There has been a resurgence of instrumentalist accounts of moral psychology. The new accounts are seen as having overcome traditional criticisms against instrumentalism—and to have done so, centrally, by incorporating key insight from P. F. Strawson’s approach. Call this strategy the Strawson Defence of instrumentalism. The defence is widespread, but I will primarily focus on an admirably explicit development of it by Dale E. Miller in response to criticism by Bernard Williams. The aims of this paper are, first, to show that the Strawson Defence fails to answer the criticism and, second, to show the unimpeded relevance of the more serious aspect of Williams’ criticism for instrumentalism today. While the Hare-Williams debate frames this discussion, as it does Miller’s discussion, its relevance extends to the significant role that the Strawson Defence presently has in motivating a revival of instrumentalism.
Some authors have recently argued that people who emit large amounts of greenhouse gases are liable to defensive harm against their property. The main reason is that, according to recent estimates, a high emitter causes—in a matter of hours or days—a climate-related death in expectation. However, the actual probability that a high emitter will cause a death is very low. This is a problem in standard defensive liability accounts, which claim that a person can only be liable if she will cause death unless stopped, or at least creates the appearance that she will. There are plausible non-standard liability accounts where causation is not necessary for liability, and culpable risk imposition can suffice. The problem is that the probability of death that a high emitter imposes on each person is still low, on a par with many everyday acts that are intuitively justified. I argue that some emitters do nevertheless culpably impose unjustified risk. These emitters impose a low probability risk of death, but a very high normic risk of death. This means that it would be ‘normal’ if emitters caused death—we would need no additional explanation why their emissions caused death.
How do the colour blue and the number four relate with respect to their tastiness? Most disregard these cases of ‘non-comparability’ due to the fact that they seem to be of no interest when discussing practical reasoning. They are taken to be nonsensical and consequently do not cause a problem for everyday practical deliberation. In this paper, non-comparability is treated more carefully and not swiftly judged to be of no philosophical interest. It is argued that non-comparability constitutes support for the claim that there can be instantiated incomparability. First, several definitions of non-comparability are presented. Then a toy example is presented to show how non-comparability can cause a problem for practical deliberation. Finally, well-known discussions involving irreducible normative concepts are shown to constitute cases of non-comparability that are interesting from the perspective of practical reasoning. It is concluded that non-comparability provides substantial support for the possibility of instantiated incomparability.
It is often believed that experimental philosophy poses a serious challenge to reflective equilibrium as a valid philosophical method. In a recent paper, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen presents a radical version of this challenge, which (if true) implies that political philosophers should drastically change the way they appeal to intuitions in their work. In this paper, I argue against this challenge in part by drawing on experiences from experimental philosophy itself. I argue both that the challenge from diversity is less troubling than often believed, and that the function of appeal to intuition in traditional analytical political philosophy is misunderstood by its critics. Upon this, I conclude that experimental political philosophy is no threat to the methodology of reflective equilibrium.
In ethics classes, students are often asked to form judgements on practical issues and, in doing so, to apply the ethical theories they have learned. It is plausible that this practice is often based on the assumption that applying these theories makes a significant contribution to the justification of students’ ethical judgements. This paper argues that this assumption is doubtful in many educational contexts. My argument identifies two main obstacles. First, there is the ‘Problem of Arbitrary Use’: rather than applying theories responsibly, students often seem to engage in practices such as cherry-picking or theory-hopping to support their pre-existing views. Second, there is the ‘Problem of Unclear Epistemic Contribution’: even if students applied theories non-arbitrarily, it would remain unclear at a fundamental level how doing so could make such a contribution. If my argument succeeds, it has important practical implications: we should resolve or bypass the obstacles identified in this paper, settle for a more modest benefit of theory application, or consider abandoning the application of ethical theories in the practical parts of certain ethics classes.
The notion of trustworthiness has received increasing attention among philosophers. However, it has recently been argued that existing accounts of trustworthiness largely neglect the notion of untrustworthiness and thus fail to treat these conceptually related notions within a single theoretical framework. This paper addresses that gap by developing a unifying account grounded primarily in the normative concept of fittingness. The proposed account highlights the worthiness aspect of trustworthiness while incorporating the strengths of other prominent views in the literature.
Despite impressive advances, the consensus remains that we cannot yet justify creation of genetically modified babies. This paper raises a puzzle for the consensus to the extent that it rests on concerns about risks to those modified babies. Although it is hard to justify disabling someone who already exists, I argue that it is presumptively permissible to create a disabled person who would not otherwise exist. So, which kind of metaphysical risk does early editing pose? A hard to justify risk of disabling someone, or a presumptively permissible risk of creating someone who happens to be disabled? I will show how clinical and metaphysical considerations push in opposite directions, creating a dilemma for the consensus: The stronger the case that editing risks serious disability, the stronger the case that it would be an identity-altering, presumptively permissible instance of creating a disabled person.
This article criticizes the expanding circle theory of moral progress, the view, associated with Peter Singer and others, that moral progress consists primarily in the gradual extension of moral concern to a wider range of beings. While moral inclusion captures an important dimension of progressive moral change, I argue that the expanding circle framework cannot serve as the dominant theory of moral progress, since it is both internally too coarse and externally too narrow. It is internally too coarse because it conflates the width of the moral circle (which beings receive any moral standing) with its depth (how much weight their interests receive). This distinction, captured by contrasting a Moral Cylinder with a Moral Cone, matters when assessing the standing of beings such as invertebrates or digital minds. And it is externally too narrow because moral circle expansion is, at best, one subtype of moral progress among many. I identify several neglected dimensions: justified circle contraction, proper moralization and demoralization, conceptual refinement, value reprioritization, institutional scaffolding of moral behavior, and anticipatory governance under moral uncertainty. A satisfactory theory of moral progress should integrate all of these.
