21 found
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  1. Moral Saints, Moral Monsters, and the Mirror Thesis.Peter Brian Barry - 2009 - American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2):163 - 176.
    A number of philosophers have been impressed with the thought that moral saints and moral monsters—or, evil people, to put it less sensationally—“mirror” one another, in a sense to be explained. Call this the mirror thesis. The project of this paper is to cash out the metaphorical suggestion that moral saints and evil persons mirror one other and to articulate the most plausible literal version of the mirror thesis. To anticipate, the most plausible version of the mirror thesis implies that (...)
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  2.  56
    Evil and Moral Psychology.Peter Brian Barry - 2012 - Routledge.
    This book examines what makes someone an evil person and how evil people are different from merely bad people. Rather than focusing on the "problem of evil" that occupies philosophers of religion, Barry looks instead to moral psychology—the intersection of ethics and psychology. He provides both a philosophical account of what evil people are like and considers the implications of that account for social, legal, and criminal institutions. He also engages in traditional philosophical reasoning strongly informed by psychological research, especially (...)
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  3.  92
    Doxing Racists.Peter Brian Barry - 2020 - Journal of Value Inquiry 55 (3):457-474.
  4. Extremity of Vice and the Character of Evil.Peter Brian Barry - 2010 - Journal of Philosophical Research 35:25-42.
    It is plausible that being an evil person is a matter of having a particularly morally depraved character. I argue that suffering from extreme moral vices—and not consistently lacking moral vices, for example—suffices for being evil. Alternatively, I defend an extremity account concerning evil personhood against consistency accounts of evil personhood. After clarifying what it is for vices to be extreme, I note that the extremity thesis I defend allows that a person could suffer from both extremely vicious character traits (...)
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  5. The Kantian Case Against Torture.Peter Brian Barry - 2015 - Philosophy 90 (4):593-621.
    There is a decided consensus that Kantian ethics yields an absolutist case against torture – that torture is morally wrong and absolutely so. I argue that while thereisa Kantian case against torture, Kantian ethics does not clearly entail absolutism about torture. I consider several arguments for a Kantian absolutist position concerning torture and explain why none are sound. I close by clarifying just what the Kantian case against torture is. My contention is that while Kantian ethics does not support a (...)
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  6. Evil Actions, Evildoers, and Evil People.Peter Brian Barry - manuscript
    Typically, philosophers interested in evil have typically been concerned with reconciling (or not) the apparent existence of gratuitous suffering with the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient and supremely loving and caring Deity. Undeniably, ‘evil’ functions as a mass noun: note the intelligibility of asking “Why is there so much evil in the world?” But ‘evil’ sometimes functions as an adjective and is used variously to describe persons, actions, desires, motives, and intentions; Joel Feinberg even speaks of “evil smells.” In (...)
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  7. Same-Sex Marriage and the Charge of Illiberality.Peter Brian Barry - 2011 - Social Theory and Practice 37 (2):333-357.
    However liberalism is best understood, liberals typically seek to defend a wide range of liberty. Since same-sex marriage [henceforth: SSM] prohibitions limit the liberty of citizens, there is at least some reason to suppose that they are inconsistent with liberal commitments. But some have argued that it is the recognition of SSM—not its prohibition—that conflicts with liberalism’s commitments. I refer to the thesis that recognition of SSM is illiberal as “The Charge.” As a sympathetic liberal, I take The Charge seriously (...)
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  8. Wickedness Redux.Peter Brian Barry - 2011 - Philo 14 (2):137-160.
    Some philosophers have argued that the concepts of evil and wickedness cannot be well grasped by those inclined to a naturalist bent, perhaps because evil is so intimately tied to religious discourse or because it is ultimately not possible to understand evil, period. By contrast, I argue that evil—or, at least, what it is to be an evil person—can be understood by naturalist philosophers, and I articulate an independently plausible account of evil character.
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  9. The Liberal Case Against Same-Sex Marriage Prohibitions.Peter Brian Barry - manuscript
    Experience clearly suggests that most legal philosophers and ethicists are not surprised to be told that liberal states cannot permissibly prohibit same-sex marriage (henceforth: SSM). It is somewhat less clear just what the appropriate liberal strategy is and should be in defense of this thesis. Rather than try to defend SSM directly, I shall proceed indirectly by arguing that SSM prohibitions are indefensible on liberal grounds. Initially, I shall consider what I take to be the most powerful liberal argument against (...)
