Rethinking Anonymous Grading
AbstractIt has become increasingly common to endorse and implement anonymous grading as a way of promoting fairness or equality of opportunity in the classroom. The American Philosophical Association currently recommends anonymous grading, as do the Canadian Philosophical Association, the British Philosophical Association, the Society for Women in Philosophy, and Minorities and Philosophy. Despite its increasing prevalence, the practice has received surprisingly little attention in applied ethics. This paper begins filling this gap. I start by clarifying the ‘Standard Argument’ from fairness or equality of opportunity ...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - December 22, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Federica Liveriero: Relational Liberalism: Democratic Co-Authorship in a Pluralistic World Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023. Hardback (ISBN 978-3-031-22742-4) $119.99. 291 pp.
(Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - November 21, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Editorial
(Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - November 17, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
What ’s Wrong with Social Hierarchy? On Niko Kolodny’s The Pecking Order
AbstractThis review critically assesses Niko Kolodny ’s theory of social hierarchy and its importance as articulated inThe Pecking Order (2023). After summarizing Kolodny ’s argument, I raise two critical challenges. First, I ask whether Kolodny leaves us without adequate account of why social hierarchies are, in themselves, objectionable. Second, I query whether Kolodny’s defense of representative democracy is decisive, and suggest that egalitarians should be op en to alternative ways of mitigating the threat of hierarchy posed by political rule. (Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - November 16, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The Moral Permissibility of Perspective-Taking Interventions
AbstractInterventions designed to promote perspective taking are increasingly prevalent in educational settings, and are also being considered for applications in other domains. Thus far, these perspective-taking interventions (PTIs) have largely escaped philosophical attention, however they are sometimesprima facie morally problematic in at least two respects: they are neither transparent nor easy to resist. Nontransparent or hard-to-resist PTIs call for a moral defense and our primary aim in this paper is to provide such a defense. We offer two arguments for the view that an exemplar PTI is morally permissible even thoug...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - November 16, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Do Your Homework! A Rights-Based Zetetic Account of Alleged Cases of Doxastic Wronging
AbstractThis paper offers an alternate explanation of cases from the doxastic wronging literature. These cases violate what I call thedegree of inquiry right—a novel account of zetetic obligations to inquire when interests are at stake. The degree of inquiry right is a moral right against other epistemic agents to inquire to a certain threshold when a belief undermines one’s interests. Thus, the agents are sometimes obligated to leave inquiry open. I argue that we have relevant interests in reputation, relationships, and the well-being of our social groups. These interests generate obligations against others to “do t...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - November 15, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Metaethical Deflationism, Access Worries and Motivationally Grasped Oughts
AbstractMathematical knowledge and moral knowledge (or normative knowledge more generally) can seem intuitively puzzling in similar ways. For example, taking apparent human knowledge of either domain at face value can seem to require accepting that we benefited from some massive and mysterious coincidence. In the mathematical case, a pluralist partial response to access worries has been widely popular. In this paper, I will develop and address a worry, suggested by some works in the recent literature like (Clarke-Doane,2020) , that connections between ought facts and action prevent us from giving a similarly pluralist resp...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - November 10, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Cognitivism and the argument from evidence non-responsiveness*
AbstractSeveral philosophers have recently challenged cognitivism, i.e., the view that moral judgments are beliefs, by arguing that moral judgments are evidence non-responsive in a way that beliefs are not. If you believe that P, but acquire (sufficiently strong) evidence against P, you will give up your belief that P. This does not seem true for moral judgments. Some subjects maintain their moral judgments despite believing that there is (sufficiently strong) evidence against the moral judgments. This suggests that there is a mismatch between moral judgments and beliefs. This is an interesting argument. In particular, it ...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - November 4, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Does Political Equality Require Equal Power? A Pluralist Account
AbstractIn this paper, I criticize two views on how political equality is related to equally distributed political power, and I offer a novel, pluralist account of political equality to address their shortcomings —in particular, concerning their implications for affirmative action in the political domain, political representation, and the situation of permanent minorities. The Equal Power View holds that political equality requires equally distributed political power. It considers affirmative action—e.g. , racial or gender electoral quotas—, representation, and more-than-equal power to permanent minoritiespro tanto o...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - November 2, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Anonymous Arguments
AbstractAnonymous argumentation has recently been the focus of public controversy: flash points include the outing of pseudonymous bloggers by newspapers and the launch of an academic journal that expressly permits pseudonymous authorship. However, the controversy is not just a recent one —similar debates took place in the nineteenth century over the then common practice of anonymous journalism. Amongst the arguments advanced by advocates of anonymous argumentation in either era is the contention that it is essential if the widest range of voices are to be heard; amongst the counte rarguments of its critics, that it weak...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - October 25, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Schr ödinger’s Fetus and Relational Ontology: Reconciling Three Contradictory Intuitions in Abortion Debates
AbstractPro-life and pro-choice advocates battle for rational dominance in abortion debates. Yet, public polling (and general legal opinion) demonstrates the public ’s preference for the middle ground: that abortions are acceptable in certain circumstances and during early pregnancy. Implicit in this, are two contradictory intuitions: (1) that we were all early fetuses, and (2) abortion kills no one. To hold these positions together, Harman and Räsänen have argued for the Actual Future Principle (AFP) which distinguishes between fetuses that will develop into persons and those that will never develop into persons. Howe...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - October 17, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Reasoning in Character: Virtue, Legal Argumentation, and Judicial Ethics
AbstractThis paper develops a virtue-account of legal reasoning which significantly differs from standard, principle-based, theories. A virtue approach to legal reasoning highlights the relevance of the particulars to sound legal decision-making, brings to light the perceptual and affective dimensions of legal judgment, and vindicates the relevance of description and specification to good legal reasoning. After examining the central features of the theory, the paper proposes a taxonomy of the main character traits that legal decision-makers need to possess to successfully engage in legal reasoning. The paper concludes by d...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - October 16, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Correction to: “Stay Away from the Park”: A Case for Police-Issued Personal Safety Advice for Women
(Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - October 11, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Metz on Enhancement: A Relational Critique
This article, written for a book symposium onA Relational Moral Theory,primarily demonstrates how Metz ’s criticisms presented in his book fail to convince. Furthermore, we explore some possible objections from Metzian deontology against enhancement and also show that these do not imply that enhancement is intrinsically wrong. Finally, we showed how Metzian ethics offers good reasons to support rat her than oppose enhancement. (Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - October 7, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The Voting Rights of Senior Citizens: Should all Votes Count the Same?
AbstractIn 1970, Stewart advocated disenfranchising everyone reaching retirement age or age 70, whichever was earlier. The question of whether senior citizens should be disenfranchised has recently come to the fore due to votes on issues such as Brexit and climate change. Indeed, there is a growing literature which argues that we should increase the voting power of non-senior citizens relative to senior citizens, for reasons having to do with intergenerational justice. Thus, it seems that there are reasons of justice to disenfranchise senior citizens, or at least to grant them a lower voting weight than non-senior citizens...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - October 4, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
