Alfred Archer

ABSTRACT The testimonies of celebrities affect the lives of their many followers who pay attention to what they say. This gives celebrities a high degree of epistemic power, which has come under scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the duties that arise from this power. We argue that celebrities have a negative duty of testimonial justice not to undermine trust in authoritative sources by spreading misinformation or directing attention to untrustworthy sources. Moreover, celebrities have a general imperfect duty to try to correct for an unjust distribution of attention by redirecting it to those who deserve it. During a pandemic this may become a perfect one, due to the harm that could be prevented if people follow the advice of experts. Relatedly, we argue that celebrities have an imperfect duty to promote behavior that will reduce the spread of a pandemic. We outline three ways they might do so: they might take on the position of a role model, they may act as a salience magnet or they can direct people’s attention towards others who have taken on these roles.

Is there good reason to worry about celebrity involvement in democratic politics? The rise of celebrity politicians such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky has led political theorists and commentators to worry that the role of expertise in democratic politics has been undermined. According to one recent critique, celebrities possess a significant degree of epistemic power that is unconnected to appropriate expertise. This presents a problem both for deliberative and epistemic theories of democratic legitimacy, which ignore this form of power, and for real existing democracies attempting to meet the standards of legitimacy set out by these theories. But do these critiques apply to democratic elitism? In this paper, we argue that recognition of celebrity epistemic power in fact represents a valuable resource for supporting the legitimacy and practice of democratic elitism, though these benefits do come with certain risks to which elite theories are particularly vulnerable.

Is it permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally? While this issue has recently been the subject of widespread public debate, it has received little attention in the philosophical literature. This paper will investigate this issue by examining the nature and ethics of fandom. I will argue that the crimes and misdemeanors of the object of fandom provide three kinds of moral reasons for fans to abandon their fandom. First, being a fan of the immoral may provide support for their immoral behavior. Second, fandom alters our perception in ways that will often lead us to be fail to perceive our idol’s faults and even to adopting immoral points of view in order to be able to maintain the positive view we have of them. Third, fandom, like friendship, may lead us to engage in acts of loyalty to protect the interests of our idols. This gives fans of the immoral good reason to abandon their fandom. However, these reasons will not always be conclusive and, in some cases, it may be possible to instead adopt a critical form of fandom.

Is it appropriate to honour and admire people who have created great works of art, made important intellectual contributions, performed great sporting feats or shaped the history of a nation if those people have also acted immorally? This book provides a philosophical investigation of this important and timely question. The authors draw on the latest research from ethics, value theory, philosophy of emotion, social philosophy and social psychology to develop and substantiate arguments that have been made in the public debates about this issue. They offer a detailed analysis of the nature and ethics of honour and admiration, and present reasons both in favor and against honouring and admiring the immoral. They also take on the important matter of whether we can separate the achievements of public figures from their immoral behavior. Ultimately, the authors reject a "one-size-fits-all" approach and argue that we must weigh up the reasons for and against honouring and admiring in each particular case. Honouring and Admiring the Immoral is written in an accessible style that shows how philosophy can engage with public debates about important ethical issues. It will be of interest to scholars and students working in moral philosophy, philosophy of emotion, and social philosophy.

In recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged on the subject of epistemic injustice: wrongful harms done to people in their capacities as knowers. Up to now this literature has ignored the role that attention has to play in epistemic injustice. This paper makes a first step towards addressing this gap. We argue that giving someone less attention than they are due, which we call an epistemic attention deficit, is a distinct form of epistemic injustice. We begin by outlining what we mean by epistemic attention deficits, which we understand as a failure to pay someone the attention they are due in their role as an epistemic agent. We argue that these deficits constitute epistemic injustices for two reasons. First, they affect someone’s ability to influence what others believe. Second, they affect one’s ability to influence the shared common ground in which testimonial exchanges take place. We then outline the various ways in which epistemic attention deficits harm those who are subject to them. We argue that epistemic attention deficits are harms in and of themselves because they deprive people of an essential component of epistemic agency. Moreover, epistemic attention deficits reduce an agent’s ability to participate in valuable epistemic practices. These two forms of harm have important impacts on educational performance and the distribution of resources. Finally, we argue that epistemic attention deficits both hinder and shape the development of epistemic agency. We finish by exploring some practical implications arising from our discussion.

