This original and compelling book argues that previous studies of John Stuart Mill's work have neglected his egalitarianism and thus seriously misunderstood his views. Morales demonstrates that Mill was fundamentally concerned with how the exercise of unjust or arbitrary power by some individuals over others sabotages the possibility of human well-being and social improvement. Mill therefore believed that 'perfect equality'--more than liberty--was the foundation of democracy and that democracy was a moral ideal for the organization of human life in (...) all of its dimensions. By reinterpreting Mill, Morales also challenges twentieth-century views of liberalism, and addresses its contemporary communitarian and feminist critics. (shrink)

Through a witty and engaging style, this book is for anyone who has a job (employees, managers, and leaders), and who wants to do the right thing, but aren't always sure what that means, how to go about it, or how to withstand the forces that push all of us away from being ethical. By poking fun at the ironies and hypocrisies of human behavior, Exercising Your Ethics prompts readers to leverage techniques that can help us become more deliberate about (...) choosing value-driven actions. In a world that seems to reward winning, regardless of how it is achieved, we need a clearer reason for wanting to be and become our best selves. This approach to business ethics is innovative, fresh, and evocative in that the serious subject is treated in an informal and adventurous manner, poking fun at the ironies and hypocrisies of human behavior. Readers will see how our race to achieve quarterly profits, combined with a self-indulgent consumption-based economy, has shaped our entire lives. Readers will delight in the book's humor, as the ironies of human interaction prompt introspection to consider how to better equip oneself with the knowledge, tools, and techniques to engage in and support others in the path to moral action at work. Bringing Ethics to Work explains business ethics in a way that is engaging, understandable and enables the reader to recognise behaviors in themselves and others. It is ideal for adult education (students in undergraduate, Masters, or professional degree programs) and training within organizational settings (employees, management, and future leaders). HR professionals, team leaders, professional coaches, and organizational ethics trainers will find the book particularly insightful and useful. (shrink)

I put equality at the center of John Stuart Mill's practical philosophy. His principle of "perfect equality" embodies a substantive relational ideal, which I call "equality as reciprocity." This ideal requires removing injustices due to domination and subjection in human associations, including the family. Justice grounded on perfect equality must be the basis of personal, social, and political life, because the moral sentiments, chief among human beings' "higher" faculties, find adequate channels only under equality. Genuine happiness, which involves the (...) exercise and development of these faculties, is open only to those who relate as equals. Thus, on my account, equality as reciprocity adds substance to Mill's liberalism. ;In The Subjection of Women, Mill appealed to his view of human progress to argue for perfect equality. He maintained that this ideal is not appropriate for all times, but required for human improvement and a part of everyone's good under conditions of "modernity." Modern democratic cultures embrace such "progressive" human interests as equal justice, sympathy, and cooperation. Replacing the archaic command and obedience ethic with the nonhierarchical pattern of reciprocity would bring out human beings' "true virtue": living as equals. Inequality, and the exercise of unjust power generally, corrupts everyone's moral character and thwarts human flourishing. All other things equal, egalitarian relations are a critical part of anyone's autonomously chosen plan of life. Given human sociability, any other choice would impoverish a person's life. ;It is clear from Mill's argument for perfect equality that Mill was not a classical utilitarian. He conceived of utility broadly, as concerning progressive human interests, and argued for educating the "moral part" of human nature through just institutions and social practices. He believed that strengthening equal justice, the chief moral sentiment, is a central requirement of utility, because of the importance of other-regarding sentiments to a good human life. Thus, on my account, Mill's "enlarged" account of utility supports his substantive egalitarianism. His defense of perfect equality is utilitarian only in his idiosyncratic sense. (shrink)

This study introduces the concept of moral imagination in a work context to provide an ethical approach to the controversial relationships between dirty work and dirty workers. Moral imagination is assessed as an essential faculty to overcome the stigma associated with dirty work and facilitate the daily work lives of workers.The exercise of moral imagination helps dirty workers to face the moral conflicts inherent in their tasks and to build a personal stance toward their occupation. Finally, (...) we argue that organizations with dirty work groups should actively adopt measures to encourage their employees' exercise of moral imagination. This study investigates how organizations might create conditions that inspire moral imagination, particularly with regard to the importance of organizational culture as a means to enhance workers' moral sensitivity. Furthermore, this investigation analyzes different company practices that may derive from a culture committed to moral imagination. (shrink)