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  10. Intentional Action, Causation, and Deviance.Peter Brian Barry - manuscript
    It is reasonably well accepted that the explanation of intentional action is teleological explanation. Very roughly, an explanation of some event, E, is teleological only if it explains E by citing some goal or purpose or reason that produced E. Alternatively, teleological explanations of intentional action explain “by citing the state of affairs toward which the behavior was directed” thereby answering questions like “To what end was the agent’s behavior directed?” Causalism—advocated by causalists—is the thesis that explanations of intentional action (...)
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  11. Two Dogmas of Moral Psychology.Peter Brian Barry - manuscript
    I contend that there are two dogmas that are still popular among philosophers of action: that agents can only desire what they think is good and that they can only intentionally pursue what they think is good. I also argue that both dogmas are false. Broadly, I argue that our best theories of action can explain the possibility of intentionally pursuing what one thinks is not at all good, that we need to allow for the possibility of intentionally pursuing what (...)
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  12. Capital Punishment as a Response to Evil.Peter Brian Barry - 2015 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 9 (2):245-264.
    Some jurisdictions acknowledge, as a matter of positive law, the relevance of evil to capital punishment. At one point, the state of Florida counted that the fact that a murderer’s crime was “especially wicked, evil, atrocious or cruel” as an aggravating factor for purposes of capital sentencing. I submit that Florida may be onto something. I consider a thesis about capital punishment that strikes me as plausible on its face: if capital punishment is ever morally permissible, it is permissible as (...)
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  13.  26
    Punitive Torture.Peter Brian Barry - 2022 - In Matthew C. Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 703-724.
    The use of punitive torture was practiced historically and has hardly been purged from our current practices. Fairly little attention has been paid to its justification, perhaps because many theorists of punishment have thought it so obviously unjust. But there is a fairly straightforward retributivist argument that punitive torture is sometimes morally justified: roughly, punitive torture is proportionate to the wrongdoing of some malefactors, such that, in the absence of overriding reasons, torturing them as punishment for their wrongdoing is morally (...)
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  14. In defense of the mirror thesis.Peter Brian Barry - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 155 (2):199-205.
    In this journal, Luke Russell defends a sophisticated dispositional account of evil personhood according to which a person is evil just in case she is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in conditions that favour her autonomy. While I am generally sympathetic with this account, I argue that Russell wrongly dismisses the mirror thesis—roughly, the thesis that evil people are the mirror images of the morally best sort of persons—which I have defended elsewhere. Russell’s rejection of the (...)
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  15.  16
    The Fiction of Evil.Peter Brian Barry - 2016 - Routledge.
    What makes someone an evil person? How are evil people different from merely bad people? Do evil people really exist? Can we make sense of evil people if we mythologize them? Do evil people take pleasure in the suffering of others? Can evil people be redeemed? Peter Brian Barry answers these questions by examining a wide range of works from renowned authors, including works of literature by Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde alongside classic (...)
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  16.  36
    Wanting the bad and doing bad things: an essay in moral psychology.Peter Brian Barry, David I. Copp, Anton Tupa, Marina Oshana, Crystal Thorpe & Dolores Albarracin - unknown
    Title from title page of source document.
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  17.  56
    Brake, Elizabeth. Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 240. $99.00 ; $24.95. [REVIEW]Peter Brian Barry - 2013 - Ethics 123 (2):349-353.
  18. Saving Strawson: Evil and Strawsonian Accounts of Moral Responsibility. [REVIEW]Peter Brian Barry - 2011 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (1):5-21.
    Almost everyone allows that conditions can obtain that exempt agents from moral responsibility—that someone is not a morally responsible agent if certain conditions obtain. In his seminal Freedom and Resentment, Peter Strawson denies that the truth of determinism globally exempts agents from moral responsibility. As has been noted elsewhere, Strawson appears committed to the surprising thesis that being an evil person is an exempting condition. Less often noted is the fact that various Strawsonians—philosophers sympathetic with Strawson’s account of moral responsibility—at (...)
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  19.  71
    Allhoff, Fritz. Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture: A Philosophical Analysis: Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. 280. $35.00. [REVIEW]Peter Brian Barry - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3):675-676.
  20.  32
    Book review. [REVIEW]Peter Brian Barry - 2007 - Journal of Value Inquiry 41 (1):121-125.
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  21.  44
    Book ReviewsSergio Tenenbaum,. Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason.New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 315. $80.00. [REVIEW]Peter Brian Barry - 2007 - Ethics 118 (1):181-184.