Schopenhauer and anti-natalism

The article traces origins of the contradiction that calls into being the polemics on the moral status of duties to close persons (special obligations). Special obligations are created by the unique life narrative of an actor that makes different recipients of her actions more or less distant. Those who are less distant are “close ones.” Those who are more distant are “strangers.” The basis of this distance can be different: individual sympathy, consanguinity, belonging to cultural, territorial and political communities. Special obligations presuppose that the preferential treatment of “close ones” is not only permissible but obligatory. This feature of moral duties to close persons makes moral philosophers suspicious because they are prone to endow moral requirements with two interrelated properties: universality and the high level of generality. The main reason for this is that the typical moral duty is a duty of every human being to another human being without any further qualifications. Against the background of such duties, any preference to close persons looks like the breach of moral equality and manifestation of impermissible partiality. Though, common moral beliefs persistently include special obligations in the whole system of moral duty. R. Goodin thinks that they have a priority over positive general duties and yield to negative general duties. The empirical researches of moral evaluations which reviewed in this article in general confirm this conclusion. The ethical theory cannot ignore fundamental features of common moral beliefs. That is why it is doomed to look for ways of reconciling the moral equality and impartiality with the preferential treatment of close persons embedded into special obligations.

Human Selves, Chronic Illness, and the Ethics of Medicine One of the rare pleasures of being at The Hearings Center and involved in discussions of medical ethics is that occasionally we are shaken to our philosophic boots. Amidst our deliberations, we come to the sudden and stunning realization that we do not really know what we are talking about. We rediscover that medical ethics hovers over a philosophic abyss. Fortunately this does not happen often, or we would not be able to carry on with our work. Ordinarily we are like the Harlem Globetrotters of old. We emerge from our offices, the bioethicist's locker room, gather around the conference table, and toss around our cherished ethical principles, autonomy, beneficence, and justice. We twirl them on our fingers, bounce them off our lips, and dribble them through our legs. Ignoring the abyss, we put on a great show and skillfully employ our conceptions, assuming both that they are adequate and that we all know what they mean and imply. This is "Sweet Georgia Brown" ethics, and it is lively, interesting, and usually serves us well. But occasionally the music stops, and we become mired in philosophic quandary. Consider one of our fundamental ethical values: respect for persons and individual autonomy. We ethically require our health care providers to obtain our informed consent, either direct or substituted, before they practice their medicine on us. But who and what are these professionals finally supposed to respect? Is it our rational decision-making capacities? Our individual bodily integrity and historical, biographical, temporally deep selves? Our lives amidst immediate family and friends? Or our active lives pursued within particular and concrete wordly settings, cultural and natural? How we answer this question importantly determines our particular ethical duties. However, such an answer depends on our conception of a human self, of who we are. This, in turn, determines what in practice we want respected or cared for, and what individual human autonomy, may concretely mean. It is precisely here, with the human self, that we stare into the philosophic abyss. "You would not find out the boundaries of the soul, even by traveling along every path: so deep a measure (Logos) does it have." Thus spoke the presocratic Heraclitus (Fragment 45). After all these years, we still lose ourselves along the footpaths of the soul. No doubt it is difficult enough to understand the enigmatic Heraclitus, yet there is one thing we can learn from his aphoristic arrows. The understanding of the self is not a matter of scientific or empirical knowledge that can be decided once and for all. It is a task for philosophic or speculative interpretation, and is essentially open-ended. It is a metaphysical question finally requiring bold fights of rational imagination, always tentative, aiming at an adequate conceptual elucidation of who we are and what we experience and endure. In our ongoing efforts to understand ourselves adequately, we moderns are importantly undermined by recent metaphysical speculation. We poorly comprehend the essential relation of our concrete selves to our organic bodies and to the world abroad. The chief philosophic culprit is arguably the modern conception of "substance," originally fashioned in the great period of substance and genius, the seventeenth century. Here is the crucial point from which critical and speculative reflections should commence. We must begin, of course, with Descartes and his famous and fateful partition of reality into three types of substance--God, Res Extensa, and Res Cogitans: the Divine Being, extended or physical things, and thinking things. A substance is conceived as that which requires nothing else in order to exist, an entity that can be alone by itself, in need of no other in order to be. For example, a human individual's mind does not require a body in order to exist, nor does a body need a human mind, and God requires neither. …

