Review of Nicole Hassoun’s A Minimally Good Life: What We Owe to Others and What We Can Justifiably Demand. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024, 192 pp.

Joel J. Kupperman, 1936–2020 Diana Tietjens Meyers (bio) It is with deep sadness that I report the death of Joel Kupperman, University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He died in Brooklyn, New York on April 8, 2020. Joel received both his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Cambridge University. He joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut in 1960. Except for visiting Trinity College, Oxford as a lecturer in 1970, two years supported by NEH fellowships, and fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he remained at UConn until his retirement from teaching in 2013. In addition to these major national and international awards, Joel received the Faculty Excellence in Research award from the UConn Foundation in 2004. A widely recognized and influential scholar, Joel specialized in ethics, aesthetics, and Asian philosophy. He published numerous journal articles and chapters in all three fields. Two early books resist subjectivism in ethics: Ethical Knowledge (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970; reprint Routledge, 2002) and The Foundations of Morality (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1983; reissue from Routledge, forthcoming in 2022). In his monographs, Joel’s long-standing interest in Chinese philosophy first became prominent in Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Value . . . And What Follows (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Joel’s scholarship in Asian philosophy long predated the recent professional awakening to non-Western philosophical traditions. Initially, he studied Chinese philosophy with H. G. Creel at the University of Chicago, and in 1967 he traveled to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan to continue his studies. In the 1980s he created Asian philosophy courses at all levels of the UConn undergraduate and graduate curriculum. His scholarship and pedagogical initiatives were visionary. Regarded as a classic by many in the field, his Learning from Asian Philosophy nimbly integrates insights from classical Chinese and Indian philosophy as well as Western philosophy into nuanced accounts of the self, choice, moral psychology, moral requirements, and interpersonal communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; Chinese translation, Beijing: Renmin Press, 2009). That Joel delivered the keynote lecture at the [End Page 1] conference honoring the ninetieth anniversary of the Peking University Philosophy Department as well as the keynote lecture at the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy’s 2011 meeting in Hawai‘i are two measures of the importance of this book. Click for larger view View full resolution Joel Kupperman (1936–2020) during his keynote speech at the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy 43rd annual conference, May 25–28, 2011 in Honolulu. In addition, Joel published books that would be valuable to professional philosophers and that would also reach college students and the larger educated public. Notable among these are Theories of Human Nature (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), Ethics and Qualities of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Six Myths about the Good Life: Thinking about What Has Value (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), and Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; second edition, 2006). When it became possible for Chinese students to come to the United States to study, Joel attracted some of them to the UConn philosophy department. Like all the graduate students, they studied Western philosophy. But thanks to Joel, they were able to study Chinese philosophy as well. Joel received the Faculty Excellence in Teaching award from the UConn Foundation in 1973. Upon his retirement, two of his Ph.D. students, Chenyang Li and Peimin Ni, celebrated his career by publishing a festschrift containing chapters by leading scholars: Moral Cultivation and Confucian [End Page 2] Character: Engaging Joel J. Kupperman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). Joel is survived by his wife, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, his two children, Michael Kupperman and Charlie Kupperman, and a grandchild, Ulysses Kupperman Dougherty. His colleagues and many students join me in sympathy over their loss. His singular voice and distinctive presence are irreplaceable. In honor of Joel and his philosophical legacy, the department and Joel’s family have set up a graduate fellowship fund in his name to provide some financial support for Ph.D. students in the UConn Philosophy...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Contemporary Virtue Ethics

