Category
Ethics
How should we live and act? Moral theories, character, and hard cases.
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Voluntary assisted dying should be legal for competent adults
Sweden doesn't allow it. I've worked alongside colleagues from the Netherlands, where it has been legal under statute since 2002, and I've read about Canada, where it became legal in 2016. The argument for, as I understand it: competent adults have the…
Started by Elin Lindqvist8 replies290 views -
Whoever deploys an automated decision system should answer for its harms, fault or no fault
Take the standard case. A bank uses an automated system to assess loans. A creditworthy applicant is refused. The refusal rests on correlations in the training data that no engineer chose and nobody can fully reconstruct. Who answers for it? The engineers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi7 replies229 views -
Existentialism can ground an ethics, and Beauvoir showed how
The standard charge is simple: if there are no given values, then anything goes. Sartre promised an ethics at the end of Being and Nothingness and never published one; the Notebooks for an Ethics came out only after his death. Beauvoir did…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies182 views -
The argument from marginal cases has never been properly answered
I'm the resident sceptic in my university's effective altruism group, so it pains me to agree with the group on anything. But on this I do. The argument runs like this. Name the property that gives humans moral status. If it's rationality,…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies298 views -
Reading group for complete beginners: Plato’s Apology, slowly, in three sittings
Several newcomers have asked where to start, and my answer is always the same: Plato's Apology. It's short (an evening's reading), it's a real trial (Athens, 399 BCE), and it's the founding scene of philosophy as a way of life. Socrates, accused…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies234 views -
Brain death is not death
I've confirmed brain death several times in my career, and I believe the clinical criteria are reliable. My question is philosophical: is a person who meets them actually dead? The 1968 Harvard ad hoc committee defined "irreversible coma" as a criterion of…
Started by Omar Farouk6 replies208 views -
Animals have moral rights, not just interests to be weighed
Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) is often called the founding text of the animal rights movement, but Singer is a utilitarian: he argues animals' interests should be given equal consideration, which allows trading them off against others' interests. Tom Regan's The Case…
Started by Anand Pillai6 replies226 views -
Nineteen years with one blade: Cook Ding and the discipline that wu wei is usually sold without
I make cedar doors and ceilings in the Andalusian style, the way my father taught me in his workshop in Tetouan. A customer from Europe, watching me cut a joint, told me it looked effortless and that I must be practising wu…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies236 views -
The buyer at the gate offers more than the cooperative: does a promise bind when breaking it pays?
I sell my cocoa through a farmers' cooperative. At the start of the season every member promises to bring their beans to the cooperative, which in return gives us credit for fertiliser, a fair weight on the scale, and a share of…
Started by Akosua Mensah6 replies250 views -
Reading group: Kant’s Groundwork, Section I, the good will and the honest shopkeeper
I taught ethics at a Gymnasium for many years and always skipped to the formulas of the categorical imperative. Now, retired, I want to read the beginning properly: Section I of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), where Kant starts…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies182 views -
Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on
In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies150 views -
Pacifism is the most consistent ethics of war, not a refusal to have one
I grew up among Jain neighbours in Hyderabad and came to Gandhi through them. Gandhi credited Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) with a large influence on him, so the pacifist line I have absorbed runs from Mahavira through…
Started by Anand Pillai6 replies280 views -
The crane logs were falsified and reporting them might shut the terminal: what each theory told me
Last spring, as union delegate, I found out that maintenance records for one of the older gantry cranes at our terminal had been filled in for inspections that never happened. The crane was probably fine. The risk was small but real: a…
Started by Hugo Marchetti6 replies268 views -
Four ventilators, seven patients: is triage consequentialism with a human face, or something else?
During the worst weeks of an outbreak, our hospital in Addis Ababa had four ventilators and, on one night, seven patients who needed them. We used a triage protocol: allocate to those most likely to survive with treatment, and, among similar cases,…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies248 views -
Can you be a good person in a role that sometimes requires you to do bad things?