In my view, the moral case for giving animals legal protection is strong. This is so whether or not we think of animals as having moral rights, such as a right to be cared for, or at least a right not to be harmed, because even if animals do not have moral rights, humans have moral duties toward animals, such as a general duty not to harm animals, say, by performing experiments on them, or raising them for food, or having them perform tricks to amuse tourists. The question I wish to consider in this article, however, is not what moral rights animals have, or even what our moral duties to animals are, but whether we have reason to think of animal law not only as imposing legal duties on humans, but also as conferring legal rights on animals. This is not a moral question, but a question about how to conceptualize legal positions, and the arguments in favor of or against competing conceptualizations should be of a theoretical nature. I shall argue (A) that while there are good moral reasons to impose legal duties on humans regarding the treatment of animals, there are good theoretical reasons not to think of animals as legal right-holders, because doing so would either be pointless, on the interest-theory analysis, or else incoherent, on the will-theory analysis. On route to this conclusion, I shall also argue (B) that in the field of law, the method of explication is in many cases, including the elucidation of the concept of a legal right, preferable to conceptual analysis, strictly conceived; (C) that we should think of legal rights as complexes of Hohfeld-elements (claims, liberties, powers, immunities) and distinguish accordingly between claim-rights, liberty-rights, power-rights, and immunity-rights; (D) that when discussing animal rights we should focus on claim-rights; and, finally, (E) that an explication of the concept of a legal right along the lines of the will-theory of legal rights is preferable to an explication along the lines of the interest-theory.

Much has been written about the general moral duty to love one’s neighbors. In this article, I explore the specific application of this moral duty in the work setting. I argue from a secular perspective that individuals have the moral duty to love their stakeholders. Loving one’s stakeholders is an affective valuing of the stake-related values these stakeholders pursue and as such is the real recognition of one’s stakeholders as stakeholders and of oneself as a stakeholder of one’s stakeholders. This moral concept of stakeholder love offers promising contributions to stakeholder theory, leadership theories, and ethical theories in general and business ethics theories in particular.

Much has been written about the general moral duty to love one’s neighbors. In this article, I explore a specific application of this moral duty: i.e., in the context of work. I argue from a secular perspective that individuals have the moral duty to love their stakeholders. Loving one’s stakeholders is an affective valuing of the stake-related values these stakeholders pursue and as such is the only real recognition of one’s stakeholders as stakeholders and oneself as a stakeholder of one’s stakeholders. This moral concept of stakeholder love has implications for stakeholder theory, leadership theories, and ethics theories in general and for business ethics theories in particular.

The Basic Argument The failure of Transactional and Associative theories to explain the source of a general duty to obey domestic law pushes us to explore other possibilities. In particular, since the moral duty to obey seems to many a relatively basic, natural, nonvoluntary feature of social life, it seems initially promising to suppose that the moral principle that accounts for this duty belongs to that group of principles that specifies our natural moral duties. Natural Duty theories of the duty to obey the law, as we have seen, are those that ground our duty to obey not in who we are (as in Associative accounts) or in what we've done or enjoyed (as in Transactional accounts), but rather either (a) in the moral importance of advancing some impartial moral good or (b) in some moral duty thought to be owed by all persons to all others as moral equals, regardless of roles, relationships, or transactions. Thus, the natural duty in question, from which the duty to obey is to be derived, could be a consequentialist moral duty to promote or maximize the occurrence of some good property or state of affairs – such as happiness (utility, preference satisfaction, etc.), moral perfection, or justice.

This paper reconsiders the contemporary moral reading of women’s oppression, and revises our understanding of the practical reasons for action a victim of mistreatment acquires through her unjust circumstances. The paper surveys various ways of theorising victims’ moral duties to resist their own oppression, and considers objections to prior academic work arguing for the existence of an imperfect Kantian duty of resistance to oppression grounded in self-respect. These objections suggest (1) that such a duty is victim blaming; (2) that it distorts the normative direction of self-regarding duties; and (3) that consequentialist reasons are inapt for justifying self-regarding ethical responsibilities. The paper then argues that the need for normative coherence in our very concept of a moral duty is of paramount importance, and especially so in the fight against patriarchal oppression. Accordingly, we should acknowledge the salient differences between pro tanto or defeasible moral reasons and fully fledged moral duties identifying agent-relative obligatory action. The paper concludes that we better respect and defend women’s rights when first we understand them as having, at best, defeasible moral reasons to oppose their oppression; and second, ensure that we make adequate allowance for a woman’s interpretative right to choose how to respond to her oppressive circumstances.

In this paper, I show that David Benatar’s asymmetry argument for anti-natalism leads to a dilemma. In Chapter 2 of his book Better Never to Have Been, Benatar claims that there is an axiological asymmetry between harms and benefits that explains four prevalent asymmetries. Based on the axiological asymmetry, he defends the anti-natalist conclusion that we should not have children. The four prevalent asymmetries to be explained are moral duties, reasons, attitudes, or feelings concerning life as a whole. However, Benatar explains them by applying the axiological asymmetry to parts of life, such as pains and pleasures. I find a serious gap here. While two ways are available to bridge this gap, a dilemma arises from Benatar’s asymmetry argument. The axiological asymmetry is not supported because it cannot explain the four prevalent asymmetries, or else it cannot lead to the anti-natalist conclusion. A number of philosophers have already criticized Benatar’s asymmetry argument, mainly questioning its assumptions. In this paper, I contend that there is no good reason to agree with his argument even if all its explicit assumptions are accepted.

