Samuel Scheffler has recently argued that some relationships are non-instrumentally valuable; that such relationships give rise to “underived” special responsibilities; that there is a genuine tension between cosmopolitan egalitarianism and special responsibilities; and that we must consequently strike a balance between the two. We argue that there is no such tension and propose an alternative approach to the relation between cosmopolitan egalitarianism and special responsibilities. First, while some relationships are non-instrumentally valuable, no relationship is (...) unconditionally valuable. Second, whether such relationships give rise to special responsibilities is conditional on those relationships not violating certain moral constraints. Third, these moral constraints arise from within cosmopolitan egalitarianism itself. Thus the value of relationships and the special responsibilities to which they give rise arise within the parameters of cosmopolitan egalitarianism itself. The real tension is not between cosmopolitan equality and special responsibilities, but between special responsibilities and the various general duties that arise from the recognition, demanded by cosmopolitan egalitarianism, of a multiplicity of other basic goods. Indeed, even the recognition of special relationships itself gives rise to general duties that may condition and/or weigh against putative special responsibilities. (shrink)

It is common in contemporary sport to liken the notion of the team to that of the family. That is, the family is used to evoke team life. Portraying the team as a family usually implies a positive evaluation. Despite its prevalence, the team as a family equation has not been analyzed in the sport philosophy literature. Thus, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it explores whether the team is to be equated with the family. To discuss the (...) nature of the family and the team, I draw together the work of several sport philosophers with that of Laura Wildemann Kane. Second, and considering what characterizes the team, this article investigates whether teammates have special responsibilities to one another by virtue of their relationship and the value attached to it. I propose that the team as a family equation does not align with the constitution of these two social groups and that teammates have special responsibilities to one another, but such responsibilities are different from those observed in the family. (shrink)

Addressing concerns about the treatment of psychopaths, Grant Gillett and Flora Huang (2013) argue that we ought to accept a relational or holistic view of psychopathy and APSD rather than the default biomedical-deficit model since the latter “obscures moral truths about the psychopath”. This change in approach to the psychopath will both mitigate at least some of their moral responsibility for the harms they cause, and force communities to incur special obligations, so they claim, because the harms endured by (...) psychopaths will be understood as part of the cause for the harms they are guilty of committing. However, as I will argue, even if we accept that a relational or holistic approach is better suited to understand psychopathy (which is itself contentious), it does not follow that their responsibility is mitigated in a way that causes communities to have special obligations to them as Gillett and Huang suggest. A diagnosis of APSD or psychopathy does not, prima facie, exculpate an agent or suggest a different way of treating them. My discussion will focus on the widely accepted excusing conditions one must meet for responsibility to me mitigated and conclude, contra Gillett and Huang, that psychopaths are no different from you or I with regards to having a causal history that leads to action. Outside forces play a role in all of our behavior. If the psychopath is owed anything because of the way they have come to understand the world then we all are owed that same debt. (shrink)

What is the basis of our obligations to our animal companions? This is an important question for practical reasons, as the relationship that many individuals have with their animal companion is amongst the most intimate of relationships they share with a non-human animal. It is also important for theoretical reasons. One of those reasons is that our commitments to animal companions may appear to present a kind of puzzle. If we think that we have moral commitments to animal companions that (...) we do not have to other animals, such as livestock or free-roaming animals, what could explain this? I argue that the explanation for this difference in moral commitments is the result of the special relationship we have with our animal companions. More specifically, the basis of our moral commitments to animal companions are like those incurred by parents. Further, it is argued that causing the existence of or voluntarily taking on commitments of care for especially vulnerable and dependent sentient organisms implies robust responsibilities aimed at nurturing and promoting individual flourishing. This conclusion has implications regarding several related moral issues, such as whether animal companions require a moral education, what end-of-life commitments animal companion caregivers have, and whether it is justified to feed our animal companions other animals or let them engage in predation. Further, these issues are of practical interest to animal companion caregivers, law makers, and veterinarians, as well as being of theoretical interest to legal scholars and ethicists. (shrink)

