Garrett Cullity

Community-based healthcare organisations manage competing, and often conflicting, priorities. These conflicts can arise from the multiple roles these organisations take up, and from the diverse range of stakeholders to whom they must be responsive. Often such conflicts may be titled conflicts of interest; however, what precisely constitutes such conflicts and what should be done about them is not always clear. Clarity about the duties owed by organisations and the roles they assume can help identify and manage some of these conflicts. Taking divisions of general practice in Australia as an example, this paper sets out to distinguish two main types of conflicts of interest, so that they may be more clearly identified and more effectively managed

How much are we morally required to do to help people who are much worse off than us? On any credible moral outlook, other people's pressing need for assistance can ground moral requirements on us to help them---requirements of beneficence. How far do those requirements extend?One way to think about this is by means of a simple analogy: an analogy between joining in efforts to help people at a distance and rescuing a needy person yourself, directly. Part I of Garrett Cullity's book examines this analogy. In some ways, the analogy is not only simple, but politically and metaphysically simplistic. However, it contains an important truth: we are morally required to help other people, indirectly as well as directly. But the number of needy people in the world is enormous, and their need is very great. Once we start to recognize requirements to help them, when is it morally acceptable to stop? Cullity answers this question in Part II. Examining the nature of beneficence, he argues that its requirements only make sense on the assumption that many of the interests we share in common-rich and poor alike-are interests it is not wrong to pursue.

What requirements does morality impose on us in relation to climate change? This question can be asked of individuals, of the entire global population, and of groups of various sizes in between. Given the case for accepting that we all collectively ought to be causing less climate-affecting pollution than we do, what follows from that about the moral status of the actions of members of the larger group? I examine two main ways in which moral requirements on group members can derive from requirements that apply to the larger group. But neither of them seems to apply to the case of climate-affecting pollution. Perhaps this is a case where we together act wrongly, although no-one’s contribution to our doing so is wrong.

This paper argues that it is morally wrong for the affluent not to contribute money or time to famine relief. It begins by endorsing an important methodological line of objection against the most prominent philosophical advocate of this claim, Peter Singer. This objection attacks his strategy of invoking a principle the acceptability of which is apparently based upon its conformity with "intuitive" moral judgements in order to defend a strongly counterintuitive conclusion. However, what follows is an argument for that counterintuitive conclusion which claims to circumvent the methodological objection, and moreover without having to resort to a justificational ethical theory. How can this be done? Merely by appealing, it is maintained, to the simple practical considerations which are characteristic of the virtues of kindness and justice. Accordingly, an account of those virtues, outlining the structure of the practical reasoning of their possessors, occupies a central place in the argument. The paper displays the resources for normative argument of a "virtue ethics;" but it claims also that its conclusion cannot be escaped by the adherents of any plausible moral outlook. And this yields a further conclusion. All moral outlooks, and not only those which equate the moral point of view with the impartial point of view, face a "problem of demandingness" - for it seems to be a corollary of the argument that if one is to be living a life which is not immoral, one is precluded from pursuing practically any source of personal satisfaction.

This critical notice discusses five main themes of Williams's collection: (1) The “morality system” and blame: our ethical thought both misconceives and overemphasizes the practice of blaming. (2) The theorist’s predicament: how can a theorist of human practice coherently relate her theory to her own practice? (3) Psychological realism: a central constraint on a defensible ethical outlook is that it takes account of us as we are. (4) Culture and explanation: there is no culturally neutral form of social explanation. (5) Objectivity and realism: ethical objectivity should be interpreted in a practical vein, dissociating it from realism.

This paper presents a moral philosophical account of free riding, specifying the conditions under which failing to pay for nonrival goods is unfair. These conditions do not include the voluntary acceptance of the goods: this controversial claim is supported on the strength of a characterization of the kind of unfairness displayed in paradigm cases of free riding. Thus a "Principle of Fairness" can potentially serve as a foundation for political obligations. The paper also discusses the relation between its moral philosophical account of free riding, and a game theoretic or economic account.

What is the significance of empirical work on moral judgement for moral philosophy? Although the more radical conclusions that some writers have attempted to draw from this work are overstated, few areas of moral philosophy can remain unaffected by it. The most important question it raises is in moral epistemology. Given the explanation of our moral experience, how far can we trust it? Responding to this, the view defended here emphasizes the interrelatedness of moral psychology and moral epistemology. On this view, the empirical study of moral judgement does have important implications for moral philosophy. But moral philosophy also has important implications for the empirical study of moral judgement.

According to "the argument from discernment", sympathetic motivation is morally faulty, because it is morally undiscriminating. Sympathy can incline you to do the right thing, but it can also incline you to do the wrong thing. And if so, it is no better as a reason for doing something than any other morally arbitrary consideration. The only truly morally good form of motivation--because the only morally non-arbitrary one--involves treating an action's rightness as your reason for performing it. This paper attacks the argument from discernment and argues against its conclusion.

