Signing on: A Contractarian Understanding of How Public History is Used for Civic Inclusion
AbstractWhat makes public history more than just another hill to fight over in culture war politics? In this paper I propose a novel way of understanding the political significance of how public history creates and shapes identities: a contractarian one. I argue that public history can be sensibly understood as representing groups as a society ’s contracting parties. One particular value of the contractarian approach is that it helps to elucidate the phenomenon of “signing on,” where a marginalized or oppressed group is offered membership in a society without the social order being meaningfully changed. (Source: Ethi...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - March 28, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Responsible Agency and the Importance of Moral Audience
AbstractEcological accounts of responsible agency claim that moral feedback is essential to the reasons-responsiveness of agents. In this paper, we discuss McGeer ’s scaffolded reasons-responsiveness account in the light of two concerns. The first is that some agents may be less attuned to feedback from their social environment but are nevertheless morally responsible agents – for example, autistic people. The second is that moral audiences can actually w ork to undermine reasons-responsiveness if they espouse the wrong values. We argue that McGeer’s account can be modified to handle both problems. Once we understand...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - March 24, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Book Review: Rethinking Rights
(Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - March 22, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Is Rational Manipulation Permissible?
AbstractRational manipulation is constituted by the following conditions: (i) A aims to persuade B of thesis X; (ii) A holds X to be true and rationally justifiable; (iii) A knows of the existence of evidence, argument or information Y. While Y is not itself misinformation (Y is factually correct), A suspects B might take Y as important evidence for not-X; (iv) A deliberately chooses not to mention Y to B, out of a concern that it could mislead B into believing not-X; and, (v) B has no compelling reason to expect A will avoid mentioning Y in this way. A ’s behavior isrational insofar as A aims to use reasons to persuade ...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - March 21, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Correction to: How Can Hope Be Rational in the Context of Global Poverty?
(Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - March 18, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The Skill Model: A Dilemma for Virtue Ethics
AbstractAccording to agent-centered virtue ethics, acting well is not a matter of conforming to agent-independent moral standards, like acting so as to respect humanity or maximize utility. Instead, virtuous agents determine what is called for in their circumstances through good practical reason. This is an attractive view, but it requires a plausible account of how good practical reason works. To that end, some theorists invoke the skill model of virtue, according to which virtue involves essentially the same kind of practical reason as ordinary skills. I contend, however, that ordinary skills provide a plausible and info...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - March 16, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
How Can Hope Be Rational in the Context of Global Poverty?
AbstractThis paper is a critical discussion of Claudia Bl öser’s (2022) “Hope and Global Poverty.” While Blöser shows that a lack of hope is often rational in the context of global poverty, I argue that some people’s hopes in the face of poverty might actually be rational, and that understanding the rationality of a person’s hope may require knowing more about the unique circumstances of their lives. I suggest that Blöser’s work on ‘fundamental hopes’ (with Titus Stahl) (2017) may be key to understanding why some people hold on to hope for a better life and future. These reflections are meant to be more ...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - March 9, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Climate Change and Anti-Meaning
AbstractIn this paper, we propose meaningfulness as one important evaluative criterion in individual climate ethics and suggest that most of our greenhouse gas emitting actions, behaviours, and lives are the opposite of meaningful: anti-meaningful. We explain why such actions etc. score negatively on three important dimensions of the meaningfulness scale, which we call the agential, narrative, and generative dimensions. We suggest that thinking about individual climate ethics also in terms of (anti-) meaningfulness illuminates important aspects of our troubled ethical involvement with CC and can make a fresh and fruitful c...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - March 9, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
What Doesn ’t Kill Primary Reason Atomism Will Only Make It Stronger: A Limited Defense
This article will pick up the slack, and argues that none of its existing powerful criticisms works that can be derived fr om Swanton’s target-center view of the virtues, Stangl’s virtue variabilism, Dancy’s bottom-up holism, and coverage challenge, McKeever& Ridge, and V äyrynen’s double-counting objection, and Scanlon’s buck-passing account of values. This may not prove PRA to be right, but at least shows PRA to be a serious contender for the right theory of how moral reason behaves. (Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 28, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Editors ’-in-Chief Note
(Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 27, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
A Realist Membership Account of Political Obligation
AbstractThe paper offers a realist account of political obligation. More precisely, it offers an account that belongs to the Williamsian liberal strain of contemporary realist theory (as opposed to a Geussian radical realist strain) and draws on and expands some ideas familiar from Bernard Williams ’s oeuvre (thick/thin ethical concepts, political realism/moralism, a minimal normative threshold for distinctively political rule). Accordingly, the paper will claim that the fact of membership in a polity provides people with sufficient reason for complying with those political authority claims whose source is that particula...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 24, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Analysing Extremism
AbstractWhat is extremism, and how can it be countered? According to a recent account by (Cassam,2021), there are three kinds of extremism: ideological, methodological, and psychological. The psychological kind – what Cassam calls ‘mindset extremism’ – is used by Cassam to explain what leads individuals to resort to extreme methods. From there we can say that methods extremism can be countered by preventing people from becoming mindset extremists. This paper outlines Cassam’s overall theory, and challenges it in two respects. First, it is argued that whilst mindset extremism does account for some individuals, it ...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 23, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Reasons for Political Friendship
The objective of this paper is to answer this question in the affirmative. To this end, I investigate whether members of modern polities havereasons to form friendly bonds with one another. The paper has four parts. The first establishes a fundamental desideratum that any consideration must satisfy to count as a reason for political fellows to partake in political friendship. The second evaluates and rejects a line of argument that presents bonds of mutualidentification andbelonging among political fellows as reasons for political friendship. The third evaluates and rejects a line of argument due to Paul Ludwig that presen...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 23, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Correction to: Change the People or Change the Policy? On the Moral Education of Antiracists
(Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 21, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Vaccine Passports and Political Legitimacy: A Public Reason Framework for Policymakers
AbstractAs the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, taking its toll on people ’s lives around the world, vaccine passports remain a contentious topic of debate in most liberal democracies. While a small literature on vaccine passports has sprung up over the past few years that considers their ethical pros and cons, in this paper we focus on the question of when vaccine pass ports are politically legitimate. Specifically, we put forward a ‘public reason ethics framework’ for resolving ethical disputes and use the case of vaccine passports to demonstrate how it works. The framework walks users through a structured an...
Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - February 15, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
