Moral Asymmetry Research Articles

Compassionate Principlism: Towards a Novel Alternative to Standard Principlism in Bioethics.

Principlism appears to be the prevailing applied ethical framework in bioethics. Despite the view's various strengths, critics point out that since the principles are ad hoc, conflicts indubitably emerge leading to inconsistency. There is debate around whether principlism can provide definitive action-guiding moral prescriptions or only help structure intelligent analyses and justifications of moral choices. In this paper, I contend that applying concepts of moral symmetry and moral asymmetry allows us to modify one of principlism's principles-the principle of beneficence-into what I will call the principle of compassion. I argue that the principle of compassion can function as an arbitrating or primary principle within the principlist framework. The result is a view we might call compassionate principlism. Arguably, compassionate principlism leads to fewer inconsistencies and provides more acceptable action-guiding moral prescriptions than traditional principlism.

Thou Shalt Not Create; But If Thou Dost, Thou Shalt Kill? A Comment on Belshaw

In his article “Anti-Natalism and the Asymmetry” in this issue, Christopher Belshaw defends the common-sense view that, while there is a reason not to cause individuals to exist whose lives would not be worth living, there is no reason to cause individuals to exist just because their lives would be worth living. But the reasons why these claims are true, he argues, also imply that it is wrong to cause individuals to exist even if their lives would be worth living. I argue that the moral asymmetry between intrinsic goods and intrinsic evils that is the basis of his view is too strong, and that a more defensible view includes a recognition that there is a moral reason to cause well-off individuals to exist, though it is less strong than the reason not to cause an equivalently badly-off individual to exist, and that this weaker asymmetry supports the view that procreation is generally permissible.

Why there are no Frankfurt‐style omission cases

AbstractFrankfurt‐style action cases have been immensely influential in the free will and moral responsibility literatures because they arguably show that an agent can be morally responsible for a behavior despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. However, even among the philosophers who accept Frankfurt‐style action cases, there remains significant disagreement about whether also to accept Frankfurt‐style omission cases – cases in which an agent omits to do something, is unable to do otherwise, and is allegedly morally responsible for that omission. Settling this debate about Frankfurt‐style omission cases is significant because the resolution entails an important fact about moral responsibility: whether there is there a moral asymmetry between actions and omissions with respect to the ability to do otherwise. My proposal is that both Frankfurt‐style action cases and omission cases involve the same type of causal structure: causal preemption. However, the preemptor and the preemptee differ. In action cases, the Frankfurted agent preempts the neuroscientist and is causally and morally responsibility for the effect. In omission cases, Frankfurted agent is neither causally nor morally responsible for the effect. Instead, the neuroscientist preempts the Frankfurted agent. Thus, there are no Frankfurt‐style omission cases.

The Moral Asymmetry of Conscientious Provision and Conscientious Refusal: Insights from Oppression and Allyship

Conscientious refusal involves decisions by healthcare workers, on grounds of their conscience, to refuse to provide legal, professionally permissible and safe health interventions to patients. Conscientious provision involves decisions by healthcare workers, also on grounds of conscience, to provide safe and beneficial healthcare to patients that is prohibited by law or policy. Some bioethicists believe that the moral issues governing both are identical, and that if one permits conscientious refusals, one should also permit conscientious provisions. This article argues that this assumption of symmetry is incorrect. To demonstrate this, it does the following: first, it establishes why it matters that we understand the difference between them; second, it describes three recent cases of conscientious provision in Canadian healthcare to help characterize its nature and scope; third, it situates these cases in a socio-economically nuanced analysis of the role of the conscientious provider under conditions or privilege and oppression; finally, it applies insights from the cases and the intersectional analysis to common criticisms of conscientious refusal to reinforce the fundamental asymmetries between conscientious refusal and conscientious provision.

Is it getting too personal? On personalized advertising and autonomy

It has recently been suggested that personalized advertising is often more an affront to a person's autonomy and thus more morally worrisome than its generic counterpart precisely because it involves or takes advantage of such personalization. This paper argues that central reasons that have been forwarded to support this claim are unpersuasive and that generic and personalized advertising should therefore be treated as morally on par in terms of their potential to undermine consumer autonomy. The paper then suggests that, if this is true, it presses scholars who wish to maintain there to be a moral asymmetry between personalized and generic advertising in terms of their effect on consumer autonomy to choose between three argumentative avenues, but that none of these is likely to be particularly attractive for a defender of the asymmetry.

If You Must Give Them a Gift, Then Give Them the Gift of Nonexistence.

