Strong Moral Reasons Research Articles

Acting Out

Abstract When is it morally permissible for performers to portray characters from marginalized groups of which they are not a member? Although this question is philosophically underexplored, it has been commanding increasing attention in the public sphere, especially with respect to straight performers portraying queer characters. While the demand for increasing self-representation from marginalized communities is laudable, we argue that demanding performers to disclose their social identity is, in general, morally counterproductive. We make our case by focusing on recent instances where fans demanded that a performer disclose their sexual orientation, putting vulnerable performers in a harmful trilemma. In short, it will force many to either out themselves against their will, subject themselves to intense public backlash by taking the role without outing themselves, or forgo taking a role they want and at which they would excel. Instead, we propose that performers have a general (epistemic) obligation to learn about what their characters’ corresponding real-world experiences would plausibly be like, representing what they learned in their performances. We will argue that meeting this obligation typically entails learning about the values, broadly construed, of the community in question. If we are right, there is not even a general obligation that performers only take roles that correspond to their own social identity. Just as importantly, there is a strong moral reason not to demand that performers disclose aspects of their social identity in order to take on a role.

Influencers as role models

ABSTRACT The claim that celebrities have special duties to be good role models is prominent in the philosophical literature on fame. We investigate whether these arguments can be extended to social media influencers. According to the role model argument, the fact that celebrities are widely known and admired gives them a high degree of influence over others’ behaviours. This gives them strong moral reasons to act as a good example to others. While celebrities have a right to privacy, this is forfeited when they choose to open their private lives to the public or present themselves as role models. Influencers seem to be paradigmatic examples of celebrities who have strong duties to be good role models; they are the focus of high levels of attention and admiration, and offer their private lives for public consumption. However, we argue that influencers do not have stronger duties to be a role model in comparison to traditional celebrities. Influencers generally do not present genuine versions of their private lives to the public, but rather curated public personas. Influencers should be entitled to the same privacy protections as other celebrities, provided they are transparent about the accuracy of what they represent as their private life.

What Third-Party Forgiveness Has to Offer

AbstractThere are strong moral reasons to acknowledge that third parties can have the standing to forgive. Third-party refusals to forgive can reinforce the moral agency and value of women and disrupt the gendering of forgiveness. Third-party forgiveness can also be crucial for restorative justice aims, like recognizing the value of wrongdoers. Lastly, many victim-only accounts of forgiveness are problematic and utilize an individualistic conception of the self that reinforces the logic of misogyny. Victim-only accounts of forgiveness can also restrict focus to the victim's suffering, thereby neglecting the importance of healing and the relevance of third-party forgiveness for facilitating healing.

A Scalar Approach to Vaccination Ethics

Should people get vaccinated for the sake of others? What could ground—and limit—the normative claim that people ought to do so? In this paper, we propose a reasons-based consequentialist account of vaccination for the benefit of others. We outline eight harm-based and probabilistic factors that, we argue, give people moral reasons to get vaccinated. Instead of understanding other-directed vaccination in terms of binary moral duties (i.e., where people either have or do not have a moral duty to get vaccinated), we develop a scalar approach according to which people can have stronger or weaker moral reasons to get vaccinated in view of the moral good of vaccination. One advantage of our approach is that it can capture why a person might have strong moral reasons to get vaccinated with Vaccine A, but only weak moral reasons to get vaccinated with Vaccine B. We discuss theoretical strengths of our approach and provide a case study of vaccination against COVID-19 to demonstrate its practical significance.

Taking into Account Sentient Non-Humans in AI Ambitious Value Learning: Sentientist Coherent Extrapolated Volition

Ambitious value learning proposals to solve the AI alignment problem and avoid catastrophic outcomes from a possible future misaligned Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), such as Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV), have focused on ensuring that an Artificial Superintelligence would try to do what humans would want it to do. However, present and future sentient non-humans, such as non-human animals and possible future digital minds, could also be affected by the ASI’s behavior in morally relevant ways. This paper puts forward Sentientist Coherent Extrapolated Volition, an alternative to CEV, that directly takes into account the interests of all sentient beings. This ambitious value learning proposal would significantly reduce the likelihood of risks of astronomical suffering from the ASI’s behavior, and thus we have very strong pro-tanto moral reasons in favor of implementing it instead of the CEV. This fact is crucial in conducting an adequate cost–benefit analysis between different ambitious value learning proposals.

