This paper discusses a puzzling tension in attributions of moral responsibility in cases of resultant moral luck: we seem to hold agents fully morally responsible for unlucky outcomes, but less-than-fully-responsible for unlucky outcomes brought about differently than intended. This tension cannot be easily discharged or explained, but it does shed light on a famous puzzle about causation and responsibility, the Thirsty Traveler.

I argue that fitting envy plays a special role in safeguarding our happiness and flourishing. After presenting my theory of envy and its fittingness conditions, I contrast Kant’s view that envy is always unfitting with D’Arms and Jacobson’s defense of fitting envy as an evolutionarily-shaped response to a deep and wide human concern, that is, relative positioning. However, D’Arms and Jacobson don’t go far enough. First, I expand on their analysis of positional goodness, distinguishing between an epistemic claim, according to (...) which we use implicit or explicit comparison to know what position we occupy in a continuum of goodness, and thus to form judgments of goodness, and a metaphysical one, according to which much human goodness depends on implicit or explicit rankings and positionality. Second, I argue that fitting envy is not only intrinsically valuable qua fitting response to authentic goodness, but can be epistemically, morally and prudentially valuable. (shrink)

Popular and groundbreaking crime novelist Sara Paretsky earned a PhD in history at the University of Chicago in the mid-1970s, with a dissertation on moral philosophy and religion in New England in the early and mid-nineteenth century. This edition of that work analyzes attempts by theologians at the Andover Seminary to square and secure Calvinist religious beliefs with emerging knowledge from history and the sciences. As Paretsky shows, the open-minded scholasticism of these theologians paradoxically led to the weakening of (...) their intellectual credibility as conventional religious belief structures became discredited, and this failure incited reactionary forces within Calvinism. Leading religious scholar Amanda Porterfield provides an afterword discussing where Paretsky s work fits into the contemporary study of religion. Paretsky s foreword offers a sobering picture of what it was like to be a female graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s.". (shrink)

_The Promise of Happiness_ is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which (...) is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including_ Mrs. Dalloway_, _The Well of Loneliness_, _Bend It Like Beckham_, and _Children of Men_, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy. (shrink)

In this paper I present a novel taxonomy of envy, according to which there are four kinds of envy: emulative, inert, aggressive and spiteful envy. An inquiry into the varieties of envy is valuable not only to understand it as a psychological phenomenon, but also to shed light on the nature of its alleged viciousness. The first section introduces the intuition that there is more than one kind of envy, together with the anecdotal and linguistic evidence that supports it. The (...) second section proposes and explains in detail a definition of envy tout court. The third section presents a recurring distinction between behavioral tendencies of envy, which has been explained in two distinct ways, one mostly proposed by psychologists, the other discernible in the philosophical tradition. The fourth section argues that these models of explanation track two variables, whose interplay is responsible for the existence of the four envies. The fifth section illustrates four paradigmatic cases, and provides a detailed analysis of the phenomenology, motivational structure, and typical behavioral outputs of each. The paper ends with a brief discussion of the implications of the taxonomy for moral education. (shrink)

This paper poses an original puzzle about the relationship between causation and moral responsibility called The Moral Difference Puzzle. Using the puzzle, the paper argues for three related ideas: (1) the existence of a new sort of moral luck; (2) an intractable conflict between the causal concepts used in moral assessment; and (3) inability of leading theories of causation to capture the sorts of causal differences that matter for moral evaluation of agents’ causal contributions to outcomes.

In this article, I propose a new theory of “Buddhist para-charisma” by analyzing the case of an iconoclastic monk in Vietnam. My argument draws from 20 months of ethnographic research conducted in Ho Chi Minh City between 2015 and 2019. During fieldwork, I was introduced to a highly respected monk with the extraordinary capacity to read minds and perceive karmic obstacles in the lives of his lay and monastic followers. This monk was unique for openly consuming meat and alcohol, wearing (...) lay clothing, and using insults while preaching. These behaviors had the deliberate effect of creating an uncomfortable, tense environment among his visitors. Later, the nun who introduced us explained that his harsh language and adversarial demeanor were a rare form of compassion that urged immediate awakening to Buddhist teachings. I compare this case with previously developed theories of Buddhist charisma and moral aesthetics. While past studies analyze Buddhist charisma through the moral aesthetics of physical beauty or affective responses of tranquility, gratitude, and awe, the theory of para-charisma shows how some monks can deliberately use repulsive behavior and negative affects to attract followers and advance spiritual goals. (shrink)