I present a qualified new defense of antinatalism. It is intended to empower potential parents who worry about their possible children's life quality in a world threatened by environmental degradation, climate change, and the like. The main elements of the defense are an understanding of antinatalism's historical nature and contemporary varieties, a positional theory of value based on Epicurean hedonism and Schopenhauerian pessimism, and a sensitive guide for reproductive decision-making in the light of different views on life's value and risk-taking. My conclusion, main message, to the concerned would-be parents is threefold. If they believe that life's ordinary frustrations can make it not worth living, they should not have children. If they believe that a noticeably low life quality makes it not worth living and that such life quality can be reasonably expected, they should not have children, either. If they believe that a noticeably low life quality is not reasonably to be expected or that the risk is worth taking, they can, in the light of their own values and beliefs, have children. The conclusion is supported by a combination of the extant arguments for reproductive abstinence, namely the arguments from consent, moral asymmetry, life quality, and risk.

Hateful Counterspeech

Faced with hate speech, oppressed groups can use their own speech to respond to their verbal oppressors. This “counterspeech,” however, sometimes itself takes on a hateful form. This paper explores the moral standing of such “hateful counterspeech.” Is there a fundamental moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech, and the hateful utterances of dominant or oppressive groups? Or are claims that such an asymmetry exists indefensible? I argue for an intermediate position. There is a key moral asymmetry between these two forms of speech. But, this asymmetry notwithstanding, hateful counterspeech is capable of enacting serious harms—and so, contrary to what many legal theorists have argued, it is in principle an appropriate object of legal regulation. I begin by considering the central argument for thinking that hateful counterspeech is not seriously troubling. This argument holds that oppressed groups lack authority—and, by extension, “speaker power.” Yet this argument, I suggest, sits in tension with the fact that low-status members of dominant groups can, through their utterances, seriously harm members of oppressed groups. Philosophers of language have developed sophisticated arguments to explain this last phenomenon: they have argued that speaker power is relativised to particular jurisdictions; that it can be acquired dynamically in local settings; and that it is socially dispersed. I argue that, in light of these arguments, it appears that hateful counterspeech, too, can generate serious harms. Nevertheless, I show that this conclusion is compatible with recognising a crucial moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech and the hate speech of oppressors.

Rights-based Justifications for Self-Defense

I defend a modified rights-based unjust threat account for morally justified killing in self-defense. Rights-based moral justifications for killing in self-defense presume that human beings have a right to defend themselves from unjust threats. An unjust threat account of self-defense says that this right is derived from an agent’s moral obligation to not pose a deadly threat to the defender. The failure to keep this moral obligation creates the moral asymmetry necessary to justify a defender killing the unjust threat in self-defense. I argue that the other rights-based approaches explored here are unfair to the defender because they require her to prove moral fault in the threat. But then I suggest that the unjust threat account should be modified so that where the threat is non-culpable or only partially culpable, the defender should seek to share the cost and risk with the threat in order for both parties to survive.

Individually Sufficient and Disjunctively Necessary Conditions for Moral Responsibility

In this paper, we motivate, propose and defend the following two conditions as individually sufficient and disjunctively necessary for moral responsibility: (1) PODMA(s) (the principle of doxastic moral asymmetry)—originally proposed by Coren, Acta Analytica, 33, 145–159, (2018), now cast as sufficient rather than necessary—and (2) the TWC* (twin world condition), which amends versions presented by Young (Philosophia, 44(3), 961–969, 2016; Philosophia, 45(3), 1365–1380, 2017). We explain why there is a need for new necessary and sufficient conditions, how these build on and improve existing ideas, particularly in relation to Frankfurt-style counterexamples and the continuing discussion on their effectiveness, and why PODMA(s) and the TWC* are good candidates. Finally, we defend the proposal against anticipated objections in order to clarify why we think these individually sufficient and disjunctively necessary conditions are plausible and able to inform the ongoing debate on the role of alternate possibilities in the ascription of moral responsibility.

The Moral Asymmetry of Juvenile and Adult Offenders

Many commentators agree that the trend to try juveniles as adults fails to recognize that there should be an asymmetry in our treatment of juvenile and adult crime such that all else being equal juvenile crime deserves less punishment than does adult crime. This essay explores different rationales for this asymmetry. A political rationale claims that the disenfranchisement of juveniles compromises the state’s democratic authority to punish juveniles in the same way it is permitted to punish adults. A developmental rationale claims that juveniles deserve to be punished less than adults because their immaturity makes them less responsible and, hence, less culpable for their wrongdoing. Gideon Yaffe’s new book The Age of Culpability expresses skepticism about the developmental rationale and defends a version of the political rationale. By contrast, this essay finds important limits to the political rationale and defends a qualified version of the developmental rationale. In the process, it argues against treating the asymmetry between juvenile and adult crime as a categorical one.

