Contemporary Moral Philosophy Research Articles

The Non-Duality of the “Conditioned” and “Unconditioned”: Hongzhou Chan Buddhism on Reconciling the Morality/Prudence Distinction

This paper illustrates how Hongzhou Chan Buddhism provides valuable resources for dealing with issues in contemporary moral philosophy. In particular, when philosophers adopt the Hongzhou Chan Buddhist’s non-dualistic account of reality, we can see how their teachings provide us with important resources needed for resolving philosophical problems that were originally undertaken by philosophers like the American Pragmatists John Dewey and Richard Rorty. When the pragmatists hoped to extirpate traditional metaphysics from moral philosophy, one of their focuses was on providing an alternative to the morality/prudence distinction. As this study illustrates, by overcoming the metaphysical dualism between the “unconditioned” and the “conditioned”, the Hongzhou Chan Buddhist can provide an account of compassion that is unconditionally grounded. Their account of compassion can then be understood as bridging the divide between “morality” and “prudence”.

A resolute reading of Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

ABSTRACT It is often remarked that Iris Murdoch’s thought deeply influenced the landscape of twentieth-century moral philosophy. It is certainly true that she inspired a generation of Anglo-American philosophers who sought to critique the moral philosophy of their day. However, these philosophers drew almost exclusively from her early philosophical thought, most notably The Sovereignty of Good. When it came to Murdoch’s second book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM), moral philosophers and scholars alike found it hard to place within contemporary moral philosophy. Our aim in this paper is to offer a reading of MGM that is resolute in its commitment to do justice to the book’s resistance against domestication within standard moral philosophy, while taking Murdoch at her word when she writes that her “whole argument can be read as moral philosophy” (MGM, 740). This commitment allows us to read MGM as an integrated unity. More importantly, it allows us to reassess Murdoch’s place in twentieth-century philosophy and to propose MGM as one of the works seeking to transform it. Our hope is that our reading will interest any philosopher who feels that something essential is missing in current typical practices in the discipline.

Strategic justice, conventions, and game theory: introduction to a Synthese topical collection

Evolutionary, game-theoretic approaches to justice and the social contract have become increasingly popular in contemporary moral and political philosophy. (Vanderschraaf, Strategic justice: convention and problems of balancing divergent interests, Oxford University Press, 2019) theory of strategic justice represents the most recent contribution to this tradition and, in many ways, can be viewed as a culmination of it. This article discusses some of the central features of Vanderschraaf’s theory and relates them to the contributions in this collection. Some of the contributions directly address Vanderschraaf’s work, while others explore related topics in game theory, bargaining theory, formal philosophy, rationality, equality, justice, and the theory of conventions. This collection aims to bridge a gap between disjoint but closely related literature spanning a wide range of disciplines. The contributions allow readers to systematically engage with the topic of strategic justice, advance dialogue, and more easily follow this rich and expanding field of study.

Ethics and rule breaking in a vulnerable society: some challenges

Scientific and procedural rationality becomes compatible with subjectivism, increasing the modern ethical void. In this work I will show how that void impact in disruptive behavior. First, I shortly describe the general problem of our moral culture making dialogue one of the most important contemporary moral philosophers, Enmanuel Levinas and the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has made the main critical contribution to the moral culture. Second, I will make some observations in the sphere of art, where it is specially notorious how the crisis of ethics due to the evolution of the culture of individualism affects to the behavior erasing limits -v.g. Proof-Of-Authority-, extending the beliefs that all is possible, that anyone can do anything, everything can happen, and, so that, rules and forecast are perceived more relatives that never. In a third step, I will focus the attention on the multidisciplinary field of Criminology -rule breaking, deviance-, because it is the main place where can be proof the failure of norms which lead society to both, problems for coexistence, and ability to predict insecurity. The formulas invented by social scientist to understand “normal” as well “deviant” behaviour, seems to fail more than ever. That should make us consider two kinds of challenges. How can we reinforce the ethical side of the norms under a cultural environment secularized and liquid, and physically threatened? How can we manage the self-criticism in social sciences so that we not all in the pessimism apparently propitiated by Cancel Culture?

The Cautionary Account of Supererogation

Abstract The problem of supererogation has attracted significant attention from contemporary moral philosophers. In this paper, we show that this problem was outlined in different terms in the work of the 11th century Persian philosopher Abū Alī Miskawayh. As well as identifying this problem, Miskawayh also developed a unique solution cashed out in terms of virtue ethics that has not yet been considered in the contemporary literature. We will argue that this solution, which is in its general form independent of virtue ethics, provides a plausible explanation of what makes some acts supererogatory and faces two important advantages over the most popular response to the problem of supererogation, The Sacrifice View. Unlike The Sacrifice View, The Cautionary Account can class acts of benevolence that advance the agent's own interests as supererogatory and easily explain why certain acts of sacrifice are neither permissible nor praiseworthy.