This paper investigates qualitatively the significance of different dimensions of ethical organisation culture for the exercise of middle managers’ moral agency in ethical problems. The research draws on the social cognitive theory of morality and on the corporate ethical virtues model. This study broadens understanding of the factors which enable or constrain managers’ potential for moral agency in organisations, and shows that an insufficient ethical organisational culture may contribute to indifference towards ethical issues, the experiencing of moral (...) conflicts, lack of self-efficacy and morally disengaged reasoning. In contrast, a healthy ethical culture can contribute to motivation to tackle ethical problems, an increased capacity for self-regulation and ultimately ethical behaviour. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the presence and power of guilt in health and fitness discourses, and argue that it is potentially damaging to its targets, however normalized it may have become. It is not that guilt has been excluded from sociocultural studies of exercise, fitness, and health ; rather, it has merely been lurking inside these general areas of concern and has not been purposefully isolated to be investigated on its own merit. Addressing this lull in the conversation, I (...) conducted research to ask what the sources of exercise related guilt in women’s lives are, how that guilt manifests, how it operates, and how women manage it. My arguments... (shrink)

In the Cypriot trilogy Isocrates does not intend to carry out only an oratorical exercise on his conception of the monarchic regime. These are speeches whose primary meaning was to carry out a diplomatic action whose intention was for Cyprus to support the Athenian hegemonic cause. They were written at the precise moment when Timotheus travelled through the Aegean Sea and the north of Greece in order to consolidate Athenian expansionism. In this way, he made a sequence of political speeches (...) in which he used his own philosophical notions adapting them, on the one hand, to the Cypriot political situation characterized by confrontations between the pro-Hellenic and pro-Persian factions and, on the other hand, to the strategic needs of Athens. (shrink)

Literary criticism of Shakespeare’s Othello since the early 20th century leaves us with various complaints that Shakespeare fails to achieve poetic justice therein, or that this work leaves us, in the end, with a moral enigma—despite what seems to be Shakespeare’s intent to represent a plot and characters having moral probity and, thereby, to foster our moral edification through the tragedy that unfolds. Here a number of interpretive views concerning the morality proper to Othello are reviewed. Thereafter, (...) it is proposed that Heidegger’s thought about the relation of appearance, semblance, and reality enables a novel interpretation of the moral significance of this tragedy, thereby to resolve the question of moral enigma. (shrink)

In Our Moral Fate: Evolution and Escape from Tribalism, Buchanan’s challenging attempt to account for morality through an evolutionary lens has, as its turning point, the introduction of the key roles of the human capacity for critical, open-ended moral reasoning and the powerful motivating force of moral identity to exercise it, in order to explain the shift from “shallowly inclusive” to “deeply inclusive moralities” and therefore to account for the possibility of the Two Great Expansions of the (...) moral regard. Nevertheless, these two crucial human traits seem to produce those large-scale social-political effects required by these two momentous moral shifts only under certain necessary conditions, specifically because—according to the author—the widespread and relatively unconstrained exercise of the capacity for critical, open-ended moral reasoning is something of a luxury good, namely, something that requires a considerable surplus reproductive success. This contribution aims at highlighting why a real exercise of human moral reasoning cannot be a luxury good, by raising three fundamental points to ground Buchanan’s novel pathway from a moral standpoint. The first section argues for the introduction of a moral justification for the necessary conditions underlying the REHMR. The second section claims the need for an evolutionary or moral foundation of the moral reasons and principles which inform and prompt the affirmation of an authentic moral identity. Finally, the third section motivates the demand for an elucidation on what deep normative source of morality is specifically at stake in Buchanan’s theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss how a Working group on ethics dealt with the question whether the collapse of the Icelandic banks and related financial setbacks can to some extent be explained by morality and work practice. I describe how the Working group delineated its subject matter by evaluating practice in the financial sector, the administration, the political sector and the social or cultural sector. I demonstrate the approach used by the Working group by discussing some important examples which throw (...) light on some aspects of its manifold analyses. The examples show how different aspects of morality are of importance in an analysis of the events that took place. (shrink)

The political discourse of Rafael Caldera and Carlos Andrés Pérez is here analyzed. Thess leaders share features in exercising power as presidents of Venezuela, and in their being members of the traditional political parties that ruled the country in the second half of the XXth century. A crit..

The field of “science studies” has often been suspected of dubious moral grounds because of its intensive concern with nonhumans; the accusation is made by those who use a roughly Kantian definition of what it is to occupy the moral high ground. By evaluating four contrasting texts (by Comte-Sponville, Kant, Serres, and Lovelock) in tandem, this article explores what an “objective morality” would look like, and it considers how to compare the Kantian axiology with the actor-network theory's possible (...) definition of a thing-oriented morality. Especially important in this context is the moral intensity of a text, which this article defines semiotically in terms of the ability to feel responsible by responding to the “call” of more beings than the human beings so exclusively attended to in the moralist tradition. (shrink)

Moral distress is a phenomenon increasingly recognized in healthcare that occurs when a clinician is unable to act in a manner consistent with his or her moral requirements due to external constraints. We contend that some experiences of moral distress are self-inflicted due to one’s under-assertion of professional authority, and these are potentially avoidable. In this article we outline causes of self-inflicted moral distress and offer recommendations for mitigation.

