Moral Assertion Research Articles

Health Information as a Human Right: From Justification to Practice

The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated how necessary clear and accurate health information is and yet how vulnerable people are to mis- and disinformation. The objective of this article is to put forth a sound argument, based on both policy and philosophical doctrine, on why people—regardless of citizenship—have a right to accurate, current health information. Evidence is provided to show that access to quality health information is a human right asserted by the United Nations, and academic writing from scholars of philosophy is explored to put forth a moral assertion that agrees. Finally, practical measures are offered for librarians and other information professionals to promote these rights in their institutions and communities—for example, by teaching health and information literacy skills while pushing back on disinformation flooding communities in times of crisis.

American Women Activists and Autobiography: Rhetorical Lives by Heather Ostman

Reviewed by: American Women Activists and Autobiography: Rhetorical Lives by Heather Ostman Ana Belén Martínez García (bio) American Women Activists and Autobiography: Rhetorical Lives Heather Ostman Routledge, 2022, viii + 183 pp. ISBN 9781032050768, $160.00 hardcover. American Women Activists and Autobiography examines six case studies of women activists' lives as written by themselves. Heather Ostman approaches the autobiographical projects of Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Angela Davis, Mary Crow Dog, and Betty Friedan by looking at what they shared and what they did not, especially regarding the authors' feminist rhetorics and the various ways their lives and social justice causes were entangled. This premise is particularly exciting for scholars interested in the relationship between life writing and social justice. Ostman's volume can be read as an evolution of themes (womanhood, sisterhood, motherhood, marriage, class, race, gendered body, conversion) threaded along each chapter. Surprisingly, it does not proceed chronologically, which might be interpreted as the author's intent to make readers reflect on the ebbs and flows in feminist activism as it moves from the early twentieth century and into the present. The book is structured into six main chapters, each focusing on the autobiographical work of a single activist. There is an introduction to the volume that guides the reader and offers an overview of the rationale of the book as well as of each woman's life and lifewriting project. The introduction also makes a potent claim—that American women activists ignited the now-common utilization of self-narration in the context of advocacy. Interestingly, Ostman suggests that the "narrative 'self'" of these autobiographies does not conform to the "American individualistic self" typical of canonical male autobiography, and instead points to "situated feminist rhetorics" (1). After this eloquent start to the volume, Ostman draws on scholarship from James Olney and Sidonie Smith, but ultimately relies on the work of Lindal Buchanan and Dana Anderson on women's rhetorical strategies, particularly conversion as a trope. Some more nuance would have been helpful in Ostman's observation of the specific area of women activist autobiographies: "With the exception of Martha Watson's Lives of Their Own (1999), no other volumes have considered the rhetorical value of women social activist autobiography" (12). [End Page 374] The first chapter, "The Progressive Cassandra: Rhetoric in Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull-House," explores Jane Addams's advocacy for welfare, education, peace, women's and workers' rights, and the settlement house movement via her autobiographical work. The apparent contradiction between Addams's self-portrayal as a maternal figure and her public persona as "the Mother of Social Work" (18) while she did not have children of her own is connected to biological mothers being shown as powerless in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). Addams becomes, by contrast, what Ostman labels a "moral mother" (38), capable of aiding those in need on the streets of Chicago in the early twentieth century. The trope of Cassandra, subject of Addams's 1881 namesake essay, is employed to counter patriarchy, for "an intuitive perception committed to a woman's charge is not a prejudice or fancy, but one of the holy means given to mankind in their search for truth" (20). Thus, Ostman continues, rhetorical success as expounded by Addams hinges upon "one's rhetorical abilities and one's moral assertion to claim the right to speak" (20). In the second chapter, "Anarchism and the Rhetoric of Womanhood: Emma Goldman's Living My Life," we are presented with yet another kind of figurative mother: "the Mother of the Cause" for anarchist supporters (45). Ostman categorizes Goldman's discourse in Living My Life (1931) as that of "rhetorical motherhood" (69), distinguishing it from that of the preceding chapter, even as both Addams and Goldman share the reliance on motherhood as a trope. Rejecting the values her father, a Jewish immigrant, tried to impose on her, in her two-volume autobiography Goldman depicts how she converted, ideologically, to anarchism following the Chicago Haymarket Riot in 1886, then becoming one of the most notorious anarchist women in the United States. Ostman weaves in other writings by Goldman to account for the evolution of her thinking...