Spontaneous Freedom

Spontaneous freedom, the freedom of unplanned and unscripted activity enjoyed by “free spirits,” is central to everyday talk about “freedom.” Yet the freedom of spontaneity is absent from contemporary moral philosophers’ theories of freedom. This article begins to remedy the philosophical neglect of spontaneous freedom. I offer an account of the nature of spontaneous freedom and make a case for its value. I go on to show how an understanding of spontaneous freedom clarifies the free will debate by helping to make sense of the libertarian claim that compatibilist varieties of freedom do not allow for genuine novelty and creativity.

Navzdory své rétorice liberál? K MacIntyrově politice společného dobra

The aim of the article is to present and criticise the political thought of Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most renowned contemporary moral philosophers. This eminent representative of the Aristotelian­-Thomistic tradition is a strong opponent of the modern state, which he does not consider to be an appropriate place for his favoured politics of the common good. He proposes the politics of local communities as his alternative. The article criticises his alternative by focusing on the premises of his understanding of the concept of the common good. In several steps, there is an attempt to deminstrate how his conceptualisation is not completely faithful to his own Aristotelian­-Thomistic tradition. Moreover, his politics of local communities remains deeply vulnerable to the liberal politics of the modern state. As a matter of fact, despite his scorching criticism of liberalism, MacIntyrean politics is in its consequences paradoxically liberal.

The problem of equal moral status

A central puzzle of contemporary moral and political philosophy is that while most of us believe that all or almost all human beings enjoy the same moral status, human beings possess the capacities that supposedly ground moral status to very unequal levels. This paper aims to develop a novel strategy to vindicate the idea of moral equality against this challenge. Its central argument is that the puzzle emerges only if one accepts a usually unstated theoretical premise about value and the proper response to value. The premise holds that if the presence of a valuable property warrants a certain kind of response towards its bearers, then every variation in the degree to which the property is present necessarily constitutes a reason for a corresponding variation in the response that is warranted towards its bearers. It argues that despite its intuitive appeal, the premise is not plausible as a general view about the proper way of responding to value, and as a view about responding to the value of rational beings in particular. It proposes an account of the proper manner of valuing rational beings that supports a distinctive version of the so-called threshold approach to justifying equal moral status.

To Live is to Devour Others

This paper studies how Ishida Sui’s Tokyo Ghoul creates its typical sense of “tragedy,” by stressing the injustice inherent in every act of eating, and by generalizing the model of nutrition to every ethically laden act. Ishida undermines the Kantian principle that “ought implies can,” depicting a twisted world which forces us into wrongdoing: we have to eat, but there is no Other we can eat with moral impunity. Still, his characters provide some ethical models which could be implemented in our everyday food ethics, given that the tragicality spotted by Ishida is not that alien to our food system: food aesthetics, nihilism, amor fati, living with the tragedy, and letting ourselves be eaten are the options Ishida offers to cope with the tragedy, to approach the devastation our need for food brings into the world in a more aware and charitable way. The examination of Ishida’s narrative device, conducted with the mediation of thinkers such as Lévinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, and other contemporary moral philosophers, shall turn the question: “how to become worthy of eating?” into the core problem for food ethics.

Clarifying Moral Clarification: On Taylor’s Contribution to Metaethics

ABSTRACT Given Taylor’s status as one of the most important thinkers in contemporary moral and political philosophy, it is somewhat surprising that so little attention has been paid to the implications of his views for metaethics. To fill this gap, this paper considers the highly unorthodox approach to metaethics articulated in his philosophy. While his views can be seen as ‘anti-metaethical,’ I argue that Taylor in fact takes the cause of metaethics in a new direction by showing the problems of moral realism in a whole new light. To demonstrate this, I first sketch the mainstream debate on moral realism (§1) to clear the way for Taylor’s non-mainstream approach (§2). I continue to explain his unusual position by highlighting the contrast between the classical conception of moral facts and Taylor’s key concepts of ‘strong evaluation’ and ‘moral sources’ (§3). Against the background of this contrast, I turn to Taylor’s view on the nature of language to explain how it informs his distinctive conception of moral realism (§4). I conclude by discussing the implications of Taylor’s realism for wider trends within metaethics (§5).

