Selling sustainability: how ESG marketing overlooks moral complexity

The question of whether large language models (LLMs) can exhibit moral capabilities is of growing interest and urgency, as these systems are deployed in sensitive roles such as companionship and medical advising, and will increasingly be tasked with making decisions and taking actions on behalf of humans. These trends require moving beyond evaluating for mere moral performance, the ability to produce morally appropriate outputs, to evaluating for moral competence, the ability to produce morallyappropriate outputs based on morally relevant considerations. Assessing moral competence is critical for predicting future model behaviour, establishing appropriate public trust and justifying moral attributions. However, both the unique architectures of LLMs and the complexity of morality itself introduce fundamental challenges. Here we identify three such challenges: the facsimile problem, whereby models may imitate reasoning without genuine understanding; moral multidimensionality, whereby moral decisions are influenced by a range of context-sensitive relevant moral and non-moral considerations; and moral pluralism, which demands a new standard for globallydeployed artificial intelligence. We provide a roadmap for tackling these challenges, advocating for a suite of adversarial and confirmatory evaluations that will enable us to work towards a more scientifically grounded understanding and, in turn, a more responsible attribution of moral competence to LLMs.

The ethical debate on the moral consideration of non-human animals (hereafter animals) is currently centred on the evidence of sentience in these individuals. Legal protection for vertebrates and cephalopods (and decapods in the UK) has resulted from the recognition of sentience in these animals. Although one should celebrate the significant advances in the legal protection of animals in recent decades, current animal legislation is modulated by an instrumental viewpoint, remaining speciesist and anthropocentric. A sentient being is here understood as one who has the phenomenological experience of awareness, which is the most basic sense of phenomenal consciousness that implies the existence of a subject who is not indifferent to what happens to itself. This paper demonstrates, with reasonable assumptions, that this concept of sentience would apply to many invertebrate species, thus deeming them worthy of increased moral consideration and legal protection. In cases in which sentience cannot be demonstrated clearly, one should assume the precautionary principle and consider the intrinsic value of each animal to designate moral consideration. In considering sentience as the primary condition for moral consideration, science must expand who is recognized as sentient rather than being reductionist. Animal ethics must review to whom the moral consideration should be given. Animal legislation must include legislative innovations and invertebrates in its protective scope. Thereby, a significant improvement in the current political and legislative decisions would be rooted in animal ethics. Opening the ethical perception and broadening the debate are urgent, as moral consideration should be given to all animals.