We introduce the concept of “organizational terrorism” to describe dysfunctional leaders who are abusive and who treat organizational members with contempt and disregard. After identifying the moral duties of leaders in organizations, we explain how organization members respond to their dissatisfaction with organizations through Exit, Voice, Loyalty, or Neglect. We explain why exercising voice is the most effective moral choice in dealing with dysfunctional leaders.

Objective: To determine whether a moral reasoning exercise can improve response quality to surveys of healthcare priorities Methods: A randomised internet survey focussing on patient age in healthcare allocation was repeated twice. From 2574 internet panel members from the USA and Canada, 2020 (79%) completed the baseline survey and 1247 (62%) completed the follow-up. We elicited respondent preferences for age via five allocation scenarios. In each scenario, a hypothetical health planner made a decision to fund one of two programmes (...) identical except for average patient age (35 vs 65 years). Half of the respondents (intervention group) were randomly assigned to receive an additional moral reasoning exercise. Responses were elicited again 7 weeks later. Numerical scores ranging from –5 (strongest preference for younger patients) to +5 (strongest preference for older patients); 0 indicates no age preference. Response quality was assessed by propensity to choose extreme or neutral values, internal consistency, temporal stability and appeal to prejudicial factors. Results: With the exception of a scenario offering palliative care, respondents preferred offering scarce resources to younger patients in all clinical contexts. This preference for younger patients was weaker in the intervention group. Indicators of response quality favoured the intervention group. Conclusions: Although people generally prefer allocating scarce resources to young patients over older ones, these preferences are significantly reduced when participants are encouraged to reflect carefully on a wide range of moral principles. A moral reasoning exercise is a promising strategy to improve response quality to surveys of healthcare priorities. (shrink)

We introduce the concept of "organizational terrorism" to describe dysfunctional leaders who are abusive and who treat organizational members with contempt and disregard. After identifying the moral duties of leaders in organizations, we explain how organization members respond to their dissatisfaction with organizations through Exit, Voice, Loyalty, or Neglect. We explain why exercising voice is the most effective moral choice in dealing with dysfunctional leaders.

The development of science and engineering, and the social transformations occurring in the world of today open entirely new prospects to humanity. The scale and consequences of decisions made are expanding as never before in any previous period of history, and people's responsibility is also increasing. Herein lies one of the reasons for the constantly increasing attention to human freedom and to the intimately related problems of choice and decision-making.

This paper engages with two contrasting approaches to conceptualising and studying consumer behaviour that appear to dominate existing research on consumption. On one hand, agency-focused perspectives take an individual consumer to be the primary author of practice and a basic unit of analysis. On the other hand, socio-centric paradigms focus on the social roots of consumption activities and the wider societal contexts in which they take place. The need to provide a more balanced view of consumption phenomena has been acknowledged, (...) yet not adequately acted upon. This paper begins to fill this gap through relevant theoretical and empirical contributions. First, we provide a critical review of the dominant theoretical perspectives on consumption in general and ethical consumption in particular, highlight their key ontological assumptions and explain how they preclude a fuller understanding of the ways in which consumer practices are moulded and shaped. Taking a critical realist approach, we then present the findings from qualitative analysis of consumers' ethical food practices to empirically demonstrate the role of human agency and social structure in creating and shaping ethical consumption. Thus, by means of theoretical analysis and empirical research this paper responds to the call for a more comprehensive understanding of consumption and provides a consolidated account of consumer behaviour which acknowledges and explains the complex ensemble of individual and systemic powers in which consumer practices are contained. (shrink)

This paper presents an experiential exercise introducing the concept of the personal ethical threshold (PET) to help explain why moral behavior does not always follow moral intention. An individual’s PET represents the individual’s vulnerability to situational factors, i.e., how little or much it takes for members of organizations to cross their proverbial line to act in a way they deem unethical. The PET reflects the interplay among the situation, the particular ethical issue, and the individual. Exploring the PET (...) can help account for why some people are sometimes able to withstand substantial organizational pressures to behave in congruence with their ethical intentions, whereas others crumble in the face of apparently minimal situational forces. We hope that students’ exposure to and subsequent reflection upon their PET, by means of the exercise we present, will foster the development of their moral courage. (shrink)