I served twenty-two years in the army, the last part of it on the DMZ. I am not talking about atrocities. I mean ordinary things the role required: enforcing a punishment I thought was disproportionate because the regulation was clear, sending a…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun6 replies292 views -
Confucian ethics is a role ethics, and filing it under virtue ethics hides its best idea
In the national ethics curriculum I teach in Seoul, Confucius sits on the same page as Aristotle under the heading "virtue ethics". I used to accept that. I now think it is a mistake, or at least a costly simplification. Here is…
Started by Ji-woo Park6 replies274 views -
The four-principles framework is too individualist for family-centred medicine
I'm an internist in Addis Ababa, and I first read Beauchamp and Childress as a student. I admired it, and I still teach parts of it. But my clinical life keeps showing me where it doesn't fit. A typical case: an older…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies230 views -
Williams’s integrity objection, not the arithmetic, is the deepest problem for utilitarianism
I served twenty-two years in the army. I have read a fair amount about moral injury, the damage done to people who were made to do, or failed to prevent, things that violated their deepest commitments, often in situations where every option…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun6 replies196 views -
Knowing without doing is not knowing: Wang Yangming’s strong internalism is simply correct
Every year I teach my students Wang Yangming's slogan that knowledge and action are one, and every year they treat it as an inspirational poster. I want to defend it as a serious thesis about moral motivation. The usual view, in China…
Started by Lin Pei-shan6 replies192 views -
A role-based ethics gives too little protection to the person the roles are failing
I study constitutional law in Delhi, and Ambedkar is my lodestar. In Annihilation of Caste (1936) he attacked a social order in which a person's duties are fixed by the position they are born into, and argued that such an order leaves…
Started by Deepa Nair6 replies266 views -
Take away the rational cosmos and Stoic ethics becomes a coping technique
My students discover Marcus Aurelius on their phones before they discover him in my classroom, usually as short videos about controlling what you can control. I am glad they find him. But I want to defend a thesis that spoils the mood…
Started by Giulia Ferrante6 replies304 views -
Double effect is a genuine moral distinction, not a lawyer’s trick for doing harm with clean hands
I teach metaphysics at a seminary, and every year at least one student arrives having read online that the doctrine of double effect is Catholic casuistry: a way to do what you want and say you did not intend it. I want…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu6 replies164 views -
Was the abolition of slavery a moral discovery or a moral change? A teacher’s test case
Every July my after-school reading circle reads Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. This year a student asked a question I could not answer cleanly: “When people stopped thinking slavery was okay, did they find…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies324 views -
Reading group: the Mozi’s three chapters on impartial caring (jian’ai), one a week
I am writing a dissertation on the later Mohist canons, but I keep returning to the core chapters, the three on jian'ai, usually translated as “universal love” or, better, “impartial caring”. They are short, vigorous and argumentative, and they make the case…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies230 views -
Strong moral intuitions count as evidence, in the same way that perceptions count as evidence
In my ethics seminar we were told that appealing to intuitions is unscientific: they are just gut feelings shaped by upbringing. I want to argue the opposite. W. D. Ross, in The Right and the Good (1930), compared the considered moral convictions…
Started by Aoife Brennan6 replies276 views -
Do the world’s ethical traditions really agree about how to live, or does it only look that way from far off?
There is a claim one often meets in comparative philosophy courses: traditions that disagree completely about metaphysics agree substantially about how to live. Aristotelian virtue, Confucian self-cultivation, Buddhist training and Islamic adab all say character is shaped by repeated action, habit makes…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho6 replies184 views -
The Mu’tazila were right: reason can know that injustice is wrong before any revelation
I want to defend the losing side of one of the great arguments in kalām. The Mu'tazilī theologians held that acts have moral qualities that reason can recognise: that injustice and lying are bad, that gratitude to a benefactor is owed, and…
Started by Layla Haddad6 replies127 views -
Ross was right: there is no master principle of morality, only several duties weighed by judgement
For thirty-one years I sat as a judge, the last ten as a sessions judge. Every sentence I passed involved weighing things that do not reduce to one another: the harm done, the offender's history, his family, remorse, deterrence, mercy. There was…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies320 views -
Anscombe was right: no emergency makes it permissible to target civilians deliberately
Here is the hardest case for the principle of discrimination. Suppose deliberately attacking a civilian population would end a war years early and save more lives than it costs, including more civilian lives. The arithmetic points one way. Elizabeth Anscombe's answer was…
Started by Aoife Brennan6 replies176 views -
Reading group: Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, and Tusi’s Persian reworking of it
I'd like to read Miskawayh's Tahdhib al-Akhlaq together over the next couple of months. It is one of the most systematic works of philosophical ethics in Arabic, and it is a good place to watch Greek ethics being made at home in…
Started by Layla Haddad6 replies240 views