Moral Assertion

In this paper, I introduce a puzzle about moral assertion and defend a solution that centrally features the claim that the normativity of moral assertion centrally features moral understanding.

Moral Deference, Moral Assertion, and Pragmatics

In this paper, I offer a novel defense of moderate pessimism about moral deference, i.e., the view that we have pro tanto reason to avoid moral deference. I argue that moral deference fails to give us the epistemic credentials to satisfy plausible norms of moral assertion. I then argue that moral assertions made solely on the basis of deferential moral beliefs violate a plausible epistemic and moral norm against withholding information that one knows, has evidence, or ought to believe will importantly affect another person’s deliberation. Finally, I argue that not only does moral deference fail to put the audience in a good epistemic position it also puts the audience in a bad epistemic and moral position. First, there is a tight connection between outright believing something and being disposed to assert it and so deferential moral beliefs often motivate people to assert something that they don’t have the epistemic credentials to properly assertion. Second, there will often be moral reasons to make assertions—even based on deferential moral beliefs. These assertions, while all-things-considered permissible, will be epistemic impermissible and involve violating a moral norm.

"Ought" and Error

The moral error theory generally does not receive good press in metaethics. This paper adds to the bad news. In contrast to other critics, though, I do not attack error theorists’ characteristic thesis that no moral assertion is ever true. Instead, I develop a new counter-argument which questions error theorists’ ability to defend their claim that moral utterances are (typically) meaningful assertions. More precisely: Moral error theorists lack a convincing account of the meaning of deontic moral assertions, or so I will argue.

The Norm of Moral Assertion: A Reply to Simion

Mona Simion has recently argued for a function-first norm of moral assertion. According to function-first accounts, the norm of any kind of assertion is determined by the function of that kind of assertion. She argues that, on the assumption that moral understanding is the goal of moral inquiry, the function of moral assertion is reliably generating moral understanding in others and that the norm of moral assertion should fall out of that function. In particular, she thinks the norm should be such that satisfying it is the most reliable way for one’s moral assertions to generate moral understanding in others—at least when all else goes well. With this in mind, she proposes The Explanation Proffering Account of Moral Assertion (EPNMA). First, I argue that satisfying EPNMA is not the only or most reliable way for one’s moral assertion to generate moral understanding in one’s audience. I propose an alternative norm on which one must accompany one’s moral assertions with a maieutic speech act, i.e., an utterance in the form of a question or assertion that aims to elicit knowledge or other epistemic states from an audience. Second, I present counterexamples to EPNMA wherein speakers make moral assertions that violate EPNMA and yet they are not intuitively epistemically criticizable for their assertion. I conclude by briefly sketching an alternative account that avoids the pitfalls of EPNMA.

Emotions and beliefs about morality can change one another

A dual-process theory postulates that belief and emotions about moral assertions can affect one another. The present study corroborated this prediction. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 showed that the pleasantness of a moral assertion – from loathing it to loving it – correlated with how strongly individuals believed it, i.e., its subjective probability. But, despite repeated testing, this relation did not occur for factual assertions. To create the correlation, it sufficed to change factual assertions, such as, “Advanced countries are democracies,” into moral assertions, “Advanced countries should be democracies”. Two further experiments corroborated the two-way causal relations for moral assertions. Experiment 4 showed that recall of pleasant memories about moral assertions increased their believability, and that the recall of unpleasant memories had the opposite effect. Experiment 5 showed that the creation of reasons to believe moral assertions increased the pleasantness of the emotions they evoked, and that the creation of reasons to disbelieve moral assertions had the opposite effect. Hence, emotions can change beliefs about moral assertions; and reasons can change emotions about moral assertions. We discuss the implications of these results for alternative theories of morality.

Justice and justification

Is good reasoning in the moral domain different from its counterpart in non-moral domains? What counts as a good moral argument, or a valid moral assertion or claim? What does ‘validity’ mean in the moral realm? Lots of ink has been spilled on these and related questions in the past few decades, but not much has been settled. In what follows I will spill a little more, this time with the hope that bringing epistemic concerns directly to bear on them might shed some light. A particular focus will be Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics and its conceptions of communicative rationality and ideal discourse. I will try to show that Habermas and some of his defenders in the philosophy of education literature fail to get the epistemology right and, as a result, both their defenses of Habermasian communicative rationality and critiques of non-Habermasian alternatives fail as well. I will also argue that these epistemic failures do not threaten their Habermas-based educational recommendations, which can be justified on other, more straightforwardly moral, grounds.