Flesh Without Blood: The Public Health Benefits of Lab‐Grown Meat

Synthetic meat made from animal cells will transform how we eat. It will reduce suffering by eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals. But it will also have big public health benefits if it becomes widely consumed. In this paper, we discuss how “clean meat” can reduce the risks associated with intensive animal farming, including antibiotic resistance, environmental pollution, and zoonotic viral diseases like influenza and coronavirus. Since the most common objection to clean meat is that some people find it “disgusting” or “unnatural,” we explore the psychology of disgust to find possible counter-measures. We argue that the public health benefits of clean meat give us strong moral reasons to promote its development and consumption in a way that the public is likely to support. We end by depicting the change from farmed animals to clean meat as a collective action problem and suggest that social norms rather than coercive laws should be employed to solve the problem.

Ethical consumerism, human rights, and Global Health Impact.

In this paper, I raise some doubts about Nicole Hassoun's account of the obligations of states, pharmaceutical firms, and consumers with regard to global health, presented in Global Health Impact. I argue that it is not necessarily the case, as Hassoun claims, that if states are just, and therefore satisfy all of their obligations, then consumers will not have strong moral reasons, and perhaps obligations, to make consumption choices that are informed by principles and requirements of justice. This is because there may be justice-based limits on what states can permissibly and feasibly do both to promote access to existing drugs for all of those who need them, and to promote research and development for new drugs that could treat diseases that primarily affect the global poor. One important upshot of my argument is that there can be reasons for organizations like the Global Health Impact Organization to exist, and to do the kind of work that Hassoun argues is potentially valuable in our deeply unjust world, even in much less unjust worlds in which states and firms largely, or even entirely, comply with their obligations.

Procreative Justice and genetic selection for skin colour.

Should nonprejudiced reproducers genetically select embryos for light skin under background conditions of racism and colourism, given that darker skin will be disadvantageous for their child? Many intuit that there are strong moral reasons not to select light skin in these contexts. I argue that existing procreative principles cannot adequately account for this judgement. Instead, I argue that a more compelling rationale for this intuition is that such selection completes an instance of race or colour injustice. Given this, I propose a new, complementary principle-Procreative Justice-which holds that reproducers have strong pro tanto moral reasons to avoid completing race and colour injustices via their selection choices. While these reasons may be overridden by competing considerations, they nonetheless continue to exert normative force.

Planned Plunder, the British Museum, and the 1868 Maqdala Expedition

AbstractIn 1863, Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) took a British consul hostage; five years later, the British sent a punitive expedition. This military expedition continued the brutal tradition of earlier ones and shaped later campaigns in Sudan and West Africa in the 1890s. Typically, a large contingent of non-military personnel accompanied these expeditions and the 1868 expedition to Maqdala was no different. What was unique for Maqdala was the inclusion of a member of staff from the British Museum. We argue that a letter from Charles Thomas Newton, keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, to Sir Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), illustrates that the plunder of cultural heritage was planned. We also argue that the plunder did not go to plan. The inclusion of a man from the museum made this expedition unique in the museum's history. The acquisition of these objects through colonial violence constitutes a strong moral reason for their repatriation from the British Museum and the numerous institutions in which they are dispersed. Understanding the planning involved in their plunder illustrates the entanglement of politics and imperialism with scientific and cultural institutions that constituted the backbone of Victorian Britain.

Ecocentrism and Biosphere Life Extension

The biosphere represents the global sum of all ecosystems. According to a prominent view in environmental ethics, ecocentrism, these ecosystems matter for their own sake, and not only because they contribute to human ends. As such, some ecocentrists are critical of the modern industrial civilization, and a few even argue that an irreversible collapse of the modern industrial civilization would be a good thing. However, taking a longer view and considering the eventual destruction of the biosphere by astronomical processes, we argue that humans, a species with considerable technological know-how and industrial capacity could intervene to extend the lifespan of Earth’s biosphere, perhaps by several billion years. We argue that human civilization, despite its flaws and harmful impacts on many ecosystems, is the biosphere’s best hope of avoiding premature destruction. We argue that proponents of ecocentrism, even those who wholly disregard anthropocentric values, have a strong moral reason preserve the modern industrial civilization, for as long as needed to ensure biosphere survival.

