Jason Kawall

Virtue ethics has emerged as a distinct field within moral theory - whether as an alternative account of right action or as a conception of normativity which departs entirely from the obligatoriness of morality - and has proved itself invaluable to many aspects of contemporary applied ethics. Virtue ethics now flourishes in philosophy, sociology and theology and its applications extend to law, politics and bioethics. 'The handbook of virtue ethics' brings together leading international scholars to provide an overview of the field. Each chapter summarizes and assesses the most important work on a particular topic and sets this work in the context of historical developments. Taking a global approach by embracing a variety of major cultural traditions along with the Western, the handbook maps the emergence of virtue ethics and provides a framework for future developments.

I present an account of epistemic autonomy as a distinctively wide-ranging epistemic virtue, one that helps us to understand a range of phenomena that might otherwise seem quite disparate – from the appropriate selection of epistemic methods, stances and topics of inquiry, to the harms of epistemic oppression, gaslighting and related phenomena. The account draws on four elements commonly incorporated into accounts of personal autonomy: (i) self-governance, (ii) authenticity, (iii) self-creation and (iv) independence. I further argue that for a distinctively epistemic virtue of autonomy; the above elements must ultimately reliably lead to valuable epistemic goods (for the agent herself and others). I then turn to the domains or ways in which epistemic autonomy so understood, can be made manifest. I suggest that epistemic autonomy is a virtue that allows us to appropriately choose (i) subject matters and areas of inquiry, (ii) methods, sources, and processes of belief formation, (iii) epistemic goals and (iv) epistemic stances or frameworks. So understood, epistemic autonomy has a role to play in shaping most every aspect of our epistemic lives.

Despite projected devastating impacts on human communities, the US still lacks comprehensive national policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This vacuum has provided the space for a surge of promising sustainability and climate action planning efforts at the state and local level. Meanwhile, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s (2015) Out of Reach Report, ‘there is no state in the US where a minimum wage worker working full time can afford a one-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent’. We are calling for a reimagining of local climate action planning that encourages policies and programs designed to reduce GHG emissions from the built environment while explicitly and comprehensively addressing the affordability component. With equitable local climate action planning, we can address both environmental and social justice issues.

To reliably choose morally sound policies, whether as a society or as an individual, will typically require a deep and wide-ranging base of relevant knowledge. In this paper I consider the epistemic demands for morally sound action and policy in the Anthropocene age. I argue that these demands are likely to be unsatisfied, leading to a potential downward spiral of ineffective action in the face of worsening conditions; this seems a strong possibility both for individual lives, and for societies as a whole. Given the likely scale of ignorance in the face of rapid, poorly-understood change, the best efforts of future generations to act morally may often be little more than guesses, with a far lower chance of success than in more stable conditions. If moral failures mount, and conditions continue to deteriorate, our epistemic efforts seem likely to be pressured and subject to various biases, leading to further errors and failures. Our ability to live virtuously and to act rightly is likely to be put under severe strain in the Anthropocene. Our approach to ethics will likely need to change to the extent that, for a wide range of cases, we will not know what the right action to perform will be; we will typically be acting without such moral knowledge. Instead, we must come to expect to merely act non-culpably at best, with many errors and false starts along the way. The final section of my paper addresses ways in which we might attempt to address or mitigate these worries.

The central claim of this dissertation is that the most plausible form of virtue theory will incorporate a number of features from an ideal observer theory, and vice versa. Virtue theorists in ethics and epistemology often characterize the virtues as those traits required for a good human life, and right action in terms of the behaviour of virtuous persons. I argue that while such positions are mistaken , a related form of ideal observer theory can capture the virtue theorists' insights. The core of my dissertation lies in developing a unified metaethical/epistemological/aesthetic theory which grounds normative properties in the judgements of ideal observers. Thus, for example, an action is morally right if and only if a virtuous ideal observer would declare it to be so. These ideal observers are identified by their possession of characteristics considered ideal by a class of semi-ideal observers, who are in turn identified by their possession of traits considered ideal by psychologically healthy humans. ;Instead of appealing to human nature, we make direct appeal to our ideals---the factors which give human nature theories much of their initial plausibility. On the other hand, our ideals reflect our human needs, our way of life, etc. They are grounded in human nature and thus of interest to us, capturing a further insight from human nature theory. Like standard ideal observer theories we arrive at a metatheory which provides an attractive blend of cognitivism, while avoiding commitment to 'queer' normative facts in the world. But the ideal observers we appeal to are much more fully characterized than standard ideal observers---their characteristics are grounded in human ideals, thus providing a basis for the judgements of the ideal observers, and providing us with reason to abide by their judgements. I motivate and develop this procedure for deriving ideal observers, consider objections to the approach, and show how the theory improves upon traditional virtue and ideal observer theories