This article intends to show that Levinas' humanism does not imply speciesism. Our argument is that Levinas does not derive the sense of an ethical obligation from a pregiven concept of the human being. His defence of humanism is therefore not the expression of the idea that human beings have an exclusive moral dignity on the basis of their being human. This argument will be developed in two parts. In the first part, we situate Levinas' humanism within the tradition of modern humanism and differentiate it from Herder's approach in the eighteenth century, which can be considered paradigmatic for a modern concept of humanism that inevitably implies speciesism. In the second part, we argue that a metaphorical transference is at the core of Levinas' concept of subjectivity, the appearance of which is required for the ethical sense of oneself-for-the-other. We will refer, therefore, to Levinas' use of the metaphor of the 'skin' in his analyses of subjectivity and otherness in Otherwise than Being. As a result, it will be shown that the ethical sense of subjectivity does not deny but entails 'the ambiguity of the animal'.
Rowe has recently argued that pure risk of harm cannot itself be a harm, while Stef & aacute;nsson has replied that-given an appropriate understanding of objective risk-it can. In this article, I refer to their contributions as paradigmatic of the current discussion in the risk/harm debate, I try to critique them, and I then move on to consider other relevant thinkers such as Scanlon, Finkelstein, Frick and Oberdiek. The aim of this article is to offer a consequentialist theory of contractualism and a resulting definition of objective risk to outline why pure risk of harm cannot itself be a harm, and to explore two ideas that might be of interest to anyone concerned with metaethics: (i) whether to correctly understand 'objective risk' we must redefine the concept in contractualist terms, clearly separating it from 'objective probability'; and (ii) whether the extent of the wrongness of an action depends entirely on the unjustifiable risks it raises and is thus fully separate from whether it causes harm.
The paper argues that the ethics of compromise, toleration, and war sometimes have to bracket who is right in the underlying conflict. It starts by highlighting a parallel between the ethics of compromise, toleration, and war: All three sometimes seem to apply symmetrically to those who are right and those who are wrong. It then discusses three attempts to make sense of this without bracketing who is right: one employs the idea of secondary oughts, a second appeals to conventions that are justifiably articulated in neutral terms, a third interprets the relevant oughts as subjective. The paper tries to show that none of them succeeds, and it concludes that we should embrace the view that the ethics of compromise, toleration, and war sometimes have to bracket who is right. The deeper rationale for this view, it suggests, is that sometimes all parties to a conflict must count as legitimate.
This paper presents a critique of the social model of impairment. It situates the social model of impairment within the broader framework of the social model of disability, where the distinction between disability and impairment originates. The paper begins by outlining the social model of disability and contrasting it with the individual (medical) model. It then offers an initial critique of the social model. Subsequently, two strategies employed to defend the social model are analysed. The first strategy posits that critiques of the social model arise from misinterpretations; however, this paper argues that such an approach reduces substantive issues to mere semantic debates. The second strategy, which serves as the primary focus of this paper, asserts that both disability and impairment are socially constructed. This argument is critiqued on the grounds that it relies on inconclusive evidence and, if accepted, would lead to nihilistic implications, ultimately undermining the moral responsibility of able-bodied individuals to support those with severe disabilities.
This article examines whether moral theory can provide satisfactory guidance to agents facing (resolvable) moral conflicts where mutually exclusive actions are required by significant moral reasons. Employing an exploratory approach, we map the alternatives offered by value-based moral theories, focusing on monism, which grounds moral reasons in a single value like utility, and hierarchical pluralism, which assigns a fixed ranking to multiple intrinsic values. Non-hierarchical pluralism is dismissed as it fails to offer practical guidance beyond subjective prioritisation. We propose two criteria for evaluating these theories: scope of resolution-the range of conflicts a theory can address-and explanatory capacity-the ability to account for ordinary moral experiences regarding moral conflicts, such as moral residue. Monism is criticised for its inability to explain the persistence of moral reasons not acted upon, while hierarchical pluralism faces a dilemma: it is either too narrow in scope or unable to accommodate circumstantial variations in the relative importance of values. Our findings suggest that moral theory's practical role in resolving moral conflicts is inherently limited. Instead, resolving most moral conflicts requires practical wisdom, as theorised in the Aristotelian tradition, which acknowledges the complexity and context-dependence of moral reasoning.