This book offers an updated and comprehensive phenomenology of norms and normativity. It is the first volume that systematically tackles both the normativity of experiencing and various experiences of norms. Part I begins with a discussion of the methodological resources that phenomenology offers for the critique of epistemological, social and cultural norms. It argues that these resources are powerful and have largely been neglected in contemporary philosophy as well as social and human sciences. The second part deepens the discussion by (...) studying the existential and moral-philosophical foundations of practical normativity. It takes on the task of illuminating the origins of normativity and offers phenomenological alternatives to the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian approaches that dominate contemporary debates on the sources of normativity. The final part proceeds from practical normativity to the analysis of the guiding powers of values, perceptual norms, instincts and drives. These are different forms of intentionality that in various manners contribute to the constitution of human practices. By clarifying their divergences and their interrelations, the volume demonstrates that normativity is not one phenomenon but a complex set of various phenomena, with multiple origins and sources. Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on issues of normativity in phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to describe the development of a model of moral distress in military nursing. The model evolved through an analysis of the moral distress and military nursing literature, and the analysis of interview data obtained from US Army Nurse Corps officers (n = 13). Stories of moral distress (n = 10) given by the interview participants identified the process of the moral distress experience among military nurses and the dimensions of the military nursing moral distress (...) phenomenon. Models of both the process of military nursing moral distress and the phenomenon itself are proposed. Recommendations are made for the use of the military nursing moral distress models in future research studies and in interventions to ameliorate the experience of moral distress in crisis military deployments. (shrink)

This paper argues that several sorts of metaphysical and semantic indeterminacy afflict the causal relation. If, as it is plausible to hold, there is a relationship between causation and moral responsibility, then indeterminacy in the causal relation results in indeterminacy of moral responsibility more generally.

The origin of moral agency is a much-debated issue. While rationalists or Kantians have argued that moral agency is rooted in reason, sentimentalists or Humeans have ascribed its origin to empathic feelings. This debate between rationalists and sentimentalists still stands with respect to persons with mental disorders, such as individuals diagnosed with mild forms of Autism Spectrum Disorder, without intellectual impairment. Individuals with ASD are typically regarded as moral agents, however their ability for empathy remains debated. The goal of this (...) paper is to investigate the mechanisms of moral actions in people with ASD, by finding arguments for the origin of their moral actions, supporting either the sentimentalist or the rationalist view of the dispute. We propose to revisit the debate using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to study the autobiographies of individuals with High-Functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome. While conducting the systematic analysis of 10 autobiographies, we re-examined both the rationalist and the sentimentalist positions, considering the links between empathic feelings and moral agency. The investigation of the temporal dimensions of emotional experiences, an aspect overlooked by previous research, indicated that individuals with ASD empathize with others, but in different ways as compared to neurotypicals. A relationship between emotional experience and the type of moral agency exhibited by individuals with forms of ASD was established. As a consequence, our analyses support the sentimentalist stance on moral action. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that a certain kind of envy is not only morally permissible, but also, sometimes, more fitting and productive than admiration. Envy and admiration are part of our emotional palette, our toolbox of evolutionary adaptations, and they play complementary roles. I start by introducing my original taxonomy of envy, which allows me to present emulative envy, a species of envy sometimes confused with admiration. After reviewing how the two emotions differ from a psychological perspective, I focus (...) in particular on the distinct and complementary roles they play in the ethical and political domains. (shrink)

This essay explores an increasingly popular genre of organized group travel in white mainline and emerging evangelical US Christianity I call “journeys to the margins”: trips centered on learning from marginalized persons for the traveler’s ethical formation. Drawing on ethnographic research with one case study, “Come and See Tours” to Israel/palestine, I interrogate how the commodified form of these trips shape possibilities for ethical subjectivation. First, I demonstrate ways in which journeys to the margins market ethical transformation to American Christian (...) consumers in the form of packaged moral narratives. Second, I focus on the paradoxical nature of journeys to the margins as simultaneously packaged commodities and ethical encounters. Finally, I use reformulations of freedom emerging from the anthropology of ethics to argue that possibilities for ethical subjectivation occur in moments when tour ideals come into tension with lived realities. (shrink)

