Metaethical Issues Research Articles

Analyzing Grade Inflators: Some Metaethical Issues

Analyzing Grade Inflators: Some Metaethical Issues

Wittgenstein and Feminism: Alice Crary in Conversation with Mickaëlle Provost

Alice Crary is a moral and social philosopher who has written widely on issues in metaethics, moral psychology and normative ethics, philosophy and feminism, critical animal studies, critical disability studies, critical philosophy of race, philosophy and literature, and Critical Theory. She has written on philosophers such as John L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Iris Murdoch and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is the first of two parts of the interview with Crary conducted in a single exchange in the first weeks of January 2022, where she discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations. The second part on “Wittgenstein and Critical Theory” is published in the regular volume 11 of NWR.

Responsibility: The First Virtue of Innovation? A discussion of some ethical and meta-ethical issues concerning the concept of ‘responsibility’ in technological innovation

In this paper I investigate the concept of responsibility in the context of technological innovation, with reference to two types of responsibility: ex post and ex ante responsibility. Exposing the shortcomings of ex post responsibility in the context of innovation, I examine different ways of conceiving of a form of ex ante responsibility suitable for our current technological situation. Here I identify two positions with very different approaches to the question of the ethical status of responsibility: Hans Jonas’s concept of responsibility as an ethical principle structuring moral behavior, and René von Schomberg’s idea of responsibility as “responsiveness” linked to procedures of communication and collaboration. Rejecting von Schomberg’s concept on ethico-philosophical grounds, I argue in favor of a critical rehabilitation of some basic thoughts in the philosophy of Jonas. Finally, I suggest taking the step from the Jonasian ethics of responsibility towards the Hegelian concept of Sittlichkeit – a concrete social morality that disentangles responsibility from the dilemmas of subjectivist morality.

Współzależność i asymetria w relacjach pedagogiki z filozofią

The author presents and analyses the issue of the interrelationship between philosophy and pedagogy. He shows the areas of connections which have already been indicated and the ones which have not been clearly indicated yet. These areas are as follows: the genetic-historic area, the institutional-structural area, evaluation, ethical and metaethical issues and others. For each of those areas there is argumentation underlying the relationship between the two mentioned disciplines. In conclusion, the author presents general characteristics of that relationship.

Consequentialism and Thought Experiments in Philosophy Comes to Dinner

Abstract In this article, I review Philosophy Comes to Dinner, examining some of its persistent metaethical issues, especially some potentially controversial assumptions made by the authors and the tendency found in some to treat thought experiments as empirical experiments. The book covers arguments for different diets, the causal efficacy argument (i.e., the argument that individual food choices do not change societal food practices), feminist food ethics, harms of the food system, locavorism, and other topics. The causal efficacy argument, while not a part of all chapters in the book, is its focus, with authors arguing for and against it, and for and against various interpretations of its ethical consequences.

On the search for sources of good and evil in the Lvov-Warsaw School of Philosophy

Abstract In this article, the author attempts to identify the sources of good and evil as undertaken by the Lvov-Warsaw School of Philosophy (LWSP) founded by Kazimierz Twardowski. Such attempts were undertaken by both Twardowski himself and his closest students and associates; Władysław Witwicki, Tadeusz Kotarbiński. Tadeusz Czeżowski, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The best-known approach is Kotarbiński’s independent ethics in which the author refers to Aristotle perceiving such potential in the characteristics of each individual as to distinguish elementary qualities in the form of opposites including opposition to good and evil. According to this approach, man acts in an evil manner because he stops following the natural voice of his own heart and instead implements set proposals provided by external factors. In the opinion of the author, the proposals formulated within the LWSP can form the basis for a rational explanation of the atrocities committed during World War II which modern ethics, being focused on neutral metaethical issues, fails to do.

The existence of personites

Mark Johnston and Eric Olson have both pressed what Johnston has dubbed the personite problem. Personites, if they exist, are person-like entities whose lives extend over a continuous proper part of a person’s life. They are so person-like that they seem to have moral status if persons do. But this threatens to wreak havoc with ordinary moral thinking. For example, simple decisions to suffer some short-term hardship for long-term benefits become problematic. And ordinary punishment is always also punishment of the innocent, since it punishes personites that didn’t exist when the crime was committed. An initially attractive way around the personite problem may be to simply deny that personites exist. But as I discuss in this talk, relating to contemporary discussions in metaontology (the doctrine of quantifier variance, and Ted Sider’s ontological realism), this response for principled reasons doesn’t work. The problems I discuss illustrate the significance of metaontological considerations for issues in ethics and metaethics, and generalize widely beyond the personite problem.

Normative Ethics: an Armchair Discipline?