RESUMEN Introducción: El proceso de cuidar es el resultado de una construcción propia de cada situación, se origina con la identificación de los problemas de salud y las necesidades reales o potenciales de las personas, familia y comunidad que demandan cuidado. Objetivo: Evaluar el impacto del Diplomado Prevención del Síndrome de Burnout, en el autocuidado del personal de enfermería de la Atención Secundaria de Salud de la provincia Camagüey. Métodos: Se realizó un estudio descriptivo observacional, en el Hospital Amalia Simoni (...) Argilagos de Camagüey, durante el Diplomado Prevención del Síndrome de Burnout dirigido al personal de enfermería de la Atención Secundaria de Salud. Para ello se aplicó una encuesta y el Test Psicológico de Maslach y Jackson al inicio y al final de la aplicación del Diplomado. Los datos aportados por estos instrumentos se complementaron con los provenientes de la aplicación de la técnica del PNI. Resultados: Predominó el sexo femenino. El total de los cursistas son licenciados en Enfermería. Con la ejecución del diplomado se constatan cambios importantes en cuanto a la autopreparación, el rendimiento, los hábitos de descanso, satisfacción personal y realización de ejercicios físicos. Discusión: La aplicación del diplomado logró transformar estilos de trabajo, afrontamientos al estrés, así como una mejor satisfacción personal y colectiva. ABSTRACT Introduction: The process of taking care is the result of a proper construction of every situation, it originates with the identification of the problems of health and the real or potential needs of the persons, family and community that demand care. Objective: To evaluate the impact of Postgraduate Course Prevention of the Syndrome of Burnout, in the self-care of the personnel of infirmary of the Secondary Attention of Health of the Camagüey province. Methods: a descriptive, observational study was carried out in the Hospital Amalia Simoni Argilagos of Camagüey, during Postgraduate Course Prevention of the Syndrome of Burnout directed to the personnel of infirmary of the Secondary Attention of Health. For that reason, a survey and the Psychological Test of Maslach and Jackson was applied at the beginning and at the end of the application of the course. The information contributed by these instruments complemented itself with the originated ones from the application of the technique of the PNI. Results: The sex that predominated was the feminine one. All of the students are licensed in Infirmary. With the execution of the course important changes are stated as for the self-preparation, the yield, the habits of rest, personal satisfaction and achievement of physical exercises. Discussion: The application of the course managed to transform styles of work, confrontations to the stress, as well as a better personal and collective satisfaction. (shrink)

In this provocative study, Bedau demonstrates the usefulness of "casuistry," or "the method of cases" in arriving at moral decisions. He examines well-known cases, including the aftermath of the sinking of the William Brown in 1841, that compel us to consider questions about who ought to survive when not all can. By doing so, we learn something about how we actually reason concerning such life and death situations, as well as about how we ought to reason if we wish (...) both to be consistent and to properly respect human life. Bedau's elegant book will be a valuable resource for students, philosophers, and general readers. (shrink)

Moral agency is limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained. This is evident in the many ways we all unwittingly participate in widespread injustice through our everyday actions, which I call ‘structural wrongs’. To do justice to these facts, I argue that we should distinguish between summative and formative moral criticism. While summative criticism functions to conclusively assess an agent's performance relative to some benchmark, formative criticism aims only to improve performance in an ongoing way. I show that the negative (...) sanctions associated with summative responses are only justifiably imposed under certain conditions when persons exercise their agency wrongly — conditions that do not always hold for structural wrongs. Yet even in such cases we can still use formative responses, which are warranted whenever agents fall short of moral ideals. Expanding our repertoire of moral criticism to include both summative and formative responses enables us to better appreciate both the powers and limitations of our agency, and the complexity of moral life. (shrink)

This paper defends the possibility of doxastic freedom, arguing that doxastic freedom should be modelled not on freedom of action but on freedom of intention. Freedom of action is exercised by agents like us, I argue, through voluntary control. This involves two conditions, intentions-reactivity and reasons-reactivity, that are not met in the case of doxastic states. Freedom of intention is central to our agency and to our moral responsibility, but is not exercised through voluntary control. I develop and defend (...) an account of freedom of intention, arguing that constitutive features of intention ensure that freedom of intention cannot require voluntary control. Then I show that an analogous argument can be applied to doxastic states. I argue that if we had voluntary control of intentions or of doxastic states, this would actually undermine our freedom. (shrink)

Morality exercises a deep and questionable influence on the way we live our lives. The influence is deep both because moral injunctions are embedded in our psyches long before we can reflect on their status and because even after we become reflective agents, the question of how we should live our lives among others is intimately bound up with the more general question of how we should live our lives: our stance toward morality and our conception of our (...) lives as having significance are of a piece. The influence is questionable because morality pretends to a level of objectivity that it may not possess. Moral injunctions are meant to be binding on us in some way that is independent of the desires or preferences we may happen to have. When one asserts that a certain action is morally worthy or shameful one is, prime facie, doing more than merely expressing approval or disapproval or trying to get others to act as instruments of one's own will. If moral assertions were shown, at bottom, to be merely such exhortations, then they would be shown to wear a disguise. Morality would be revealed as pretending to an objectivity it does not have, and such a revelation could not but have a profound impact on our lives. It is doubtful that such a revelation could be kept locked up inside our studies. (shrink)