Many philosophers hypothesize that our concept of personal identity is partly constituted by the one-person-one-place rule, which states that a person can only be in one place at a time. This hypothesis has been assumed by the most influential contemporary work on personal identity. In this paper, we report a series of studies testing whether the hypothesis is true. In these studies, people consistently judged that the same person existed in two different places at the same time. This result undermines (...) some widely held philosophical assumptions, supports others, and fits well with recent discoveries on identity judgments about inanimate objects and non-human animals. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that philosophers of science have an obligation to recognize and engage with the social nature of the sciences they assess if those sciences are morally relevant. Morally-relevant science is science that has the potential to risk harm to humans, non-humans, or the environment. My argument and the approach I develop are informed by an analysis of the philosophy of biology literature on the criticism of evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolution of human psychology and (...) behaviour. From this literature, I tease out two different methods of scientific critique. The first I call the “truth-detectional” approach. Those who take this approach are first and foremost concerned about the truth of EP claims as that truth can be determined by evidence. The second I call the “social-dimensional” approach. Those who take this approach talk about the production and truth of EP claims but within a social framework. On this account, the legitimacy and perceived legitimacy of EP claims are not separate from the institutional and social processes and values that lend to their production. I show that the truth-detectional approach risks harms to society and to the philosophy of science, but that the social-dimensional approach avoids these harms. Philosophers of science, therefore, should take a social-dimensional approach to the assessment of morally-relevant science. (shrink)

I present and develop the view that omissions are de re possibilities of actual events. Omissions do not literally fail to occur; rather, they possibly occur. An omission is a tripartite metaphysical entity composed of an actual event, a possible event, and a contextually specified counterpart relation between them. This view resolves ontological, causal, and semantic puzzles about omissions, and also accounts for important data about moral responsibility for outcomes resulting from omissions.

We argue that in implanted neurotechnology research, participants and researchers experience what Henry Richardson has called “moral entanglement.” Participants partially entrust researchers with access to their brains and thus to information that would otherwise be private, leading to created intimacies and special obligations of beneficence for researchers and research funding agencies. One of these obligations, we argue, is about continued access to beneficial technology once a trial ends. We make the case for moral entanglement in this context through exploration of (...) participants’ vulnerability, uncompensated risks and burdens, depth of relationship with the research team, and dependence on researchers in implanted neurotechnology trials. (shrink)

Philosophers who have written on modesty have largely agreed that it is a virtue, and that it therefore has an important psychological component. Mere modest behavior, it is often argued, is actually false modesty if it is generated by the wrong kind of mental state. The philosophical debate about modesty has largely focused on the question of which kind of mental state—cognitive, motivational, or evaluative—best captures the virtue of modesty. We therefore conducted a series of experiments to see which philosophical (...) account matches the folk concept of modesty. Surprisingly, we found that the folk concept is primarily behavioral. This leads us to argue that modesty may not be a virtue, but that if it is none of the extant philosophical accounts have properly explained why. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the rhetoric surrounding the profession’s presentations of auditor independence. We trace the evolution of thecharacter of the auditor from Professional Man in the early years of the twentieth century to the more public and abstract figures of Judicial Man and Economic Man. The changing character of the auditor in the profession’s narratives of legitimation reflects changes in the role of auditing, in the economic environment, and in the values of American society. Economic man is a self-interested and (...) shallow character who offered the auditing profession little protection against involvement in corporate scandals. In the wake of recent accounting scandals, the profession is calling for a return to the character of Professional Man to restore trust in audits and the financial markets.We also analyze the philosophical bases of the metaphors surrounding auditor independence. These metaphors, particularly the metaphor of independence as separation, create problems in conceptualizing independence concepts. How can you discuss appropriate relationships when your basic concept is one of separation, or no relationship? On the other hand, relational concepts of independence are also flawed if they are not based on a firm moral foundation. We suggest how the profession can act to rebuildits moral foundation through recognition of collective responsibility. (shrink)

Omissions – any events, actions, or things that do not occur – are central to numerous debates in causation and ethics. This article surveys views on what omissions are, whether they are causally efficacious, and how they ground moral responsibility.