To what extent can we as a community legitimately require individuals to contribute to producing public goods? Most of us think that, at least sometimes, refusing to pay for a public good that you have enjoyed can involve a kind of 'free riding' that makes it wrong. But what is less clear is under exactly which circumstances this is wrong. To work out the answer to that, we need to know why it is wrong. I argue that when free riding is wrong, the reason is that it is unfair. That is not itself a very controversial claim. But spelling out why it is unfair allows us to see just which forms of free riding are wrong. Moreover, it supplies a basis from which some more controversial conclusions can be defended. Even if a public good is one that you have been given without asking for it or seeking it out, it can still be wrong not to be prepared to pay for it. It can be wrong not to be prepared to pay for public goods even when you do not receive them at all. And furthermore, it can be right to force you to do so.

Moral evaluation is concerned with the attribution of values whose distinction into two broad groups has become familiar. On the one hand, there are the most general moral values of lightness, wrongness, goodness, badness, and what ought to be or to be done. On the other, there is a great diversity of more specific moral values which these objects can have: of being a theft, for instance, or a thief; of honesty, reliability or callousness. Within the recent body of work attempting to restore to the virtues a central place in ethical thinking, two claims stand out. One is that, of these two kinds of values, the specific ones are explanatorily prior to the general – that if an action is wrong, it is because it is wrong in one of those specific respects. A second claim, though, is now standardly made definitive of ‘Virtue ethics’: that amongst the specific values, the value of character is explanatorily prior to that of action – that if an action is callous, say, it is because it expresses callousness of character – and that in this sense, the moral value of action derives from that of character. This second claim has been widely attacked; in what follows, I present a reason for believing that, at least in the case of callousness, it is right

This paper defends the claim that there is deontic knowledge - knowledge of rightness and wrongness - which can be inferred from aretaic knowledge - knowledge of the possession of virtue-attributes. In doing so, it seeks to address two forceful objections, identified at the outset. The first is that the only way of making the claim appear plausible is by assuming a practice of virtue-ascription which actually makes the reverse inference. The second objection is that there is that "aretaic cognitivism" will face a familiar non-cognitivist challenge - that the cognitivist must choose between an "intuitionism" and a "naturalism", against both of which there are well-known attacks - and that there is no reason to believe that this challenge can be met any more readily than by a direct deontic cognitivism. After a first section in which I outline a certain weak sense of the term "norm" in which our actions are often normatively guided, the defence of aretaic cognitivism begins with a schematic expression of the practical norms which are central to a number of important moral virtues. Guidance by any one of the schematized norms is not sufficient to guarantee the virtuousness of an action, because there may be countervailing applications of competing practical norms. However, aretaic knowledge does not require knowledge that there are no such countervailing considerations - and what it does require can apparently be satisfied. Therefore, I argue, both objections can be met: there are at least some circumstances in which our possession of aretaic knowledge does not depend on the possession of deontic knowledge, and since it does not, there is a way between the horns of the non-cognitivist's dilemma.

Weak particularism about reasons is the view that the normative valency of some descriptive considerations varies, while others have an invariant normative valency. A defence of this view needs to respond to arguments that a consideration cannot count in favour of any action unless it counts in favour of every action. But it cannot resort to a global holism about reasons, if it claims that there are some examples of invariant valency. This paper argues for weak particularism, and presents a framework for understanding the relationships between practical reasons. A central part of this framework is the idea that there is an important kind of reason-a 'presumptive reason'-which need not be conclusive, but which is neither pro tanto nor prima facie. /// [Richard Holton] Should particularists about ethics claim that moral principles are never true? Or should they rather claim that any finite set of principles will not be sufficient to capture ethics? This paper explores and defends the possibility of embracing the second of these claims whilst rejecting the first, a position termed 'principled particularism'. The main argument that particularists present for their position-the argument that holds that any moral conclusion can be superseded by further considerations-is quite compatible with principled particularism; indeed, it is compatible with the idea that every true moral conclusion can be shown to follow deductively from a finite set of premises. Whilst it is true that these premises must contain implicit ceteris paribus clauses, this does not render the arguments trivial. On the contrary, they can do important work in justifying moral conclusions. Finally the approach is briefly applied to the related field of jurisprudence.

Are there good grounds for thinking that the moral values of action are to be derived from those of character? This virtue ethical claim is sometimes thought of as a kind of normative ethical theory; sometimes as form of opposition to any such theory. However, the best case to be made for it supports neither of these claims. Rather, it leads us to a distinctive view in moral epistemology: the view that my warrant for a particular moral judgement derives from my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge. This view seems to confront a regress-problem. For the belief that I am a good moral judge is itself a particular moral judgement. So it seems that, on this view, I need to derive my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge from my warrant for believing that I am a good judge of moral judges; and so on. I show how this worry can be met, and trace the implications of the resulting view for warranted moral judgement.

Morality, it is commonly argued, cannot be extreme in the demands it makes of us, because “ought” implies “can”, and normal human psychology places limits on the extent to which most of us are capable of devoting our lives to the service of others. To evaluate this argument, we need to distinguish different uses of “ought” and “can”. Having distinguished these uses, we find that there is more than one defensible version of the principle that “ought” implies “can”. However, these distinctions can also be deployed to show that the attempt to argue from this principle to the conclusion that morality cannot be extremely demanding fails.