Moral Stakes Research Articles

Moral Uncertainty and Public Justification

Moral uncertainty and disagreement pervade our lives. Yet we still need to make decisions and act, both individually and politically. So, what should we do? Moral uncertainty theorists provide a theory of what individuals should do when they are uncertain about morality. Public reason liberals provide a theory of how societies should deal with reasonable disagreements about morality. They defend the public justification principle: state action is permissible only if it can be justified to all reasonable people. In this article, we bring these two approaches together. Specifically, we investigate whether considerations of moral uncertainty support public reason liberalism: given moral uncertainty, should we favor public justification? We argue that while moral uncertainty theory cannot vindicate an exceptionless public justification principle, it supports adopting public justification as a pro tanto principle – albeit one that can be overridden when the moral stakes are high. It also provides new answers to some intramural debates among public reason liberals and new responses to some common objections.

Agnosticism and the Ethics of Belief: Are there Moral Reasons to Suspend Judgement on God’s Existence?

This article will draw from two central notions of normative epistemic interest: ‘It is wrong to maintain a belief despite the awareness that it is not supported by evidence,’ and ‘If the evidence is inconclusive or otherwise insufficient to support a decision, one should not make a judgement.’ Both of these sentiments are captured in philosophical thought, the former in the ethics of belief, the latter in agnosticism. It will be examined how an overlap of these inclinations can be spelt out and whether it holds for the locus classicus of agnosticism: religious belief in the existence of God/gods. More specifically, whether a moderate and modern version of moral evidentialism can provide arguments for being agnostic or support existing agnostic theories. The core premise which will be defended here is that in certain cases there can be moral reasons for suspending judgement when the evidence is inconclusive. Where beliefs become morally relevant, i.e., through the actions we base on them, there are not only epistemic but also moral reasons to carefully stick to the evidence. It will then be argued that the belief in God’s/gods’ (non-)existence is such a case. Both religious and atheist convictions can be of great practical relevance on a personal and societal level. Through their impact and authority, they hold moral stakes and have to be founded on a solid evidential base. Finally, the article provides agnostic arguments to show that such an evidential base has not yet been met and ends with an appeal to reconsider the authority of atheist and theist convictions, especially in a secularizing and religiously pluralistic society.

What We Owe to Ukrainians: A Moral Perspective on Nuclear Coercion and Military Intervention

AbstractUkraine's war of self-defense against Russia is one of the clearest examples of a nation fighting a just war in recent history. Ukraine is clearly entitled to defend itself, and Russia is clearly obligated to cease hostilities, withdraw troops, and make repair. In light of this, some of the most salient moral questions related to Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine involve the international community; namely, what moral duties it has toward Ukraine, especially in light of Russia's extreme and pervasive human rights abuses. The first section of the essay argues that there is a pro tanto moral duty to intervene militarily in Ukraine to stop Russian human rights abuses and ensure that Ukraine achieves a military victory. This duty is grounded in duties of rescue, promissory obligations, and reliance obligations, as well as duties to nations’ own citizens and to the international community. The second section of the essay argues that the most relevant consideration in determining whether there is an all-things-considered duty for the international community to intervene militarily in Ukraine is Russia's nuclear coercion and the associated risk of nuclear war. This section highlights the nuclear risks involved in compliance with Russian nuclear coercion, which I argue have been neglected in prominent discussions. The moral stakes involved in this determination are very high, and succumbing to Russian nuclear coercion in the face of massive human rights violations would set a dangerous precedent. Any course of action should be guided by a thorough analysis of all the risks involved, both nuclear and moral.

Social Group Moral Encroachment

AbstractAccording to moral encroachers, the moral stakes of a belief partly determine how much evidence we need for the belief to count as knowledge. This view concerns the beliefs of individual believers. In this paper, I argue for a social group version of moral encroachment: dominant groups, such as white people or men, need to have more evidence than the marginalised in order for some of their beliefs to constitute knowledge. I argue for this claim in three steps. First, I spell out the group moral stakes involved – the harms dominant knowers cause the marginalised and the knowledge economy. Second, I show off the theoretical benefits of having the notion of social group moral encroachment at our disposal: it can be an invaluable tool for decolonial and feminist epistemologists if they want to avoid the relativistic ring to their views (a ring that tends to put off many well-wishers). Finally, I start on a positive account of social group moral encroachment by addressing a potential puzzle and responding to objections.