Miscarriage of pregnancy is widely experienced and seldom discussed. Because of the surpassing silence on the subject, experiences of miscarriage may be misunderstood, difficult to articulate, and isolating, and attitudes toward miscarriage may be under-informed. Women are more likely to be offered cultural information on what to expect when we are expecting, than we are to be offered preparation for, or recognition of, the unexpected. Philosophers can, and should, contribute to changing that by promoting discourse on miscarriage as an experience which is meaningful, and significant to self-understanding and social awareness, and by providing a contextual realm in which related discussions of pregnancy, fertility loss, and fetal death could take place. The implications of reflections on the phenomenon of miscarriage for many lines of inquiry turn out to be multifold. To date, unfortunately, philosophers have not been central participants in theorizing about miscarriage, pregnancy loss, or fetal death outside of the confines of abortion debates.1 We ought to be concerned about the risks of furthering the social and academic silence surrounding phenomena that so many have experienced, and that raise important questions regarding grief and loss, the social construction of pregnancy, technological developments, social recognition, and, to put it grandly, the nature of human life. As our contributors observe, one reason at least for the silence on miscarriage is obvious: addressing and conceptualizing the loss that is central to some (and not all) experiences of miscarriage may risk undermining some central principles of reproductive freedom. As feminist philosophers, we are certainly sympathetic to such concerns. We suggest that the riskiness of theorizing about miscarriage, and its implications for applied philosophical arguments with respect to abortion, seem to us to be compelling reasons why this issue is especially important to offer. The practice of philosophical investigation includes the social practices of cooperatively facing our reasons for ignoring some topics while devoting attention to related issues. Existing accounts of meaning in reproductive contexts—especially those put forward in debates concerning abortion—tend to focus on the (moral) status of the fetus. This is true even of relational accounts aimed at promoting reproductive autonomy by highlighting the ways in which the fetus is inseparable from the woman who carries it. It will probably not come as a surprise that we hope this issue on miscarriage, pregnancy loss, and fetal death accomplishes a shift this conversation, in the direction of pushing past embryo-centric value judgments. In part this is because, to put it bluntly, the miscarried embryo is not the one who has to live with the experience. The essays in this special issue are a significant addition to the scarce literature on miscarriage and fetal death. Contributions are from specialists in continental and analytical philosophy, feminism, bioethics, theoretical and applied ethics, social and political philosophy, social epistemology and philosophy of language, narrative, aesthetics, popular culture, and gender studies. As guest editors, we sought to offer a variety of approaches to the topic, to further the understanding of miscarriage and fetal death as important to many areas of philosophy, especially social philosophy. We suggest that the unchosenness and invisibility of miscarriage are central to its seeming irrelevance to social identities and social norms of testimony, recognition, and ascription of significance to experiences. The first several contributions to this volume focus on the phenomenon of miscarriage and its meanings. In “‘The Event That Was Nothing’: Miscarriage as a Liminal Event,” Alison Reiheld argues that miscarriage is poorly understood and that people find it difficult to make sense of the experience of miscarriage for the reason that it is a liminal event—an event suspended in a space between socially recognized states. Reiheld identifies four distinct, but related, dimensions along which miscarriage is liminal: parenthood, procreation, death, and abortion. In relation to parenthood, miscarriage halts the transition from not being a parent to being a parent to the child that would have been born. In relation to procreation as a result of a specific pregnancy, miscarriage lies between having procreated and having not procreated. In relation to death, it is not clear whether miscarriage involves the death of someone or the loss of (potential) life given the lack of social agreement about the status of embryos and fetuses. In relation to abortion, miscarriage lies in the space between the social categories of induced abortion and pregnancy. Reiheld argues that, as a result of its liminality, miscarriage has been enrolled in social and moral debates that are not really about miscarriage at all. These include debates about the permissibility of abortion and debates about control over pregnancy. By considering particular laws bearing on miscarriage, Reiheld points to some of the dangers resulting from our failure to separate miscarriage from the states between which it is suspended. Reiheld's hope is that a better understanding of miscarriage's liminality will help us respond in better ways to women who experience miscarriage and avoid enrolling their experiences in debates that really have little to do with miscarriage. In “Early Pregnancy Losses: Multiple Meanings and Moral Considerations,” Amy Mullin draws on literature from a variety of disciplines to highlight some of the complex and variable features of the ethical terrain related to pregnancy loss. She then considers, specifically, the moral significance of early pregnancy loss—that is, pregnancy loss that occurs before the fetus is sentient and before the fetus is able to survive outside of the womb. Mullin points to problems with arguments that tie the moral status of the fetus to the question of whether the fetus is a person. These include the argument, defended by many feminist scholars, that the moral status of a fetus depends on the extent to which other people, and especially pregnant women, construct their fetuses as persons. Mullin proposes another way of understanding the moral significance of early pregnancy loss. Specifically, she postulates that the loss of embryos or early fetuses can be morally considerable for the reason that embryos and early fetuses have the potential to survive until infancy and to become members of the moral community (a potential resting on both the features of the fetus itself and the plans of the pregnant woman). If we accept this postulate, we are able to understand miscarriage as a loss of a being that is morally considerable without presupposing that every person will respond to pregnancy loss in the same way and without abandoning respect for reproductive autonomy. In “Miscarriage and Intercorporeality,” Ann J. Cahill develops a philosophical account of pregnancy that allows the possibility of recognizing the suffering of persons who experience miscarriage without undermining reproductive rights. Cahill resists the relational