This paper responds to Elijah Weber’s “Vulnerability, Dependence, and Special Obligations to Domesticated Animals: A Reply to Palmer”. Weber’s paper develops significant objections to the account of special obligations I developed in my book Animal Ethics in Context, in particular concerning our obligations to companion animals. In this book, I made wide-ranging claims about how we may acquire special obligations to animals, including being a beneficiary of an institution that creates vulnerable and dependent animals, and sharing in (...) attitudes that contribute to causing harms or to creating vulnerable animals. Weber finds these claims implausible, and offers an alternative, much narrower, voluntarist account, on which we only have special positive obligations if, in some way, we have agreed to them. In this paper, I defend, against Weber, a non-voluntarist account of at least some special obligations towards animals, and I respond to some of his more specific objections to my account. (shrink)

This article assesses some of the implications of globalization for the scholarly debate on business ethics, CSR and related concepts. The argument is based, among other things, on the declining capacity of nation state institutions to regulate socially desirable corporate behavior as well as the growing corporate exposure to heterogeneous social, cultural and political values in societies globally. It is argued that these changes are shifting the corporate role towards a sphere of societal governance hitherto dominated by traditional political actors. (...) This leads to a discussion of the ambivalent results of such a process for a responsible corporate role in a globalized world. While assessing the current reception these changes have received in the management literature, the contributions of the four articles in this Special Issue are framed and evaluated. The argument closes by highlighting avenues of future research on this new challenge. (shrink)

This article assesses some of the implications of globalization for the scholarly debate on business ethics, CSR and related concepts. The argument is based, among other things, on the declining capacity of nation state institutions to regulate socially desirable corporate behavior as well as the growing corporate exposure to heterogeneous social, cultural and political values in societies globally. It is argued that these changes are shifting the corporate role towards a sphere of societal governance hitherto dominated by traditional political actors. (...) This leads to a discussion of the ambivalent results of such a process for a responsible corporate role in a globalized world. While assessing the current reception these changes have received in the management literature, the contributions of the four articles in this Special Issue are framed and evaluated. The argument closes by highlighting avenues of future research on this new challenge. (shrink)

I would have preferred that the Special Section on Children as Organ Donors had focused on the donation of a specific organ because morally relevant differences are obscured when the subject is discussed in general terms. The donation of a lobe of liver and peripheral blood or bone marrow stem cells does not result in the permanent loss of vital tissue because these organs regenerate; however, a kidney does not regenerate and its donor loses a vital organ permanently. Liver (...) tissue and peripheral blood or bone marrow stem cells are typically required to save a life, but, because most patients with end-stage renal disease can be kept alive on dialysis, the donation of a kidney is rarely life saving. Also, donor risk is organ specific; for example, it is more dangerous to donate a lobe of liver than it is to donate peripheral blood or bone marrow stem cells. (shrink)

The idea of cloning adult human beings often gives rise to objections involving mad dictators producing copies of themselves, or deranged billionaires who want to live forever. But what about situations where we can more readily understand and accept the reasons for creating a clone? Consider, for instance, the case of parents who have simultaneously lost their newly born child and found out that they cannot have any more children of their own by other known methods. Would it be wrong (...) of them to want a new child, a genetic copy of the lost infant, if the child were healthy and could only be produced by cloning the infant who no longer lives? And would it be wrong of genetic engineers to assist them? (shrink)

The essays in this volume are illustrative of the variety of issues that arise when thinking about moral responsibility. From metaphysical concerns about free will and determinism to normative interest in the nature of our social practices, the philosophy of moral responsibility seems to have something to offer philosophers of nearly any taste or temperament. It is, in part, this pervasive and diverse significance that sparked and has sustained my own interest in the topic. I hope the essays in this (...) volume have similar effects on readers.The volume begins with an essay by Justin Capes, examining blameworthiness in the context of tragic choices. It is natural to think that freely and knowingly doing wrong, despite the awareness that one could do right, is a sufficient condition of blameworthiness. But some have recently argued that there are counterexamples to this claim. Suppose that Ann is faced with the difficult choice of saving a few strangers from certain death or preventing her c .. (shrink)

A recent issue of CambridgeQuarterlyofHealthcareEthics provides a fascinating look into the uncertainties surrounding the subject of human cloning. As Nelkin and Lindee point out, for example, the popular assumption is that this technology will lead to individual immortality. life everlasting for the deserving.considers the use of cloning for the replication of human individuals to be ethically unacceptable.”.

