Christopher Cowley

Most modern moral philosophy is what I call ‘Impersonalist.’ It claims, quite plausibly, that the particular identity of the moral agent has nothing to do with the rightness or bestness of a given course of action, with the overriding moral reasons supporting such an action, nor with the moral obligation placed upon the agent to perform it.In addition, the Impersonalist account assumes what I call a Humean model of practical reasoning, whereby perception, deliberation, decision, and action are all logically separate stages.I challenge both the alleged moral irrelevance of the agent and the logical separation of the reasoning stages by invoking Peter Winch’s metaphor of a ‘moral perspective’: my perception andmy deliberation are both shaped by the perspective from within which I experience – and must experience – the world.Different people have different moral perspectives, and so they will consider different moral options as available and different reasons as relevant when considering the same situation. This is relativism, but only a benign form, and I explain why

This paper asks three inter-related questions, proceeding chronologically through a divorcee’s experience: is it responsible and rational to make an unconditional marital vow in the first place? does divorce break that unconditional marital vow? And the main question: can the divorcee make a second unconditional marital vow in all moral seriousness? To the last question I answer yes. I argue that the divorce process is so disorienting – to use Amy Harbin’s term – as to transform the divorcee and therefore partly release her from the original vow. Arguing this will require a specific understanding of personal identity and change.

The 2016, the UK Supreme Court case of Jogee confirmed a long-standing convention in English law. In cases where D is assisting or encouraging P to commit an offence, D will only be liable as an accessory for that offence if she intentionally assists or encourages P and if she knows the essential features of the offence. In this paper, I discuss and develop some of the arguments from Sanford Kadish’s 1996 article “Reckless Complicity.” I argue that a special sub-category of complicity, namely ‘enabling’, can be done recklessly, and is sufficiently blameworthy to ground criminal liability.

This paper asks three inter-related questions, proceeding chronologically through a divorcee’s experience: is it responsible and rational to make an unconditional marital vow in the first place? does divorce break that unconditional marital vow? And the main question: can the divorcee make a second unconditional marital vow in all moral seriousness? To the last question I answer yes. I argue that the divorce process is so disorienting – to use Amy Harbin’s term – as to transform the divorcee and therefore partly release her from the original vow. Arguing this will require a specific understanding of personal identity and change.

We are living through a boom in autobiographical writing. Every half-famous celebrity, every politician, every sports hero—even the non-famous, nowadays, pour out pages and pages, Facebook post after Facebook post, about themselves. Literary theorists have noticed, as the genres of “creative nonfiction” and “life writing” have found their purchase in the academy. And of course psychologists have long been interested in self-disclosure. But where have the philosophers been? With this volume, Christopher Cowley brings them into the conversation. Cowley and his contributors show that while philosophers have seemed uninterested in autobiography, they have actually long been preoccupied with many of its conceptual elements, issues such as the nature of the self, the problems of interpretation and understanding, the paradoxes of self-deception, and the meaning and narrative structure of human life. But rarely have philosophers brought these together into an overarching question about what it means to tell one’s life story or understand another’s. Tackling these questions, the contributors explore the relationship between autobiography and literature; between story-telling, knowledge, and agency; and between the past and the present, along the way engaging such issues as autobiographical ethics and the duty of writing. The result bridges long-standing debates and illuminates fascinating new philosophical and literary issues.

This paper asks three inter-related questions, proceeding chronologically through a divorcee’s experience: is it responsible and rational to make an unconditional marital vow in the first place? does divorce break that unconditional marital vow? And the main question: can the divorcee make a second unconditional marital vow in all moral seriousness? To the last question I answer yes. I argue that the divorce process is so disorienting – to use Amy Harbin’s term – as to transform the divorcee and therefore partly release her from the original vow. Arguing this will require a specific understanding of personal identity and change.

The big issues of medical ethics are more in the news than ever before. And yet they remain as stubborn and often as incendiary as ever. This book claims that in an effort to deal with the issues, mainstream philosophers have arbitrarily omitted many ethically relevant features in order to reduce the central problems to more tractable technical puzzles. The most gratuitous omissions have been the patient's point of view on the problem; the patient's ordinary life, which provides the wider context for his point of view; and the ordinary language and concepts by which the patient tries to make sense of the problem.

Medical ethics is normally taught in a combination of three ways: through discussions of normative theories and principles; through for-and-against debating of topics; or through case studies. I want to argue that a fourth approach might be better, and should be used more: teaching medical ethics through medical law. Medical law is already deeply imbued with ethical concepts, principles and reasons, and allows the discussion of ethics through the “back door,” as it were. The two greatest advantages of the law are its familiar authority, especially among the disengaged medical students who have little interest or respect for the subject of ethics; and its focus on the reality of the people and the tragedies discussed. Finally, I argue that medical law, unlike ethics, allows more efficient and more detailed MCQ assessment.

There is a long-standing philosophical discussion about the relationship between love and choice. The most simplistic versions see love as something one “falls” into, without any choice at all. A more sophisticated account of love would accommodate some degree of indirect choice: I feel an initial interest, and choose to seek her out more. I can also choose to create and sustain the conditions that support love, for example, by avoiding infidelity and long commutes. However, such indirect choices are relatively discrete or time-limited. In contrast, I want to explore a more temporally extended kind of choice, which starts when I take responsibility for the other. This is an attitude involving a prospective commitment, an achievement of the imagination, and an active concern. I argue that one essential requirement of longer-term adult romantic and friendly love is precisely that the lover takes responsibility for meeting the beloved’s unpredictable and possibly onerous needs in the future.