Sobre la estructura y los límites de los derechos sociales

Los derechos en general y los derechos sociales en particular se enfrentan a tres tipos de problemas: problemas filosóficos relativos a su fundamentación; problemas políticos que afectan a su reconocimiento; y, por último, problemas jurídicos que surgen a la hora de su garantía y protección. La pregunta acerca del status constitucional de los derechos sociales afecta directamente a este último problema.En este trabajo voy a mantener dos tesis, que, si bien son conceptualmente independientes, guardan una estrecha relación. En primer lugar, cualquier acercamiento a los problemas jurídicos de los derechos sociales debe tener en cuenta la estructura de los derechos, esto es, la posición del titular y del obligado por el derecho. Tener un derecho, al margen de cuál pueda ser su fundamento, significa ocupar una posición determinada en el marco de una relación jurídica. Afirmar que se tiene derecho a algo sin indicar quién está afectado, como obligado a hacer o a abstenerse de hacer, es una declaración política o moral, pero no el reconocimiento de un derecho en sentido estricto, esto es, en sentido jurídico.En la segunda parte señalaré que los límites que afectan a la garantía y protección de los derechos sociales dependen de la estructura de los derechos más que de su status constitucional.Recibido: 12 abril 2018Aceptado: 25 junio 2018Publicación en línea: 03 agosto 2018

The Explanation Proffering Norm of Moral Assertion

In recent years, much attention has been given to the epistemic credentials of belief based on moral testimony. Some people think pure moral deference is wrong, others disagree. It comes as a surprise, however, that while the epistemic responsibilities of the receiver of moral testimony have been closely scrutinized, little to no discussion has focused on the epistemic duties of the speaker. This paper aims to supply this lack: it defends a function-first account of the normativity of moral assertion. According to this view, in virtue of its function of reliably generating understanding in the audience, a moral assertion that p needs be knowledgeable and accompanied by a contextually appropriate explanation why p.

Varieties of Inheritance: Leithauser, Kirsch, Sinclair, Allen, Sanders

Varieties of Inheritance:Leithauser, Kirsch, Sinclair, Allen, Sanders Stephen Kampa (bio) Emily Leithauser's poems forgo histrionics. With their careful, muted tones and measured progress toward quiet conclusions, they might seem too modest were it not for the soft-spoken brutality underlying some of them. In "Undertow," a speaker responsible for a younger swimmer considers options: I tell you that I'll steer us through,but something pulls and I release your palm from mine, letting the currentcomb and choke your little ribs for half a second. Then I decideto tug you up and lead us home. Granted, it's half a second, but it's the half a second most of us would prefer to forget. The preponderance of monosyllables and the tetrameter lend a certain childish, nursery-rhyme quality to these lines, but the verb "decide" is all grown up and frighteningly precise. It makes what might have been an anecdote about a startling day at the beach a moral assertion: to decide is to admit the possibility of having decided something else, something much darker than the language of the poem would otherwise suggest. The title of Leithauser's debut collection makes clear her themes: The Borrowed World acknowledges the world as an inheritance (that it is borrowed means that it has belonged, and perhaps still belongs, to someone else), and a contingent one (that it is borrowed means eventually we will have to give it back). The question of borrowing must be especially urgent for a writer who has two writers for parents, a fact Leithauser does not shy from in her acknowledgments. Faced with such predecessors, a poet has two options: to pretend as though she has sprung fully formed from some Greek egg or to accept her indebtedness and brave forward. Wisely, Leithauser chooses the latter, and her poems—though at times perhaps [End Page 302] tonally or formally reminiscent of the work of Brad Leithauser or Mary Jo Salter (and how could they not be?)—achieve their own successes on their own terms. The poems are richest in their wisdom about relationships, and if it seems as though the bulk of the book concerns familial grief or gratitude and a certain romantic restlessness, I see no problem: most of our lives are concerned with these very things. Leithauser can be unsparing: looking through photographs in "Haiku for a Divorce," she sees her parents in Tokyo, "such tourists / in marriage," and one senses in that phrase both her recognition of their newlywed naïveté and her rage at dissolution. In "Jacket," she considers the implications of the look—in more than one sense—of her mother in a dust jacket photo. … My mother has duly mastered self-willed words without a fuss. Unshelved, she's a vision on a book I browse and almost buy. The phrase "almost buy" surely pertains not only to the book, but also to the vision. Elsewhere, she remembers an unidentified "you / telling me a riddle" and imagines … we'd had a childwho waits to hear the answer,who finds a good excusenot to play close to meuntil I'm of some use. Those final lines are both canny and un-, making of the paradigm of innocence—a playing child—a study in pragmatism. Formally speaking, there are few surprises here—although "My Mother's Riddle" rhymes anagrammatically to dazzling effect ("amend" and "named" is the big payoff)—but Leithauser's poems do not aim for the surprise of novelty; they aim for the surprise of perfection. When she finishes a poem by rhyming cemetery and hard to carry, one thinks, "Exactly so." When she writes, "These past three days I've missed you comically," [End Page 303] one thinks, "Comically? Of course!" If I wished on occasion that Leithauser would let a poem off its leash, I came back to the final lines of "Instinct," a poem in which the speaker prepares herself to crush the skull of a suffering animal but can't find the animal after arming herself with a rock: I place the rock back in my purse. It's for the best— this instinct teased, and put to rest...