How To Read The Body in Pain** David B. Morris He has seen but half the Universe who never has been shown the House of Pain. — Ralph Waldo Emerson1 A quiet revolution beginning about 1960 promises to transform centuries of medical thinking about pain. From the time of the Hippocratic writings, pain has held die clear and secure status of a symptom. In effect, Western medicine has attributed a distinctive legibility to pain, as if pain were a more or less readable inscription diat die skilled physician might interpret for its revelations about processes hidden deep within the flesh: a message composed, sent, and delivered by illness. The physician dius serves, among other offices, as a professional reader of pain, and pain — despite its reputation for noisy inarticulateness — holds the physician in the peculiar intimacy characteristic of reading. They share a common but equivocal language ranging from open, unmistakable declarations of fact to delicate hints and subtle ambiguities. The medical revolution now under way does not seek to overthrow the ancient status of pain as a symptom. Radier, it introduces a radical change in perspective, which acknowledges that pain is sometimes completely illegible. This more or less unreadable pain no longer resembles a message that passes in between the physician and the illness. The message is die illness. "We treat pain as a diagnosis, not a symptom," explains anesthesiologist Michael Kilbride, founder of die Muskegon (Michigan) General Hospital's Pain Management Center, opened four years ago.2 This typical transformation of pain from symptom to diagnosis or syndrome — from * Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). All quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. Copyright β 1985 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. t This work was supported by a grant from the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Literature and Medicine 6 (1987) 139-155 © 1987 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 140 READING THE BODY IN PAIN the sign of illness to illness itself — is the conceptual change underlying a major realignment in the contemporary practice of medicine that might be called the emergence of the pain clinic. By recent count, there are close to one thousand private and public pain treatment centers in the United States. The two separate programs first established in 1960 by Dr. John J. Bonica (Seattle) and by Dr. Benjamin L. Crue, Jr. (Pasadena) have fostered within medicine a new growth industry. Faced with this sudden proliferation , patients do not always recognize that at different pain clinics the philosophies, goals, and methods of treatment may differ greatly, even as Drs. Crue and Bonica disagree about fundamental issues in the understanding of pain.3 Medical opinion about the value of pain clinics is far from unanimous. Still, the institutional signs of change are unmistakable. Two weighty medical journals now share the one-word title Pain.* There are national organizations, international conferences, and an entirely new medical specialty (algology) all devoted to the study of pain. Pain (with its accompanying issues, physical and metaphysical) now threatens to obsess the modern world much in the way pleasure (in its relations to virtue, reason, and the good life) preoccupied the ancients. From a literary point of view, what appears most striking about recent developments in medicine is that pain has acquired an unprecedented textuality. Its complications and elusive silences, which defeat simplistic or reductive readings, give pain something of the texture we recognize in complex novels or poems, where the physician who seeks to treat Macbeth or Lear must unravel a knot that ties body to mind, medicine to politics, nature to culture. For some researchers and clinicians, pain is better understood not in its traditional role as a sensation but rather as a perception, implying that it cannot be fully grasped apart from the vagaries of human consciousness. Non-conscious pain seems a contradiction in terms, and even the most unambiguously organic injury (if it hurts long and hard enough) eventually provides a site for the mind to brood upon. The "gatecontrol " model of pain developed by Ronald...

Reviewed by: Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life Svetla Slaveva-Griffin Daniel Russell . Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp.ix, 272. $74.00. ISBN 0-19-928284-6. This book is important for two reasons. First, it offers a comprehensive analysis of the concept of pleasure and its relation to "the good life" (according to the philosophers) and happiness in the Euthydemus, Gorgias, Phaedo, Republic, Philebus, Laws, Timaeus, and Protagoras. This breadth makes the book one of the most complete presentations of Plato's ethics. Second, Russell proposes and defends with marked persistence the thesis that we can talk about conditional and unconditional good in Plato. That is, happiness is based on a lifestyle directed by wisdom (as an unconditional good), while pleasure is only a conditional good in need of a rational direction. This view presents an instructive perspective on the traditional debates on whether Plato is a hedonist and whether his dialogues present an integral ethical theory. Chapters 1–3 expose the evidence that Plato does not view happiness as an accumulation of pleasures ("additive happiness") but as a result of the rationality with which all elements of one's life are brought together as a whole ("directive happiness"). The answer of the latter question constructs the overarching argument of the study that one cannot talk about a developed value theory in Plato. Chapter 1 establishes that in the Euthydemus Plato distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic goods. Wisdom and intelligent agency are among the former, while everything else which has value in one's life, including pleasure, is among the latter. Russell argues that wisdom is the only unconditional good that has the power to direct one's life as a whole, and that it constitutes what he calls "directive happiness." Chapter 2 reveals that this, indeed, is the case in the Gorgias, in which Plato allows that happiness