The Moral Case for the Development and Use of Autonomous Weapon Systems

ABSTRACT Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS) are artificial intelligence systems that can make and act on decisions concerning the termination of enemy soldiers and installations without direct intervention from a human being. In this article, I provide the positive moral case for the development and use of supervised and fully autonomous weapons that can reliably adhere to the laws of war. Two strong, prima facie obligations make up the positive case. First, we have a strong moral reason to deploy AWS (in an otherwise just war) because such systems decrease the psychological and moral risk of soldiers and would-be soldiers. Drones protect against lethal risk, AWS protect against psychological and moral risk in addition to lethal risk. Second, we have a prima facie obligation to develop such technologies because, once developed, we could employ forms of non-lethal warfare that would substantially reduce the risk of suffering and death for enemy combatants and civilians alike. These two arguments, covering both sides of a conflict, represent the normative hill that those in favor of a ban on autonomous weapons must overcome. Finally, I demonstrate that two recent objections to AWS fail because they misconstrue the way in which technology is used and conceptualized in modern warfare.

Regulatory Entrepreneurship, Fair Competition, and Obeying the Law

Some sharing economy firms have adopted a strategy of “regulatory entrepreneurship,” openly violating regulations with the aim of rendering them dead letters. This article argues that in a democracy, regulatory entrepreneurship is a presumptively unethical business strategy. In all but the most corrupt political environments, businesses that seek to change their regulatory environment should do so through the democratic political process, and they should do so without using illegal business practices to build a political constituency. To show this, the article defends a qualified moral obligation for businesspeople to obey the law even in societies that fall short of ideal democracy and that are rife with economic injustice. Owners and managers of successful businesses have strong moral reasons to obey laws concerning resource allocation. Such laws include not only property law, but also tax laws, environmental regulations, and other laws that regulate businesses in competitive markets. The moral reasons to obey such laws apply even to laws that business leaders think unfair or inefficient, provided that the laws in question have reasonable, good faith defenders.

A Legacy of Harm? Climate Change and the Carbon Cost of Procreation

AbstractThere is growing acknowledgement of a moral obligation to curb our personal carbon emissions. However, while much has been said regarding certain kinds of carbon‐intensive behaviours, the philosophical literature has – until only very recently – been largely silent regarding one of the worst things that a person can choose to do from a climate perspective: namely, have a child. I contend that procreation is an inessential high‐emission activity – one that results in inordinately greater emissions than other activities like joyguzzling or flying. Given this, I argue that if we believe that individuals bear moral responsibility for their personal carbon emissions, then we have strong moral reasons to refrain from choosing to procreate, reasons which – for many – amount to a moral obligation to refrain from choosing to have children. I also consider whether our climate duties might also be discharged by offsetting the climate burden of any children we do choose to have and providing a concrete quantification of what that offsetting might look like.

Ethical consumerism: Veganism

AbstractIn this article, we review an array of positions in the contemporary literature that concern the moral reasons for vegan consumerism. We situate veganism within the broader field of ethical consumerism, present a variety of motivations and justifications for veganism, and discuss criticisms of vegan consumerism. The arguments presented in the article ultimately pertain to the question of whether concerns for animals, human rights, or climate justice entail strong moral reasons to adopt a vegan lifestyle. Additionally, we address issues of particular relevance for political philosophy, such as whether organized vegan consumer campaigns are a politically legitimate means to strive for structural change. We hope to show that there are anthropocentric, as well as animal‐centered, reasons that speak in favor of radically reformed human–animal relations, including diets that are at least predominantly plant‐based.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change

Pandemic ethics: the case for risky research

There is too much that we do not know about COVID-19. The longer we take to find it out, the more lives will be lost. In this paper, we will defend a principle of risk parity: if it is permissible to expose some members of society (e.g. health workers or the economically vulnerable) to a certain level of ex ante risk in order to minimize overall harm from the virus, then it is permissible to expose fully informed volunteers to a comparable level of risk in the context of promising research into the virus. We apply this principle to three examples of risky research: skipping animal trials for promising treatments, human challenge trials to speed up vaccine development, and low-dose controlled infection or “variolation.” We conclude that if volunteers, fully informed about the risks, are willing to help fight the pandemic by aiding promising research, there are strong moral reasons to gratefully accept their help. To refuse it would implicitly subject others to still graver risks.

