Moral Complacency Research Articles

The perfect technological storm: artificial intelligence and moral complacency

Artificially intelligent machines are different in kind from all previous machines and tools. While many are used for relatively benign purposes, the types of artificially intelligent machines that we should care about, the ones that are worth focusing on, are the machines that purport to replace humans entirely and thereby engage in what Brian Cantwell Smith calls “judgment.” As impressive as artificially intelligent machines are, their abilities are still derived from humans and as such lack the sort of normative commitments that humans have. So while artificially intelligent machines possess a great capacity for “reckoning,” to use Smith’s terminology, i.e., a calculative prowess of extraordinary utility and importance, they still lack the kind of considered human judgment that accompanies the ethical commitment and responsible action we humans must ultimately aspire toward. But there is a perfect technological storm brewing. Artificially intelligent machines are analogous to a perfect storm in that such machines involve the convergence of a number of factors that threaten our ability to behave ethically and maintain meaningful human control over the outcomes of processes involving artificial intelligence. I argue that the storm in the context of artificially intelligent machines makes us vulnerable to moral complacency. That is, this perfect technological storm is capable of lulling people into a state in which they abdicate responsibility for decision-making and behaviour precipitated by the use of artificially intelligent machines, a state that I am calling “moral complacency.” I focus on three salient problems that converge to make us especially vulnerable to becoming morally complacent and losing meaningful human control. The first problem is that of transparency/opacity. The second problem is that of overtrust in machines, often referred to as the automation bias. The third problem is that of ascribing responsibility. I examine each of these problems and how together they threaten to render us morally complacent.

After Arminius: A Historical Introduction to Arminian Theology

After Arminius: A Historical Introduction to Arminian Theology

Edith Wharton Society Panels at the American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, 2022

Edith Wharton Society Panels at the American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, 2022

On the Necessity of Referral to t he Category "Randomity" In the Process of Moral Assessment of Individual's Acts

In the article, firstly through the analysis of the history of ethical teachings, the basic requirements for the procedure of moral assessment, for its subject (the legitimacy of this assessment) and the object (taking into account the consequences of the act, their motives, as well as the ratio of the goal and the means used to achieve it) are identified. Consideration of a particular deed taking into account all these aspects, it would seem, allows us to make its moral assessment objective, impartial, fair. However, secondly (and most importantly!), we substantiate the thesis that if this consideration is not supplemented with the category of randomity (moreover, interpreted as aclinamen), then the resulting assessment will itself be morally problematic, giving rise to moral complacency and depriving us the opportunity to help a morally stumbled person.

Socratic Ignorance and Business Ethics

Socrates’ inquiry into the nature of the virtues and human excellence led him to experience Socratic ignorance, a practical puzzlement experienced by his recognition that his central life commitments were conceptually problematic. This practical perplexity was not, however, an epistemic weakness but a reflection of his wisdom. I argue that Socratic ignorance, a concept that has not received scholarly attention in business ethics, is a central aim that business practitioners should seek. It is what a truthful, thorough, and courageous inquiry into their professional roles and commitments leads to. It wakes them up from the moral complacency engendered by organizations, forcing them to become much more critical of their day-to-day activities and more intentional about living virtuously. It curbs the corrupting potential of authority positions and prevents the tendency of subordinates to routinely conform to sanctioned norms and expectations. Finally, it opens up novel and creative moral avenues and provides a promising model to deal with the conflicts posed by our globalized and increasingly polarized world.

“The Risks That Lie Within”

While leading the just and good life in the Western tradition has long been premised on an aversion to chance, much of the fiction of the nineteenth century suggests that setting up an antagonistic relationship between risk and morality doesn’t simply deny contingency, it also stunts the eventuality of personal/moral growth deriving from both failed and successful risk-taking and denies as well the possible harm caused by conformity and inaction. George Eliot demonstrates throughout Daniel Deronda that the real dangers for Gwendolen Harleth reside with “the risks that lie within,” the ease of acquiescing to moral complacency and self-limiting models of aesthetic experience. She implies that the potential for harm is far greater when her protagonist relies on beauty as a safe bet for achieving her aims and to this end utilizes experiences of the sublime throughout the novel to act as a vital counterforce to the complacency and stagnation that threaten to dominate Gwendolen’s future.

