Andrew Sneddon

Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton formulate two objections to moral sensibility theories in their overview of twentieth-century moral theory, “Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends.” Instead of using the work of sensibility theorists John McDowell and David Wiggins to address these objections, I turn to H. A. Prichard and P. F. Strawson. The reason for doing so is that the objections misunderstand the importance of the idea of the autonomy of the moral domain. Prichard and Strawson have provided important defenses of this idea that are independent of moral sensibility theories. Hence their work provides independent grounds for answering the two objections. Particularly important is the loosely a posteriori way they make their arguments. oral

Depuis 1963, le causalisme a été l'approche dominante en théorie de l'action. Il est possible, cependant, de distinguer diverses sortes de causalisme. La version dominante, que j'appelle CTA, essaie de trouver une analyse causale de l'action. Une version plus restreinte — le causalismeR — se montre récalcitrante à ce genre d'entreprise et se contente d'essayer d'expliquer en quel sens on peut traiter comme causales les explications par les raisons. J'examine ici les motivations sous-jacentes à CTA, ainsi que plusieurs de ses formulations les plus influentes, et je soutiens que cette approche n'a pas été très heureuse et que le projet, du reste, n'est pas au départ terriblement convaincant. Il y a beaucoup à attendre, en revanche, du causalismeR

Internalists argue that there is a necessary connection between motivation and moral judgment. The examination of cases plays an important role in philosophical debate about internalism. This debate has focused on cases concerning the failure to act in accordance with a moral judgment, for one reason or another. I call these failure cases . I argue that a different sort of case is also relevant to this debate. This sort of case is characterized by (1) moral judgment and (2) behavior that accords with the content of the moral judgment but that has been performed not because of the moral judgment. Instead it is due to some other source of motivation. I call these alternative motivation cases . I distinguish two sorts of alternative motivation cases, and I argue that externalists have natural explanations of these cases. By contrast, extant internalist accounts of failure cases are inadequate when applied to alternative motivation cases

Thick moral concepts are a topic of particular disagreement in discussions of reasons holism. These concepts, such as justice, are called “thick” because they have both evaluative and descriptive aspects. Thin moral concepts, such as good, are purely evaluative. The disagreement concerns whether the fact that an action is, for example, just always a reason in favor of performing that action. The present argument follows Jonathan Dancy’s strategy of connecting moral reasons and concepts to those in other domains. If Dancy is correct then we should expect holism about thick moral concepts to the same extent to which we find holism for other sorts of thick concepts. Using this strategy two claims are defended: that reasons holism is characteristic of non-moral thick concepts—specifically, of aesthetic, epistemic and prudential thick concepts—and that such non-moral concepts exemplify useful and heretofore unnoticed models for thick moral concepts.

This paper examines extant ways of classifying varieties of psychological externalism and argues that they imply a hitherto unrecognized distinction between shallow and deep externalism. The difference is between starting points: shallowly externalist hypotheses begin with the attribution of psychological states to individuals, just as individualistic hypotheses do, whereas deeply externalistic hypotheses begin with agent-environment interaction as the basis of cognitive processes and attribute psychological states to individuals as necessary for such interaction. The over-arching aim is to show how deep externalism works and what its implications are for psychological and philosophical theorizing.

Moral psychologists have recently turned their attention to a phenomenon they call 'moral dumbfounding'. Moral dumbfounding occurs when someone confidently pronounces a moral judgment, then finds that he or she has little or nothing to say in defense of it. This paper addresses recent attempts by Jonathan Haidt and Marc Hauser to make sense of moral dumbfounding in terms of their respective theories of moral judgment; Haidt in terms of a 'social intuitionist' model of moral judgment, and Hauser in terms of his 'Rawlsian creature' model of moral judgment. I show that Haidt and Hauser assume that moral dumbfounding is to be explained in terms of features of a.) moral judgment that are b.) construed in terms of the intrinsic features of individuals. By contrast, I hypothesize that moral dumbfounding is to be explained in terms of moral reasoning, more specifically in terms of the social dynamics of such reasoning. Finally, I argue that this hypothesis points towards an externalistic account of both moral reasoning and moral judgment.

Philosophers have various reasons to be interested in individual autonomy. Individual self-rule is widely recognized to be important. But what, exactly, is autonomy? In what ways is it important? And just how important is it? This book introduces contemporary philosophical thought about the nature and significance of individual self-rule. Andrew Sneddon divides self-rule into autonomy of choice and autonomy of persons. Unlike most philosophical treatments of autonomy, Sneddon addresses empirical study of the psychology of action. The significance of autonomy is displayed in connection with such issues as paternalism, political liberalism, advertising and physician-assisted suicide. Sneddon both introduces the themes of contemporary autonomy studies and defends a novel account of its nature and significance. Autonomy is an ideal introduction for advanced-level undergraduate and postgraduate students to the issues and debates surrounding individual self-rule.