model of pregnancy defended by many feminist scholars and invoked in the accounts of miscarriage defended by Carolyn McLeod and Kate Parsons.2 On a relational model, pregnancy is conceived of as a severable relation between two distinct individuals where the pregnant woman can attach moral and emotional significance to the relationship (and indeed to the fetus) as though she were somehow outside of the relationship, whereas the fetus cannot. While Cahill acknowledges that a relational model of pregnancy has much to recommend it, she argues that this model is problematic in so far as it rests on an individualism that precludes recognition of the ways in which the lived, embodied experience of pregnancy is transformative of the pregnant woman's subjectivity. Cahill draws on Rosalyn Diprose's notion of corporeal generosity—the prereflective openness to otherness and being given to others that constitutes social relations—to account for pregnancy and miscarriage in a manner that reflects the intersubjectivity, rather than mere relationality, of these phenomena.3 Cahill holds it to be an ontological fact that identities are constructed only through interaction with other embodied beings such that the identity of any subject is tied to and implicated in the identity of other bodies and identities. She argues that the identity being constructed by the pregnant person as a pregnant person (as an expectant parent, for instance) is inescapably intertwined with the existence of the fetus. Miscarriage is, on this account, disorienting and gives rise to many, often conflicting, emotions in so far as it ends the transformative experience of pregnancy—often with painful and sometimes long-lasting physical effects—and calls into question the identity under construction. In her contribution, “Miscarriage and Person-Denying,” Lindsey Porter considers one way in which reflecting on miscarriage and people's reactions to miscarriage can inform debates about the moral status of abortion. Specifically, she argues against person-denying arguments for the moral permissibility of abortion—arguments aimed at establishing the permissibility of abortion on the grounds that the fetus is not a person and, thus, lacks moral status. Porter observes that grief is a common response to miscarriage and suggests that grief following miscarriage is evidence that some people experience miscarriage as the loss of a loved one. She draws on Martha Nussbaum's account of grief to argue that grief following miscarriage presupposes that the fetus is something that should be given moral consideration—something with moral status.4 Porter argues that, if the person-denying argument works, it works only in the “strong form” in which it is understood that the fetus is entirely outside of the sphere of moral concern. Thus, unless we dismiss people who grieve following miscarriage as being mistaken about the significance of their loss, something Porter is unwilling to do, we must reject person-denying arguments. Along with other authors contributing to this volume, Porter is very clear that her argument is not meant to undermine reproductive autonomy. Even if we reject person-denying arguments, the permissibility of abortion might be defended on other grounds. The next several contributions focus on the ways in which experiences of miscarriage are shaped by social scripts and narrative-sharing spaces (or lack of same). While several authors contributing to this volume note with dismay the social silence surrounding the phenomenon of pregnancy loss, Hilde Lindemann's “Miscarriage and the Stories We Live By” reminds us of the relevance of narrative even with regard to things rarely spoken of. She considers that the stories by which people in English-speaking societies identify a woman who is pregnant as an “expectant mother” commonly look forward to, and converge on, the birth of the child. As such, it is easy to make sense of who a woman is when she is pregnant and it is easy to respond well to what the pregnant woman does to express who she is. In contrast, it is often difficult to know how to respond well to a woman who has miscarried. Lindemann argues that we do not lack stories by which to make sense of miscarriage. Rather, she contends that the difficulty lies in determining which stories help us respond well to people who experience a miscarriage. Lindemann suggests one condition: the stories we construct must reflect that miscarriage involves the loss of something valuable to the pregnant woman, to the fetus, or both. Recognizing that pregnancy is not purposeful in every respect, Lindemann argues for an account of pregnancy that emphasizes the agency of the pregnant woman—the creative activity that includes transforming biological processes in purposeful and deliberate ways by caring for, valuing, and giving meaning to (or otherwise coming to terms with) the natural processes of pregnancy in addition to the social activity of creating the stories that constitute the identity of the ‘child’ and the identity of the pregnant woman as an expectant mother. Lindemann also emphasizes the need to listen to the stories the woman is telling—her stories may or may not represent her as having suffered a loss. Whatever story we tell to make sense of miscarriage must represent the loss to the fetus. In “The Value of Pregnancy and the Meaning of Pregnancy Loss,” Byron Stoyles considers the meaning and value of pregnancy to conceptualize pregnancy loss and reactions to pregnancy loss. Stoyles begins by reflecting on the different ways in which philosophers engaged in debates about the moral and legal status of abortion conceptualize the meaning of pregnancy. He argues that most of the arguments found in the literature about abortion (including most feminist arguments) are fetal-centric in the sense that they focus on the status of the fetus to such an extent that the value and meaning of pregnancy as something involving persons other than the fetus is mostly ignored. Stoyles then builds on Hilde Lindemann's account of the value and meaning of pregnancy by considering how value in pregnancy can derive from both the activity Lindemann calls “calling the fetus into personhood” (an idea she explains in her contribution to this volume) and what he calls the activity of creating an identity as a parent. Stoyles argues that the recognition of these related activities allow us to make sense of common—albeit diverse and sometimes conflicting—reactions to pregnancy loss including confusion about the identity of the would-be parents and the fetus. In “Making Sense of Miscarriage Online,” Sarah Hardy and Rebecca Kukla explore ways in which women who have experienced miscarriage give narrative shape to their experiences online. Hardy and Kukla begin by noting ways in which it is difficult to make sense of miscarriage against the backdrop of medical institutions and practices in so far as miscarriage is treated as medically significant (as most matters related to pregnancy are), but also as something that happens mostly outside of the medical context. Using examples from Facebook, discussion boards, and blogs, Hardy and Kukla consider how women use online