The claim that we live in a post-truth era has led to a significant body of work across different disciplines exploring the phenomenon. Many have sought to investigate the role of fake news in bringing about the post-truth era. While this work is important, the narrow focus on this issue runs the risk of giving the impression that it is mainly new forms of media that are to blame for the post-truth phenomenon. In this paper, we call attention to the ways in which journalistic practices in traditional forms of media also play an important role in contributing to a post-truth environment. We will do so by focusing on one particular practice common in news journalism. False balance involves presenting two sides of a debate as more equal than is justified by the evidence. We will argue that although false balance does not constitute fake news, it does contribute to an environment in which truth is devalued. By obscuring what counts as evidence and who qualifies as an authority, false balance legitimizes post-truth attitudes. We finish by outlining the virtues that journalists should develop in order to guard against false balance. While fake news is made more likely when journalists possess the vices of dishonesty, prejudice or corruption, we argue that focusing too much on guarding against these vices may actually make false balance more likely. In order to be responsible gatekeepers and to avoid false balance, journalists must also develop the virtues of wisdom, vigilance, courage, care and justice

In this paper, we investigate the diachronic fittingness conditions of admiration – that is, what it takes for a person to continue or cease to be admirable over time. We present a series of cases that elicit judgements that suggest different understandings of admiration over time. In some cases, admirability seems to last forever. In other cases, it seems that it can cease within a person’s lifetime if she changes sufficiently. Taken together, these cases highlight what we call the puzzle of admiration over time. We then present a potential solution to this puzzle.

The thought that acts of supererogation exist presents a challenge to all normative ethical theories. This chapter will provide an overview of the consequentialist responses to this challenge. I will begin by explaining the problem that supererogation presents for consequentialism. I will then explore consequentialist attempts to deny the existence of acts of supererogation. Next, I will examine a range of act consequentialist attempts to accommodate supererogation: including satisficing consequentialism, dual-ranking act consequentialism and an anti-rationalist form of consequentialism. Finally, I will explore how indirect consequentialists have responded to this problem. Throughout the chapter, I will argue that in responding to the challenge of supererogation, consequentialists must choose between a more theoretically satisfying version of consequentialism and a form of consequentialism that is better able to accommodate our everyday moral intuitions and concepts.

Emotions play an important role in both sport and games, from the pride and joy of victory, the misery and shame of defeat, and the anger and anxiety felt along the way. This volume brings together experts in the philosophy of sport and games and experts in the philosophy of emotion to investigate this important area of research. The book discusses the role of the emotions for both participants and spectators of sports and games, including detailed discussions of suffering, shame, anger, anxiety, misery and hatred. It also investigates the issues of collective emotions in relation to sport such as the shared joy of a football crowd when their team scores a goal. In addition, this volume examines the role of pretence and make believe in emotional reactions to sport. In so doing, it makes important contributions both to the philosophy of sport and to the philosophy of emotions, which will be of interest to researchers and students in both fields.

Do famous athletes have special obligations to act virtuously? A number of philosophers have investigated this question by examining whether famous athletes are subject to special role model obligations (Wellman 2003; Feezel 2005; Spurgin 2012). In this paper we will take a different approach and give a positive response to this question by arguing for the position that sport and gaming celebrities are ‘ambassadors of the game’: moral agents whose vocations as rule-followers have unique implications for their non-lusory lives. According to this idea, the actions of a game’s players and other stakeholders—especially the actions of its stars—directly affect the value of the game itself, a fact which generates additional moral reasons to behave in a virtuous manner. We will begin by explaining the three main positions one may take with respect to the question: moral exceptionalism, moral generalism, and moral exemplarism. We will argue that no convincing case for moral exemplarism has thus far been made, which gives us reason to look for new ways to defend this position. We then provide our own ‘ambassadors of the game’ account and argue that it gives us good reason to think that sport and game celebrities are subject to special obligations to act virtuously.