The book explores the role of envy in society and its nature as a social emotion that is deeply concerned with both the self and others. It examines envy’s morally problematic aspects but also its aspirations, its effects, and its manifestations in a variety of contexts both personal and political.

In this chapter I critique the contemporary Western ideal of unconditional maternal love. In the first section, I draw some preliminary distinctions and clarify the scope and limitations of my inquiry. In the second section, I argue that unloving mothers exist, and are not psychologically abnormal. In the third section, I go further and suggest that lack of maternal love can be fitting and even morally permissible. In the fourth section, I sketch some implications that lack of maternal love and (...) unrequited filial love have for the debate on reasons for love. I conclude with avenues for future research. (shrink)

The development of nursing ethics as a field of inquiry has largely relied on theories of medical ethics that use autonomy, beneficence, and/or justice as foundational ethical principles. Such theories espouse a masculine approach to moral decision-making and ethical analysis. This paper challenges the presumption of medical ethics and its associated system of moral justification as an appropriate model for nursing ethics. It argues that the value foundations of nursing ethics are located within the existential phenomenon of human caring within (...) the nurse/patient relationship instead of in models of patient good or rights-based notions of autonomy as articulated in prominent theories of medical ethics. Models of caring are analyzed and a moral-point-of-view (MPV) theory with caring as a fundamental value is proposed for the development of a theory of nursing ethics. This type of theory is supportive to feminist medical ethics because it focuses on the subscription to, and not merely the acceptance of, a particular view of morality. (shrink)

Some determinist approaches to free will opine that the human brain is subordinate to physical laws not fully under our control. This results in a weakening of the concept of the personal autonomy and moral responsibility of humans. Were we to acknowledge this assumption, we might consider automatic machines unable to influence the thoughts and intentions from which our actions take root. The key issue lies in the fact that an individual does not consciously engage in particular actions (automatisms), which (...) challenges the concept of free will in an individual’s complex behaviour. Despite this issue, not all automatisms that lack conscious will can be viewed as lacking free will. The paper examines whether classical philosophical concepts may weaken the strict determinist approach, which seeks to deny that individuals have free will due to the existence of automatic actions. (shrink)

El presente estudio se realizó con el objetivo de evaluar el impacto del estrés emocional en la adecuada toma de decisiones y práctica médica oportuna y de calidad de los estudiantes que cursan el quinto año de la carrera en la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Se utilizó una lista de valoración para las competencias de la simulación de reanimación cardiopulmonar avanzada, y un Cuestionario de Maslach Burnout Inventory para valorar los sentimientos, actitudes y de (...) desgaste profesional. Los resultados muestran que aquellos que estaban expuestos a mayor cantidad de labores recientes y estrés fueron más propensos de incidir en errores médicos durante la toma de decisiones y su aprendizaje. This study was conducted with the aim of assessing the impact of emotional stress in the appropriate decision-making and quality medical practice of fifth year medical students from the Faculty of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. It was used an assessment list for cardiopulmonary resuscitation simulation competence and a Maslach Burnout Inventory Questionnaire was used to assess feelings, attitudes and professional wear and tear. Results show those who were exposed to a greater number of recent tasks and to greater stress were more likely to make medical mistakes while making decisions and learning. (shrink)

This paper identifies a type of linguistic phenomenon new to feminist philosophy of language: biased evaluative descriptions. Biased evaluative descriptions (BEDs) are descriptions whose well-intended positive surface meanings are inflected with implicitly biased content. Biased evaluative descriptions are characterized by three main features: (i) they have roots in implicit bias or benevolent sexism, (ii) their application is counterfactually unstable across dominant and subordinate social groups, and (iii) they encode stereotypes. After giving several different kinds of examples of biased evaluative descriptions, (...) I distinguish them from similar linguistic concepts, including backhanded compliments, slurs, insults, epithets, pejoratives, and dog-whistles. I suggest that the framework of traditional Gricean implicature cannot account for BEDs. I discuss some challenges to the distinctiveness and evaluability of BEDs, including intersectional social identities. I conclude by discussing the social significance and moral status of BEDs. Identifying BEDs is important for a variety of social contexts, from the very general and broad (political speeches) to the very particular and small (bias in academic hiring). (shrink)