fora to articulate the experience of miscarriage and to shape their narrative identity outside of the medical context. They also consider ways in which online fora provide opportunities for other people to give uptake to women's responses to miscarriage by posting comments and stories affirming women's responses to miscarriage as meaningful. In their contribution, Hardy and Kukla point to a number of ways in which the functional structure of different online spaces influence the kind and quantity of content posted. Facebook, for example, allows each author extensive control over the content of her own page whereas discussion boards are inherently more conversational. Despite such differences, Hardy and Kukla contend that the internet provides important social tools for creating new kinds of collaborative interaction. Engaging online, women can maintain their anonymity, create multiple (even incompatible) narrative threads simultaneously, and otherwise make sense of the experience of miscarriage in a more or less collaborative way. The last two contributions focus more explicitly on ethical questions surrounding fetal death. In “Rethinking Abortion, Ectogenesis, and Fetal Death,” Christine Overall proposes a revised understanding of abortion and argues that pregnant women are entitled to choose abortion as this is understood to include both ending the life of the fetus in utero and the evacuation of the uterus. This view is a departure from Overall's earlier view that pregnant women are entitled to choose uterine evacuation but not to end the life of the fetus if it could survive by means of ectogenesis (gestation within an artificial uterus).5 Overall outlines how she has changed her view after considering objections to her earlier work. Specifically, the view Overall defends in her contribution to this volume is aimed at rethinking abortion in a way that is consistent with pregnant women's bodily autonomy and women's right to not reproduce. The former reflects Overall's view that the pregnant woman's relationship to the fetus determines what can be done for or to it (on Overall's account, the fetus has no independent moral status until it emerges from the woman's body) and respects that women's bodily autonomy should include being entitled to determine what happens not only to one's body but also to one's body parts and the products of one's body (including the fetus). The latter respects that reproductive autonomy should reflect a right not to reproduce and the reality that a woman might want there to be no genetic offspring resulting from the pregnancy that is ended. Though Overall argues for the right for the pregnant woman to kill the fetus in utero, she opposes “after-birth abortion” for the reason that, on her view, an infant does not have the same moral status as a fetus. Since an infant is no longer in the same relationship to the pregnant woman as a fetus, a woman's entitlement to end the life of the fetus ends once it is removed from her body. Overall goes on to consider moral questions and potential problems related to the possibility of ectogenesis which she no longer regards as part of the solution to debates related to abortion. The collection closes with Sarah Clark Miller's “The Moral Meanings of Miscarriage,” in which she attends to the range of ethical challenges presented by complex and varied responses to miscarriage. Miller articulates the urgency of the need for a “perinatal ethics,” that is, not just a prenatal bioethics which tends to be the focus of clinical obstetrics literature, but a more robust ethical approach that addresses the moral issues that arise before, during, and after pregnancy, appreciative of the changes in a woman's identity over the course of the arc of miscarriage experience. Miller contends that miscarriage exceeds the standard categories of ethical analysis, involving the blending of moral agent and moral patient in the same individual, the presence of distinctive reactive attitudes along with social and political denial of recognition that an event occurred at all, the moral standing of fetal life, and the moral self-understanding of women who suffer pregnancy loss. Miller concludes that, absent a better formulation of ethics regarding miscarriage, we are in danger of neglecting the moral considerability of women when we fail to attend to their moral emotions regarding their pregnancy losses. Even these brief synopses indicate some fruitful and productive overlaps among the diverse articles that comprise this volume. There is controversy, for example, over the centrality of loss with regard to miscarriage; Cahill rejects the narrative of loss, while Lindemann argues that loss accrues to the fetus as well. The collected articles draw important connections between miscarriage and elective abortion, two phenomena that in common discourse are viewed as entirely distinct. To the contrary, our authors (especially Overall, Stoyles, and Porter) articulate important ways in which ways of thinking about abortion can affect our understanding of miscarriage, and vice versa. Mullin and Miller argue that paying philosophical attention to miscarriage should and must transform our understanding of the ethics of pregnancy and reproductive autonomy, and while Reiheld provides the most detailed account of the liminality of miscarriage, several other articles address its uncanny nature, the slippery in-betweenness that may contribute to the social and intellectual silence that surrounds the topic. Finally, almost every article in the collection mentions that silence, but Kukla and Hardy describe the way that cyberspace not only provides an opportunity for the sharing of narratives, but in fact shapes those narratives in significant ways. Yet unexplored questions remain. Reiheld's contribution articulates some of the ways that the liminality of miscarriage intersects with laws regarding pregnancy to increase the vulnerability of pregnant bodies; yet even more attention is needed to the various ways in which miscarriage has been criminalized, leading to the incarceration of women who have experienced pregnancy loss.6 There is more to be said too about the experience of the partners (of all sexes) of pregnant persons who have experienced miscarriage. What philosophical meanings can be found in an embodied experience that happens to another that has potentially transformative effects on the partner's own (perhaps embodied) subjectivity? Finally, the intriguing parallels between miscarriage and elective abortion need further exploration. How might recognizing the similarities between these phenomena (without ignoring their important differences) assist in reframing the political discourse on reproductive autonomy? These questions and, we are sure, many others, would benefit from further attention. Thus it is our hope that this volume is merely the beginning of a long-standing, vigorous philosophical exploration of these common, yet all too frequently ignored, experiences. The editors would like to express their gratitude to the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University Trust for funds to make this issue open access in entirety.