Pauvert, l'irréductible by Chantal Aubry

Reviewed by: Pauvert, l'irréductible by Chantal Aubry William Cloonan Aubry, Chantal. Pauvert, l'irréductible. L'échappée, 2018. ISBN 978-2-37309-044-4. Pp. 589. Toward the beginning of her study, the author makes a fleeting comparison be-tween Jean-Jacques Pauvert and an eighteenth libraire-éditeur. Her point is well-taken. Pauvert was very much in the tradition of earlier colleagues willing to risk their individual and financial freedom by publishing works that in one form or another challenged the status quo. Despite personal and professional risks, attacking the intellectual and moral complacency of les bien-pensants had been the hallmark of Pauvert's publishing career. Never was this more in evidence than in his championing the works of the Marquis de Sade whose declaration of innocence he appears to have taken to heart: "Ce n'est pas ma façon de penser qui a fait mon malheur, c'est celle des autres" (59). Amid the brouhaha surrounding the publishing of the Marquis's sulfurous prose, it is often forgotten that Sade was an Enlightenment philosophe, a contemporary of the more respectable Voltaire and Diderot, and that with them he struggled to break down traditional views of the individual and society. The Marquis's area of predilection, the force and complexity of sexual desire, along with his explicit if overheated ways of writing about it, might make him the most outrageous philosophe, yet still a philosophe. The Sadean shadow that hovers over Pauvert's achievements should not obscure his other activities. In the 1950s and 60s he reissued works by André Breton and other surrealists. He formed and deformed relationships with other editors in an effort to get into print works he deemed important, and helped to create a revival of interest in Georges Bataille and Raymond Roussel. It was Pauvert who first printed Dominique Aury's modern version of Sade, Histoire d'O (1954). He published for a time the idiosyncratic revue Bizarre as well as the radical pamphlets that appeared in the collection Liberté. His catalogue was extensive, and while Pauvert is best-known for favoring writers on the fringes of literary respectability, he was also responsible for reprints of works by Hugo and Chateaubriand, among others. Whatever one choses to make of Pauvert's publishing decisions, his contribution to the modern French literary scene is incontestable. Aubry, drawing heavily on materials available in the Bibliothèque Mitterrand and IMEC, tells Pauvert's story in great detail. She provides thorough discussions of his somewhat conflicted relations with the wily Jean Paulhan, his efforts to bring the Littré back into print, his dislike of bestsellers yet his thrill when Histoire d'O provided him with one. Aubry also provides succinct cultural postwar accounts of his complicated relationships with other editors, such as Maurice Nadeau, René Julliard, Jean-Claude Fasquelle, and the Gallimard clan. Yet for all the research and intelligent commentary that characterize Pauvert l'irréductible, there is one personage [End Page 255] who remains enigmatic: Jean-Jacques Pauvert. We understand his political and social milieu, but why he followed such a difficult career path remains a mystery. William Cloonan Florida State University, emeritus Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Atheism and Morality, Guilt and Shame: Why the Moral Complacency of the New Atheism is a Mistake

AbstractWhen it comes to morality, the New Atheists appear to think that their rejection of religion, except for the removal of fundamentalist distortions, changes nothing. We think that this is because they have not thought things through. Atheism might not be a threat to shame morality, but it is certainly a threat to guilt morality. Given that there are reasons to doubt the viability today of shame morality, we face a far greater problem if atheism triumphs than the New Atheists admit.