Morality exercises a deep and questionable influence on the way we live our lives. The influence is deep both because moral injunctions are embedded in our psyches long before we can reflect on their status and because even after we become reflective agents, the question of how we should live our lives among others is intimately bound up with the more general question of how we should live our lives: our stance toward morality and our conception of our (...) lives as having significance are of a piece. The influence is questionable because morality pretends to a level of objectivity that it may not possess. Moral injunctions are meant to be binding on us in some way that is independent of the desires or preferences we may happen to have. When one asserts that a certain action is morally worthy or shameful one is, prime facie, doing more than merely expressing approval or disapproval or trying to get others to act as instruments of one's own will. If moral assertions were shown, at bottom, to be merely such exhortations, then they would be shown to wear a disguise. Morality would be revealed as pretending to an objectivity it does not have, and such a revelation could not but have a profound impact on our lives. It is doubtful that such a revelation could be kept locked up inside our studies. (shrink)

Abstract:In reference to Pierre Hadot's idea of spiritual exercises, this essay examines how Zhiyi suggests his unique vision of spiritual exercises for therapeutic transformation. Though the recent interest in Madhyamaka spiritual exercises has focused on the implication of non-duality for moral-psychological transformation and self-cultivation, more research is needed on the issue of contradiction in spiritual exercises, which can also relate to the recent concern for dialetheism and the pragmatics of contradiction in Tiantai studies. This essay (...) traces how dialectic contradiction and its pragmatic uses underlie Zhiyi's non-dualistic spiritual exercises, examining his unique philosophical vision of the middle and its effects on therapeutic transformation, which is to be cultivated through various meditative techniques. (shrink)

Most people would agree that a small child, or a cognitively impaired adult, is less responsible for their actions, good or bad, than an unimpaired adult. But how do we explain that difference, and how far can anyone be praised or blamed for what they have done? In this fascinating introduction, Matthew Talbert explores some of the key questions shaping current debates about moral responsibility, including: What is free will, and is it required for moral responsibility? Are we (...) responsible for the unforeseen consequences of our actions? Is it fair to blame people for doing what they believe is right? And are psychopaths open to blame? As Talbert argues, we are morally responsible for our actions when they are related to us in particular ways: when our actions express our true selves, for example, or when we exercise certain kinds of control over them. It is because we bear these relationships to our actions that we are open to praise and blame. _Moral Responsibility_ will be an important resource for students and researchers in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of agency and of great interest to all those wishing to understand an important aspect of our moral practices. (shrink)

This study examines the effectiveness of teaching business ethics. It fills an important gap in the literature by utilizing students’ own personal reflections and reassessments involving an actual workplace ethical dilemma they have already faced. After submitting a personal ethical dilemma at the beginning of a business ethics course, students are later asked following the course whether they believe they would behave in a similar manner if they faced the same ethical dilemma again, and for what reasons. The paper is (...) organized as follows. Part one briefly summarizes the normative and descriptive research that has been conducted on the effectiveness of teaching business ethics. Part two outlines the qualitative research methodology used in the study followed by a discussion of the results and implications. The study finds that nearly one third of students would now act differently if they faced the same ethical dilemma again in the future. (shrink)

BackgroundCurrently a variety of novel scenarios have appeared within nursing practice such as confidentiality of a patient victim of abuse, justice in insolvent patients, poorly informed consent delivery, non-satisfactory medicine outputs, or the possibility to reject a recommended treatment. These scenarios presuppose skills that are not usually acquired during the degree. Thus, the implementation of teaching approaches that promote the acquisition of these skills in the nursing curriculum is increasingly relevant.ObjectiveThe article analyzes an academic model which integrates in the curriculum (...) a series of specific theoretical concepts together with practical skills to acquire the basic ethic assessment competency.Research designThe project includes designing two subjects, General Anthropology and Ethics-Bioethics, with an applied approach in the nursing curriculum. The sequential structure of the curriculum in both subjects is constituted by three learning domains (theoretical, practical, and communicative) with different educational strategies.Ethical considerationsNo significant ethical considerations as this is a discussion paper.FindingsThe model was structured from the anthropology’s concepts and decision-making process, applied to real situations. The structure of the three domains theoretical–practical–communicative is present in each session.DiscussionIt is observed that theoretical domain fosters the capacity for critical analysis and subsequent ability to judge diverse situations. The practical domain reflected two significant difficulties: students’ resistance to internalizing moral problems and the tendency to superficial criticism. The communicative domain has frequently shown that the conflicting points are in the principles to be applied.ConclusionWe conclude that this design achieves its objectives and may provide future nursing professionals with ethical competences especially useful in healthcare practice. The three domains of the presented scheme are associated with the same process used in decision making at individual levels, where the exercise of clinical prudence acquires particular relevance. (shrink)