This paper discusses a challenge to normative ethics motivated by experimental philosophy. Experimental philosophers object to the perceived “armchair” or a priori nature of philosophy, claiming it should rather be empirical or naturalistic. The paper investigates the application of this claim to normative ethics. Dubbing the application of the experimental philosophers’ contention to normative ethics “the Armchair Claim,” I distinguish descriptive and normative versions of this challenge, and consider their merits as comments on the method of normative ethics (descriptive versions), and as comments on how normative ethics should be done (normative versions). Characterizing normative ethics as essentially involving the use of the method of reflective equilibrium, I show how the versions of the Armchair Claim that I distinguish either misconstrue normative ethics, or are committed to metaethical views that are controversial. To bring home the latter point, I contrast two meta-ethical positions, and show how, on one such view, naturalism, the descriptive version could be correct, whereas on another, intuitionism, it would be false. The normative version, in turn, is consistent with naturalism, but begs the question against the intuitionist since she argues that normative ethics cannot be empirical. The upshot is that a conclusive assessment of the Armchair Claim will have to await the resolution of disputed issues in meta-ethics. However, normative ethicists can get on with their work since reflective equilibrium is unaffected by such debates.

Evolutionary models and the normative significance of stability

Many have expected that understanding the evolution of norms should, in some way, bear on our first-order normative outlook: How norms evolve should shape which norms we accept. But recent philosophy has not done much to shore up this expectation. Most existing discussions of evolution and norms either jump headlong into the is/ought gap or else target meta-ethical issues, such as the objectivity of norms. My aim in this paper is to sketch a different way in which evolutionary considerations can feed into normative thinking—focusing on stability. I will discuss two (related) forms of argument that utilize information about social stability drawn from evolutionary models, and employs it to assess claims in political philosophy. One such argument treats stability as feature of social states that may be taken into account alongside other features. The other uses stability as a constraint on the realization of social ideals, via a version of the ought-implies-can maxim. These forms of argument are not new; indeed they have a history going back at least to early modern philosophy. But their marriage with evolutionary information is relatively recent, has a significantly novel character, and has received little attention in recent moral and political philosophy.

Virtue-based Approaches to Professional Ethics: a Plea for More Rigorous Use of Empirical Science

Until recently, the method of professional ethics has been largely principle-based. But the failure of this approach to take into sufficient account the character of professionals has led to a revival of virtue ethics. The kind of professional virtue ethics that I am concerned with in this paper is teleological in that it relates the virtues of a profession to the ends of this profession. My aim is to show how empirical research can (in addition to philosophical inquiry) be used to develop virtue-based accounts of professional ethics, and that such empirically well-informed approaches are more convincing than traditional kinds of professional virtue ethics. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I outline the structure of a teleological approach to virtue ethics. In Section 2, I show that empirical research can play an essential role in professional ethics by emphasizing the difference between conceptual and empirical matters. Section 3 demonstrates the relevance of virtues in professional life; and the last section is concerned with some meta-ethical issues that are raised by a teleological account of professional virtues.

Précis of Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence

Moral error theorists and moral realists agree about several disputed metaethical issues. They typically agree that ordinary moral judgments are beliefs and that ordinary moral utterances purport to refer to moral facts. But they disagree on the crucial ontological question of whether there are any moral facts. Moral error theorists hold that there are not and that, as a consequence, ordinary moral beliefs are systematically mistaken and ordinary moral judgments uniformly untrue. Perhaps because of its kinship with moral realism, moral error theory is often considered the most notorious of moral scepticisms. While the view has been widely discussed, it has had relatively few defenders.Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence(henceforthmet) examines the view from a historical as well as a contemporary perspective, and purports to respond to some of its most prominent challenges. This précis is a brief summary of the book’s content.

Practical Reasonableness: Some Metaethical Issues

This essay develops James Lenman’s view that ‘‘moral inquiry is politics.’’ Unlike empirical investigation, moral inquiry is not connected with a domain of facts that exist independently of the inquiry and help explain its success. It is outward looking – your thought that slavery is wrong is not a thought about you – but confident moral beliefs are not best understood as receptivity to moral aspects of the world. Rather, they come from successfully negotiating, constructing and sustaining the rules of a moral community. Lenman’s picture entails an expressivist approach to moral philosophy in contrast to moral realism, but it also exhibits cognitively ample forms of approval and disapproval that expressivists have not very fully explored. In order to frame the cognitive richness of practical deliberation, the first part of this discussion sets out important metaethical parameters. In particular it surveys differences between semantic and epistemic conceptions of truth in connection with determining and justifying reasons for belief. They suggest a case for saying that when philosophers speak of normative truth they can only demonstrate reasonableness. The second part of the discussion supports this case by displaying the advantages of focussing upon reasonableness. It supports locating a cognitivist expressivism between the extremes of normative realism and non-cognitivism where the weaknesses of standard expressivism can be avoided. The benefits include better understanding and potentially addressing many of the ethical and political issues that arise in morally engaged societies. Practical inquiry is inherently subject to disputes that go unsettled, making it dubious that ‘‘We may, and must, assume our opinion to be true for the guidance of our own conduct.’’ By preferring to make