Prefiguring Cantonic Time: Temporal Categories in the Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound

The significance of time as one of the underlying organizational principles of Pound's Cantos is widely recognized in terms of Bergsonian simultaneity, Odyssean nostalgia, temporal vortices, and historical imperatives that are caught `on the barb of time'. (1) Rather than seeing a continuity between such elements and Pound's earlier poetry, Peter Nicholls argues that the temporal schemata of The Cantos represent a radical shift in Pound's treatment of time and relates this shift to his discovery of Japanese drama in the papers of Ernest Fenollosa: `These Noh plays suggested to Pound a structural conception of time which would allow him to progress from the momentary intuitions of Imagism to the complex and extended structures of The Cantos.' (2) The contrast here between the miniaturism of the strictly imagist poems and the epic canvas of The Cantos is convincing in structural terms, but prompts enquiry as to whether the poetic significance of time in The Cantos is in fact radically different or if the temporal categories in the earlier poetry in some way prefigure Cantonic time. The most explicit pronouncement concerning time in The Cantos occurs in Canto 74 in the context of the cage at Pisa: `Time is not, is the evil, beloved | Beloved the hours brododaktulos' (p. 458). A considered interpretation of these lines is required if we are to characterize Cantonic time effectively. In his seminal discussion of time in The Cantos, which takes its name from Pound's own phrase, Daniel D. Pearlman comments on these lines: `Coupled with this moral assertion that is evil is the metaphysical assertion that Time is not', (3) a reading that requires a fairly convoluted philosophical elaboration to explain the obvious contradiction: how can time be evil, if it does not exist? Pearlman's interpretation is based on the assumption that `Time is not' is a syntactically complete entity with an existential form of the verb `to be'. This is the generally accepted reading, affirmed, for example, in Alfredo Rizzardi's powerful Italian translation: `Il Tempo non e, il Tempo e il male, mio amore' where the translation of `beloved' as `mio amore' rules out any other interpretation. (4) Unlike Pearlman (and Rizzardi) I read `beloved' as the complement of a copular form of the verb `to be', `Time is not beloved', which is parenthetically interrupted by `Time is the evil'. The second line, `Beloved the hours brododaktulos', by means of a rhetorical chiasmus then provides a condensed contrast between unbeloved (capitalized, abstracted) and the beloved hours of a `rosy-fingered' Homeric dawn with which it is juxtaposed. This reading not only circumvents the apparent contradiction in the text but also embodies two of the most important temporal aspects of Pound's thinking: revulsion at the irredeemable ravages of time and celebration of the caught moment cherished. The occurrence of `Time is the evil' at Pisa is a reprise from Canto 30: its context there is reinforcement of the notion of redemptionless time. The pronouncement is instantiated by the case of Pedro of Portugal whose wife Ignez was murdered in a court intrigue. Pedro later had her body exhumed and paid court to by `the Lords in Lisboa' (pp. 147-48). Commenting on Ignez's first appearance, in Canto 3, Carroll F. Terrell notes that she represents `the overlapping of the past into the present, a discrepancy between the fine image held in the mind and the actual fact of the rotting corpse from the past, as may occur when time, for a mind like Pedro's, has stood still'. (5) Ignez is effaced by the inexorable passage of time. While Pedro's strategy for evoking the past is a madness none of us would want to be driven to, Terrell's remarks remind us that time redeemable in the mind, the power of memory, is central to any discussion of time's significance in Pound's poetry. Pedro's exhumation of Ignez is a temporally displaced reenactment of the past exemplifying the larger temporal dislocations of The Cantos which Nicholls attributes to the influence of such reenactments in Japanese drama. …