The compulsive habit model proposed by Everitt and Robbins has accumulated important empirical evidence. One of their proposals is the existence of an axis, on which each a person with a particular addiction can be located depending on the evolutionary moment of his/her addictive process. The objective of the present study is to contribute in addressing the identification of such axis, as few studies related to it have been published to date. To do so, the use/abuse of Information and Communication (...) Technologies (ICT) was quantified on an initial sample of 807 subjects. Questionnaires were also delivered to measure impulsivity, compulsivity and symptoms of prefrontal dysfunction. Evidence of the existence of the proposed axis was obtained by means of Machine Learning techniques, thus allowing the classification of each subject along the continuum. The present study provides preliminary evidence of the existence of the Impulsivity-Compulsivity axis, as well as an IT tool so that each patient that starts getting treatment for an addiction can be statistically classified as “impulsive” or “compulsive.” This would allow the matching of each person with the most appropriate treatment depending on his/her moment in the addiction/abuse process, thus facilitating the individualized design of each therapeutic process and a possible improvement of the results of the treatment. (shrink)

In Atlas Shrugged, the observations of the character Francisco d'Anconia are used to illustrate the connection between Objectivism, morality, and economics. In response, the author demonstrates how today's socioeconomic movements not only are inconsistent with d'Anconia's view but will likely lead to further large-scale economic and moral crises, unless an economic system is established that will protect the individual's right to worthwhile production, income, and ownership.

This paper offers a new philosophical account of vocations as deeply personal but at the same time also communal and generational forms of multimodal intending. It provides a reconstruction and a systematic development of Edmund Husserl’s scattered discussions on vocations. On these grounds, the paper argues that vocational life is a general human possibility and not determined by any set of material values, religious, epistemic or moral. Rather, vocations are distinguished from other complexes of intentional acts and attitudes by certain (...) structural features of their core valuations and volitions. (shrink)

Jones (1991) has proposed an issue-contingent model of ethical decision making by individuals in organizations. The distinguishing feature of the issue was identified as its moral intensity, which determines the moral imperative in the situation. In this study, we adapted three scenarios from the literature in order to examine the issue-contingent model. Findings, based on a student sample, suggest that (1) the perceived and actual dimensions of moral intensity often differed; (2) perceived moral intensity variables, in the aggregate, significantly affected (...) an individual''s moral judgments; and (3) some dimensions of moral intensity (namely, perceived social consensus and perceived magnitude of consequences) mattered more than others. (shrink)

The chapter studies the ethical dimensions of Beauvoir’s existentialism and Irigaray’s ontology of difference. It argues that Irigaray builds on one central but largely neglected result of Beauvoir’s moral philosophical argumentation: the claim that fundamentally sexual subordination constitutes an ethical problem that cannot be adequately solved merely through social reforms, political interventions, or theoretical reflections. By comparing Beauvoir’s concept of erotic generosity to Irigaray’s discussion of wonder and love, the chapter demonstrates that both philosophers conceive of male privilege as an (...) ethical issue that must be worked out between individual women and men in their concrete encounters. The task is to reform and cultivate not just human behaviors, actions, beliefs and cognitions, but also one’s own emotions and desires. (shrink)

This paper aims to understand how we reason from historical premises to normative conclusions, tracing this question through the work of Muhammad Iqbal. On our reading, he wavers between two views of history, one a kind of natural science, and the other akin to religious interpretation. These tell different stories about the lessons we draw from history.