LGBT rights and refugees: a case for prioritizing LGBT status in refugee admissions

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the case of refugees who are LGBT, and the possible grounds for using LGBT status as a basis for prioritizing LGBT persons in refugee admissions. I argue that those states most willing and able to protect LGBT persons against a variety of (also) non-asylum-grounding injustices have strong moral reasons to admit and prioritize refugees with LGBT status over non-LGBT refugees in refugee admissions. These states – typically, Western liberal democracies – are uniquely positioned to provide effective protection for refugees who are LGBT, owing to the failures of other, also refugee receiving, states to do so. The case for prioritizing refugees with LGBT status is built upon two interrelated factors. First, on the specific vulnerability of LGBT persons to a variety of (also) non-asylum-grounding injustices, and second, on the relatively low number of countries that are both willing and able to protect LGBT persons against such injustices.

Uwagi o sytuacji prawnej zwierzęcia pokrzywdzonego czynem zabronionym w polskim procesie karnym

The article is focused on the issues relating to a legal situation of an animal as a victim of a criminal offense. Currently, according to the rules of criminal procedure, an animal, as an entity, cannot be legally recognised a victim, which significantly lowers efficiency with which its interests can be protected. There are strong moral and pragmatic reasons to grant animals the status of a non-personal carrier of legal rights. Legal personality of animals as victims during a criminal trial should be of only passive nature, allowing recognition of legally-protected interests of the animal.

The Subject of Harm in Non-Identity Cases

In a typical non-identity case, the agent performs an action that causes someone to exist at a low but positive level of well-being, although an alternative was to create another, much happier person instead. There seem to be strong moral reasons against what the agent does, but it is difficult to explain how this can be so. In particular, it seems that on a simple counterfactual account of harm, the action does not harm anyone, as it does not make anyone worse off than he or she would have been had the action not been performed. In this paper, I criticize the response that the action nevertheless harms the actual child, as well as the response that it makes the counterfactual child worse off. I argue that the following alternative view deserves attention: a compound of the actual and the counterfactual child is made worse off by the action.

Just Say No (For Now): The Ethics of Illegal Drug Use

The war on drugs is widely criticized as unjust. The idea that the lawsprohibiting drugs are unjust can easily lead to the conclusion that thoselaws do not deserve our respect, so that our only moral reason to obey themflows from a general moral obligation to obey the law, rather than fromanything morally troubling about drug use itself.In this paper, I argue that this line of thinking is mistaken. I begin byarguing that the drug laws are indeed unjust. However, so long as theyremain prohibited, I argue that we have strong moral reasons to avoid druguse. First, drug users are partly responsible for the violent and exploitativeconditions in which many drugs are produced and distributed. Second,the unequal ways in which drug laws are enforced make drug use by manyan unethical exercise of privilege. These reasons do not depend on theexistence of a general moral obligation to obey the law; we ought to refrainfrom illegal drug use even if prohibition is unjust and even if we have nogeneral obligation to obey the law. In fact, drug laws turn out to representan interesting exception case within the broader debate about thisobligation, and I argue that it is the very injustice of the law that generatesthe reasons not to violate it.

Chimeras intended for human gamete production: an ethical alternative?

Human eggs for basic, fertility and stem-cell research are in short supply. Many experiments that require their use cannot be carried out at present, and, therefore, the benefits that could emerge from these are either delayed or never materialise. This state of affairs is problematic for scientists and patients worldwide, and it is a matter that needs our attention. Recent advances in chimera research have opened the possibility of creating human/non-human animal chimeras intended for human gamete production (chimeras-IHGP). In this paper, I examine four arguments against the creation of such chimeras and prove that all of them are found wanting. I conclude by showing that there is a strong moral reason for scientists to pursue this research avenue.