Die Idee des Schaminstinkts in Kants anthropologischen Schriften

Abstract This paper corrects a historical injustice that has been perpetrated against Kant for some time now. Mostly on good grounds, Kantian ethics have been accused of neglecting the role played by the emotions in moral deliberation and in morally informed action. However, the contemporary moral philosophers who have put forth such a claim tend to bypass textual sources, on the one hand, and to downplay the role played by the anthropological writings on Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, on the other. Relying on highly relevant pre-critical texts in which Kant sketches future argumentative patterns and discusses the role of negative emotions like shame on the improvement of the human species, I address a mistaken conclusion about Kantian ethics as a whole that is common in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Finally, I raise some paradoxical conclusions that follow from Kant’s argument, once its implicit premises have been brought to light.

Solidarity Today: A Problem-Based Approach

This chapter aims at establishing a problem-based approach to solidarity by describing its main characteristics and by testing its effectiveness in light of three pivotal issues today: immigration, the future of work, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The central assumption of this approach is that solidarity as a concept and practice, in order to be considered a political desideratum, must be able to tackle today’s justice problems and asymmetries, including the aforementioned issues. In order to show the advantages of a problem-based approach, this chapter analyses the complex bond between solidarity and justice as well as the models of solidarity that have been developed in contemporary moral and political philosophy. Rather than being a substitute for such models, the suggested approach aspires to strengthen existing definitions and theories of solidarity by focusing on concrete historical scenarios in which the principle of solidarity arises.

Charles Taylor and Moral Realism: A Falsifiable Realism

This paper aims to come to grips with the moral realism of Charles Taylor by focusing on the debate between realists and nonrealists. I believe that a close examination of Taylor’s moral realism can express Taylor’s critical attitude to contemporary moral philosophy, it also brings out a new way which can face to the challenges of nonrealism. Ruth Abby argues that Taylor’s moral realism is different from two current popular realisms: strong and weak moral realism and she takes Taylor’s moral realism as a falsifiable realism. But some of Taylor’s commentators contend that his moral realism belongs to the strong side. However, there are also some claims that his realism is weak. I attempt to argue against those commentators and defend his moral realism as a falsifiable realism. As a result, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it reveals the defects of both strong moral realism and weak moral realism. Second, as a consequence, this analysis not only make us believe that Taylor’s moral realism does not belong to strong or weak side, but also his attention to individual’s moral life and experience has its own unique characteristic and superiority, It also illustrates the importance of good and why his realism is called a falsifiable realism.

War and Peace: The Regulation of Murder

An important group of contemporary moral philosophers — known as revisionists — think that the morality of war is at odds with our laws of armed conflict. While the morality of war holds that combatants pursuing an unjust war are morally forbidden from killing just ones, for killing just combatants is just like killing the innocent, the laws of war provide all combatants with a legal privilege to target each other, regardless of the nature of the war they are participating in. Faced with this tension between morality and our laws of war, some revisionists provide an instrumentalist justification for our legal rules, commonly known as “the humanitarian view:” they argue that the legal rules are justified because they are better at reducing suffering than laws that would track the revisionist morality of war more closely. In this paper, I argue that if revisionists are right that killing just combatants is just like murdering the innocent, the humanitarian view stands in irreconcilable tension with their conception of the morality of war. However, I argue that this tension does not mean that we should immediately discard all instrumentalist justifications. Instead, in this Article, I offer a richer instrumentalist justification for our laws of war drawing on John Rawls’s distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory. I argue that this view provides a better moral justification for our legal regime. Still, as this Article argues, when premised on the revisionist morality of war, this alternative justification remains fragile. This fragility, as I argue towards the end of the Article, might be attenuated by directly contesting the revisionist morality of war and, in particular, by denying that what unjust combatants do is just like murdering the innocent.

COVID-19 calls for virtue ethics.

The global spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) or coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) has led to the imposition of severely restrictive measures by governments in the Western hemisphere. We feel a contrast between these measures and our freedom. This contrast, we argue, is a false perception. It only appears to us because we look at the issue through our contemporary moral philosophy of utilitarianism and an understanding of freedom as absence of constraints. Both these views can be substituted with more sophisticated alternatives, namely an ethics of virtue and a notion of freedom of the will. These offer a fuller picture of morality and enable us to cooperate with the current restrictions by consciously choosing to adhere to them instead of perceiving them as draconian and immoral. We ask whether we should collaborate with the restrictions and argue that considerations of virtue will lead to an affirmative answer. More broadly, virtue ethics permits to deal with the practical concerns about how an individual should behave during this pandemic, given the current lockdown measures or lack thereof.In section 1, we present how utilitarianism and a notion of freedom as negative liberty support the opposition to restrictive measures. In section 2, we outline an alternative based on an ethics of virtue and a more elaborated notion of free will. In the concluding section 3, we argue that considerations of virtue should guide the individual and public response to the emergency.