Kant approaches the problem of moral evil by recalling the general Critical doctrine that the free moral acts of human agents express a noumenal, timeless, choice, which is made once for all and is the ground of all temporal moral choices. The limitations of speculative reason in the sphere of religion are emphasised by Kant when he admits the existence of totally incomprehensible ‘holy mysteries’ in religion. Kant holds that every ecclesiastical faith, which is founded in some (...) historical revelation, is perhaps a means to bringing about the moral church; but such faiths must wither away, for claims to revelation are incompatible with universality. Kant is totally opposed to any devotional exercises to God, except as a means to cultivating the moral disposition; or to any characterisation of God in anthropomorphic terms, as a tyrant or ruler with an arbitrary will. (shrink)

In this article I interpret John Rawls’s concept of the original position as a spiritual exercise. In addition to the standard interpretation of the original position as an expository device to select principles of justice for the fundamental institutions of society, I argue that Rawls also envisages it as a “spiritual exercise”: a voluntary personal practice intended to bring about a transformation of the self. To make this argument, I draw on the work of Pierre Hadot, a philosopher and classicist, (...) who introduced the idea of spiritual exercises as central to ancient and modern conceptions of philosophy. By reading Rawls alongside Hadot, this article portrays Rawls as a thinker deeply concerned with the question of how subjects can lead more just and fulfilling lives. It also proposes that the original position as a spiritual exercise can help defend liberalism as a social and political doctrine. (shrink)

Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings is a much-needed collection of essays on issues of moral psychology. The aim of the book is to present the reader with a comprehensive view of both the history and foundations of moral psychology as well as the discipline's position in academia and its relationship with other disciplines, such as psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, all of which involve empirical investigation of human capabilities and behavior. This collection is well organized into (...) five distinct parts. Each part has a helpful editorial introduction that not only summarizes the main themes of the debate assigned to that part, but also provides brief summaries of each of the subsequent essays in that section. The selected papers are presented in chronological order, thus illustrating the development of the debate. First, an historical piece of philosophy is presented to demonstrate the original questions of the section's theme. The historical pieces are followed by more-recent articles or selections written by scientists concerning similar topics. Finally, each part concludes with articles written by contemporary moral psychologists. These final articles often make mention of the historical texts or the scientific articles preceding those papers. This dialectic style of presentation successfully gives the reader the context and progression of the debate while still highlighting the "live" questions that are, in a sense, left as an exercise for the reader as well as future academics. (shrink)

When health professionals experience moral distress during routine clinical practice, they are challenged to maintain integrity through conscientious practice guided by ethical principles and virtues that promote the dignity of all human beings who need care. Their integrity also needs preservation during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when faced with triage protocols that allocate scarce resources. Although a crisis may change our ability to provide life-saving treatment to all who need it, a crisis should not change the (...) ethical values that should always be guiding clinical care. Enduring ethical commitments should encourage clinicians to base treatment decisions on the medical needs of individual patients. This approach contrasts with utilitarian attempts to maximize selected aggregate outcomes by using scoring systems that use short-term and possibly long-term prognostic estimates to discriminate between patients and thereby treat them unequally in terms of their eligibility for life-sustaining treatment. During times of crisis and calm, moral communication allows clinicians to exercise moral agency and advocate for their individual patients, thereby demonstrating conscientious practice and resisting influences that may contribute to compartmentalization, moral injury, and burnout. (shrink)

Many of us are inclined to accept something like the following principle: We can only be properly morally assessed for what is in our control. And yet our ordinary practices seem to frequently violate this principle. The resulting tension, and the attempt to resolve it, is the problem of moral luck. For example, we tend to punish and think worse of the negligent driver who kills a child than we do the equally negligent driver who was lucky there was (...) no child in his path. Thus, the lucky outcomes of our actions do seem to affect the extent to which we hold and are held responsible, but these are not things over which we exercise control. And, as Thomas Nagel famously illustrated in his response to Bernard Williams (the two of which papers form the founding documents of the moral luck debate), the influence of luck is not limited to outcomes. For the circumstances in which we find ourselves and, indeed, our very constitution are also shaped by luck. Since the publication of Williams's and Nagel's papers, the existence and breadth of moral luck has been hotly debated. This debate is not a mere intellectual trifle but, as the essays in this volume illustrate, a debate which lies at the heart of free will, responsibility, identity, causation, and self-creation. (shrink)

