, otherwise it is not actually a vindicatory story. Thus, we cannot claim to have vindicated our own moral reliability unless we can explain the unreliability of those who hold contrary beliefs. This, I show, requires (...) us to engage directly with cultural history, a topic which has been unfortunately obscured by the meta-ethicist’s near-exclusive focus on evolutionary challenges to moral belief. (shrink)

In response to Kuper's article Singer writes, " I show that his counter-examples are often irrelevant to what I am advocating, and he has not substantiated his extraordinary claim that the approach I advocate would 'seriously harm the poor'.".

For millennia, philosophers have speculated about the origins of ethics. Recent research in evolutionary psychology and the neurosciences has shed light on that question. But this research also has normative significance. A standard way of arguing against a normative ethical theory is to show that in some circumstances the theory leads to judgments that are contrary to our common moral intuitions. If, however, these moral intuitions are the biological residue of our evolutionary history, it is not clear why we should (...) regard them as having any normative force. Research in the neurosciences should therefore lead us to reconsider the role of intuitions in normative ethics. (shrink)

Moral Realism is a systematic defence of the idea that there are objective moral standards. Russ Shafer-Landau argues that there are moral principles that are true independently of what anyone, anywhere, happens to think of them. His central thesis, as well as the many novel supporting arguments used to defend it, will spark much controversy among those concerned with the foundations of ethics.

Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to (...) student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues, we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with the self-reports. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation. We discuss implications for several models of the relationship between philosophical reflection and real-world moral behavior. (shrink)

We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with self-report. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, (...) such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show significantly better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: Ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation. (shrink)

Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, Jesse Prinz defends the hypothesis that morality has an emotional foundation. Evidence from brain imaging, social psychology, and psychopathology suggest that, when we judge something to be right or wrong, we are merely expressing (...) our emotions. Prinz argues that these emotions do not track objective features of reality; rather, the rightness and wrongness of an act consists in the fact that people are disposed to have certain emotions towards it. In the second half of the book, he turns to a defense of moral relativism. Moral facts depend on emotional responses, and emotional responses vary from culture to culture. Prinz surveys the anthropological record to establish moral variation, and he draws on cultural history to show how attitudes toward practices such as cannibalism and marriage change over time. He also criticizes evidence from animal behavior and child development that has been taken to support the claim that moral attitudes are hard-wired by natural selection. Prinz concludes that there is no single true morality, but he also argues that some moral values are better than others; moral progress is possible. Throughout the book, Prinz relates his views to contemporary and historical work in philosophical ethics. His views echo themes in the writings of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, but Prinz supports, extends, and revises these classic theories using the resources of cutting-edge cognitive science. The Emotional Construction of Morals will stimulate and challenge anyone who is curious about the nature and origin of moral values. (shrink)

This article argues that there is no sound basis for thinking that we have a general and strong duty to rectify disparities of wealth around the world, apart from the special case where some become wealthy by theft or fraud. The nearest thing we have to a rational morality for all has to be built on the interests of all, and they include substantial freedoms, but not substantial entitlements to others' assistance. It is also pointed out that the situation of (...) the world's poor is not that of victims of disasters, but simply of less-developed technology, which can be repaired by full and free trade relations with others. The true savior of the world's poor is the businessman, not the missionary. What we do need to do is strike down barriers to commerce, rather than requisition "aid.". (shrink)

ABSTRACTModern technological means allow for meaningful interaction across arbitrary distances, while human morality evolved in environments in which individuals needed to be spatially close in order to interact. We investigate how people integrate knowledge about modern technology with their ancestral moral dispositions to help relieve nearby suffering. Our first study establishes that spatial proximity between an agent's means of helping and the victims increases people's judgement of helping obligations, even if the agent is constantly far personally. We then report and (...) meta-analyse 20 experiments elucidating the cognitive mechanisms behind this effect, which include inferences of increased efficaciousness and personal involvement. Implications of our findings for the scientific understanding of ancestral moral dispositions in modern environments are discussed, as well as suggestions for how these insights might be exploited to increase charitable giving. Our meta-analysis provides a practical example.. (shrink)

According to Peter Singer, virtually all of us would be forced by adequate reflection on our own convictions to embrace a radical conclusion about giving. The following principle, he says, is “surely undeniable” -- at least once we reflect on secure convictions concerning rescue, as in his famous case of the drowning toddler.