depends only on that which is unconditionally good, and that all pleasant experiences, if they are not guided by rationality, amount only to "additive happiness." Chapter 3, then, examines pleasure as a conditional good in the Phaedo. The analysis crystallizes the distinction between the healthy and unhealthy ways of experiencing pleasure. Russell observes that this distinction is further carried by the duality of human nature and the dichotomy between "soul" and "body." Unsurprisingly, he addresses Plato's discussion of pleasure in the Republic as chapter 4 demonstrates how wisdom directs pleasure towards happiness and makes it an essential part of "the good life." Even more, the rational incorporation of pleasure, chapter 5 concludes based on the Philebus, provides the means by which we live our lives not in an otherworldly contemplation but in a rational tailoring of the nature we have. Chapter 6 goes even further to explain the seemingly paradoxical position in the Philebus that pleasure is necessary for the virtuous life and even for happiness. For Russell, Plato is no stranger to the mysterious depth of human psychology. In the last chapter, he demonstrates that Plato is aware that the reality of human nature is not straightforward and that we try either to rationalize or fight off our wayward desires. The book concludes with an epilogue exposing that even in the Protagoras Plato does not endorse hedonism [End Page 453] because it is inconsistent with the anti-hedonistic views presented elsewhere in his works. Russell has lucidly exposed the fundamental relation between pleasure and the good life in Plato. The first six chapters contain the meat of his argument and stand in a somewhat tangible structural and conceptual opposition to chapter 7 and the epilogue. It is surprising that the section on the Protagoras has not found a place among the main chapters of the study. For example, it would be a good first chapter, providing the background of the opinions against which the rest of the book stands. It is also interesting to note that the book contributes, without an explicit mention, to the controversial view, promoted by Pierre Hadot, that ancient philosophy is simply about the way of life one should lead. The book is written in a refreshing and clever style which combines elegantly the...

This paper addresses my understanding of well-being as harmonious relations in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. My approach shows the complexity of issues emerging when dealing with social relations. First of all, I analyse a specific case study showing the moral obligation involved among household members. Then I attempt to provide an insight into other aspects of social life to realise that the same degree of moral duty can be found when people participate in religious festivities or social protests. Collaboration, unity and co-operation often coexist with conflicts and moral obligation. The paper argues that this picture of complex coexistence is rather different from the substantive freedom described by Sen (Development as freedom. Oxford University Press, 1999) in his capability approach. By taking Sen’s theoretical framework as a point of departure for this investigation, it aims to emphasise the value of ethnography and other qualitative methods to the study of well-being. In the field of well-being, social interaction may greatly affect people’s capabilities to choose the lives they have reason to value, obliging them to follow certain models based on shared values and preferences. The paper contributes to debates on this specific issue, trying to shed light on the picture emerging when engaging with ethnographic research.

In this paper I summarize two versions of a new form of ethical theory in which all basic moral terms are defined by direct reference to exemplars of goodness. I call the Christian form Divine Motivation Theory in a book by the same name (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and the more general form I call Exemplarist Virtue Theory (Gifford Lectures 2015) or Exemplarist Moral Theory (forthcoming 2017, Oxford University Press). In the Christian form the supreme exemplar is God. In exemplarist virtue theory exemplars are superbly admirable persons or fictional characters, whose goodness is identified through the emotion of admiration rather than through the satisfaction of descriptive properties. In both versions of the theory the terms ‘good person’, ‘virtue’, ‘good life’, ‘admirable act’, and ‘right act’ are defined by the acts, motives, judgments, and attitudes of exemplary persons.

Current conceptions of solidarity impose a morality and sacrifice that did not prevail in the case of COVID-19 vaccine distribution. Notably, the vaccine distribution disparity revealed that when push came to shove, in the case of global distribution, self-interested persons reached inward rather than reaching out, prioritized their needs, and acted to realize their self-interest. Self-interest and loyalty to one's own group are natural moral tendencies. For solidarity to be normatively relevant in difficult and emergency circumstances, solidarity scholars ought to leverage the knowledge of the human natural tendency to prioritize one's own group. This paper recommends a nonexclusive approach to solidarity that reflects an understanding of rational self-interest but highlights commonalities among all people. A recommended task for future studies is to articulate what the account of solidarity informed by loyalty to the group would look like.