Responsibility Gaps and Black Box Healthcare AI: Shared Responsibilization as a Solution

As sophisticated artificial intelligence software becomes more ubiquitously and more intimately integrated within domains of traditionally human endeavor, many are raising questions over how responsibility (be it moral, legal, or causal) can be understood for an AI’s actions or influence on an outcome. So called “responsibility gaps” occur whenever there exists an apparent chasm in the ordinary attribution of moral blame or responsibility when an AI automates physical or cognitive labor otherwise performed by human beings and commits an error. Healthcare administration is an industry ripe for responsibility gaps produced by these kinds of AI. The moral stakes of healthcare are often life and death, and the demand for reducing clinical uncertainty while standardizing care incentivizes the development and integration of AI diagnosticians and prognosticators. In this paper, we argue that (1) responsibility gaps are generated by “black box” healthcare AI, (2) the presence of responsibility gaps (if unaddressed) creates serious moral problems, (3) a suitable solution is for relevant stakeholders to voluntarily responsibilize the gaps, taking on some moral responsibility for things they are not, strictly speaking, blameworthy for, and (4) should this solution be taken, black box healthcare AI will be permissible in the provision of healthcare.

How to deal with risks of AI suffering

ABSTRACT We might create artificial systems which can suffer. Since AI suffering might potentially be astronomical, the moral stakes are huge. Thus, we need an approach which tells us what to do about the risk of AI suffering. I argue that such an approach should ideally satisfy four desiderata: beneficence, action-guidance, feasibility and consistency with our epistemic situation. Scientific approaches to AI suffering risk hold that we can improve our scientific understanding of AI, and AI suffering in particular, to decrease AI suffering risks. However, such approaches tend to conflict with either the desideratum of consistency with our epistemic situation or with feasibility. Thus, we also need an explicitly ethical approach to AI suffering risk. Such an approach tells us what to do in the light of profound scientific uncertainty about AI suffering. After discussing multiple views, I express support for a hybrid approach. This approach is partly based on the maximization of expected value and partly on a deliberative approach to decision-making.

Hungarian Emancipation as a Model Central European Expropriation: How Discourses of Serfdom Argued for Takings

ABSTRACT Due to the moral stakes involved, current scholarship on modern expropriation tends to separate nineteenth-century takings, such as emancipation, from twentieth-century ones, such as Aryanization. This article reconnects Central European expropriations across the fin de siècle by demonstrating how emancipation in Hungary served as a model for later takings. The main subject of this analysis is a press debate in upper Hungary (today’s Slovakia) in 1896, roughly fifty years after the Hungarian emancipation and fifty years before the Holocaust and the building of the Soviet Bloc. I show how Christian Socials, Political Antisemites, and Social Democrats in 1896 repurposed emancipation to further their own desired expropriations. This was a critical inner logic of the practice: because the case for emancipation had been persuasive, it now served to legitimate new expropriations. I then demonstrate how emancipatory discourse over the next half century helped to fuel a series of new takings in the area, including land reform, Aryanization, and socialist nationalization. Thus, socially-beneficial takings contributed to later, often criminal ones. Considering that one result of this dynamic was genocide, it behooves scholars to take seriously these linkages.

Climate change in the courtroom: An anthropology of neighborly relations

This article follows a groundbreaking climate justice lawsuit between a Peruvian farmer and major energy company in a German court, a strategic political intervention addressing the inequities of global warming. The claim posits that the two are neighbors, meaning the company should take responsibility for contributing to climate change impacts in the Andes. Using this legal conception as a starting point to engage with academic discussions about sociality and moral responsibility, I establish neighborliness as an analytical framework for examining the moral stakes of social relations. Addressing the methodological and theoretical challenges of studying a phenomenon that draws connections across the planet, this approach allows for an ethnographically grounded understanding of global warming. Climate change expands the scope of social relations and raises the question of how we should live together on our planet. A focus on neighborliness foregrounds the normative claims through which people make sense of globalizing phenomena.

Moral Encroachment and Positive Profiling

Some claim that moral factors affect the epistemic status of our beliefs. Call this the moral encroachment thesis. It’s been argued that the moral encroachment thesis can explain at least part of the wrongness of racial profiling. The thesis predicts that the high moral stakes in cases of racial profiling make it more difficult for these racist beliefs to be justified or to constitute knowledge. This paper considers a class of racial generalizations that seem to do just the opposite of this. The high moral stakes of the beliefs we infer from these generalizations make it easier rather than harder for these beliefs to be justified or to constitute knowledge. I argue that the existence of this class of cases—cases of “positive profiling”—give us reason to expand our account of moral encroachment in a way that brings it closer to the ideal of pragmatic encroachment that motivates it in the first place.