Every day nurses are required to make ethical decisions in the course of caring for their patients. Ethics in Nursing Practice provides the background necessary to understand ethical decision making and its implications for patient care. The authors focus on the individual nurse’s responsibilities, as well as considering the wider issues affecting patients, colleagues and society as a whole. This third edition is fully updated, and takes into account recent changes in ICN position statements, WHO documents, as well as addressing (...) current issues in healthcare, such as providing for the health and care needs of refugees and asylum seekers, bioethics and the enforcement of nursing codes. (shrink)

Stakeholder management devices (SMDs) are the mechanisms through which organizations respond to stakeholder concerns. Given that SMDs serve as organizational control systems for employees and managers, this research investigates the internal rather than the external effects of a firm's SMDs. Unlike most previous research, I examined the effects of these formal structures, processes, and procedures in the aggregate, rather than focusing attention on a single type of device. The study investigates the effects of a firm's stakeholder management devices, in the (...) aggregate, on three factors that influence individual behavior in organizations: expectations, attitudes, and perceived organizational climates. Respondents were managers in 112 for-profit businesses located throughout the United States. Results suggest that a firm's stakeholder management devices affect the perceived moral climates in the firm, and affect managers' expectations about the consequences of good corporate social performance, but do not affect organization members' attitudes about corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Comedy can hold political actors accountable, for instance through satire. But what kind of moral negotiation concerns comedians? Utilizing an understanding of accountability as a dynamic of intera...

Is morality intuitive or deliberative? The distinction can obscure the role of folk moral theories in moral judgment; judgments may arise 'intuitively' yet result from abstract theoretical and philosophical commitments that participate in 'deliberative' reasoning.

: I try to identify the distinct moral horror occasioned by the attacks of September 11 in order to accord them an appropriate, limited place in the ongoing history of terror and violence. I consider the agents of evil and the victims as evil constructs them. I conclude with victim stories that reveal evil by showing the goodness it violates, making us feel the bitter loss of what violence has killed, kills, and will kill again.

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 78-79.

In June 2016, Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani social media star, was murdered. Her death sparked both public outrage and a policy debate around ‘honour killing’, digital rights and sex-positive sexuality across Pakistan and its diasporas. Qandeel challenged what constitutes a proper Pakistani woman, an authentic Baloch and a respectable digital citizen. As a national sex symbol, she failed at the gendered workings of respectable heterosexuality, and during her short lifetime she optimised this failure and public fetish as a technologically (...) mediated social currency (clicks, hashtags, comments, likes, reposts) to build a transnational celebrity brand. I centre Qandeel Baloch’s life and afterlives to think through the economic entanglements of honour, racialised ethnicity, coloniality, sexual violence and social media at the intersections of globalised anti-Blackness and honourable brownness as a matter of global capital. Within these complex registers of coloniality, Qandeel’s life and brutal murder necessitate a rethinking of categories of racialised ethnicity (Baloch), sexual labour (racial capital) and social media (digitality) as vectors of value for capitalism and nationalism. By centring Qandeel, I define honour as a form of racialised property relations. This rereading of honour, as an economic metric of heteropatriarchy, shifts my lens of honour killing from a crime of culture to a crime of property. Women’s honour functions as a necrocapitalist technology that constructs female and feminine bodies as the debris of heterosexual empire through racialised, gendered and sexualised property relations. These relations and registers of honour get further complicated by social media currency and discussions around digital rights, privacy and freedom of expression. Honour is, therefore, the economic management of sexual morality produced through race, religion and imperialism. (shrink)

Teacher strikes have taken place in the United States since the end of the 19th century, became much more common in the 1960s, and have enjoyed a resurgence over the past five years (2018-2023). In this paper, we analyze teacher strikes with two main objectives. First, we examine how sexism and misogyny impact discourse around teacher strikes, as well as the justifications that teachers themselves give for striking. We find that teachers are at risk of being deemed ‘immoral’ unless they (...) justify their decision to strike by appealing to their being in the service of others. Pressure to adopt this framing not only negatively impacts teachers’ dignity as human beings deserving of adequate compensation and working conditions, but it also inadvertently upholds unjust patriarchal norms regarding teaching as care work. In the second part of this paper, we put forward alternative framings teachers can adopt in justifying their decisions to strike. The framings are rooted in philosophical literature that allows for self-regarding actions to be recognized as properly moral in certain circumstances. We argue that by extending this recognition to teachers who strike, we combat covert sexist expectations and uphold the dignity of teachers as persons. (shrink)