Over the past two decades in the West, practices of ethical consumption have become increasingly visible within mainstream consumer culture (Lewis and Potter). While they manifest in a variety of forms, such practices are frequently articulated to politics of anti-consumerism, environmentalism, and sustainable consumption through which lifestyle choices are conceived as methods for investing in—and articulating—ethical and social concerns. Such practices are typically understood as both a reflection of the increasing global influence of neoliberal, consumer-oriented modes of citizenship and a response to the destabilisation of capitalism’s certainties in the wake of ongoing climate change and the global financial crisis (Castells et al.; Miller).

Environmental Citizenship . Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell, eds. 2006. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 296 pp. $125.00 hardcover; $24.00 paperback. Citizenship and the Environment . Andrew Dobson. 2003. Oxford University Press, New York. 227 pp. $119.95 hardcover; $39.95 paperback. Western political culture has proven itself to be remarkably durable. Despite the vicissitudes of the last twenty-five hundred years, many of its core beliefs and philosophical assumptions are still intact and continue to exert considerable influence on our contemporary political discourse. Perhaps the most venerable political construct to have survived from classical antiquity is the concept of citizenship. The ancient Greeks believed that the good life could only be achieved by the direct and active participation of the individual in the public sphere. That the Greeks explicitly privileged the public space of politics over the private space of the home is made clear by their use of the term “idiot” to characterize people who did not participate in the affairs of the political community or polis.

TheoriaVolume 80, Issue 3 p. 272-276 REVIEW Mike W. Martin Happiness and the Good Life. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. xiii + 230 pp. isbn 978-0-19-984521-7 Bengt Brülde, Bengt Brülde University of GothenburgSearch for more papers by this author Bengt Brülde, Bengt Brülde University of GothenburgSearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 March 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.12050Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume80, Issue3September 2014Pages 272-276 RelatedInformation

Tourism is all about places and people. Tourism and places are a relation to be explained under the tenets of sociology and psychology. This void the present research, that aims to assess place attachment as an emotional state. As the discussion is positing only on domestic tourists, the cultural attachment is engrained. Hence the only dimension that remains to explain is the relation within people and places, i.e. emotions. This chapter based on a sample of 1358 domestic tourists with a relation with the south of Portugal of more than 25 years, explores the role of emotions in place attachment. Grounded on pleasure-arousal model of Russell (Plato on pleasure and the good life, Oxford University Press, 2005), 12 emotional states were regressed throughout an order probit model to explain the long lasting relation with the Algarve. The results suggest that relation with the Algarve will keep on if the place will be able to delight, fascinate and surprise tourists that feel also nostalgic when their holidays are over. These results put a great pressure in tourism authorities, retain tourists is overwhelming their expectations.

Over the past decades, much progress has been made in understanding the relationship between gratitude and well-being in adults, school-aged children, and adolescents (see Emmons and Mishra, in: Sheldon, Kashdan, Steger (eds) Designing positive psychology: taking stock and moving forward, Oxford University Press, New York, pp 248–262, 2011; Watkins in Gratitude and the good life: toward a psychology of appreciation, Springer, New York, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7253-3 ). However, relatively little is known about this relationship in young children (see Park and Peterson in J Happiness Stud 7(3):323–341, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-005-3648-6 ). The aim of the present study was to fill this gap by investigating the relationship between gratitude and happiness in young children. The general propensity for gratitude, domain-specific gratitude, and trait happiness were measured in a group of children (N = 80, Mage = 5.04 years). The results revealed that children’s domain-specific gratitude predicted children’s happiness above and beyond a general propensity for gratitude. These findings establish the presence of a relationship between gratitude and happiness in children by age 5 years, and reveal the type of gratitude, namely domain-specific, that is associated with happiness among young children.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsLiao, S. Matthew. The Right to Be Loved.New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 272. $45.00 (cloth).David ArchardDavid ArchardQueen’s University Belfast Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe mark of interesting work in applied ethics is that its author should outline and defend a claim, or set of claims, that prima facie appear intuitively implausible and yet that can be shown to be defensible using rigorous argumentation and, where appropriate, an appeal to empirical evidence. By that standard Matthew Liao’s book is indeed interesting. Its title is elliptical for in fact a child’s right to be loved is defended. Most people will think that it is indeed a good thing if children are loved, but they would probably baulk at the idea that children have a right to love. Liao first defended the claim that they do have such a right in an extensively cited 2006 article. This book takes the opportunity to respond to various criticisms of that basic claim and, further, to develop an underpinning account of what it means to have a human right.The centerpiece of the book is thus a