Human beings are the cause of many current environmental problems. This poses the question of how to respond to these problems at the national and international level. However, many people ask themselves whether they should personally contribute to solving these problems and how they could (best) do so. This is the focus of this Special Issue on Individual Environmental Responsibility. The introduction proposes a way to structure this complex debate by distinguishing three broad clusters of arguments. The first cluster (...) tackles the kind of ethical theory we need to properly address different aspects of individual responsibility. The second cluster asks what individuals should do from an ethical point of view. The third cluster investigates the role of contextual factors and the limits of demandingness in individual obligations. This introduction presents the papers of the Special Issue and the interrelations between them using those clusters of arguments as reference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mental Disorder and Moral Responsibility:Disorders of Personhood as Harmful Dysfunctions, With Special Reference to AlcoholismJerome C. Wakefield (bio)Keywordsalcohol dependence, philosophy of psychiatry, mental disorder, harmful dysfunction, psychiatric diagnosis, person, moral responsibilityIn his paper, Ethical Decisions in the Classification of Mental Conditions as Mental Illness, Craig Edwards grapples with a profound problem: why is it that when we classify a mental condition as a mental disorder, that tends to (...) take the condition out of the sphere of moral responsibility or virtuousness of character? For example, it is not uncommon when someone commits suicide and the question is raised as to why he or she did it, that instead of a reason or character trait that would place the act within a moral calculus, one is offered the explanation "she was clinically depressed" or "he was bipolar," and this tends to terminate discussion and make reasons and moral evaluation superfluous. Why does such a comment have that effect?As Edwards notes, this can get complicated as the moral and the disordered interact. Certainly people are sometimes morally responsible for acting on their disordered impulses (as in pedophilia), and they are responsible for putting themselves in the way of disorder, as when someone imbibes in a way likely to lead to alcoholism. But at the normal/disorder divide, there seems to be a consistent lifting of some responsibility, reflecting the application of the sick role. For example, the rough equivalent of our current category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was recognized as a disorder in earlier wars ("shell shock," "war neurosis"), but often considered an expression of cowardice; the cowardice was morally evaluable as a failure of virtue (even if, like many personality traits, being a coward is not within the person's direct voluntary control) and led to contempt for those with PTSD, but nonetheless—except in cases thought to be malingering—the PTSD that resulted constituted a disorder for which the individual was [End Page 91] not in the same direct sense blameworthy. This moral shift requires explanation.This topic also has important social ramifications. Relief from responsibility may sound like a good thing, and it is trumpeted by mental health advocates as a reason for supporting the classification of many conditions as disorders. But as Edwards is aware, it is a two-edged sword. Disordered status may allow escape from censure and offer the protections of the sick role, but it also changes the relationship of the agent to his or her own actions and imposes the responsibility of the sick role on the individual to attempt to change ("get better"). The sick role allows for no defense of an idiosyncrasy based on normal variation ("It takes all kinds…") or the individual's eccentric vision or steadfast integrity, for that vision or sense of integrity are now seen as pathological and not morally legitimate. The individual is subjected to endless entreaties to seek help and it is implied that not to do so is irresponsible, so that a decision to embrace one's nature and remain as one is becomes illegitimate. Moreover, the sick role allows for no explanation in terms of the individual's normal defensive response to unjust, deprived, or challenging social or environmental circumstances, thus weakening the motives for social change rather than individual intervention.In sum, there is an inevitable sense in which being placed in the sick role inherently stigmatizes the "sick" condition in virtue of the special moral attitudes extended to the disordered. Cultures can thus easily exploit the sick role and its much-touted relief from responsibility to extend the reach of social control processes. This is one reason why the distinction between disorder and non-disorder is so important, and why it is crucial to identify when non-disordered conditions are mislabeled as disorders—as when, for example, psychiatry gets it wrong about the distinction between normal and disordered sadness (Horwitz and Wakefield, 2007). Such overpathologization can redefine the boundaries of our moral universe on mistaken grounds.Edwards offers two provocative answers—not entirely at ease with each other—to the question of why mental disorders relieve the patient from moral responsibility: (1) mental disorders are... (shrink)