This article considers some of the moral and social issues which are raised as the funding and character of university research in education shifts increasingly in the direction of ‘contract research’ and as those purchasing such research claim increasing ownership and control over its conduct and its publication. The article formulates these proprietorial rights as a set of propositions and then seeks to challenge them. It advances, first, an epistemological challenge based on considerations of ‘epistemic drift’; second, a moral argument against restrictive ownership of educational knowledge and then a political case based on the principles of liberal democracy. However, the article acknowledges that there are moral complexities which disturb an oversimple conclusion to the debate. It offers the reader alternative pathways to a conclusion which can be read as ending either on the resounding note struck by Roszack's defence of ‘the delinquent academy’ or on a more ambivalent note of moral complexity.

This article examines the role of moral arguments in the delegitimation of transition policies. Previous research has highlighted attitudes and arguments that explain resistance against transition policies, including perceptions of unfairness; inefficiency and effectiveness; lack of trust; and ideology. This article provides further understanding of resistance to climate policies by zooming in on how social movements implicitly and explicitly use moral arguments to delegitimise low-carbon transition policies. Through a qualitative interview study with members of a Swedish social media movement against low-carbon transport policies, we analyse central arguments against policies; how moral considerations figure in them; and how these strengthen argumentative delegitimation practices against transition policies in the transport sector. We show how moral arguments serve to legitimise protests both by instilling an urgency in the cause and generalising the demands to delegitimise mainstream transition policies, and suggest that recognition of this may contribute to both better analysis and policies.

