Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living (...) ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process. (shrink)

Talbot Brewer offers a new approach to ethical theory, founded on a far-reaching reconsideration of the nature and sources of human agency.

One On addressing understanding People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does. ...

Andréanne Turgeon | : La littérature normative, lorsqu’il est question d’étudier les pratiques religieuses passées, est souvent perçue comme limitative pour le chercheur ; en effet, les prescriptions morales contenues dans ce type d’écrits témoignent davantage des attentes du clergé en matière de moeurs et de piété que des pratiques effectives qui avaient cours parmi les fidèles. Au cours des dernières décennies, cette littérature a généralement été exclue du corpus documentaire de nombreux chercheurs qui s’intéressaient à la religion « (...) vécue », afin d’éviter de transposer sur celle-ci une image biaisée, véhiculée par des productions ecclésiastiques. Au Québec, la notion de « réveil religieux », et le débat historiographique qu’elle a suscité au cours des années 1990, fournit un excellent exemple de catégorie, puisque cette notion s’est construite et fortifiée en l’absence d’une riche documentation qui, pourtant, encadrait la pratique que l’on comptabilisait et dont on cherchait à interpréter le sens. Cet article vise à montrer que la littérature normative peut donc s’avérer indispensable pour expliquer les transformations socioreligieuses d’une époque, et que c’est la prise en compte de cette documentation, dans les études historiques récentes, qui a mené à l’éclatement de la catégorie de « réveil religieux ». | : Historians often perceive normative literature as restricting the scholarly study of past religious practices : the moral precepts contained in those writings inform readers about the clergy’s expectations related to piety and morality, but do not tell much about effective practices that prevailed among the faithful. In the last decades, many scholars interested in the religion as experienced by people have excluded normative literature from their documentary corpus, in an attempt to avoid transposing the biased image conveyed by ecclesiastical productions into their research. The concept of “religious revival” and the ensuing historiographical debate in Québec during the 1990s provides a good example of such a problem, this category being created and reinforced without taking into consideration the normative documentation underlying the religious practices historians were trying to explain. This article intends to demonstrate that normative literature may be crucial in explaining past socioreli- gious transformations, and that its use in recent historical studies has even contributed to invalidate the concept of “religious revival.”. (shrink)

An understanding of the ethical implications of their work is now essential for all scientists. This accessible textbook clearly explains bioethical theories and their philosophical foundations to science students, enabling them to confidently take part in the key ethical debates of biotechnology. Over 200 activities introduce topics for personal reflection and discussion points encourage students to think for themselves and build their own arguments. Highlighting the potential pitfalls for those new to bioethics, each chapter features boxes providing factual information and (...) outlining the philosophical background. Accompanying online podcasts by the author (two of whose podcasts on iTunesU have attracted over 3 million downloads) explain points that might be difficult for beginners. Detailed case studies provide an insight into real-life examples of bioethical problems. Within-chapter essay questions and quizzes, along with end-of-chapter review questions, allow students to check their understanding and encourage broader thinking about the topics discussed. (shrink)

This chapter contributes to a more general research programme on the social epistemology of think tanks by exploring the issue of how the production and transmission of knowledge by think tanks can best be evaluated. Most evaluations of think tanks take each organization as a unit. The goal of the assessment becomes a ranking of organizations according to a set of criteria meant to capture what an ideal think tank would look like, most often in terms of impact or transparency. (...) Although organizational-level evaluations can be valuable, we propose to evaluate think tanks at the level of ecosystems rather than at the level of individual organizations. Moreover, whereas existing evaluations conflate excellence with concerns such as ‘impact,’ we propose to evaluate them on the basis of their epistemic excellence. Thus, with the help of examples from Canada and elsewhere, this chapter illustrates how think tanks can be evaluated as ecosystems and on epistemic grounds. This chapter also concentrates on one specific component of epistemic excellence: the ways in which think tanks can hinder or foster epistemic justice. The chapter first lays out the benefits of an ecosystemic evaluation, then explains how a conception of epistemic excellence can apply to think tank ecosystems before exploring characteristics of ecosystems that can be conducive or detrimental to epistemic excellence. (shrink)

This book explores the way in which, working within the investigative tradition associated with the Royal Society, the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) used ...

Boyer & Petersen lay out a compelling theory for folk-economic beliefs, focusing on beliefs about markets. However, societies also allocate resources through mechanisms involving power and group decision-making, through the political economy. We encourage future work to keep folkpoliticaleconomic beliefs in mind, and sketch an example involving pollution and climate change mitigation policy.

De Dreu and Gross's distinction between attack and defense is complicated in real-world conflicts because competing leaders construe their position as one of defense, and power imbalances place status quo challengers in a defensive position. Their account of defense as vigilant avoidance is incomplete because it avoids a reference to anger which transforms anxious avoidance into collective and unified action.