Moral identity theorists argue that moral action is explained by the centrality of moral values to a person’s identity. Moral identity theorists refer to moral integration as both the process by which moral values become central to a person’s identity and the state an individual is in when a given moral value is central to their identity. While moral identity theorists appeal to autobiographical narratives to determine the state of moral integration (...) in an individual, they have little to say about the role of autobiographical narratives in articulating the process of moral integration. The aim of this paper is to argue that appealing to autobiographical narratives supports the view that moral integration is a learning process the outcome of which is the acquisition of an understanding of moral concepts that is exercised in moral deliberation. Since moral identity theorists argue that moral integration is empirically correlated to a sustained commitment to moral action, the upshot of the argument of this paper is an account that elucidates the relationship between moral identity, moral action and moral deliberation. (shrink)

Commentators have shown a steady interest in the role of feeling in Kant’s moral and practical philosophy over the last few decades. Much attention has been given to the notion of ‘moral feeling’ in general, as well as to what Kant calls the ‘feeling of respect’ for the moral law. My focus in this essay is on the role of feeling in practical judgment. My claim in what follows is that the act of judging in the practical (...) domain—i.e., determining what one ought to do, or what action one ought to perform, in a specific case—crucially involves feeling. Put more simply: I argue that practical judgment has an essentially affective dimension. The upshot of the account I will give is that it provides us with a richer and more complex account of moral feeling than has previously been appreciated in the literature. While it is recognized that feeling plays a certain role in moral motivation, what I hope to demonstrate here is that feeling is involved much earlier in the exercise of moral agency. Far from entering only at the point at which we are trying to muster the strength of will to carry out what we know we ought to do, feeling is present the moment we begin to deliberate about what it is that we ought to do. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the ethics of popularizing moral philosophy. In particular, it addresses the question of whether ethicists engaged in public debates should restrict themselves to acting as impartial informants or moderators rather than advocates of their own moral opinions. I dismiss the idea that being an impartial servant to moral debates is the default or even the only defensible way to publicly exercise ethical expertise and thus, to popularize moral philosophy. Using a case (...) example from the public debate about the human use of nonhuman animals, I highlight the benefits and risks of endorsing an advocate’s and a teacher’s or moderator’s role, respectively. I argue for a general requirement of judgment transparency which entails that the publicly engaged philosopher ought to be clear and consistent about the type of role she takes on, her publicly advanced opinions generally ought to be her professional ones and that she ought to flag her private opinions. I finally show that, despite general concerns about conflicts of interest, exercising ethical expertise and engaging in advocacy, i.e., acting as if one were a moral expert, are not incompatible modes of public engagement for the moral philosopher. (shrink)

Do the various ascriptions of “violence,” e.g., to rape, logical reasoning, racist legislation, unqualified statements, institutions of class and/or gender inequity, etc., mean something identically the same, something analogous, or equivocal and context-bound? This paper argues for both an analogous sense as well as an exemplary essence and finds support in Aristotle’s theory of anger as, as Sokolowski has put it, a form of moral annihilation, culminating in a level of rage that crosses a threshold. Here we adopt Sartre’s (...) analysis of the “threshold of violence” as indicating a basic “existential” possibility wherein persons may and do adopt a posture of anti-god. This has considerable symmetry with the mythic and theological figure in the Abrahamic religions who is called “Lucifer.” This personage, at a unique timeless moment, found himself empowered to assume the right to exercise an infinite will-act which tolerated no superior normative perspective. I argue that this mythic stance is a live option for persons. Further, modern day nation-state military preparedness, where nuclear weaponry is a major tool of foreign policy, is a way of putting on ice and holding in reserve, but button ready, the onto-logical madness of the Luciferian moment. (shrink)

In the past few years, the ethical ramifications of AI technologies have been at the center of intense debates. Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding how a morally responsible practice of data science can be promoted and which values have to shape it. In this context, ethics and moral responsibility have been mainly conceptualized as compliance to widely shared principles. However, several scholars have highlighted the limitations of such a principled approach. Drawing from microethics and the virtue theory (...) tradition, in this paper, we formulate a different approach to ethics in data science which is based on a different conception of “being ethical” and, ultimately, of what it means to promote a morally responsible data science. First, we develop the idea that, rather than only compliance, ethical decision-making consists in using certain moral abilities, which are cultivated by practicing and exercising them in the data science process. An aspect of virtue development that we discuss here is moral attention, which is the ability of data scientists to identify the ethical relevance of their own technical decisions in data science activities. Next, by elaborating on the capability approach, we define a technical act as ethically relevant when it impacts one or more of the basic human capabilities of data subjects. Therefore, rather than “applying ethics”, data scientists should cultivate ethics as a form of reflection on how technical choices and ethical impacts shape one another. Finally, we show how this microethical framework concretely works, by dissecting the ethical dimension of the technical procedures involved in data understanding and preparation of electronic health records. (shrink)