THE QUEST FOR SOCIAL REFORM IN THE CONTEXT OF TRADITIONAL RELIGION: A NEGLECTED THEME OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY*

IN APRIL 1976 the writer presented a paper with much the above title to the Annual Conference of the Historical Society of Nigeria. In it, I mentioned, but did not deeply explore, the fundamental question of value judgements: what is a reform, and in terms of which values ? But I was not allowed to get away with it so lightly. I encountered considerable criticism, both in my selection of specific 'reforms' and for imposing my own Christian Weltanschauung on a variety of highly diverse African experiences. The problem of value judgements became more acute in specific areas of discussionmy treatment of pacifism as an area of reform was attacked by a critic who saw war as a fruitful source of innovations-the conference was clearly faced with two different kinds of moral assertion, which seemed oddly out of place in a gathering of historians. Another claimed that my argument was not as novel as all that, that 'reform' was much the same thing as 'innovation', and that innovation-in spheres such as iron working and so on-had long been a key theme of the study of traditional societies. To which (inwardly lamenting the absence of a dictionary) I could only protest feebly that innovation was quite different from reform, and that iron working was a quite different kind of change from, for instance, critiques of human sacrifice. By this time we had moved into a sphere of the philosophers-what we say when we say what we think we mean. One critic indeed who was kind enough to make written comments on my paper, urged me to embark on the 'enormous literature' in modern philosophy, pertaining to relativism, universal values, and

Moral Commitments, Legal Validity and Duty Under Law

An assumption commonly underlies views which hold that moral utterances are capable of being correct or incorrect, valid or invalid. It is that we must find out whether a moral assertion is correct or incorrect by referring it to an objective rational or empirical standard. But the characteristics of the standard vary from theory to theory and even within individual theories. Utilitarians, for example, agree that the standard must be found in the human experiences consequent upon action. But they cannot agree whether the experiences should be those of the members of an actual community or an ideal community, whether these experiences should be computed for each case or for the average case, or whether the experience itself should be simply pleasure or something having intrinsic value. But there is one area of morals in which we consistently reach agreement without having to resort to a common ultimate criterion of duty. Let us ignore for the purposes of this discussion those higher duties, often called virtues, such as courage, benevolence, devotion to excellence, which require special capacities and gifts not possessed by all persons; and ignore also the question of what forms our duties would take in a perfectly constituted society. Let us attend exclusively to those duties which we do now have and fulfil or transgress from day to day. Here at least it is undeniable that people who hold very different views about ultimate criteria frequently reach agreement on the nature of their duties. And a man may on occasion acknowledge the force of a moral rule even though the rule is inconsistent with the philosophical criterion he himself regards as most appropriate. How is this fact of our agreement on actual rules in the face of disagreement about criteria to be explained ? I will argue that the explanation is to be found in the logic of our use of moral rules; that although statements of obligation are not themselves logically true, our duties of compliance spring from the logical relations between such statements and our own performances, and not directly from the relations between these statements and observable features of experience. The procedure I think we follow in arguments about obligations has two main parts. The first part concerns the relation between rules and performances and depends upon the fact that statements of obligation and permission, unlike statements asserting practical advantage, are normative and therefore inherently general. If, given some purpose, the act b on one occasion is desirable under conditions a, it may be the case that, given the same purpose and conditions, the performance of b will always be desirable.

Debatability and Moral Assertion

Journal Article Debatability and Moral Assertion Get access Edmund L. Pincoffs Edmund L. Pincoffs University of Houston Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 12, Issue 46, January 1962, Pages 1–12, https://doi.org/10.2307/2216834 Published: 01 January 1962