Moral Internalism proposes a necessary link between judging that an action is right/wrong and being motivated to perform/avoid that action. Internalism is central to many arguments within ethics, including the claim that moral judgments are not beliefs, and the claim that certain types of moral skepticism are incoherent. However, most of the basis for accepting Internalism rests on intuitions that have recently been called into question by empirical work. This paper further investigates the intuitions behind Internalism. Three experiments show not (...) only that these intuitions are not widespread, but that they are significantly influenced by normative evaluations of the situation in question. These results are taken to undermine Internalist intuitions, and contribute to the growing body of evidence showing that normative evaluations influence supposedly non-normative judgments. (shrink)

Contrary to Singer's view, Kuper asserts that there is no "royal road" to poverty relief, but intersecting roads that may take us to a place without poverty. Drawing on the works of Rawls and Marx, Kuper examines how an effective political philosophy of this kind might be developed.

In an influential paper, Peter Singer claims that affluent people have a strong obligation to relieve famine. If they fail, they allow others to die, and makes them murderers. In responding to this outrageous claim, which has given uneasy conscience to many, I show that Singer is engaged in indefensible moralizing that substitutes bullying for reasoned argument and gives a bad name to morality.

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether or not strong values might influence physicians' estimations of future events. In an empirical study about physicians' attitudes towards physician assisted suicide (PAS) we asked about the physicians' main reasons for being pro, doubtful or contra PAS and also asked them to estimate what would happen with patients' trust if PAS were to be legally accepted in Swedish society. Finally we asked the physicians about their own trust in healthcare in (...) the event of PAS being legally accepted. We found that in contrast to those who were pro PAS and doubtful, the group who were against PAS did not discriminate between their own opinion and their estimation of what they thought might happen with patients' trust in the future. Against the backdrop of the present study, we present a hypothesis maintaining that feeling strongly against controversial medical procedures is associated with being inclined to let one's own beliefs influence our capacity to interpret and estimate empirical results. We think this hypothesis merits closer examination. (shrink)

In his classic article, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, pp. 229–243), Peter Singer claimed that affluent people in the developed world are morally obligated to transfer large amounts of resources to poor people in the developing world. For present purposes I will not call Singers argument into question. While people can reasonably disagree about exactly how demanding morality is with respect to duties to the desperate, there is little question in my mind that it is much more demanding than common sense (...) morality or our everyday behavior suggests. Even someone who disagrees with this might still find some interest in seeing what a demanding morality would imply for well-off residents of the rich countries of the world. I proceed in the following way. First, I survey humanitarian aid, development assistance, and intervention to protect human rights as ways of discharging duties to the desperate. I claim that we should be more cautious about such policies than is often thought. I go on to suggest two principles that should guide our actions, based on an appreciation of our roles, relationships, and the social and political context in which we find ourselves. (shrink)

How much are we morally required to do to aid others? After articulating some of the main contributions to this debate, I defend the position that we are sometimes morally permitted to spend our time and resources satisfying our own interests and needs rather than using them to aid others who are in desperate need. I argue that the duty to aid the needy should not always take priority over every other end we have. Whatever else we value, we most (...) highly value the ability and opportunity to live our lives on our own terms; this grounds both our obligation to aid others and places limits on how far these obligations ought to extend. Persons ought to respect others and fulfill their moral obligations but they must also be given the moral space to set ends and pursue those ends just because they are theirs. (shrink)

In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person’s life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent’s intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-effect) and (2) whether the agent harms the victim in a manner that is relatively “direct” or (...) “personal”. Here we integrate these two classes of findings. Two experiments examine a novel personalness/directness factor that we call personal force, present when the force that directly impacts the victim is generated by the agent’s muscles (e.g., in pushing). Experiments 1a and b demonstrate the influence of personal force on moral judgment, distinguishing it from physical contact and spatial proximity. Experiments 2a and b demonstrate an interaction between personal force and intention, whereby the effect of personal force depends entirely on intention. These studies also introduce a method for controlling for people’s real-world expectations in decisions involving potentially unrealistic hypothetical dilemmas. (shrink)

Global poverty, hunger, and lack of access to save water raise problems of how to organize human society so that everyone's needs can be met. Philanthropic proposals, such as Peter Singer's and Peter Unger's, are based on a false analogy to duties of rescue and encourage philanthropic responses, thus closing the discourse to discussion of the causes and remedies of poverty. Radical criticism of capitalist social structures are put off the table, and this is a profound error.