Such thinkers as John Stuart Mill, Gerald Dworkin, and Richard Doerflinger have appealed to the value of freedom to explain both what is wrong with slavery and what is wrong with selling oneself into slavery. Practical ethicists, including Dworkin and Doerflinger, sometimes use selling oneself into slavery in analogies intended to illustrate justifiable forms of paternalism. I argue that these thinkers have misunderstood the moral problem with slavery. Instead of being a central value in itself, I argue that freedom is a means of serving the real value of autonomy. Moreover, I argue that autonomy is ambiguous. In cases of conflict, autonomous choice, here called "shallow autonomy", can justifiably be limited to serve "deep autonomy", or self-rule. I use these notions to give a better understanding of the problem with selling oneself into slavery, and argue that the work of Dworkin has to be seriously revised, and Doerflinger's position has to be given up altogether.\\\ John Stuart Mill, Gerald Dworkin y Richard Doerflinger han recurrido al valor de la libertad para explicar tanto porque está mal moralmente la esclavitud como venderse uno mismo como esclavo. Los teóricos de la ética práctica, incluidos Dworkin y Doerflinger, a veces utilizan el caso de venderse uno mismo como esclavo en analogias que pretenden ilustrar formas justificables de paternalismo. Sostengo que estos pensadores han malinterpretado el problema moral con la esclavitud. Argumento que en lugar de ser un valor fundamental en si mismo, la libertad es un medio para el valor real de la autonomia. Arguyo, por otra parte, que la autónomia es ambigua. En casos de conflicto, la elección autonóma, denominada aqui "autonomia superficial", puede justificadamente estar limitada a servir a la "autonomia profunda", o autogobierno. Utilizo estas nociones para ofrecer una mejor interpretatión del problema moral con venderse uno mismo como esclavo, y sostengo que la obra de Dworkin se debe revisar con seriedad, y que se debe abandonar por completo la postura de Doerflinger.

Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton formulate two objections to moral sensibility theories in their overview of twentieth-century moral theory, “Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends.” Instead of using the work of sensibility theorists John McDowell and David Wiggins to address these objections, I turn to H. A. Prichard and P. F. Strawson. The reason for doing so is that the objections misunderstand the importance of the idea of the autonomy of the moral domain. Prichard and Strawson have provided important defenses of this idea that are independent of moral sensibility theories. Hence their work provides independent grounds for answering the two objections. Particularly important is the loosely a posteriori way they make their arguments.

There has long been a suspicion that Kant's test for the universalizability of maxims can be easily subverted: instead of risking failing the test, design your maxim for any action whatsoever in a manner guaranteed to pass. This is the problem of maxim-fiddling. The present discussion of this problem has two theses: 1] That extant approaches to maxim-fiddling are not satisfactory;2] That a satisfactory response to maxim-fiddling can be articulated using Kantian resources, especially the first two formulations of the categorical imperative. This approach to maxim-fiddling draws our attention to a Kantian notion of an offence against morality itself that has largely been overlooked.

Philosophers of action tend to take for granted the concept of basic actions – actions that are done at will, or directly – as opposed to others that are performed in other ways. This concept does foundational work in action theory; many theorists, especially causalists, take part of their task to be showing that normal, complex actions necessarily stem from basic ones somehow. The case for the concept of basic actions is driven by a family of observations and a cluster of closely related anti-infinite regress arguments. I review this case in the work of Arthur Danto, Donald Davidson, and Jennifer Hornsby – three of the most important developers of the concept – and find it lacking. I conclude by sketching the possibility of non-foundationalist action theory.