specification of the child’s right to be loved and its defense by means both of social scientific and scientific evidence and of the defeat of some evident, and immediate, counterresponses. That core claim is buttressed by chapters that defend an account of why children, as humans, have rights; what the source of human rights is; why humans have a right to be parents; why we all have a duty to ensure that children are loved; and why those who can should adopt children who do not have parents.Liao covers a lot of ground and frequently pleads the pressures of space for not further developing or explaining some claims. This is unfortunate both since in some places the argumentation is compressed and also because he is defending substantial normative claims of general application. I will address some of those points at which I think more is needed.Yet, despite its comparative brevity, the book does an admirable job of presenting an arresting thesis. It is packed with arguments, counterarguments, and the use of what is the stock in trade these days of applied moral philosophy, namely, thought experiments. Liao’s argumentative strategy is simple enough. It is to mount the best possible empirical defense of his core claim, support it with broader normative principles that are distinguished from alternative theories, respond to theoretical objections, and spell out its implications. He thus has things to say not just about the particulars of children’s moral status and the rights and duties of parents but also concerning human rights and the demandingness of morality. Throughout the book his style is clear, engaging, and direct, and his command both of empirical facts and of contemporary moral and applied moral theory is highly commendable.In what follows I concentrate on two major rights claims made by Liao—that the child has a human right to be loved and that adults have a human right to biological parenthood. Both are debatable substantial claims, and I think more needs to be done to defend them.Despite the apparent implausibility of a right to be loved, Liao opens the book by citing multiple instances of just such a right to be found in international charters and covenants as well as national statutes and policy documents. Caution is needed even here at the outset of the book in respect of an important issue that goes to the heart of the principal claim. Liao cites a UK proposal in 2014 for a ‘Cinderella law’ that would criminalize parents who failed to show love and affection to their children (2). Actually the proposed law sought to extend the scope of child protection to include ‘emotional abuse and neglect’ by parents of children.This is a critical matter. Liao intends children not merely to have a right not to be treated in certain adverse ways (which was the practical import of the proposed UK statute) or, again, a right simply to be treated in certain positively beneficial ways. He means children ought rightfully to be loved where this is construed as being the object of an emotion. He is clear that, as an emotion, love involves not just an attitude to the other, or even further a disposition to behave positively toward the other in particular ways, but, essentially, a feeling—one of affection and warmth—for the other. That he does so understand love explains why he is compelled to devote a whole chapter to the obvious counterresponse that while attitudes and actions can be commanded feelings cannot. And if they cannot be commanded then there can—since ‘ought’ implies ‘can’—be no duty to love.Liao’s response to the ‘commandability objection’ is elegant, subtle, and mostly convincing. However, the difficulty for his account arises at an earlier stage and is twofold.First, most if not indeed every one of the impressive array of cited evidential findings (from psychology, neurology, and even simian studies) show that children suffer if (to put it bluntly) they are not cared for and reared in the right way. It does not show that children suffer from the absence of love as Liao defines it. He is explicit (86) that love is not directly observable and thus that we must make do with ‘indirect measures’ of this emotion. Yet what he lists as such measures and as observables—for instance, time spent with a parent, secure attachment by a child to a parent, adequacy of physical contact—may be in themselves, and not as outward signs of an inner feeling, what a child needs. This is to say that the evidence shows only that what a child has a right to is a parental disposition to behave in certain ways. Indeed time and again he summarizes the evidence in support of his basic claim in the language of ‘warm and responsive’ parents, ‘parental investment’ in children, ‘secure attachment’, ‘sufficient time’ spent with children, and so on.Now Liao can, and does, say that good behavior is not enough. A child needs not just the right kind of upbringing but one that is also motivated by love. In claiming and arguing for this he responds to what he terms the ‘pretended love objection’ (120–23). This is that if a parent can do everything for her child that a loving parent would—with all its good consequences for the child—why is she under any duty to cultivate the emotion of love? This is the second difficulty for his basic claim.Given that Liao cannot appeal to evidence of what he has conceded cannot be observed, his arguments are of a different kind. However, the language he elects to employ—namely, that of ‘pretense’—is somewhat prejudicial. It is not that a parent may be offering what is fake, counterfeit, or spurious. It is not, as Liao puts it, that the parent is trying to ‘fool the child’. It is not that the parent is engaged in a continuing and demanding exercise of affective deceit. The parent may be very well disposed toward the child. She is motivated to do everything a loving parent would do. She simply does not—and may for all kinds of reasons be unable to—love the child. What does she do that is wrong?Liao thinks—and this is his principal response to the ‘pretended love objection’—that she deprives the child of the capacity to distinguish