Early Pregnancy Losses: Multiple Meanings and Moral Considerations

How physicians and scientists can respond responsibly and effectively to religiously based opposition to human embryonic stem cell research

En este artículo analizo los principales argumentos del libro Tauroética de Fernando Savater. Él afirma que existen argumentos morales a favor de las corridas de toros, por lo que ser taurino es una opción ética legítima. Aquí sostengo que está en un error y que los argumentos morales no tienen la fuerza que él les adjudica; puede haber razones económicas, políticas o de otro tipo a favor de las corridas, pero no hay razones morales. Afirmo, en cambio, que sí hay razones morales fuertes en contra de las corridas que se basan en que los toros son objeto de consideración moral, es decir, tienen un estatus moral independiente de nuestros intereses. A partir de esta premisa examino y objeto, bajo una perspectiva ética, otros argumentos de Savater.

Abstract. This article examines the possibility of moral considerations and arguments serving as validity conditions of law in legal positivist theory. I argue that, despite recent attempts, this possibility has yet to be established. My argument turns on a defense of Joseph Raz's Sources Thesis, yet I do not adopt his famous “argument from authority.” Rather, I offer a renewed defense of the distinction between creation and application of law and argue that moral considerations and arguments, whether recognized in law or not, remain arguments about the modification of law.

Our lives are such that moral wrongdoing is sometimes inescapable for us. We have moral responsibilities to persons which may conflict and which it is wrong to violate even when they do conflict. Christopher W. Gowans argues that we must accept this conclusion if we are to make sense of our moral experience and the way in which persons are valuable to us. In defending this position, he critically examines the recent moral dilemmas debate. He maintains that what is important in this debate is not whether there are irresolvable moral conflicts, but whether there are moral conflicts in which wrongdoing is unavoidable. Though it would be incoherent to conclude moral deliberation by deciding to perform incompatible actions, he argues that there is nothing incoherent in supposing that we have conflicting moral responsibilities. In this way, he shows that it is possible to capture the intuitions of those who have defended the idea of moral dilemmas while meeting the objections of those who have rejected this idea. Gowans carefully evaluates utilitarian and Kantian analyses of moral dilemmas. He argues that these approaches eliminate genuine moral conflict only by displacing persons as direct objects of moral concern. As an alternative, he develops a more concrete account in which moral responsibilities to persons are central. The book also includes discussions of Melville’s Billy Budd, methodology in moral philosophy, moral pluralism, moral tragedy, and `dirty hands’ in politics.

Our lives are such that moral wrongdoing is sometimes inescapable for us. We have moral responsibilities to persons which may conflict and which it is wrong to violate even when they do conflict. Christopher W. Gowans argues that we must accept this conclusion if we are to make sense of our moral experience and the way in which persons are valuable to us. In defending this position, he critically examines the recent moral dilemmas debate. He maintains that what is important in this debate is not whether there are irresolvable moral conflicts, but whether there are moral conflicts in which wrongdoing is unavoidable. Though it would be incoherent to conclude moral deliberation by deciding to perform incompatible actions, he argues that there is nothing incoherent in supposing that we have conflicting moral responsibilities. In this way, he shows that it is possible to capture the intuitions of those who have defended the idea of moral dilemmas while meeting the objections of those who have rejected this idea. Gowans carefully evaluates utilitarian and Kantian analyses of moral dilemmas. He argues that these approaches eliminate genuine moral conflict only by displacing persons as direct objects of moral concern. As an alternative, he develops a more concrete account in which moral responsibilities to persons are central. The book also includes discussions of Melville's Billy Budd, methodology in moral philosophy, moral pluralism, moral tragedy, and `dirty hands' in politics.