Should we stop spending money on things we do not really need and send the money instead to groups that aid victims of absolute poverty? Garrett Cullity and Peter Unger have given renewed vigor to the well known argument by Peter Singer that we should do this. Like Singer, Cullity and Unger compare our duties to the poor to our duties when we encounter a victim of calamity, such as a child in danger of drowning. Singer and Unger tell us (...) what to do and why we must do it; most starkly, Unger gives us the names, addresses, and toll-free phone numbers of four organizations to which we can donate, and the book cover tells us that the author's royalties are going equally to Oxfam America and the U.S. Committee for UNICEF. Unger dissolves the divide between theory and practice. (shrink)

How much personal partiality do agent-centred prerogatives allow? If there are limits on what morality may demand of us, then how much does it permit? For a view Henry Shue has termed ‘yuppie ethics’, the answer to both questions is a great deal. It holds that rich people are morally permitted to spend large amounts of money on themselves, even when this means leaving those living in extreme poverty unaided. Against this view, I demonstrate that personal permissions are limited in (...) certain ways: their strength must be continuous with the reasons put forward to explain their presence inside morality to begin with. Typically, these reasons include non-alienation and the preservation of personal integrity. However, when personal costs do not result in alienation or violate integrity, they are things that morality can routinely demand of us. Yuppie ethics therefore runs afoul of what I call the ‘continuity constraint’. (shrink)

The Argument from Disagreement (AD) (Mackie, 1977) depends upon empirical evidence for ‘fundamental’ moral disagreement (FMD) (Doris and Stich, 2005; Doris and Plakias, 2008). Research on the Southern ‘culture of honour’ (Nisbett and Cohen, 1996) has been presented as evidence for FMD between Northerners and Southerners within the US. We raise some doubts about the usefulness of such data in settling AD. We offer an alternative based on recent work in moral psychology that targets the potential universality of morally significant (...) distinctions (e.g. means vs. side-effects, actions versus omissions). More specifically, we argue that a recent study showing that a rural Mayan population fails to perceive as morally significant the distinction between actions and omissions provides a plausible case of FMD between Mayans and Westerners. (shrink)

This paper draws on the social psychology of John Dewey to illustrate the importance of aporia, or confusion, to pragmatic pedagogywithin an ethics classroom. The strategic use of aporia solicits an appropriate expression of emotion within students. This emotional response involves dissatisfaction with the present; these dissatisfactions function as pragmatic ideals. Such ideals are not a refuge from the present, but enable students to critically and progressively reconstruct present experiences. Aporia is thus critically important for pedagogical success from a pragmatist (...) perspective. (shrink)

Moral disagreement is widely held to pose a threat for metaethical realism and objectivity. In this paper I attempt to understand how it is that moral disagreement is supposed to present a problem for metaethical realism. I do this by going through several distinct (though often related) arguments from disagreement, carefully distinguishing between them, and critically evaluating their merits. My conclusions are rather skeptical: Some of the arguments I discuss fail rather clearly. Others supply with a challenge to realism, but (...) not one we have any reason to believe realism cannot address successfully. Others beg the question against the moral realist, and yet others raise serious objections to realism, but ones that—when carefully stated—can be seen not to be essentially related to moral disagreement. Arguments based on moral disagreement itself have almost no weight, I conclude, against moral realism. (shrink)

In 1972, the young philosopher Peter Singer published "Famine, Affluence and Morality," which rapidly became one of the most widely discussed essays in applied ethics. Through this article, Singer presents his view that we have the same moral obligations to those far away as we do to those close to us. He argued that choosing not to send life-saving money to starving people on the other side of the earth is the moral equivalent of neglecting to save drowning children because (...) we prefer not to muddy our shoes. If we can help, we must--and any excuse is hypocrisy. Singer's extreme stand on our moral obligations to others became a powerful call to arms and continues to challenge people's attitudes towards extreme poverty. Today, it remains a central touchstone for those who argue we should all help others more than we do. As Bill and Melinda Gates observe in their foreword, in the age of today's global philanthropy, Singer's essay is as relevant now as it ever was. This attractively packaged, concise edition collects the original article, two of Singer's more recent popular writings on our obligations to others around the world, and a new introduction by Singer that discusses his current thinking. (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Singer’s (1972) article on ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ have debates about duties to the distant needy been marked by a high degree of controversy. Most contributors discuss how duties are established or influenced by the fact that those in need of help can be geographically close or distant. In other words, they debate the problem of duty and distance from the perspective of duties. Here, we change tack and put the concept of distance at the (...) centre of the analysis. We ask: what precisely is the definition and role of geographical distance in the different contributions? We argue that a distinction between empirical and moral disagreement over geographical distance clarifies several important aspects of the debate. The analysis also sheds new light on duties in the current European refugee crisis. (shrink)