real from ersatz love. But the child does learn what loving someone requires of a human being and to that extent can distinguish loving behavior from unloving behavior. Moreover it is not clear—by Liao’s own admission—what an adult needs. Liao concedes (99), as a way of seeing off the thought that adults might have a right to be loved, that “typically the kinds of love in which adults are interested, namely romantic love and friendship, are different from parental love.” If that is the case then it is not immediately obvious how being unable to distinguish real parental love from a motivation to do everything a loving parent would do will help when an adult enters into the different world of loving relations with other adults.Liao’s final riposte to the pretended love objection is simply question-begging. He asserts that offering pretend love would not fulfill the duty of love, any more than repayment of a debt in counterfeit money would constitute the discharge of the duty to settle what is owed. If there is a duty to love, then of course not loving the child comes up short of what is required. But the pretend objection simply denies that a convincing case for a duty to love has been made. For the evidence fails to show that doing in the absence of love everything that would be done from love falls short of what is needed by children.Rather than take issue with the claims of chapters 1 and 2 that defend in general terms, respectively, a ‘genetic basis for moral agency’ account of who can have rights and a view of human rights as protecting ‘the fundamental conditions for pursuing a characteristically good human life’, I simply raise a question of argumentative strategy. Liao thinks that showing that rights, and human rights, are to be understood as he argues they should be in these chapters suffices to establish that children can have rights, including human rights, and that the right to be loved as a child is a human right. However, it is not clear that his general theory of rights is necessary for establishing the core claim. Thus, I imagine, for instance, that a defender of an interests theory of rights (a theory Liao does not endorse) could be persuaded that children have interests and that one of those—the need to be loved—provides, in Razian terms, sufficient reason for imposing duties on others to provide the child with love. That human beings have human rights to fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life, as Liao asserts, may explain why there is a right to be loved. Yet this need not be the only possible explanation.Moreover, Liao thinks that the fact that humans have human rights on those grounds also explains why there is a “fundamental right to pursue biological parenting” (203). Here—although the claimed existence of this right does not directly impugn the existence of the child’s right to be loved—I have difficulties.In chapter 6 Liao argues for biological parenting as a fundamental right. The argument proceeds by asserting, first, that biological parenting is a ‘basic activity’, “an activity that is important to human beings’ qua human beings’ life as a whole” (158). It is not, as far as I can detect, made clear or explicit whether Liao thinks an individual human being who is not a biological parent thereby lacks something that would make any human life valuable. However, I suspect from the way that he initially defines basic activities as “characteristic of a minimally decent human life” (44) he would see a childless adult as leading an impoverished life. This is contentious and indeed is contended by many.Liao offers four reasons why biological parenthood is a basic activity. Three of these have to do with the creation of a distinctively new and morally valuable life from one’s own genetic material. The fourth cites the opportunity to see how this new life develops and, crucially, to shape its growth (157). But in offering this last reason, Liao moves from the value of being a biological parent (a progenitor) to that of being a custodial parent. It is important for him to have that fourth reason inasmuch as the purported value of procreation alone is dubious. Yet that fourth reason—the value of custodianship—is not to be derived from or necessarily linked to the fact of biological parenthood.Interestingly then, the second stage of Liao’s argument for biological parenthood being a human right identifies the fundamental conditions needed for the pursuit of a basic activity. Here Liao offers essentially two: bodily integrity and “liberty and autonomy to plan and pursue biological parenting” (159). Yet he thereby conflates under the single title, ‘biological parenting’, both procreation and custodianship, creating a child and shaping its future life.Now, first, it is not uncontroversial to see a right to procreate as encompassed within or entailed by a right to bodily integrity. This is because while a right not to reproduce seems straightforward, a right to bring humans into existence most certainly is not—for all the now familiar reasons surrounding the putative unconsented harms of existence identified by such writers as David Benatar and Seana Shiffrin.Second, no explanation or justification is offered for the idea that somehow creating a child provides its creator with the opportunity to be the child’s guardian. Liao does think and argues in chapter 4 that the duty of trying to love a child falls in the first instance to those best placed and best motivated to do so. However, this argument is distinct from one that those who create children somehow have a right to rear them.It is also important to separate carefully the rights that are being appealed to. Not only is there a distinction between a right to be a biological parent (to procreate) and a general right to act as a custodial parent of some particular child. There is also a distinction between the ground of the right to be the parent of a child (why can I exclude others from the care of this child?) and the scope of the rights of any parent (what is it that a parent may rightfully do with, to, and for a child in her care?). Thus, Liao