15 found
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  1. Utilitarianism about animals and the moral significance of use.David Killoren & Robert Streiffer - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (4):1043-1063.
    The Hybrid View endorses utilitarianism about animals and rejects utilitarianism about humans. This view has received relatively little sustained attention in the philosophical literature. Yet, as we show, the Hybrid View underlies many widely held beliefs about zoos, pet ownership, scientific research on animal and human subjects, and agriculture. We develop the Hybrid View in rigorous detail and extract several of its main commitments. Then we examine the Hybrid View in relation to the view that human use of animals constitutes (...)
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  2.  76
    An Occasionalist Response to Korman and Locke.David Killoren - 2021 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 19 (3).
    Dan Korman and Dustin Locke argue that non-naturalists are rationally committed to withhold moral belief. A main principle in their argument, which they call EC*, can be read in either of two ways, which I call EC*-narrow and EC*-wide. I show that EC*-narrow is implausible. Then I show that, if Korman and Locke rely on EC*-wide to critique non-naturalism, then the critique fails. I explain how the availability of a view that I like to call moral occasionalism can be used (...)
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  3. Group Agency and Overdetermination.David Killoren & Bekka Williams - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2):295-307.
    A morally objectionable outcome can be overdetermined by the actions of multiple individual agents. In such cases, the outcome is the same regardless of what any individual does or does not do. (For a clear example of such a case, imagine the execution of an innocent person by a firing squad.) We argue that, in some of these types of cases, (a) there exists a group agent, a moral agent constituted by individual agents; (b) the group agent is guilty of (...)
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  4. Why Care About Moral Fixed Points?David Killoren - 2016 - Analytic Philosophy 57 (2):165-173.
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  5. The Ethics of Deliberate Exposure to SARS-CoV-2 to Induce Immunity.Robert Streiffer, David Killoren & Richard Y. Chappell - 2021 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (3):479-496.
    We explore the ethics of deliberately exposing consenting adults to SARS-CoV-2 to induce immunity to the virus (“DEI” for short). We explain what a responsible DEI program might look like. We explore a consequentialist argument for DEI according to which DEI is a viable harm-reduction strategy. Then we consider a non-consequentialist argument for DEI that draws on the moral significance of consent. Additionally, we consider arguments for the view that DEI is unethical on the grounds that, given that large-scale DEI (...)
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  6. Robust moral realism: an excellent religion.David Killoren - 2016 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 79 (3):223-237.
    According to robust moral realism, there exist objective, non-natural moral facts. Moral facts of this sort do not fit easily into the world as illuminated by natural science. Further, if such facts exist at all, it is hard to see how we could know of their existence by any familiar means. Yet robust realists are not moral skeptics; they believe that we do know the moral facts. Thus robust moral realism comes with a number of hard-to-defend ontological and epistemological commitments. (...)
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  7. Moral Intuitions, Reliability, and Disagreement.David Killoren - 2009 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 4 (1):1-35.
    There is an ancient, yet still lively, debate in moral epistemology about the epistemic significance of disagreement. One of the important questions in that debate is whether, and to what extent, the prevalence and persistence of disagreement between our moral intuitions causes problems for those who seek to rely on intuitions in order to make moral decisions, issue moral judgments, and craft moral theories. Meanwhile, in general epistemology, there is a relatively young, and very lively, debate about the epistemic significance (...)
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  8. Moral Occasionalism.David Killoren & Jacob Sparks - 2024 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 19. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter develops Moral Occasionalism, according to which moral facts are grounded in certain natural facts, which are called sub-moral grounds, and these sub-moral grounds influence us in such a way as to induce largely correct moral beliefs. Moral Occasionalism is designed to explain the correlation of moral beliefs with the moral facts—and to do so in a way that is consistent with non-interactionist views, according to which moral facts neither influence nor are influenced by moral beliefs. It is argued (...)
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  9.  65
    Three and a half ways to a hybrid view in animal ethics.David Killoren & Robert Streiffer - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (4):1125-1148.
    The distinctive feature of a hybrid view (such as Nozick’s “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people”) is that it divides moral patients into two classes: call them dersons and uersons. Dersons have a deontological kind of moral status: they have moral rights against certain kinds of optimific harms. Uersons, by contrast, have a utilitarian kind of moral status: their interests are morally important (in proportion to the magnitude of those interests), but uersons do not have deontological moral rights or any (...)
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  10.  89
    Animal confinement and use.Robert Streiffer & David Killoren - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (1):1-21.
    We distinguish two conceptions of confinement – the agential conception and the comparative conception – and show that the former is intimately related to use in a way that the latter is not. Specifically, in certain conditions, agential confinement constitutes use and creates a special relationship that makes neglect or abuse especially egregious. This allows us to develop and defend an account of one important way in which agential confinement can be morally wrong. We then discuss some of the account’s (...)
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  11.  55
    Infinitism about cross-domain conflict.David Killoren - 2019 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 14.
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  12. Consequentialism, time, and value.David Killoren - manuscript
    Is consequentialism consistent with common-sense morality? I argue for a negative answer to this question. In Sections 1-4, I develop and defend a definition for “consequentialism.” In Section 5, I attempt to show that, given this definition, consequentialism and common-sense morality cannot be reconciled. In Section 6, I argue that, on the definition of consequentialism I defend, consequentialism should be understood, not as a view about the relationship between the deontic and the evaluative (as many philosophers suppose), but as a (...)
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  13.  29
    Ethics in Politics: The Rights and Obligations of Individual Political Agents.Emily Crookston, David Killoren & Jonathan Trerise (eds.) - 2016 - New York: Routledge.
    Political ethics, a subfield of applied ethics, is concerned with normative questions about voters, politicians, lobbyists, and other individual political agents. Compared with other fields in applied ethics political ethics has not developed into an area of intense interest in academic philosophy. Debates over the main questions in political ethics occur in mainstream news, on social media, in living rooms and neighborhood bars, etc., but for the most part have not bled over into the pages of philosophy journals and books. (...)
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  14. A demarcation problem for political discourse.David Killoren, Jonathan Lang & Bekka Williams - 2016 - In Emily Crookston, David Killoren & Jonathan Trerise (eds.), Ethics in Politics: The Rights and Obligations of Individual Political Agents. New York: Routledge.
     
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  15.  12
    Political Ethics: Voters, Lobbyists, and Politicians.Emily Crookston, David Killoren & Jonathan Trerise (eds.) - 2016 - New York: Routledge.
    Most research in political philosophy focuses on issues related to states and governments. Only rarely do political philosophers focus on the ethical actions of individuals—voters, lobbyists, politicians, party members—acting within large-scale political systems. _Political Ethics _works against the dominant paradigm, offering twenty-one, never before-published essays on the ethics of non-statist political agents. The chapters cover three major areas of political ethics: The Rights and Obligations of Politicians; The Rights and Obligations of Citizens; and Political Parties. The volume is a ground-breaking (...)
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