Causation and Liability to Defensive Harm

AbstractAn influential view in the ethics of self‐defence is that causal responsibility for an unjust threat is a necessary requirement for liability to defensive harm. In this article, I argue against this view by providing intuitive counterexamples and by revealing weaknesses in the arguments offered in its favour. In response, adherents of the causal view have advanced the idea that although causally inefficacious agents are not liable to defensive harm, the fact that they may deserve harm can justify harming them in the course of defending oneself. I argue that this strategy is ad hoc and leads to more problems than it solves. Once we allow normative facts outside our account of liability to affect a person's moral protection against harm, the lieability verdicts cannot tell us whether there is a relevant moral asymmetry between the victim and the target of defence. In conclusion, the causal view is wrong and causal responsibility for an unjust threat is not a necessary requirement for liability to defensive harm.

The Moral Asymmetry of Juvenile and Adult Offenders

Many commentators agree that the trend to try juveniles as adults fails to recognize that there should be an asymmetry in our treatment of juvenile and adult crime such that all else being equal juvenile crime deserves less punishment than adult crime. This essay explores different rationales for this asymmetry. A political rationale claims that the disenfranchisement of juveniles compromises the state’s democratic authority to punish juveniles in the same way it can punish adults. A developmental rationale claims that juveniles deserve to be punished less than adults because their immaturity makes them less responsible and, hence, less culpable for their wrongdoing. Gideon Yaffe’s new book The Age of Culpability expresses skepticism about the developmental rationale and defends a version of the political rationale. By contrast, this essay finds important limits to the political rationale and defends a qualified version of the developmental rationale. In the process, it argues against treating the asymmetry between juvenile and adult crime as a categorical one.

Harming as making worse off

A powerful argument against the counterfactual comparative account of harm is that it cannot distinguish harming from failing to benefit. In reply to this problem, I suggest a new account of harm. The account is a counterfactual comparative one, but it counts as harms only those events that make a person (rather than merely allow him to) occupy his level of well-being at the world at which the event occurs. This account distinguishes harming from failing to benefit in a way that accommodates our intuitions about the standard problem cases. In laying the groundwork for this account, I also demonstrate that rival accounts of harm are able to distinguish harming from failing to benefit only if, and because, they also appeal to the distinction between making upshots happen and allowing upshots to happen. One important implication of my discussion is that preserving the moral asymmetry between harming and failing to benefit requires a commitment to the existence of a metaphysical and moral distinction between making and allowing.

Benefits, Entitlements and Non‐Responsible Threats

AbstractThis article offers an explanation for the proposed moral asymmetry between non‐responsible threats and innocent bystanders. Some argue that a non‐responsible threat – a person who threatens another through no fault or choice – is required to bear a greater burden to avert the threat than a bystander. I argue that previous attempts to explain this asymmetry are either incorrect or incomplete, since they either implausibly suggest that agents who do not benefit from their bodily resources, or whose bodily resources primarily benefit third parties, are liable to greater costs than a bystander, or fail to accommodate such cases. Instead, the asymmetry (when it exists) is explained either by virtue of the fact that the non‐responsible threat has a beneficiary status with respect to the threatening object, or possesses distribution‐limiting entitlements over the threatening object.

Alternate Possibilities and Moral Asymmetry

Harry Frankfurt Journal of Philosophy, 66, 829–39 (1969) famously attacked what he called the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP). PAP states that being able to do otherwise is necessary for moral responsibility. He gave counterexamples to PAP known since then as “Frankfurt cases.” This paper sidesteps the enormous literature on Frankfurt cases while preserving some of our salient pretheoretical intuitions about the relation between alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. In particular, I introduce, explain, and defend a principle that has so far been overlooked, namely, “the principle of doxastic moral asymmetry” (PODMA): a rational agent, S, is morally responsible for an action that S performed, E, only if, when S did E, S justifiably believed either that E was closer to S’s most praiseworthy alternate possibility than it was to S’s most blameworthy alternate possibility, or that E was closer to S’s most blameworthy alternate possibility than it was to S’s most praiseworthy alternate possibility.