How and to what degree are we responsible for our characters, our lives, our misfortunes, our relationships and our children? This question is at the heart of "Moral Responsibility". The book explores accusations and denials of moral responsibility for particular acts, responsibility for character, and the role of luck and fate in ethics. Moral responsibility as the grounds for a retributivist theory of punishment is examined, alongside discussions of forgiveness, parental responsibility, and responsibility before God. The book also discusses collective responsibility, bringing in notions of complicity and membership, and drawing on the seminal contemporary discussion of collective agency and responsibility: the Nuremberg trials.

According to its simplest definition, supererogation means freely and intentionally doing good beyond the requirements of duty. A more complex definition incorporates the responses of third parties: the supererogatory act is one that is praiseworthy if performed, but not blameworthy if omitted, as long as one does one's duty. This collection of essays, based on papers delivered at the Royal Institute of Philosophy's Annual Conference in Dublin in June 2014, explores a broad range of philosophical problems that stem from various definitions of supererogation. How can something be good and yet not required? How relevant is the agent's motivation to our assessment of that agent's sacrifice? What is the difference between supererogation and virtue? Is supererogation essential to friendship and love? Do all of us have the genuine capacity to be saints and heroes?

The Philosophy of Forgiveness is multi-dimensional and complex. As recent scholarly philosophical works on forgiveness illustrate, incorporating personal, relational, political, ethical, psychological, and religious dimensions into one consistent conception of “forgiveness” is difficult. As part of Vernon Press’s series on the Philosophy of Forgiveness, Explorations of Forgiveness: Personal, Relational, and Religious begins the task of creating a consistent multidimensional account of forgiveness by bringing together multiple voices from around the globe to analyze, discuss, and draw conclusions about how best to understand forgiveness. The volume’s three opening chapters examine forgiveness as a relational concept, and offer insights into the role of forgiveness in repairing, sustaining, stewarding, and healing relationships damaged by wrongdoing. Continuing with the relational theme, the next four chapters incorporate Hannah Arendt’s philosophical teachings into the discussion to offer several intriguing conclusions relating to “unforgiveable” persons and acts. The final chapters examine the nature of forgiveness from three major world religions: Buddhism, Christianity, and Confucianism.

Forgiveness is widely considered a paradigm of supererogation: it seems to be morally permissible without being obligatory, and it seems to be almost always admirable and praiseworthy. I want to show that the phenomenon is a bit more complicated, and that many instances are hard to describe as supererogatory. First, I will distinguish forgiveness from some other responses to the transgression (ignoring, excusing, letting go). Second, I will examine the philosophical debate over the question of whether or not the victim should wait for the transgressor to fulfil some kind of condition (e.g., repentance, apology, compensation) before forgiving, and how this might affect the supererogatory status. Third, I look at more serious cases of transgression and ask what it might mean for something or someone to be unforgivable.

Notoriously, most philosophers write for other philosophers. Most philosophy books are designed for students of philosophy, students who can be assumed to have signed up and remained in the subject voluntarily, and therefore to have a certain interest in the subject and a certain understanding of the point of it all. In this paper I want to consider the philosopher’s engagement with those who, living in the ‘real world’, have had neither interest in nor exposure to philosophy beyond the stereotypes of popular culture.1 By ‘engagement’ I have in mind formal pedagogical encounters such as compulsory teaching sessions in professional schools, public discussions and television talk-shows where the speaker is introduced as a ‘philosopher’, but above all the informal conversations that a philosopher inevitably has with his family, neighbours, doctor, accountant, his child’s teachers, his priest etc., where he is not so much teaching philosophy as explaining what the subject is. I’m hoping this is not of merely anthropological concern, but that this exploration can reveal something important about teaching the subject to philosophy students as well, even if for reasons of space it will have to be a bit polemical.

ABSTRACT In a recent (2015) Bioethics editorial, Udo Schuklenk argues against allowing Canadian doctors to conscientiously object to any new euthanasia procedures approved by Parliament. In this he follows Julian Savulescu's 2006 BMJ paper which argued for the removal of the conscientious objection clause in the 1967 UK Abortion Act. Both authors advance powerful arguments based on the need for uniformity of service and on analogies with reprehensible kinds of personal exemption. In this article I want to defend the practice of conscientious objection in publicly‐funded healthcare systems (such as those of Canada and the UK), at least in the area of abortion and end‐of‐life care, without entering either of the substantive moral debates about the permissibility of either. My main claim is that Schuklenk and Savulescu have misunderstood the special nature of medicine, and have misunderstood the motivations of the conscientious objectors. However, I acknowledge Schuklenk's point about differential access to lawful services in remote rural areas, and I argue that the health service should expend more to protect conscientious objection while ensuring universal access.

John Bayley was married to Iris Murdoch for 45 years. In the last few years of her life, Murdoch developed Alzheimer’s, and John Bayley wrote a memoir about their life together, including the difficulties of looking after her with the disease. Although the Memoir was generally well-received, some critics called the publication an act of betrayal, because of the intimacy of some of the revelations, because of the public reduction of a great mind to a sick old woman, and especially because of Murdoch’s inability to consent or respond to it. I agree, but I think it was even worse than that. I want to distinguish the ‘shallow’ betrayal of a ‘three-dimensional’ person in the narrow timeframe of the present from a ‘deep’ betrayal – and I will argue that Bayley is guilty of both. Deep betrayal essentially involves a close intimate of the victim betraying the ‘four-dimensional’ person across her whole life, as well as betraying the relationship between them. Such a betrayal inevitably casts a shadow back on our understanding of the earlier relationship between Bayley and Murdoch.