The purpose of the research is to develop philosophical and ethical foundations of ecological behavior, as well as thinking that generates creative consciousness, dialog communication, directed against the utilitarian approach to reality. The novelty consists, firstly, in substantiating the idea of developing the essential forces of man, which are not opposed to the everyday world, but harmonize it with spiritual satisfaction. Ecological thinking and behavior do not arise randomly and automatically, but require moral effort. Normative action is connected with human efforts to join the world of humanism and love as an invariant that remains unchanged in various cultural and historical forms. Secondly, the modern understanding of the ethics of human duty involves requirements for human action to be neither destructive of future existence nor threatening to the preservation of life. The conclusions are based on the deontological understanding of ethics of duty. The applied dialectical method, which is based on the principle of activity of self-consciousness, is associated with the rise above utilitarianism, overcoming the consumerist, technocratic attitude to the surrounding world, operating with quantitative indicators of intellectual progress. The research is based on the principle of additionality of sensuality and reason, pleasure and duty. The authors substantiate the transcendental way of cognizing the ecology of man and society. Human needs and interests lie at the foundation of understanding the social and spiritual consequences of a committed action. Harmony of the principles of duty and love is promoted by creative overcoming of utilitarianism and recognition of the limits of possibilities of impact on the natural environment. Environmental behavior must be viewed in the context of the rich world of human individuality, which contributes to the harmonization of ethical duty and pleasure.

The standard line about Kantian ethics is that as an ethics of duty it can brook no exceptions, no matter how awful the results of acting from duty. This chapter argues that the standard line misunderstands what a Kantian ethics of duty is, and where, in the deliberative structure of a duty, its necessity lies. What duties rule out are exceptions to their requirement for self-interest as such. Various contexts of self-killing are explored to make this point. And it is explained why the discretion that comes with an imperfect duty like beneficence is not a matter of making exceptions to a general duty at all.

While philosophers usually agree that there is room for civil disobedience in democratic societies, they disagree as to the proper justification and role of civil disobedience. The field has so far been divided into two camps—the liberal approach on the one hand, which associates the justification and role of civil disobedience with the good of justice, and the democratic approach on the other, which connects them with the value and good of democracy. William Smith’s Civil Disobedience and Deliberative Democracy offers a ‘deliberative’ theory, which constitutes an attractive synthesis of the two camps as it conceives of civil disobedience as a guardian of both justice and deliberative democracy. In this review essay, I first revisit the ‘problem’ of civil disobedience, examining in particular the two pillars of the case against civil disobedience as Smith depicts it, namely, (a) the prohibition on legal disobedience established by the moral duty to comply, and (b) the notion that civil disobedience strains the bonds of civic friendship. I suggest, contra (a), that the duty to comply as Smith defends it fails to be comprehensive (to cover all laws) because it is tightly bound to deliberative democratic procedures, which are involved in the making of only a portion of authoritative decisions; and, contra (b), that civil disobedience does not strain, but instead invigorates, civic friendship. Second, I entertain the possibility that citizens have a moral duty, not a mere right, to resist injustice. I show that Smith’s theory, in particular his account of the moral duty to comply, provides the resources to defend a general duty to resist injustice which, depending on the circumstances, can demand protesting the law (including through civil disobedience) or frustrating injustice (including through covert disobedience). Third, I contend that Smith’s conception of the different contexts of injustice—he identifies three main ones—should be expanded to include what I call ‘official disrespect’ (i.e., routine and open illegal practices by the authorities) and ‘deliberative ignorance’ (which occurs when the state conceals officials programs or misconduct from the public). I argue that each context offers reasons to disobey the law but not necessarily in the civil manner determined by Smith.

In both the literature and practice, it has been advocated that companies should have a profit cap. Utilizing corporate social contract theory, this article posits that under at least three conditions, companies do not have a general moral duty to cap their profits. These conditions entail that a company adheres to the contracting principles of its stakeholder relationships, that the constitutive stakeholders of the company have not otherwise stipulated in the corporate social contract, and that the macrosocial contract does not prescribe otherwise to the company. The first two conditions are company-specific and hence do not constitute a generic moral imperative, and there is currently insufficient evidence for the third, generic condition.

Political Animals Revisited

The results of the research of the main elements of the corporate culture in the formation of the competitive tourist enterprise have been presented in the article. It has been defined that one of the main factors of the increase of the competitiveness of the tourist enterprise is the corporate culture, that represents the complex multi-level system of the relations between the enterprise and the consumer of the services. The concepts of the culture of the enterprises and the organizations have been analyzed in the research. The forms of the influence of the corporate culture on the activity of the enterprise and organization have been defined, the ways of the necessary reformation of the corporate culture of the enterprise on human individuality and the organic combination of one’s own interests with the system of the corporate relations have been defined. It has been defined that the corporate culture is an important formation of the effective working team and the decisive factor of the increase of the competitiveness of the enterprise.

Shaw and the Sacred Cows: