Category
Ethics
How should we live and act? Moral theories, character, and hard cases.
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Where do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics fit, if they are neither utilitarian, Kantian nor virtue ethics?
I teach capoeira Angola in Salvador, and I am new to academic ethics. In a free course online, the lecturer said there are three main moral theories: consequences, duties and virtues. Then, in a footnote, she said Ubuntu and Confucian ethics “don't…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Can someone walk me through the Frege–Geach problem without the jargon?
A friend recommended an introduction to ethics and I got stuck on one page for most of a week. The book explained emotivism, the view that “stealing is wrong” is not a statement of fact but an expression of disapproval, a bit…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
How much of just war theory is really in Augustine?
Every introduction I read says that Augustine founded the Christian theory of just war. So I went looking for the treatise. I have read a fair amount of The City of God for other reasons and could not find one. What I…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies -
What are the ‘four principles’ of medical ethics, and what do you do when they conflict?
A drug rep who also teaches a short course mentioned "the four principles" as if everyone knew them, and I nodded and then looked them up: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. I understand each one on its own. My problem is a…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies -
Reading group: Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, from the shack to the land ethic
Leopold's A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949, the year after he died helping fight a neighbour's grass fire. It's short, it's beautiful, and its last essay, "The Land Ethic", is one of the founding texts of environmental ethics. I work…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
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 Kurup6 replies -
Why did Philippa Foot invent the trolley case, and what did Judith Jarvis Thomson change?
The trolley problem comes up at every debate tournament, usually as a gotcha: "so you'd push the fat man?" My students treat it as a puzzle with a trick answer. I'd like to teach it properly, which means knowing where it came…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
When the woman in labour is your cousin: professional fairness and the ethics of care
Last month my cousin came in to our district hospital to deliver her second child. It was a busy night: four other women in labour, one of them in difficulty, and only two of us on the ward. Everyone expected things of…
Started by Farhana Akter4 replies -
What were Mozi’s three tests for judging whether a doctrine is right?
I've been reading about early Chinese philosophy for fun. Several books mention that Mozi proposed "three tests" or "three standards" for judging a doctrine, and one claims this was the first explicit methodology in Chinese thought. I'd like to know what the…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
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 replies -
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 replies -
Murdoch’s mother-in-law: is moral change mostly a matter of learning to see someone differently?
I've been rereading Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and I keep coming back to the example in its first essay. A mother-in-law, M, finds her son's wife, D, tiresome: a bit common, too familiar, juvenile. M behaves perfectly correctly throughout.…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
When the ventilators run out: lottery, first come first served, or most life-years saved?
During the pandemic a doctor friend in Nairobi described a night when her hospital had two ventilators and five patients who needed them. Since then I've been reading about allocation rules, and I'm surprised how much they disagree. The main options, as…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Reading group: Vitoria’s lectures On the American Indians and On the Law of War
Francisco de Vitoria gave his relectiones at Salamanca in the 1530s. Two of them, usually known as On the American Indians and On the Law of War, both from 1539, are where a Dominican theologian asked whether his own crown's conquest in…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies -
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 replies -
If virtue ethics says ‘do what the virtuous person would do’, how does a beginner use that?
Reading Aristotle slowly, with a pencil, I have hit something that bothers me. I suspect it is a beginner's worry, so forgive me. The summaries I have read say virtue ethics tells you to act as a virtuous person would act in…
Started by Gerrit Venter5 replies -
The last person and the kelp forest: does nature matter when no one is left to value it?
Last month, on a long dive in the kelp, I found myself thinking about Richard Routley's "last man" thought experiment from 1973. Imagine you are the last human being. You're dying; nobody will come after you. Before you go, you set out…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo4 replies -
What is a genuine consultation for? Consensus, shura and the contractualist test
Contractualism's core question, "could you justify this to everyone it affects?", is usually treated as a test you run in your head. I've been wondering what it looks like as a practice. Wiredu argued that traditional Akan politics was organised around consensus…
Started by Kwame Asante4 replies -
Why do some translators refuse to render ren as ‘benevolence’?
This question came to me through my work. A French colleague asked me why English translations of the Analects disagree so much about the word 仁, ren: Legge often has "perfect virtue", D. C. Lau "benevolence", Waley and Slingerland "Goodness", others "humaneness",…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Can you be a good person in a role that sometimes requires you to do bad things?
I am thinking of my years in the army, and 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 capable young private on a…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun6 replies -
Dai Zhen was right: moral principle used to crush desire is itself a cruelty
My students memorise Zhu Xi for their exams, and one slogan of the Cheng–Zhu school always sticks: preserve heavenly principle, eliminate human desires. They write it down without blinking. Dai Zhen (1724–1777) blinked. A Qing scholar trained in the philological methods of…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Do I see that an old woman is being humiliated, or do I infer it? Moral perception on a night shift
Last month, when I went with one of our residents to the hospital, a senior doctor spoke to her as if she were not there, discussing her bowels with a junior doctor across her bed. I did not reason my way to…
Started by Elin Hedqvist5 replies -
Genealogy and the genetic fallacy: can the history of a value ever count against it?
Every introductory logic course warns against the genetic fallacy: where a belief came from does not settle whether it is true. Your racist uncle may believe the earth is round, and it is. And yet a whole style of moral philosophy works…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt5 replies -
What is threshold deontology, and isn’t it just consequentialism with extra steps?
In my constitutional law seminar we discussed whether rights can ever be suspended in an emergency. I mentioned the ADM Jabalpur case from 1976, when our Supreme Court accepted that even the right to life could not be enforced during the Emergency,…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
Can technomoral virtues be cultivated the way Confucian ones are, or is the borrowing too loose?
My students spend most of their waking lives on their phones, so Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues (2016) caught my attention. She argues that rules and impact assessments cannot keep up with technologies that change every year, and that what we…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Mencius’s child at the well, seen from a delivery room in Sylhet
I have worked on a maternity ward for nineteen years. Last month a friend lent me a translation of Mencius, and I stopped at the passage about the child at the well and read it three times. Mencius says that anyone who…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Care ethics has no convincing account of what we owe to strangers far away
Working alongside GPs persuaded me that care is morally basic in the consulting room. What I'm not persuaded of is that it can be a whole ethics. The thesis: if moral obligation is grounded in particular relationships and the responsiveness they call…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Reading group: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Parts I and III
Having started with Hume, I have moved on to Adam Smith, working through the Scottish Enlightenment in local order. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments first appeared in 1759 and he kept revising it until the sixth edition of 1790, the year he…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies -
Reflective equilibrium or tidy prejudice? How a prison reading class changed my view on punishment
Two years ago I would have told you, without hesitation, that people should get what they deserve, and that a man who killed someone deserves to lose most of his life. I held that as a principle. I also had a strong…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma5 replies -
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 Ryu6 replies