Nonhuman animals have traditionally been excluded from the realm of beings who can be held morally responsible for their actions. In this article, I challenge this picture by expanding on anger’s relevance to moral responsibility practices, which has been little explored in the debate on animal morality. I develop an account that takes social mammals as paradigmatic examples and argue that these animals’ capacity for anger and empathy enables them to engage in responsibility practices that presuppose blame, reconciliation, and recognition of intentional harm. To defend this thesis, I posit a Strawsonian approach to moral responsibility, which takes our practice of holding others responsible and the reactive attitudes it entails as a starting point for outlining the nature of moral responsibility. More precisely, I argue that social mammals’ capacity (1) to recognize intentional harm and (2) to form interpersonal relationships with other animals (3) gives rise to expectations about how others ought to treat them. These expectations find their expression in a specific emotion: anger. Because these animals can recognize intentional harm in others and form interpersonal relationships that provide the basis of trust, this renders them susceptible to anger, which interacts with the awareness that an expectation was violated.
Sovereigns sometimes borrow money from creditors. To demonstrate their creditworthiness, private credit rating agencies assess sovereigns and provide them with sovereign credit ratings. While the ethical issues associated with the credit scoring of individuals have received considerable attention, the ethical dimensions of sovereign credit ratings are underexplored. I argue that the current way in which sovereign credit ratings are calculated, which does not use opaque algorithms, is objectionable. This is because of concerns associated with opacity. The credit-rating process is opaque to actors on the outside, while in-principle transparent to credit rating agencies. Furthermore, some economists have proposed that opaque machine learning techniques should be used to calculate sovereign credit ratings. I argue that such a proposal gives rise to independent concerns about opacity. If such algorithms are used, the credit-rating process is opaque to actors on the outside and to the credit rating agencies employing them.
Making one’s information publicly available does not necessarily remove all privacy protections. It is well-known that an individual can be identified from a few data points of publicly available data about the individual. Privacy protections most obviously apply as duties that limit the intentional collection of publicly available information for a privacy-infringing purpose. What is unclear is whether privacy protections also apply in cases where the collection is for purposes that do not infringe privacy, but that cause others to involuntarily infer a privacy-infringing conclusion about an individual. The aim of this paper is to distinguish a type of involuntary inference which I call “irresistible inference”. This distinction allows us to distinguish involuntary inferences for which duties of restraint and inattention are possible from those for which the duties are psychologically impossible. Within a framework of contextual integrity, irresistible inference to some privacy-infringing conclusions can imply that the privacy right is normatively idle and reasoning with other ethical reasons than privacy is more practically useful.
This review discusses Craig Taylor’s Moral Thought Outside Moral Theory (Routledge, 2024), a book that argues against the possibility of a general theory of morality. Taylor insists that moral thought is not reducible to impartial and universalizable moral judgment; it also involves our responsiveness to others, our recognition of particular values, and our shared vulnerability. Through close readings of literature and philosophy, he shows how moral theorizing risks deflecting from the difficulties of moral life. While his refusal to engage directly with competing moral theories may frustrate some readers, the book offers a subtle and compelling alternative vision of moral philosophy.
Feminist criticisms of the ethics of care – from both within and outside the approach's own fold – have historically charged care ethics with “valorising caring”. Feminist care ethicists have responded to this criticism by acknowledging that care can sometimes be bad – it can be performed poorly, prove lacking or deficient in some respect, or take place under deeply unjust structural conditions. But this consensus leaves the harder and more important question untouched – and it is this question that explains why the criticisms persist. Can caring actions be bad insofar as they are caring? Can the very feature that makes an action caring also make it morally bad? I argue here that it can. Analysing a range of caring actions that strike us as bad, I identify one category – which I call ‘true bad care’ – wherein the very feature that makes the act caring is also what makes it morally bad. Here, the badness stems from the agent's intention to fulfil another's needs – one characterised by a paternalistic disregard for the recipient's say. Since such cases of true bad care exist, caring actions are not necessarily valuable even insofar as they are caring. This finding clarifies the moral valence of care ethics' foundational concept and paves the way for further development of the approach along these revised lines. It also demonstrates that paternalism and care are more conceptually intertwined than philosophers acknowledge. Paternalistic actions are not separate from care. They are the central case of bad care.
This paper examines the tension between the distinctive gravity of sexual coercion and a progressive sexual ethics that permits casual and promiscuous sex. Through a discussion of Fiona Woollard, Berit Brogaard, and Adrià Moret, I argue that leading attempts to explain the special wrongness of sexual coercion tend to move beyond a flatly permissive view of sex and toward a normatively loaded conception of the sexual domain. I then develop an alternative account that understands sexual coercion as the corruption of an ideal, and identifies that ideal with the unitive character of sex. Although this view introduces a hierarchy of sexual practices, it does not entail a conservative rejection of casual sex. Rather, it yields a more layered sexual ethics, one that distinguishes permissibility from ethical excellence and makes room for ideals of intimacy, connection, and mutual regard without denying the permissibility of non-ideal sexual practices.