It is common for philosophers to reject otherwise plausible moral theories on the ground that they are objectionably demanding, and to endorse “Moderate” alternatives. I argue that while support can be found within the method of reflective equilibrium for Moderate moral principles of the kind that are often advocated, it is much more difficult than Moderates have supposed to provide support for the view that morality’s demands in circumstances like ours are also Moderate. Once we draw a clear distinction between (...) Moderate accounts of the content of moral principles, and Moderate accounts of morality’s demands in circumstances like ours, we can see that defenses of Moderate views that include both of these components are subject to both methodological and substantive objections. I consider arguments for Moderate views that have been made by Samuel Scheffler and Richard Miller, and argue that both are methodologically problematic because they rely on appeals to intuitions that we have strong grounds to think are unreliable. I conclude that we must take seriously the possibility that Moderate principles, applied to well off people in circumstances like ours, imply demands that are much more extensive than Moderates typically accept. (shrink)

This paper responds to the four critiques of my book Experiments in Ethics published in this issue. The main theme I take up is how we should understand the relation between psychology and philosophy. Young and Saxe believe that “bottom line” evaluative judgments don’t depend on facts. I argue for a different view, according to which our evaluative and non-evaluative judgments must cohere in a way that makes it rational, sometimes, to abandon even what looks like a basic evaluative judgment (...) because we have changed our minds about the facts. This leads me to qualify Tiberius’s claim that our moral judgments always derive, in part, from fundamental evaluative “justificatory stopping points,” arguing that even these can themselves be adjusted in the light of scientific understanding. Weinberg and Wang object to my use of Kant’s distinction between the perspective of the senses and the perspective of the understanding, because they identify it with a distinction between scientific and philosophical worlds. I argue that a distinction of perspectives isn’t a distinction between worlds and that, in any case, the distinction is not between science and ethics. Finally, in responding to Machery’s objections to a couple of my proposals, I return to the suggestion that a coherentist epistemology is required to deal with the relations between science and ethics. (shrink)

Debate about the responsibilities of affluent people to act to lessen global poverty has dominated ethics and political philosophy for forty years. But the controversy has reached an impasse, with the main approaches either demanding too much of ordinary mortals or else letting them off the hook. In Distant Strangers I show how a preoccupation with standard moral theories and with the concepts of duty and obligation have led philosophers astray. I argue that there are serious limits to what can (...) be demanded of ordinary human beings, but that this does not mean we must abandon the moral imperative to reduce poverty. Drawing on findings from behavioral economics and psychology, I show how we can motivate better-off people to lessen poverty without excessively taxing their moral virtue. And I argue that this approach is not just pragmatically but morally appropriate. (shrink)

Acting Now to End World Poverty Peter Singer. were our own, and we cannot deny that the suffering and death are bad. The second premise is also very difficult to reject, because it leaves us some wiggle room when it comes to situations in.

Given that there is a forceful case for thinking that the affluent are morally required to devote a substantial proportion of what they have to helping the poor, Garrett Cullity examines, refines and defends an argument of this form. He then identifies its limits.

For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am (...) I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live. (shrink)

All contentious moral issues--from gay marriage to abortion and affirmative action--raise difficult questions about the justification of moral beliefs. How can we be justified in holding on to our own moral beliefs while recognizing that other intelligent people feel quite differently and that many moral beliefs are distorted by self-interest and by corrupt cultures? Even when almost everyone agrees--e.g. that experimental surgery without consent is immoral--can we know that such beliefs are true? If so, how? These profound questions lead to (...) fundamental issues about the nature of morality, language, metaphysics, justification, and knowledge. They also have tremendous practical importance in handling controversial moral questions in health care ethics, politics, law, and education. Sinnott-Armstrong here provides an extensive overview of these difficult subjects, looking at a wide variety of questions, including: Are any moral beliefs true? Are any justified? What is justified belief? The second half of the book explores various moral theories that have grappled with these issues, such as naturalism, normativism, intuitionism, and coherentism, all of which are attempts to answer moral skepticism. Sinnott-Armstrong argues that all these approaches fail to rule out moral nihilism--the view that nothing is really morally wrong or right, bad or good. Then he develops his own novel theory,--"moderate Pyrrhonian moral skepticism"--which concludes that some moral beliefs can be justified out of a modest contrast class but no moral beliefs can be justified out of an extreme contrast class. While explaining this original position and criticizing alternatives, Sinnott-Armstrong provides a wide-ranging survey of the epistemology of moral beliefs. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is perhaps the most important development within late twentieth-century moral philosophy. Rosalind Hursthouse, who has made notable contributions to this development, here presents a full exposition and defense of her neo-Aristotelian version of virtue ethics. She shows how virtue ethics can provide guidance for action, illuminate moral dilemmas, and bring out the moral significance of the emotions.