Cephalus, the Myth of Er, and Remaining Virtuous in Unvirtuous Times

Through a reading of the Myth of Er and Socrates' conversation with Cephalus, I will argue that merely conventional virtue is highly unstable and unreliable. Virtue acquired by convention proves foundationless outside the confines of the political regime that establishes those conventions, and a tendency toward an unreflective moral complacency on the part of the conventionally virtuous leaves them in particular danger of committing unjust actions. Socrates recommends the study of philosophy because it can ground conventionally acquired virtue and, even more importantly, because it is capable of shaking the moral complacency that afflicts the conventionally virtuous.
 Keywords: Republic, conventional virtue, Cephalus, Myth of Er, Ancient Political philosophy, relation between convention and philosophy

RETHINKING DEMOCRACY

In many respects these books, like their authors, are very different. John Dunn has spent his career as a professional political theorist calling into question the dominant idioms of his discipline. In addition to historical research on political thought and revolutions, and studies of contemporary West African politics, this enterprise has included exposing the assumptions of liberal and Marxist ideologies. Since the 1970s, running alongside this tremendous range of concerns, Dunn has also repeatedly returned to explore the history and theory of democracy. His latest book should be seen in the context of this extended preoccupation. It has its origins in the Stimson Lectures, delivered at Yale University in 2011, resulting in what the author describes as a compact study devoted to “a very large subject.” Herein lies the first contrast with Jonathan Israel's new book. Israel has produced a large-scale intellectual history, building on a series of studies of the European Enlightenment, which began to appear at the start of the new millennium. Before that, Israel had written on colonial Mexico, European Jewry, and early modern Dutch history. It was his work on the Netherlands that led him to the thought of Spinoza, which then drew him to the ideas of the Enlightenment. As an Enlightenment scholar his approach has been characterized by a certain obduracy: a fixed commitment to a morally charged thesis. This approach can again be contrasted with Dunn’s: while Dunn's book is a sceptical assault on moral complacency, Israel's is a more didactic performance, unflinchingly committed to the righteousness of its cause. As a result, ideology collides with dispassionate inquiry, arguably simplifying both.

Health journalism in the service of power: 'moral complacency' and the Hebrew media in the Gaza-Israel conflict.

The power of health news as a vehicle in the production of meaning in the service of power is the core of this article. Tracking the media coverage of a medical service, it shows how a routine practice can be invoked at a time of armed conflict so as to enhance a benevolent state image. The case at hand is the medical treatment of Gaza children in Israeli hospitals. A series of Internet searches revealed a group of publications on the subject in the Hebrew media, during and shortly after Israel's assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009. In the press articles the treatments were invariably constituted as the epitome of Israel's compassion towards the enemy's children. This image relied, however, on a simultaneous silencing of other aspects of these treatments, which would have challenged this image. The monolithic depictions give rise to the notion of reversed moral panic or 'moral complacency', wherein the media amplifies a little-known social phenomenon into an epitome of societal values and charges it with significance on a national scale. The article ends with considering some features that possibly render health news an especially convenient domain for state-supportive media presentations.