The familiar argument from disagreement has been an important focal point of discussion in contemporary meta-ethics. Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interdisciplinary work between philosophers and psychologists about moral psychology. Working within this trend, John Doris and Alexandra Plakias have made a tentative version of the argument from disagreement on empirical grounds. Doris and Plakias present empirical evidence in support of premise 4, that ethics is beset by fundamental disagreement. They examine Richard Brandt on Hopi ethics and, especially, Richard E. Nisbett & Dov Cohen on cultures of honor to make a prima facie version of this case. This raises important questions. Are Doris and Plakias correct that there is even a prima facie empirical basis for moral anti-realism? What sort of empirical contribution can be made to such debates in meta-ethics? I argue that we should have reservations about the prospects of empirical contributions to the argument from disagreement. Specifically, before empirical results from psychology can be used to offer conclusions about meta-ethical issues, more careful attention must be paid to normative ethics, and especially to normative theory. There are two parts to this position. First, there is good reason to think that the evidence we currently have about moral disagreement is irrelevant to the meta-ethical debate. Second, the relevant evidence is useless for meta-ethical purposes on its own. Instead, it must be combined with normative theorizing about value pluralism

It is fitting that The Daily Show had Harry Frankfurt as a guest: Frankfurt is the author of the popular “On Bullshit”, and one aim of The Daily Show, especially in its 1st and 2nd segments, is to call out bullshit as they see it. The assumption, both of the show and of its admirers, seems to be that identifying bullshit is always morally and politically significant (not to mention funny, but this aspect is not my focus). The aim of this paper is to show that, although this assumption is substantially correct, the truth is rather more complicated. The reason is that bullshit can be defensible, even good. I will show this by attending more closely to bullshitting and the bullshitter than Frankfurt does. Frankfurt identifies lack of concern for the truth/falsity of one’s utterances as the hallmark of bullshit. I will show that even given this, it can be good. However, this defense pertains directly to speech contexts that aim at truth, such as educational contexts. Political speech is different. To determine whether the defense of bullshit transfers to political contexts, I will attend to the value and role of truth in political speech. I will argue that, due to the derivation of political authority from the individual autonomy of the governed in liberal democracies, political bullshit is very rarely justifiable. One upshot is that skills that are valuable in educational contexts turn out to be dangerous in political ones. Another is that The Daily Show turns out to have a valuable function protecting liberal democracy, insofar as it functions as an effective political bullshit detector. I will conclude with reflections on whether The Daily Show itself produces bullshit, and if so, whether it is problematic.

Concerns about advertising take one of two forms. Some people are worried that advertising threatens autonomous choice. Others are worried not about autonomy but about the values spread by advertising as a powerful institution. I suggest that this bifurcation stems from misunderstanding autonomy. When one turns from autonomous choice to autonomy of persons, or what is often glossed as self-rule, then one has reason to think that advertising poses a moral problem of a sort so far unrecognized. I diagnose this problem using Charles Taylor''s work on "strong evaluation". This problem turns out to have political ramifications that have been only dimly recognized in business ethics circles.

What makes an event count as an action? Typical answers appeal to the way in which the event was produced: e.g., perhaps an arm movement is an action when caused by mental states (in particular ways), but not when caused in other ways. I argue that this type of answer, which I call "productionism", is methodologically and substantially mistaken. In particular, productionist answers to this question tend to be either individualistic or foundationalist, or both, without explicit defence. Instead, I offer an externalist, anti-foundationalist account of what makes an event count as an action, which he calls neo-ascriptivism, after the work of H.L.A. Hart. Specifically, I argue that our practices of attributing moral responsibility to each other are at least partly constitutive of events as actions.

Philosophers and psychologists have been vigorously examining the psychological capacities that realize our moral agency. Our purpose is to take some of this work and present its implications for moral education. To connect recent work with more long-standing debates in moral education, we frame this discussion with Helen Haste’s 1996 examination of liberal and communitarian positions on moral agency and education. We argue that contemporary research does not confirm the descriptive theory of moral agency offered by either liberal theorists or communitarians, but nonetheless the prescriptive theory of liberal moral education can be vindicated

We are familiar with the idea of symbolic value in everyday contexts, and philosophers sometimes help themselves to it when discussing other topics. However, symbolic value itself has not been sufficiently studied. What is it for something to have symbolic value? How important is symbolic value? The present purpose is to shed some light on the nature and significance of symbolic value. Two kinds of symbolic value are distinguished, called the ‘symbolic mode of valuing’ and ‘symbolism as a ground of value’. Their potential significance lies in making a thoroughly relational contribution to thought about values, compared to the individualistic nature of more familiar values. This relational contribution consists in the role of symbols in shared ways of living.

Philosophers have long studied the nature of happiness and, as a consequence, have made recommendations about how to achieve it. The present paper argues that perhaps this has been a mistake. Empirical studies of happiness have been yielding important results in recent years, the implication of which is that happiness is more complex than philosophers have suspected. The crucial point is this: although very abstract and very individual-specific things can be said about happiness, there is nothing substantial that can be said about happiness in general. For practical yet general recommendations about how to achievehappiness, such an intermediate level of generality is necessary. Since it is not available, no general recommendations about happiness are possible.