is mistaken to identify Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift as seeking to answer in their recent book the question of why individuals have a right to biological parenthood. They are interested in the different question—important for liberal egalitarians who worry about the inequitable effects of families—of why anyone should be permitted to act as a parent. They are indeed skeptical, as Liao notes (163), about the idea that biological provenance—being the progenitor of a child—gives an adult a decisive claim to be the parent of that child. But their principal preoccupation is whether there should be custodial parents at all. It is, on their account, “a separate and further question which adults should parent which children” (Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014], 49). In short they are not addressing the question Liao thinks he has answered but which I think he has not done so satisfactorily.I have no space to consider other arguments and claims made in the first part of the book on the nature and ground of human rights. These will surely attract critical attention. The book as a whole is a very welcome addition to a rich volume of philosophical writing on the ethics of the family and of procreation and on the moral and political status of children and parents. Some thirty years ago these topics were a comparatively neglected area of study. They are not now. Liao’s book considerably enhances this domain of work. It contributes a clear defense of a provocative thesis that needed identifying, and we should all now as a result have a clearer sense of what children, and parents, can claim as their rights. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 127, Number 1October 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687344 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviewed by: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor Wessel Reijers Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, Oxford University Press, 2016. Some books can be said to represent ‘new beginnings’, opening up new spaces for academic discourse and new methods and perspectives. Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues can rightfully be claimed to be one of those books. There is much about this book that is not only laudable but also urgent. First, it has managed to firmly establish virtue ethics as a tradition worthy of consideration in the field of ethics of technology. Other authors have suggested such a turning (Ess 2009; Coeckelbergh 2012), but none have done it so far in a manner that can live up to the comprehensiveness of Technology and the Virtues. Second, the book has served the virtue ethics tradition well in convincingly arguing for its continuing relevance in a time of serious sociotechnical challenges. As our moral critiques of technologies are increasingly entangled in discussions of existential threats that are claimed to be too complex to be handled by common human beings and call for an enhancement of our species, Vallor’s urgent call back to earth, back to our own human capabilities, will be welcomed by many. Third, it establishes a way of approaching matters in moral philosophy that is quite uncommon today, namely drawing from not only the ‘Western’ perspective but also systematic moral philosophies from other cultures: Buddhist and Confucian ethics. This echoes the increasing need in a multipolar world to build bridges between moral traditions, to construct a global dialogue (insofar possible) concerning the good life and the kind of societies we want to live in. Vallor’s book is structured in a convincing way and guides the reader from foundational questions to a framework of the ‘technomoral’ virtues, and to a series of in-depth case studies of contemporary technologies: social media, surveillance technologies, robots, and human enhancement technologies. In the introduction and Part I of the book, Vallor has three main objectives. The first is to argue for the existence of a so-called state [End Page E-17] of “acute sociotechnical opacity” (6) in the 21st century, which means that the practical circumstances of our everyday lives are changing so rapidly due to technological innovations that we cannot reasonably anticipate the impact of future states of affairs on our morality. This notion provides Vallor with the resources to argue against the use of utilitarian ethics, due to its false reliance on transparent choices based on the rational calculation of their outcomes, and against Kantian ethics, due to the impossibility of any categorical rule to respond to highly contingent future states of affairs. Virtue ethics is presented as a modest but viable alternative, in that enables us to acknowledge the existence of sociotechnical opacity and at the same time offers us a strategy for self-cultivation that empowers us to manage it prudently. The second objective is to introduce the revival of the virtue ethics tradition, to connect it to contemporary philosophy of technology, and to make the claim that both should be wary of their Western provincialism and engage in a global dialogue because the problems they address (e.g. climate change) are of a global character. The third objective is to lay down the fundamentals of the three virtue ethics traditions used in the book (Aristotelian, Buddhist, and Confucian) and to argue for their convergence on four major issues: a conception of the highest human good, of virtues as cultivated states of character, of a practical path for moral self-cultivation, and of a the existence of an essence of human beings (44). In Part II of the book, Vallor presents seven “core elements” (64) or perhaps rather conditions of the practices that mediate the cultivation of technomoral virtues. These conditions pertain to the ‘how’ of the cultivation of technomoral virtue, indicating according to what kinds of standards we could for instance evaluate our educational, mentoring, and training practices. Vallor painstakingly discusses the details of the accounts of cultivation of virtue in the three virtue ethics traditions she...