Metaethics and Nihilism in Reginster's The Affirmation of Life

Abstract Bernard Reginster, in his book The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, takes up the challenge of figuring out what Nietzsche might mean by nihilism and the revaluation of values. He argues that there is an alternative, normative subjectivist interpretation of Nietzsche's views on nihilism and revaluation that makes as much sense as—indeed, he often clearly leans toward thinking that it makes more sense than—a fictionalist reading of Nietzsche. I argue that his arguments do not succeed. Once we have looked carefully at the details of the positions and the arguments ascribed to Nietzsche, the fictionalist option is the more charitable interpretation of the texts. I focus on the metaethical issues that play a central role for Reginster in his articulation of Nietzsche's nihilism and Nietzsche's strategy for overcoming nihilism.

Washing the Dust from my Mirror: The Deconstruction of Buddhism—A Response to Bronwyn Finnigan

I thank Professors Finnigan and Garfield (Jay) and the editors of Philosophy East and West for inviting me to join in this discussion of Chinese Buddhism. I have not taken many opportunities in my career to write about Zen Buddhism and Daoism, although I have been fascinated by their connection. I remember quite clearly a discussion I had with Jay some years back in which I broached the idea that Daoism had contrib uted important dialectical steps leading to the formulation of Zen, which I join the Chinese tradition in regarding as the highest version of the Buddhist insight. Jay ar gued to me at that time that the necessary insights were actually all available in Nagarjuna. I am accordingly pleased to see him exploring the idea of the contribu tions that features of Chinese thought might have made to this development in Bud dhism, although I don't assume that he needs to repudiate Nagarjuna's depth of insight or the claim that it contains all that is strictly necessary for the Zen account of insight or enlightenment. Accordingly in my discussion here, I will focus on how I see features of Chinese Daoist thought facilitating, if not providing necessary and sufficient conditions for, these insights. The account I will give targets neither Buddhist epistemology nor the state of mind of one who achieves the insight. Nor, strictly speaking, is my account focused on Buddhist ethics, which in my view would be the deontology of the Eight fold Path. However, along with Professor Finnigan, I will take the Four Noble Truths as the beginning point. Chinese schools tend to treat this as kindergarten Buddhism. I would agree that the other three noble truths raise issues in meta-ethics and the quasi-ethical issue of the meaning of life (is it meaningless suffering from which the only goal is escape?). The problem of Buddhism from China's point of view was how to reconcile the deeply pessimistic, nihilistic, and decadent (apologies to Nietzsche) tone of Buddhism with the upbeat, humorous, joyful exuberance of Chinese Daoism. Despite their different settings, my narrative will still pass through and deal with Finnigan's worry that some alleged tension in wu-wei is not resolved in Chinese thought and thus cannot resolve the deeper problem in Buddhism. I was invited

Vulnerable Embryos

Contemporary philosophical discussion on human embryonic stem cell research has focused primarily on the metaphysical and meta-ethical issues such research raises. Though these discussions are interesting, largely ignored are arguments rooted in the secular research ethics tradition already informing human subject research. This tradition countenances the notion of vulnerability and that vulnerable human subjects (of which human embryos are likely members) ought to be protected from research-related harms. This is the basic idea behind the argument from vulnerability, and it enjoys prima facie plausibility. This article presents the vulnerability argument and then focuses critically on several lines of attack including: (1) twinning and totipotency arguments, (2) embryo-rescue arguments, and (3) natural loss arguments. The article concludes that there is no good defeater for the vulnerability argument, and, therefore, we have undefeated reasons for protecting human embryos from research related harms.

Asimov’s “three laws of robotics” and machine metaethics

Using Asimov’s “Bicentennial Man” as a springboard, a number of metaethical issues concerning the emerging field of machine ethics are discussed. Although the ultimate goal of machine ethics is to ...

EVALUATIVE CONCEPTS AND OBJECTIVE VALUES: RAND ON MORAL OBJECTIVITY

Those familiar with Ayn Rand's ethical writings may know that she discusses issues in metaethics, and that she defended the objectivity of morality during the heyday of early non-cognitivism. But neither her metaethics, in general, nor her views on moral objectivity, in particular, have received wide study. This article elucidates some aspects of her thought in these areas, focusing on Rand's conception of the way in which moral values serve a biologically based human need, and on her account of moral values as both essentially practical and epistemically objective in a sense fundamentally continuous with the objectivity of science. The bearing of her epistemological writings on her ethical thought is emphasized throughout, and her epistemology is defended against a line of criticism inspired by John McDowell's criticism of the so-called “myth of the given.”