Perhaps the most fundamental and distinctive idea of Kantian moral psychology is that no behavior can count as action unless it is performed on a subjective practical principle, or a maxim of action. The maxim is supposed to provide the target of moral assessment of all actions, whether this assessment is prospective or retrospective. The presence of a maxim is also supposed to illuminate how it is that agents are active in, hence responsible for, the peculiar species of events we (...) call actions. To put the point roughly, agents are the sources of their actions in that they have in some sense affirmed or endorsed the maxims of these actions. (shrink)

It is not clear whether to assess Robert Audi’s Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character as a collection of essays or a unified piece of theorizing. Seven of the book’s twelve essays have been published before, and at first blush they appear connected by little more than a common focus on ethics. These essays are framed, however, by an introduction and conclusion characterizing the book as the elaboration of a single, large-scale ethical theory. Perhaps a comprehensive theory can be disentangled from (...) these essays, but its contours and merits would be far clearer if Audi had presented it systematically, drawing selectively from previous essays rather than reproducing them wholesale. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics describes a universe with physical properties that run completely contrary to everyday experience and intuition. These strange properties cause some people to seek equally strange philosophical theories to explain them. Talbot attempts to link the physical theories with some non-physical experimental results. The latter are, if true, disturbing and fascinating. Among the subjects explored are poltergeists, the possibility of instantaneous communication across great distances, and the nature of the mind and consciousness. This is an interesting combination of (...) physics, metaphysics, and parapsychology. Harold D. Shane, Mathematics Dept., Baruch Coll., CUNY. (shrink)

Perhaps the most fundamental and distinctive idea of Kantian moral psychology is that no behavior can count as action unless it is performed on a subjective practical principle, or a maxim of action. The maxim is supposed to provide the target of moral assessment of all actions, whether this assessment is prospective or retrospective. The presence of a maxim is also supposed to illuminate how it is that agents are active in, hence responsible for, the peculiar species of events we (...) call actions. To put the point roughly, agents are the sources of their actions in that they have in some sense affirmed or endorsed the maxims of these actions. (shrink)

Like literature and art, music has "works". But not every piece of music is called a work, and not every musical performance is made up of works. The complexities of this situation are explored in these essays, which examine a broad swathe of western music. From plainsong to the symphony, from Duke Ellington to the Beatles, this is at root an investigation into how our minds parcel up the music that we create and hear.

It is widely affirmed that human beings have irreplaceable valuable, and that we owe it to them to treat them accordingly. Many theorists have been drawn to Kantianism because they think that it alone can capture this intuition. One aim of this paper is to show that this is a mistake, and that Kantianism cannot provide an independent rational vindication, nor even a fully illuminating articulation, of irreplaceability. A further aim is to outline a broadly Aristotelian view that provides a (...) more fitting theoretical framework for this appealing conception of human value. This critique of Kantianism extends to contemporary theorists with a broadly Kantian orientation, including Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Darwall and John Rawls. The problem with these views, at heart, is that they attempt to ground morality in respect alone. Yet it is love, not respect, that brings irreplaceability into view. The paper closes with a sketch of a virtue-theoretic theory that follows Aquinas in taking love to be a master virtue that refines the other virtues so as to ensure a continuous and practically efficacious sensitivity to the irreplaceable value of fellow human beings. (shrink)

Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in the face of powerful inclinations to act immorally, and indeed that opposing inclinations only highlight the worth of the action. I argue that this conclusion rests on an implausibly mechanistic account of desires, and that many desires are constituted by tendencies to see certain features of one’s circumstances as reasons to perform one or another action. I try to show that inclinations to violate (...) moral requirements sometimes manifest a morally objectionable half-heartedness in one’s commitment to those very requirements, and – by extension – to the values that undergird these requirements. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of "commissive" utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me (...) in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer (...) from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it. (shrink)

It is common, in current literature on the topic at hand, to distinguish two kinds of reasons for action: justificatory reasons, which answer questions about what we ought to do, and explanatory reasons, which explain what we actually do. Internalism is a thesis about justificatory reasons—that is, the kind of reasons we are in search of when we deliberate about what to do or advise others about what they ought to do. Of course, since internalism traces justificatory reasons to the (...) subjective motivations of those to whom the reasons apply, and since these motivations play a central role in explaining actions, the doctrine implies that there is a close relation—perhaps even a relation of identity—between justificatory and explanatory reasons. Still, the main proponents of internalism have presented it, in the first instance, as a thesis about justificatory reasons. What I hope to show is that internalism cannot be accepted as a limitation on justificatory reasons because it cannot coherently be accepted in the course of first-person deliberation; and it ought not to be accepted when offering advice. To think otherwise, I will argue, is to reverse the ‘direction of gaze’ appropriate to deliberation, mistaking the psychological states that shape our view of justificatory reasons for the justificatory reasons they bring into view. The upshot of this reversal is to make justification far too easy to come by, and to render it obscure what we are doing when we pause to consider whether we really have the reasons that we are disposed to think we have. (shrink)