Two familiar features of Ronald Dworkin's theory of adjudication generate a strange predicament. On the one hand, Dworkin maintains that most cases, including most hard cases, have answers. On the other hand, Dworkin argues that to discover that right answer, judges must avail themselves of moral considerations and moral argument: a party's rights follow from the principle which explains some significant portion of the prior institutional history and provides the best justification for that institutional history as a matter of political morality. But if moral considerations figure decisively in determining the answer to a legal dispute, then there can only be a single right answer as a matter of law if there is a single right answer to the question of political morality. Yet if morality is, as many seem to think, subjective in some sense, then there may be as many right answers as a matter of morality as there are judges and thus, consequently, no single right answer as a matter of law. Dworkin's response to this attack on the of morality asks us to distinguish between sensible, but defeasible, internal attacks on the objectivity of morality, from unintelligible, and irrelevant, external attacks on the objectivity of morality. The attacks, Dworkin argues, depend on the latter external perspective and, thus, reflect a misunderstanding about what is at stake in worrying about the objectivity of morality and, thus, in worrying about the objectivity of law. For the only type of objectivity that matters--namely, an internal objectivity--Dworkin's theory faces no predicament. Many have found Dworkin's internal/external distinction implausible or unclear. It may be usefully recast, I argue, as involving two competing paradigms of objectivity. On what I will call the Conception, objectivity in any domain must be understood on the model of the natural sciences, whose objects of study are objective in the sense of being mind-independent and causally efficacious (i.e., in making a causal difference to the course of experience). The Conception, by contrast, denies that the type of objectivity found in the natural sciences is the relevant type of objectivity to aspire to in all domains. We shall see, I think, that the grain of truth in what Dworkin is getting at in his external/internal distinction is really best understood as the difference between a Naturalistic versus a Non-Naturalistic Conception of Objectivity. Dworkin would have us, then, embrace the latter as the only type of objectivity at stake in assessing his theory of adjudication. Dworkin's version of Non-Naturalism bears a striking similarity to John McDowell's. I conclude by arguing, however, that neither version provides an adequate account of objectivity: they fail to explain basic intuitions about objectivity (even in ethics), as well as leaving us with a picture of the of ethics that would, in fact, be quite congenial to the non-cognitivism that both McDowell and Dworkin purport to have left behind. If that is right, then the original predicament remains a live one for Dworkin's theory.

Unlike many mainstream accounts of deliberation, Kwasi Wiredu offers a distinctly ethical conceptualization that foregrounds a robust accounting of pluralism in understanding the distinctive, general good of deliberation. Wiredu’s account partially emerges from his considerations of an African political geography where the pluralism of high ethnic stratification is structured into all political life. His broader arguments, however, further underscore the benefits to Africa, and everywhere else, of a robust consideration of pluralism and its ethical significance to deliberative understanding. Indeed, developing Wiredu’s arguments corrects a longstanding oversight in much deliberative theory that fails to treat pluralism robustly. Consequently, much mainstream theory misses a crucial, ethical, understanding of deliberation and of its distinctive good. Developing Wiredu’s political and moral arguments, the article argues that deliberation fulfils a distinctly ethical function in enabling citizens’ moral consideration of each other and of those interests that are most meaningful to them in ways that are fundamental to the communal fabric of free society. This challenges the dominant justificatory view that sees deliberation predominantly as a means of justifying law and policy. By drawing out the moral and philosophical implications of Wiredu’s arguments, the article argues that the justificatory view fails to account for a normatively coherent understanding of deliberation because it fails, also, at an ethically robust understanding of the kind of difference—and agreement—with which deliberation is concerned. Further, with a field experiment, the article demonstrates that the empirical claim embedded in the justificatory view about the adherence of participants to deliberative decisions lacks support. Citation: Ṣóyẹmí, Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́, ‘Citizen Deliberation and a Communalist Ethics of Freedom’ (14 Feb. 2026), in Nadia E Brown, Meena Dhanda, Kouslaa Kessler-Mata (eds), Politics and Government, in Meena Dhanda (ed.), Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context (Oxford, online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 Mar. 2025 -), https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198945246.003.0008, accessed [date].

Objectivity, Morality and Adjudication

Over the past fifty years numerous ethical and political traditions, and positions and sub-positions, have emerged in the fields of animal and environmental ethics. In combination with inconsistent terminology and axiological variation, this has made it difficult for both novices and professional scholars to maintain an overview of these fields. Referring to the preliminary work of Kenneth Goodpaster, William Frankena and Kirsten Schmidt, this paper describes and explains a workable 3D method in which advantageous use is made of three dimensions in ethical argumentation: “moral considerability”, “moral significance” and “moral practice”. The method is a useful research tool for at least three reasons: it allows us to systematically analyze, reconstruct, compare and criticize different normative positions in animal and environmental ethics; it helps ethical theorists to reflect on, and define, their distinctive positions; and it leads to the construction and development of a moral position with the desirable qualities of clarity, transparency, comprehensibility and completeness. First, the 3D method is introduced, and its historical context and origins outlined. Then the three dimensions of the method (moral considerability, moral significance, and moral practice) and their interrelations are considered. The paper concludes with some critical remarks and discusses the limits of the method.