Nursing Facing the Loss of the Right to Universal Health Access in Spain

Since 1986, universal access to the National Health Service (NHS) is considered a human right in Spain. Informed by the principle of distributive justice (Boutain 2012), the objective of the NHS is to ensure equal access to health care resources for all citizens and residents. The NHS is one of the most important elements of the Spanish welfare state; however, this model has limitations in protecting the most vulnerable of the population due to structural factors of social inequality (gender, social class, and ethnicity, among others) (Mackenbach 2012) and the organization of the health system (e.g., people with a history of alcoholism have difficulty accessing a liver transplant). The current Spanish government has adopted a powerful neoliberal discourse of austerity with respect to public services as the unique solution to the current economic crisis. This policy has increased the difficulty in accessing the NHS at all levels of the population, with the greatest impact on the most disadvantaged sectors of society (elderly, unemployed, poor, illegal immigrants, etc.) (Bover et al. 2011). The aforementioned rapid and mandated changes are producing enormous moral tensions among Spanish health care professionals. A case such as Mr. Jones as presented by Nivens and Buelow (2013) was inconceivable in Spain a few months ago. The Spanish health system is undergoing a sudden transition from an imperfect model of distributive justice to a model of market justice in which health is considered an economic good regulated by market rules (Boutain 2012). Since then, health professionals have reacted to this new moral problem with diverse, but usual attitudes (Davis, Tschudin, and de Raeve 2006; Guerra 2008). Some of them show moral blindness since they do not recognize the problem; others show moral complacency explained by their inability to change the situation. Finally, some professionals show moral distress when they perceive a clash between their professional values and the values of the institutional/political system. LikeMr. Jones’ nurse, Spanish nurses have had limited success when trying to cope with these unjust situations. Even the most committed and sensitive professionals barely attain an ethical minimum when working within this new reality. The deterioration of Mr. Jones’ health is not only unjust Bioethical Inquiry (2013) 10:421–422 DOI 10.1007/s11673-013-9459-2

Forgotten Virtues

Forgotten Virtues

Ethical Problems Experienced by Psychiatric Nurses in Korea

This study aimed to explore the ethical problems experienced by psychiatric nurses in a clinical setting. Data were collected using semistructured interviews with a purposive sample of 12 female psychiatric nurses from 3 psychiatric facilities in Korea. A thematic content analysis was used to identify ethical problems. The study illustrated 5 categories of ethical problems: moral unpreparedness and blindness, moral numbness, moral complacency, moral conflict, and moral stress. This study provides a theoretical basis of psychiatric ethical problems for developing ethical guidelines that will enable psychiatric nurses to make decisions reasonably and behave ethically in their workplace.

“What have you done. What have you failed to do”: Aesthetic and Moral Complacency in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men

“What have you done. What have you failed to do”: Aesthetic and Moral Complacency in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men

Mill and the Value of Moral Distress

People are sometimes distressed by the bare knowledge that lifestyles are being practised or opinions held which they take to be immoral. Is this distress to be regarded as harm for the purposes of Mill's Harm Principle? I argue, first, that this is an issue that is to be resolved not by analysis of the concept of harm but by reference to the arguments in On Liberty with which the Harm Principle is supported. Secondly, I argue that reference to those arguments makes it clear beyond doubt that, since Mill valued moral confrontation and the shattering of moral complacency as means to social progress, he must have regarded moral distress as a positive good rather than as a harm that society ought to intervene to prevent. Thirdly, I relate this interpretation to Mill's points about temperance, decency and good manners. I argue, finally, that my interpretation is inconsistent with Mill's underlying utilitarianism only if the latter is understood in a crudely hedonistic way.

Relativism and Moral Complacency

Moral relativism is the doctrine that morality may vary from culture to culture. Given the difficulty of saying when two individuals belong to the same culture it can be taken in more or less radical forms. In its least radical form it means nothing more than that, although morality is fixed and universal for human beings, Martian morality may be different. In its most radical form it implies that each person has his own morality which may vary from one individual to another and from one moment to the next.

The right not to be eaten

The current debate over the rights of animals has not been wholly satisfactory. Those who believe that animals have no rights argue that it is not conceivable that creatures without human capabilities could possess rights. Those who defend the rights of animals argue that such claims are ‘speciesist’, resemble racist and sexist claims, and bear the marks of moral complacency. Both sides have assumed that the issue can ultimately be settled through an analysis of the concept of rights in isolation from other factors. In this paper I argue that the issue can be discussed more satisfactorily in the context of classical teleological ethical theory which provides a basis for favoring the maximum development of all the more highly organized beings consistent with the diversification of nature. The conclusion is that wild animals have the right not to be eaten and that we should discontinue the wasteful practice of domesticating animals for the purpose of meat production.