Training Virtue without Losing Autonomy:A Response to Aaron Stalnaker Patricia Marechal (bio) Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority. By Aaron Stalnaker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Introduction In Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority, Aaron Stalnaker argues that reading Confucian ethics will persuade us that dependence on the right authorities is essential to living a good, virtuous life. Relinquishing autonomy to experts early in life can allow us, in time, to become fully autonomous [End Page 512] and exercise our autonomy in appropriate ways. Indeed, these forms of non-oppressive dependence "make possible a much richer and better shared life" (p. 209).1 For the Rú, a good life requires virtues such as ritual and wisdom. These virtues, Stalnaker argues, are a mix of "trained abilities, i.e. skills, and cultivated tendencies to think, feel, and desire in certain ways" (p. 79). A virtuous character is "in fact partially constituted by the mastery of certain skills" (p. 81). Insofar as the virtues involve skill, they are partly acquired in the same way as other skills, such as carpentry or archery, are acquired. That is, they are trained by experts. Understanding virtue as a form of skilled behavior or practical mastery, Stalnaker argues, allows us to see why it is so important to subject oneself to, and obey, the (right) authorities: we become virtuous only if we are trained by the right people, follow these experts' guidance and example, and (at least in the beginning) obey their commands. Eventually, this results in an internalized sense of what is correct and incorrect, and so we become ready to act virtuously on our own and apply what we have learned to novel situations. Furthermore, we become able to articulate why this is the right action in these circumstances, and challenge our leaders if we think they have deviated from the virtuous path. As Stalnaker claims, "human beings are not automatically, spontaneously, autonomous; our capacity for autonomy needs to be cultivated, over time, through deliberate practices of training, [for] which we depend on the guidance of virtuous and skilled teachers" (p. 269). Appropriate dependence is, then, essential to living well. Some of this, Stalnaker tells us, is familiar to those of us embedded in a Western tradition. The idea that living a good life involves cultivating virtues of character, and that developing the virtues requires shaping our natural dispositions by repeatedly acting in a virtuous way under the guidance of elders and teachers until these actions become "second nature," is central to ancient Greek virtue ethics—in particular to an Aristotelian conception of virtue. According to Aristotle, we acquire a firm and steady disposition to act and feel at the right time, toward the right people, and in the right way by a process of habituation that involves repeatedly performing good actions, just as we become good piano players by playing the piano (Nicomachean Ethics II.1 1103a33–b1; II.4 1105a30–34; II. 1106b21–23). Moreover, Aristotle insists that this process of habituation requires the guidance of virtuous people who will steer us in the right way (II.3 1104b8–12; X.1 1172a20–21). But can ethical virtue be trained in the same way that skills like carpentry or archery can? Can this sort of training result in autonomous, responsible agents? Furthermore, if our sense of what is good and bad is deeply molded by others, how can we come to realize that the practices in which we were trained are actually not good, so as to exercise appropriate remonstration? [End Page 513] I. Virtue as Skill Virtue versus Mere Self-Control In chapter 3 of his book, Stalnaker addresses a controversy in virtue ethics. In a nutshell, we may wonder whether the virtues of character involve skill. Aristotle himself makes a distinction between virtue and skill, even though he often finds similarities between the two. Stalnaker argues that making a distinction between virtue and skill is "importantly misleading" (p. 81), and that thinking of the virtues as involving skill helps us understand their nature and how we acquire them, namely thanks to the rigorous training received from those who are already experts. But do the virtues involve...