Response-dependence theories have historically been very popular in aesthetics, and aesthetic response-dependence has motivated response-dependence in ethics. This chapter closely examines the prospects for such theories. It breaks this category down into dispositional and fittingness strands of response-dependence, corresponding to descriptive and normative ideal observer theories. It argues that the latter have advantages over the former but are not themselves without issue. Special attention is paid to the relationship between hedonism and response-dependence. The chapter also introduces two aesthetic properties (...) that lead to wrong kinds of reasons problems for aesthetic response-dependence: insightfulness and the capacity to change one’s perspective. These properties do not have obvious parallels in the ethical domain, and so present an obstacle for response-dependence even in aesthetics. The chapter ends by examining replies on behalf of the response-dependence theorist, ultimately suggesting that a restricted form of response-dependence is the most promising way forward for fans of such theories. (shrink)

The idea of cloning adult human beings often gives rise to objections involving mad dictators producing copies of themselves, or deranged billionaires who want to live forever. But what about situations where we can more readily understand and accept the reasons for creating a clone? Consider, for instance, the case of parents who have simultaneously lost their newly born child and found out that they cannot have any more children of their own by other known methods. Would it be wrong (...) of them to want a new child, a genetic copy of the lost infant, if the child were healthy and could only be produced by cloning the infant who no longer lives? And would it be wrong of genetic engineers to assist them? (shrink)

We evaluate people all the time for a wide variety of activities. We blame them for miscalculations, uninspired art, and committing crimes. We praise them for detailed brushwork, a superb pass, and their acts of kindness. We accomplish things, from solving crosswords to mastering guitar solos. We bungle our endeavors, whether this is letting a friend down or burning dinner. Sometimes these deeds are morally significant, but many times they are not. Simply Responsible defends the radical proposal that the blameworthy (...) artist is responsible in just the same way that the blameworthy thief is. We can be responsible for all kinds of different activities, from lip-synching to long division, from murders to meringues, but the relation involved, what author Matt King calls the basic responsibility relation, is the same in every case. We are responsible for the things we do first, then blameworthy or praiseworthy for having done them in light of whether they're good or bad, according to a variety of standards. Why is this a radical proposal? Firstly, because so much of the contemporary literature on moral responsibility has moralized its nature. According to most accounts, moral responsibility is either a special species of responsibility or else depends on moralized capacities. In contrast, King argues that we get a more complete and unifying picture of responsible agency from a more general theory of responsibility. Secondly, the proposal is radical due to its drastic simplicity. King foregoes many of the complications that feature in other accounts of responsibility, arguing that we can make do with less demanding theoretical elements. (shrink)

Yitzhak Benbaji argues that those combatants who have agreed to blindly obey their superiors and who are ordered to fight in unjust wars are released from their duty to deliberate about the merits of the acts that they are ordered to perform. This is because their agreements result in the combatants’ permissible lack of a necessary capacity for moral responsibility. Thus, the combatants are not morally responsible for their wrongful acts—their moral responsibility is “transferred” to their superiors. We argue, first, (...) that Benbaji’s own reasoning suggests that the agreements entered into between the combatants and their superiors are not binding and, second, that even if such agreements are binding, those combatants who obey their orders to fight are nevertheless morally responsible for their wrongful acts. Thus, Benbaji has failed to show that the combatants are permitted to act as ordered. By critically examining Benbaji’s view, then, we defend the revisionist position that just and unjust combatants are morally unequal. (shrink)

Development is a process of achieving a right balance between economic growth and psychic income growth. A foreign investor’s manner of conducting business in a country could result in any of four scenarios in which economic/psychic income is low/inadequate, high/inadequate, low/adequate, or high/adequate. Foreign investment will contribute to development only if it reflects the fourth scenario. A responsible corporation can contribute to money income and more importantly to psychic income of a company’s workers. This paper examines the corporate responsibility performance (...) of Indian and Chinese investments in Zambia’s mining sector. The paper finds that while Chinese companies seem to be operating close to the first scenario, Indian companies are operatingbetween the first and fourth. Thus, neither of them is contributing to true development. (shrink)