As novas biotecnologias e a questão antropológica: aspectos filosóficos

Taking previous research work into account, I intend to formulate the anthropological issue in the context of contemporary philosophy, as it has been challenged in the last decades by accomplishments of biomedicine, especially molecular genetics and bioengineering, in their medical applications and different uses with other aims. Particular attention is given to epistemic, ontological and ethical aspects, by emphasizing the capacity of different technologies, in the wake of the different equations of knowledge and power, to make and create things, authorizing philosophical speculations about the new demiurge and the geneticist “playing God”. From another perspective, with the powers of technology, especially of biotechnologies, the contemporary philosophical debate is marked by intense discussions about the dangers and the menaces caused by more radical and ambitious technologies, like CRISPR and transgenics. These debates give rise to proposals such as moratoria and stricter rules for bioproducts and biohackers, leading Chinese authorities to banish two geneticists who edited the HIV-immune twins. This is the more polemical and dramatic face of contemporary moral philosophy, whose foundations will be discussed in this paper and developed in further studies.Keywords: Philosophy, genetics and bioengineering; philosophy and anthropological issue; epistemics, ontological and ethical aspects; biotechnologies, CRISPR and transgenics; demiurge and playing God; moral implications.

The normative status of friendship: Do young children enforce sharing with friends and appreciate reasonable partiality?

Contemporary moral philosophy stresses the idea of reasonable partiality. This concept proposes that close relationships carry a normative obligation to be partial toward another person. This study explored in two experiments whether 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 185) enforce partiality toward friends from third parties (Experiment 1) and how they prioritize a norm of equality and interpersonal obligations toward friends (Experiment 2). Children were presented with protagonists who could distribute resources between a friend and a disliked peer. One protagonist complied with a norm of partiality by allocating more resources to his friend, whereas the other protagonist either behaved in the opposite way (Experiment 1) or distributed resources equally (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, children enforced partiality by protesting against the protagonist who gave more to the disliked peer and by selectively affirming the protagonist who gave more to the friend. Yet, in Experiment 2, children showed stronger enforcement of a norm of equal sharing than partiality toward the friend. The study demonstrates how young children deal with normative demands in the context of friendship. At the same time, it suggests that fairness norms are given priority. Overall, our study demonstrates how young children handle normative demands and interpersonal responsibilities.

Thematic Symposium Editorial: Virtue Ethics Between East and West

Virtue ethics is widely recognized as one of three major approaches in contemporary moral philosophy and arguably the most influential normative theory in business ethics. Despite its rich pedigree in Western and Eastern philosophy, most work in contemporary virtue ethics is part of the Western tradition. The purpose of this Thematic Symposium is to foster dialogue between Western and Eastern conceptions of virtue in business and engage them with questions about the nature, justification, and content of the virtues in each tradition. This Editorial offers a brief introduction to the problem, a summary of Western and Eastern varieties of virtue ethics, an overview of the six articles included in this Thematic Symposium, and a section with five common themes for further exploration and future collaborative research (namely, the centrality of rites and rituals, the normative status of social relationships and organizations, role modeling, the analogy of families and communities to define the business corporation, and the definition of social responsibilities).

Is R. Rorty’s Moral Philosophy Possible? Antifoundationalism and Kant’s Criticism

This article aims to answer the main question raised – is Rorty’s moral philosophy possible? To what extent is it possible to treat it as an authentic theory? Rorty’s criticism of Kant and the Kantians, as one of the key points of contemporary moral philosophy, determines the posture in the moral domain and provides a certain place in discourse. The article states that, despite the fact that Rorty’s moral philosophy is not based on a particular theoretical concept, it can be considered as a fragmented whole consisting of several parts, one of which is the agent’s openness to the choice of moral identity. At the same time, we will critically question the position of Rorty himself – while maintaining the suspicion towards the sources of moral knowledge, he maintains an insufficient distance with one of his own sources of moral knowledge, namely historical progress.

A Letter from the Editor

As editor in chief of Utilitas, it is my great pleasure to announce the appointment of two new associate editors. Dr. Emmanuelle de Champs is Professor of British History and Civilisation at the University of Cergy-Pontoise. She is the author of Enlightenment and Utility: Bentham in France, Bentham in French (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and La déontologie politique ou La pensée constitutionnelle de Jeremy Bentham (Droz, 2008). Dr. Holly Smith is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Her Making Morality Work has just been published by Oxford University Press. So we have now strengthen our editorial roster in both the history of ideas and contemporary moral philosophy.