Asimov’s “three laws of robotics” and machine metaethics

Using Asimov’s “Bicentennial Man” as a springboard, a number of metaethical issues concerning the emerging field of machine ethics are discussed. Although the ultimate goal of machine ethics is to create autonomous ethical machines, this presents a number of challenges. A good way to begin the task of making ethics computable is to create a program that enables a machine to act an ethical advisor to human beings. This project, unlike creating an autonomous ethical machine, will not require that we make a judgment about the ethical status of the machine itself, a judgment that will be particularly difficult to make. Finally, it is argued that Asimov’s “three laws of robotics” are an unsatisfactory basis for machine ethics, regardless of the status of the machine.

Sport and ethics: how far can you go?

This article deals with the relationship between sport and ethics from comparative and conceptual perspectives by examining key concepts in (competitive) sport on the one hand and ethics on the other. This is done by focusing on a distinctive methodological question through which certain features of both sport and ethics can be compared. This distinctive question asks, “How far can you go?” The key concepts introduced for understanding (competitive) sport reside in the phenomenological structure of sport. Three different aspects of this structure are distinguished. The analysis from the ethical perspective focuses on the two questions; what do we actually believe morality to be, and how do we normally try to justify something as being morally good or right? By aligning these meta-ethical issues with the overarching question in this paper, illuminating differences are traced on how morality is understood in the context of (competitive) sport. The main conclusion is that ethics in sport tend too often to be based on an impoverished and narrow view of morality, which deals only with surface rules, categories of acts and mechanics of control.

From Morality to Politics and Back Again: Feminist International Ethics and the Civil-Society Argument

Feminist ethics is a branch of moral philosophy. Its concerns range across meta-ethics (the question of how feminist moral principles and values may be grounded or legitimated), moral theory (the articulation of substantive feminist moral principles and values), and applied ethics (the application of feminist moral principles and values to specific areas of practice such as health, education, reproduction, war, and so forth). (1) Yet although it is a branch of moral philosophy, there is a sense in which feminist ethics has always unsettled and subverted the morality/politics binary that helps to define the business of modern moral philosophy in the Western academy. According to this mainstream thinking (reflected also in much commonsense usage) morality may ground, orient, or be applied as a corrective to politics, but nevertheless a clear line is (must be) drawn between them. (2) Morality is defined as being about values and principles that transcend the particularities of any specific human life, whereas politics is about the struggles and negotiations through which those particularities are constructed, sustained, challenged, and managed. The subversion of this binary takes different forms in different strands of feminist ethics. But one common thread that runs through all feminist ethics is the argument that the moral theories, religious and philosophical, that have dominated thinking about morality from ancient times to modernity in the West are fundamentally political in one key sense. All of them purport to be the revelation of God or outcome of reason (or both), but all of them turn out, in whole or in part, to be about the reflection and maintenance of relations of power in which women are systematically oppressed, excluded, and silenced. However, feminist ethicists differ in the extent to which they interpret the latter as a problem in principle or in application and in the extent to which they turn the same skeptical eye upon their own moral discourse. (3) As a result of this, ongoing debates within feminist ethics have been less to do with the substantive accounts of justice and the good on offer and more to do with the question of whether feminist claims about justice and the good have any authoritative foundation or can achieve universal reach across different women in different times and places. For feminist critics of moral universalism, feminist ethics risks assimilating and/or silencing different women, thus reproducing the same oppressive politics as the patriarchal mainstream in which morality operates as a mask for power. For feminist universalists, their critics risk reducing morality to politics in the sense of making all moral claims contingent on specificities of power and culture and thereby losing the possibility of making the moral critique of women's oppression that is needed to underpin feminism as a political project. Within the context of feminism as a transnational movement, which reaches across barriers of state and culture, the question of authoritative foundation and universal reach for the claims of feminist ethics is particularly salient. For example, most feminist ethics in the Western tradition has tended to focus either on abstract meta-ethical issues or on the application of feminist insights to issues that particularly affect women within Western liberal states. (4) Even where specifically international contexts or issues are in question (e.g., global distributive justice, human rights, and war) there has been a tendency to take an ethical position worked out in relation to the context of a Western liberal state and apply it to the international domain. (5) This tendency has increasingly become subject to challenge by non-Western feminists, who argue for the irrelevance or inapplicability of the concerns of Western feminist ethics to the lives and experiences of women in nonliberal states and/or non-Judeo-Christian cultures. (6) In this article, my concern is with a response to the feminist dilemma between moral universalism and moral pluralism--a response that appears to offer a particularly promising route forward for a feminist ethics that is specifically concerned with international, transnational, or global political contexts and issues. …