Encountering Shame with Stamina in Clinical Work with Race and Racism

ABSTRACT In this discussion, I concentrate on Levine’s engagement with the problem of race and racism as it inhabits and grows and complicates clinical treatments with people different from the analyst in matters of race and class and caste. There are radical and painful differences between analyst and analysand, differences that are emotional, social, financial, and professional. Levine’s agenda is to open the painful and often humiliating places of difference and oppression and social possibility when racial differences enter and shape a treatment. In this discussion, using racial theorists like George and Gay, I explore how Levine writes and illuminates the moral and emotional stakes, including shame and guilt, that dominate discourses that cross race and class lines in the consulting room. I consider how Levine’s bravery must be our model for movement and change in analytic work and theory.

Twenty-Four Ways to Have Sex within the Law

This article argues that how sex appears in the law shapes what erotic pleasure is in a commercial context, and indirectly produces sex workers’ ideas about the moral stakes of engaging in certain acts. Although Japan’s anti-prostitution law was intended to eliminate commercial sex, the state’s mid-century attempt to define a proscribed site of sexual pleasure centered on intercourse instead led to the proliferation of erotic services in a diversified marketplace. The efforts of cisheteronormative sex industry businesses to navigate the actual conditions of the law’s enforcement have in turn made intercourse a distinctive site of concern for many sex workers, who regard it as the basis of an imagined moral hierarchy within the industry and as representing the inability of their workplaces to protect them.

Proof Paradoxes, Agency, and Stereotyping

AbstractMany have attempted to justify various courts’ position that bare or naked statistical evidence is not sufficient for findings of liability. I provide a particular explanation by examining a different, but related, issue about when and why stereotyping is wrong. One natural explanation of wrongness of stereotyping appeals to agency. However, this has been scrutinised. In this paper, I argue that we should broaden our understanding of when and how our agency can be undermined. In particular, I argue that when we take seriously that our agency is exercised in the social world, we can see that stereotyping can and does undermine our agency by fixing the social meaning of our choices and actions as well as by reducing the quality and the kinds of choices that are available to us. Although this improves the agency‐based explanation, it must be noted that undermining agency is not an overriding reason against stereotyping. Much depends on the balance of reasons that take into account moral stakes involved in a case of stereotyping. This results in a messier picture of when and why stereotyping is wrong, but I argue that this is a feature, not a bug. I end by applying this agency‐based explanation to cases that have motivated the so‐called Proof Paradoxes.

Beyond Bad Beliefs

Abstract Philosophers have recently come to focus on explaining the phenomenon of bad beliefs, beliefs that are apparently true and well-evidenced but nevertheless objectionable. Despite this recent focus, a consensus is already forming around a particular explanation of these beliefs’ badness called moral encroachment, according to which, roughly, the moral stakes engendered by bad beliefs make them particularly difficult to justify. This paper advances an alternative account not just of bad beliefs but of bad attitudes more generally according to which bad beliefs’ badness originates not in a failure of sufficient evidence but in a failure to respond adequately to reasons. I motivate this alternative account through an analogy to recent discussions of moral worth centered on the well-known grocer case from Kant’s Groundwork, and by showing that this analogy permits the proposed account to generalize to bad attitudes beyond belief. The paper concludes by contrasting the implications of moral encroachment and of the proposed account for bad attitudes’ blameworthiness.

Moral encroachment and the epistemic impermissibility of (some) microaggressions

A recent flurry of philosophical research on microaggression suggests that there are various practical and moral reasons why microaggression may be objectionable, including that it can be offensive, cause epistemic harms, express demeaning messages about certain members of our society, and help to reproduce an oppressive social order. Yet little attention has been given to the question of whether microaggression is also epistemically objectionable. This paper aims to further our understanding of microaggression by appealing to recent work on moral encroachment—the idea that knowledge is sensitive to the moral stakes of believing—to argue that microaggression can be irrational in a distinctively epistemic sense, as it can involve relying on an epistemically unwarranted belief. This view suggests that the notion of epistemic justification may come apart from the notion of epistemic blame.