The practical phenomenon of moral diversity is a central feature of many contemporary societies and poses a distinct problem to moral theory building. Because of its goal to settle the moral question fully and exclusively and/or to provide better understanding of moral disagreement, traditional first-order moral theory often does not provide sufficient guidance to address this phenomenon and moral agency in deeply morally diverse societies. In this article, I move beyond traditional first-order moral (...) theorizing and, based on multilevel social contract theory (Moehler 2018, 2020a), develop a practically sound notion of moral agency for morally diverse societies. The interrelational and dynamic notion of integrated moral agency developed in this article demands that agents actively exercise their rational and affective capacities, are receptive to the capacities of others, and are aware of the type of moral interaction in which they engage with others. The notion of integrated moral agency helps agents to reconcile conflicting first-order moral directives and to maximally protect agents’ autonomy in morally diverse societies. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis is to examine two moral emotions(‘ressentiment' and 'cheerfulness’) in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality. In “the first essay”, Nietzsche analyzes 'ressentiment' as the moral emotion of the weak and explains how the weak have succeeded in the inversion of values. However, Nietzsche considers that 'ressentiment' have played a negative role in harming human health from the perspective of the value of life. The feeling of the incompetence inherent in 'ressentiment', at first, turned (...) the discontent toward the powerful men. But in the end it resulted to oneself, and ascetic ethics appeared. The ascetic ethics have played a role in their own way. It not only interpreted the meaning of human suffering, but also kept it from disturbance of impulses and emotions. But Nietzsche says that the ascetic ethics is far from "great health", because it excessively restrains the exertion of our nature and power. The feelings of 'ressentiment' still remain in the ascetic ethics and make a life heavy. A sinful Life itself can never be a cheerful life. It is Nietzsche's idea that you can not really feel the cheerful emotion without departing from the moral duties and self-condemnation. Nietzsche suggests that "emotions of power" should be exercised to the maximum, unlike the ascetic who want to suppress emotions as much as possible. He believes that man must be completely free from moral obligations and guilt in order to experience these emotions. For Nietzsche, 'cheerfulness' is an emotion that comes to free humans completely free from moral duty. Man must unleash the yoke of life that forces only truth and good. Nietzsche says that "great health" comes when man seeks strength and beauty. 'Cheerfulness' is the signal that "great health" is coming. The restoration of 'cheerfulness' from the feelings of 'ressentiment' is a new challenge of Nietzsche's philosophy. (shrink)

Speeding is a major problem in road safety. Intelligent Speed Adaptation is a potential solution, but the moral acceptability of ISA has been called into question both in the popular media and in academic discussions. In this article, a moral case is made for making warning and limiting versions of ISA obligatory in all cars. The practice of car driving involves frequent speeding, which imposes unacceptable risks of harm on other road users. In this article, I argue that (...) ISA can therefore be justified on the basis of the harm it prevents, as is the current criminalisation of speeding. I defend obligatory ISA against three objections. First, ISA is likely to introduce some additional risk for drivers. However, drivers should accept these risks to reduce the risks from driving for other parties to an acceptable level. Second, although limiting ISA reduces drivers' options for moral agency and exercising self-restraint to some extent, this consequence is defensible. Third, accepting ISA does not commit us to accepting an entire range of other behaviour-regulating technologies. (shrink)

People unacquainted with moral philosophy suppose that its business is to tell us the difference between right and wrong. Many moral philosophers, unfortunately, seem to agree with them, to the extent, at any rate, of taking it for granted that there is some one divison of actions into two classes, which division is of some especial or even unique significance. Actions, they have supposed, are either right or wrong. If they are right, then they must and ought to (...) be done, and to do them is our duty. If they are wrong, then they must not and ought not to be done, and it is our duty not to do them. If we do what is right, and do this because it is right, and not just because it suits us, then we have performed a morally good action, and we deserve praise or commendation. If we have done something which is wrong, then we have performed a morally bad action, and deserveblame, and possibly punishment. Finally, a man manifests his moral goodness by performing, from a sense of duty, those actions which belong to the first class, and omitting those which belong to the second class; since there are no other ways in which actions may be classified morally, he has ample oppo tunity for exercising his talents, and the morally good man, or the conscientious man, or the dutiful man, becomes the archetype of what a man ought to be. (shrink)