A simple linguistic approach to the Knobe effect, or the Knobe effect without any vignette

In this paper we will propose a simple linguistic approach to the Knobe effect, or the moral asymmetry of intention attribution in general, which is just to ask the felicity judgments on the relevant sentences without any vignette at all. Through this approach we were in fact able to reproduce the (quasi-) Knobe effects in different languages (English and Japanese), with large effect sizes. We shall defend the significance of this simple approach by arguing that our approach and its results not only tell interesting facts about the concept of intentional action, but also show the existence of the linguistic default, which requires independent investigation. We will then argue that, despite the recent view on experimental philosophy by Knobe himself, there is a legitimate role of the empirical study of concepts in the investigations of cognitive processes in mainstream experimental philosophy, which suggests a broadly supplementary picture of experimental philosophy.

Bent into Security: Barrister Contribution to a Skewed Order in Two Terrorism Prosecutions in Australia

This article explores two terrorism prosecutions – R v. Benbrika and Ors and R v. Elomar and Ors – to probe how Australian lawyers approach the integration of national security interests into the heart of public law. A brief background is provided followed by an analysis of how the Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act 2002 (Cth), as amended, and the National Security Information (Criminal and Civil Proceedings) Act 2004 (Cth) deviate from the legal order to produce a ‘skewed blend’ between national security and criminal justice. We examine three ways in which barristers contribute to bending of process in counter‐terrorism trials: accommodation to the precautionary standard, the resetting of equality of arms expectations, and brokered agreements that depend on the deferential relationships within the court. Consequently, the moral asymmetry of terrorism is the backdrop for the ‘plausible legality’ of ‘just world’ derogations from liberal politics.

Moral asymmetries and the semantics of "many"

We present the results of four experiments concerning the evaluations people make of sentences involving many , showing that two sentences of the form many As are Bs and many As are Cs need not be equivalent when evaluated relative to a background in which B and C have the same cardinality and proportion to A, but in which B and C are predicates with opposite semantic and affective values. The data provide evidence that subjects lower the standard relevant to ascribe many for the more negatively valued predicate, and that judgments involving many are sensitive to moral considerations in a broad sense, namely to expectations involving a representation of the desirability as opposed to the mere probability of an outcome. We relate the results to similar semantic asymmetries discussed in the psychological literature, in particular to the Knobe effect and to framing effects. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.8.13 Supplementary materials , BibTeX info

Moral asymmetries in judgments of agency withstand ludicrous causal deviance.

Americans have been shown to attribute greater intentionality to immoral than to amoral actions in cases of causal deviance, that is, cases where a goal is satisfied in a way that deviates from initially planned means (e.g., a gunman wants to hit a target and his hand slips, but the bullet ricochets off a rock into the target). However, past research has yet to assess whether this asymmetry persists in cases of extreme causal deviance. Here, we manipulated the level of mild to extreme causal deviance of an immoral versus amoral act. The asymmetry in attributions of intentionality was observed at all but the most extreme level of causal deviance, and, as we hypothesized, was mediated by attributions of blame/credit and judgments of action performance. These findings are discussed as they support a multiple-concepts interpretation of the asymmetry, wherein blame renders a naïve concept of intentional action (the outcome matches the intention) more salient than a composite concept (the outcome matches the intention and was brought about by planned means), and in terms of their implications for cross-cultural research on judgments of agency.

The De of Levinas: Cultivating the Heart-Mind of Radical Passivity

This essay explores the early Chinese text Guanzi to address the question of ethical responsibility in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. We begin with the premise that being responsive to the other, feeling the impossibility of renouncing ethical obligation, and experiencing the basic moral asymmetry at the heart of Levinas’s project all rely on the welcome openness of the subject that Levinas describes as the subject’s “radical passivity.” However, his emphasis on infinite responsibility, coupled with the theme of radical passivity, gives the problematic impression that ethics amounts to a never-ending to-do list for the other, and certainly this is not what Levinas means. We turn to the Guanzi, which recommends that the ethically efficacious sage-prince must cultivate a state of passive stillness and inner vacuity. Only because the sage-prince maintains this deferential heart-mind is he freely open and responsive to others. Here the sage-prince looks strikingly like a good Levinasian: He is deferential, sensitive to context, and hyper-aware of the limits of his own knowledge. The Guanzi goes on to describe specific practices the sage-prince can employ to cultivate his ethical prowess, including practices of meditation and gentle physical exercises. Taking this insight into Levinas’s context, we suggest that such practices of self-regulation are necessary to enable effective responsiveness to the other. From this perspective, responsibility is “infinite” not because I am perpetually beholden to the other’s whims, but because I am perpetually accountable for calming and clearing my own mind of the unstable emotions, selfish desires, and intellectual machinations that prevent the welcome openness of radical passivity.