Sarah Buss argues that if we are to rise to the challenge of standing up to justice when doing so is costly, we will have to internalise a sense of our own unimportance. That is, we will have to cultivate an attitude that is ‘the opposite of self‐love’. I try to show that what we need is not to eliminate our love of self but to give it a proper and discerning shape, so that it conduces to our goodness rather (...) than to our self‐interest narrowly construed. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of “commissive” utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me (...) in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, moral philosophers have been engaged in a seemingly interminable debate about the role of internal and external reasons in practical reasoning. The rough distinction between these two sorts of reasons is this: internal reasons apply to particular agents in virtue of their relation to that agent's desires, preferences, or other motivational states, while external reasons are normative for particular agents quite independently of their relation to the subjective motivational states of these agents.

Presents a sustained and original challenge to the orthodox understanding of the relationship between morality and voluntary choice. The two main theses of the book are that we can be morally responsible for aspects of our character that we have not chosen or otherwise authored, and that we can enter into interpersonal commitments to which we have not voluntarily consented.

This article elaborates a conceptual framework to systematize the epistemic evaluation of social systems. This framework can be used to structure an evaluation or to characterize and assess existing ones. The article then uses the framework to assess four representative evaluations of think tanks. This meta-evaluation exemplifies how the framework can play its structuring role. It also leads us to general conclusions about the existing evaluations of think tanks. Most importantly, by focusing on the organizational level, existing evaluations miss factors (...) that are situated at the network and ecosystemic levels and that significantly determine how well think tanks serve society in producing and disseminating knowledge relevant to public policy. This conclusion suggests the need for epistemic evaluations of think tank ecosystems. (shrink)

I argue that desires and emotions have a cognitive element that leaves them open to direct moral assessment. I maintain that a wide range of affects enter into moral reasoning as initial mappings of practical reasons onto the world. This suggests a way of characterizing conflicts between persistent desires and all-things-considered practical judgments. Such conflicts indicate that our considered judgments lack the status of wholehearted convictions. The dissertation culminates in a distinctive account of certain interpersonal obligations that builds upon this (...) idea of wholehearted conviction. ;In Chapter 1, I examine the conception of moral worth and the companion conception of virtue at work in Kant's seminal moral writings. I argue that these conceptions leave Kant without resources to explain the critical distinction between self-interested and malicious violations of duty. ;In Chapter 2, I ask how significant a revision must be made to Kantian moral theory in order to accommodate my criticisms. I argue that there are demanding affective preconditions for the full recognition of the equal moral standing of other humans, and that these provide the core of a more plausible conception of moral virtue than is usually associated with Kant. I maintain that the Kantian who accepts this picture of virtue must give up the attractive claim that we can always voluntarily will to do whatever morality requires. Such a Kantian might still preserve the essential Kantian equation of dutiful action and autonomy--here understood as self-governance in accordance with laws we wholeheartedly accept. ;In the course of Chapters 1 and 2, I argue that when there are conflicts between our desires and our all-things considered judgments of what we have reason to do, this shows that our considered beliefs are not wholehearted convictions. In Chapters 3 and 4, I attempt to show that the obligations which bind together intimates and fellow members of certain face-to-face communities are best analyzed in terms of wholehearted convictions. I argue that this approach is truer to the phenomenology of moral deliberation than rival analyses. (shrink)

Some contemporary Kantians have argued that one could not be virtuous without having internalized certain patterns of awareness that permit one to identify and respond reliably to moral reasons for action. I agree, but I argue that this insight requires unrecognized, farreaching, and thoroughly welcome changes in the traditional Kantian understanding of maxims and virtues. In particular, it implies that one''s characteristic emotions and desires will partly determine one''s maxims, and hence the praiseworthiness of one''s actions. I try to show (...) this by pointing out an instability in the Kantian understanding of maxims. On the one hand, maxims are thought of as consciously affirmed, subjective principles of action. On the other hand, Kantians claim that nothing counts as an action, nor as morally assessable, unless it has a maxim. One cannot take both thoughts seriously without implausibly constricting the range of behavior that counts as action, hence as morally assessable. This difficulty can be overcome, I suggest, by jettisoning the idea that maxims must be consciously affirmed, and by stressing the way in which maxims are grounded in the pruning and shaping of one''s emotions and desires during socialization. This opens the door to a rich Kantian theory of virtue. It also raises questions about the scope and ground of our moral responsibility, which I address at the end of the paper. (shrink)