Sex, Love, and Paternalism
AbstractPaternalistic behaviour directed towards a person ’s informed and competent decisions is often thought to be morally impermissible. This view is supported by what we can call the Anti-Paternalism Principle (APP). While APP might seem plausible when employed to show the wrongness of paternalism by the state, there are some cases of paternalistic b ehaviour between private, informed, and competent individuals where APP seems mistaken. This raises a difficulty for supporters of APP. Either they need to reject APP to accommodate our intuitions in these cases, or provide grounds for thinking that paternalistic behavio...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 11, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Moral Progress and Evolution: Knowledge Versus Understanding
AbstractThe paper explores the interplay among moral progress, evolution and moral realism. Although it is nearly uncontroversial to note that morality makes progress of one sort or another, it is far from uncontroversial to define what constitutes moral progress. In a minimal sense, moral progress occurs when a subsequent state of affairs is better than a preceding one. Moral realists conceive “it is better than” as something like “it more adequately reflects moral facts”; therefore, on a realist view, moral progress can be associated with accumulations of moral knowledge. From an evolutionary perspective, on the ...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 10, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Collegial Relationships
AbstractAlthough collegial relationships are among the most prevalent types of interpersonal relationships in our lives, they have not been the subject of much philosophical study. In this paper, we take the first step in the process of developing an ethics of collegiality by establishing what qualifies two people as colleagues and then by determining what it is that gives value to collegial relationships. We argue that A and B are colleagues if both exhibit sameness regarding at least two of the following three features: (i) the same work content or domain of activity; (ii) the same institutional affiliation or common pur...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 5, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Inferentialist Truth Pluralism
AbstractMetasemantic inferentialism has gained popularity in the last few decades. Traditionally, inferentialism is combined with a deflationary attitude towards semantic terms such as truth and reference, i.e., many inferentialists hold that when we use these semantic terms we do not purport to refer to substantive properties. This combination makes inferentialism attractive for philosophers who see themselves as antirealists. Although the attractions of combining inferentialism and deflationism are easy to see, deflationism is also a controversial position. For one, deflationists maintain that truth is an insubstantive p...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 3, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Alberto G. Urquidez, (Re-)Defining Racism: A Philosophical Analysis , Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, Viii +421 Pp. the Concept of Racism and the Adjective Racist
(Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - January 30, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