Ethical Exploration and the Role of Planetary Protection in Disrupting Colonial Practices

We recommend that the planetary science and space exploration community engage in a robust reevaluation concerning the ethics of how future crewed and uncrewed missions to the Moon and Mars will interact with those planetary environments. This should occur through a process of community input, with emphasis on how such missions can resist colonial structures. Such discussions must be rooted in the historical context of the violent colonialism in the Americas and across the globe that has accompanied exploration of Earth. The structures created by settler colonialism are very much alive today, impact the scientific community, and are currently replicated in the space exploration communities' plans for human exploration and in-situ resource utilization. These discussions must lead to enforceable planetary protection policies that create a framework for ethical exploration of other worlds. Current policy does not adequately address questions related to in-situ resource utilization and environmental preservation and is without enforcement mechanisms. Further, interactions with potential extraterrestrial life have scientific and moral stakes. Decisions on these topics will be made in the coming decade as the Artemis program enables frequent missions to the Moon and crewed missions to Mars. Those first choices will have irreversible consequences for the future of human space exploration and must be extremely well considered, with input from those beyond the scientific community, including expertise from the humanities and members of the general public. Without planetary protection policy that actively resists colonial practices, they will be replicated in our interactions and exploration of other planetary bodies. The time is now to engage in these difficult conversations and disrupt colonial practices within our field so that they are not carried to other worlds.

Surgical Teamwork and the Pragmatic Ethics of the Outcome

ABSTRACT Surgical teams engage in complex social and technical practices to maintain group cohesion and ensure that routine practices stay on track. The work of communication, coordination, and surveillance becomes part of a pragmatic ethics of teamwork through which team members show regard for others, both patients and fellow practitioners, by working agentially from within the team to represent the patient’s interests and keep the surgery moving. When breaks in routine occur, practitioners work to contain damage, restore routine, and communicate the moral stakes of deviating from the routine. This is the pragmatic ethics of the outcome.

Silicon Valley Goes to War

Across the world, militaries are racing to acquire and develop new capabilities based on the latest in machine learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, I argue that the shift into military AI is shaping human behaviour in heretofore unacknowledged and morally significant ways. Following Anders, I argue that as the human becomes digitally co-machinistic (mitmaschinell), they are compelled to adopt a logic of speed and optimisation in their ethical reasoning. The consequence of this is a form a moral de-skilling, whereby military personnel working with digital infrastructures and interfaces become less able to act and decide as moral agents. This is an especially concerning development when it comes to the conduct of war, where the moral stakes could not be higher.

Is Group Ontology Morally Distracting? A Natural Law Approach to Corporate Religious Liberty

Abstract In recent years, a variety of corporate litigants, from houses of worship to for-profit enterprises, have brought religious liberty suits to the US Supreme Court. Interestingly, the metaphysical status of such litigants has been subject to intense debate by judges and commentators alike. Are these litigants corporate moral persons or mere aggregates of individuals? How, if at all, does their metaphysical status affect our assignment of corporate rights to religious freedom? While many have entertained such questions, others reject them as morally distracting. This article challenges that latter position. Drawing upon the natural law tradition, I argue that group ontology can be used in the assignment of corporate rights in a morally illuminating way. I point out the tradition’s distinctive ontology, which views groups primarily as social actions, subject to moral evaluation. I then discuss how this conception moves attention away from polarizing rights-based discourse towards measured consideration of what is morally right. Finally, I show how this ontology helps practical reasoning to discover a variety of (non-rights-based) reasons and means to protect religious freedoms as well as other moral stakes. Far from causing moral distraction, a natural law group ontology facilitates careful moral deliberation.

Radical moral encroachment: The moral stakes of racist beliefs

AbstractHistorical patterns of discrimination seem to present us with conflicts between what morality requires and what we epistemically ought to believe. I will argue that these cases lend support to the following nagging suspicion: that the epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. We can resolve these seeming conflicts by adopting a framework wherein standards of evidence for our beliefs to count as justified can shift according to the moral stakes. On this account, believing a paradigmatically racist belief reflects a failure to not only attend to the epistemic risk of being wrong, but also a failure to attend to the distinctively moral risk of wronging others given what we believe.

Spy Films and Intellectual Alienation

The article analyzes spy films as examples of alienation within modern office life. It shows how intellectual socialization within this type of life can lead to a corruption of a person’s moral capabilities. The article studies this corruption process with a focus on how the moral person, in this case the fictional spy character, uses her intellect in relation to other mental faculties and in relation to the person’s own biographical experience of time. With reference to Plato and Hannah Arendt, the article shows that the professional use of intellect has an active and a passive quality. It is passive in so far as the person acquires it gradually, through training. It is active on the other hand, since the person willingly submits to this training. The moral stakes of these spy narratives thus concerns the choice to become a certain kind of person by subjecting oneself to a certain type of intellectual training. Memory forms an entry into this question of choice in all the examined films, hence memory is also at the centre of my analysis. This psychological mode of interpretation is inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of narrative.