A perennial topic in introductory ethics classes, abortion has offered students a real-life issue to critically analyze. In this paper, I argue that a popular approach to teaching abortion in such classes fails to attend to the relevant political context of the issue and that this contributes to harms against pregnant people. I will argue for these conclusions by identifying three related problems with such an approach: these lessons frame a political issue as apolitical, value impartiality over lived experiences in (...) moral assessment, and objectify the already-objectified group of pregnant people in the course of debating about them. I will then point to considerations that may help counter the harms caused by this approach and informed by these problems. These involve framing abortion lessons in terms of the relevant political and historical context of abortion and incorporating first-person accounts that engage with the embodied, lived experiences of abortion. (shrink)

There is little more common in ethics than to think pain is intrinsically bad and pleasure is intrinsically good. A Humean-style error theory of the axiology of pain and pleasure is developed against these commonsense claims. We defend the thesis that the value of pain and pleasure is always contingent and only instrumental. We survey prominent theories of both intrinsic value and pain/pleasure, all of which assume that pain and pleasure are intrinsically valuable. We base our error theory on counterexamples (...) to this assumption, upon which these theories falter, and a theory of pain and pleasure which derives their value solely from their evolutionary function. (shrink)

Moral questions surrounding suffering tend to focus on obligations to relieve others’ suffering. In this paper, I focus on the overlooked question of what sufferers morally owe to themselves, arguing that they have the duty to self-care. I discuss agents who have been shaped by moral luck to contribute to their own suffering and canvass the ways in which this damages their moral agency. I contend that these agents have a duty to care for themselves by protecting and expanding their (...) agency, which involves precluding further destruction of agency and ensuring the continued ability to self-care. (shrink)

I argue that communities have a moral responsibility to repair and prevent moral damage that some survivors of domestic violence may experience. This responsibility is grounded in those communities’ complicity in domestic violence and the moral damage that may result. Drawing on Claudia Card’s work on domestic violence, I first explain two forms of moral damage that some survivors may experience. These are: 1) normative isolation, or abusive environments that are marked by distorted moral standards about the abuse itself, and (...) 2) coerced self-betrayal, the coercive entrapment of the survivor’s agency, emotions, and beliefs to express the will of the abuser. Though the abuser is always the primary cause of abuse, I argue that survivors’ communities can contribute to a climate that facilitates domestic violence by, for instance, sustaining harmful norms about gender roles, shaming survivors, protecting abusers, and not wanting to interrupt “private matters.” When this complicity exists, I argue that communities have a moral responsibility to create structures that repair and prevent moral damage from domestic violence. Finally, I sketch out some practical considerations for building these structures. These involve creating violence-resistant communities that protect survivors, hold abusers accountable, and help survivors reclaim their agencies. (shrink)

While emotions can play positive, contributory roles in our cognition and our lives, they frequently have the opposite effect. Michael Brady’s otherwise excellent introduction to the topic of emotion is unbalanced because he does not attend to harms emotions cause. The basic problem is that emotions have a normative aspect: they can be justified or unjustified and Brady does not attend to this. An example of this is Brady’s discussion of curiosity as the emotional motivation for knowledge. More importantly, while (...) emotions can and sometimes do reveal to us what we value, it is far less frequent that emotions reveal objective value. (shrink)

Common-sense morality tells us we should help our loved ones who suffer. Self-saboteurs complicate this intuition: ought we help someone who wants to suffer? In this paper, I discuss mechanisms of and motivations for self-sabotaging behavior. I then turn to the ethical complications of these cases: the risk of becoming complicit in another’s self-sabotage; the acceptable limits of caring for a self-saboteur; and the permissibility of paternalistic interference. I argue that while there is some permissible leeway involved in meeting another’s (...) needs—including submitting to their low-stakes manipulation—doing so risks damaging the relationship. While paternalistic interference may seem justified, I argue that this approach is a morally problematic denial of the self-saboteur’s agency. Instead, I offer an alternative route between complicity and interference: carers ought to try to maintain a relationship built on the honest recognition of each other’s reasons, which may include the self-saboteur’s legitimate reasons to suffer. (shrink)

Common-sense morality tells us we should help our loved ones who suffer. Self-saboteurs complicate this intuition: ought we help someone who wants to suffer? In this paper, I discuss mechanisms of and motivations for self-sabotaging behavior. I then turn to the ethical complications of these cases: the risk of becoming complicit in another’s self-sabotage; the acceptable limits of caring for a self-saboteur; and the permissibility of paternalistic interference. I argue that while there is some permissible leeway involved in meeting another’s (...) needs—including submitting to their low-stakes manipulation—doing so risks damaging the relationship. While paternalistic interference may seem justified, I argue that this approach is a morally problematic denial of the self-saboteur’s agency. Instead, I offer an alternative route between complicity and interference: carers ought to try to maintain a relationship built on the honest recognition of each other’s reasons, which may include the self-saboteur’s legitimate reasons to suffer. (shrink)

Although clinical understandings of self-injury, the deliberate mutilation of body tissue, have developed significantly since the phenomenon was first studied, the predominant stereotype of who self-injures is still White, teenage girls.1 White girls as well as White women are, indeed, at risk for SI, and sociocultural explanations appealing to oppressive socialization—particularly the influence of Western beauty norms—have been offered to explain their high rates of SI. Yet evidence exists to challenge this conception that SI is exclusively a White, female issue: (...) Black women, South... (shrink)