The aim of this book is to foster a more explicit and direct discussion of the concept of sacrifice and its importance in moral philosophy. Acts of self-sacrifice have a special place in our moral lives. We admire and celebrate those who give up their lives so that others may live. Despite this important role that sacrifice plays in our moral thinking, moral philosophers have had surprisingly little to say about the nature of sacrifice. This lack of attention to the nature of sacrifice is particularly important given that sacrifice also has an important role to play in several key debates in moral philosophy. The chapters in this volume make an important contribution to our understanding of sacrifice in three areas. The first part of the book investigates the nature of sacrifice. The next group of chapters investigates the role of sacrifice in moral philosophy. Three of these pieces investigate the role of sacrifice in our moral lives generally, while two investigate the role of sacrifice in relation to particular moral theories. The final two chapters investigate the value of sacrifice in relation to political and theological issues. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

The Northern Irish footballer James McClean chooses not to take part in the practice of wearing a plastic red poppy to commemorate those who have died fighting for the British Armed Forces. Each year he faces abuse, including occasional death threats, for his choice. This forms part of a wider trend towards ‘poppy enforcement’, the pressuring of people, particularly public figures, to wear the poppy. This enforcement seems wrong in part because, at least in some cases, it involves abuse. But is there anything else wrong with it? We will consider the various ways the existing literature on the ethics of commemoration might help us understand what is wrong with poppy enforcement. We will argue that this cannot provide a complete account of what is wrong with poppy enforcement. We then argue that such pressure can constitute two distinct forms of affective injustice, which are wrongs done to people specifically in their capacity as affective beings. In McClean’s case, we argue first that poppy enforcement is a violation of affective rights and second that he faces a particular type of affective injustice that we call emotional imperialism.

In this paper we develop a view about the disorientation attached to the process of falling out of love and explain its prudential and moral value. We start with a brief background on theories of love and situate our argument within the views concerned with the lovers’ identities. Namely, love changes who we are. In the context of our paper, we explain this common tenet in the philosophy of love as a change in the lovers’ self-concepts through a process of mutual shaping. This, however, is potentially dangerous for people involved in what we call ‘subsuming relationships’, who give up too much autonomy in the process of mutual shaping. We then move on to show how, through the relation between love and the self-concept, we can explain why the process of falling out of love with someone is so disorientating: when one is falling out of love, one loses an important point of reference for self-understanding. While this disorientating process is typically taken to be harmful to the person experiencing it, we will explain how it can also have moral and prudential value. By re-evaluating who we were in the relationship and who we are now, we can escape from oppressive practices in subsuming relationships. We finish by arguing that this gives us reason to be wary of seeking to re-orient ourselves -or others- too quickly after falling out of love.

Victims of oppression are often called to let go of their anger in order to facilitate better discussion to bring about the end of their oppression. According to Amia Srinivasan, this constitutes an affective injustice. In this paper, we use research on emotion regulation to shed light on the nature of affective injustice. By drawing on the literature on emotion regulation, we illustrate specifically what kind of work is put upon people who are experiencing affective injustice and why it is damaging. We begin by explaining affective injustice and how it can amount to a call for emotion regulation. Then we explain the various techniques that can be used to regulate emotions and explain how each might be harmful here. In the penultimate section of the paper, we explain how the upshot of this is that victims of affective injustice are left with a dilemma. Either they try to regulate their anger in a way that involves ignoring the fact of their oppression or they regulate it in a way that is likely to be harmful for them. Finally, we consider whether there are any good solutions to this dilemma, and how this issue opens up the possibility for further research into emotion regulation and moral philosophy.

What, if anything, is problematic about the involvement of celebrities in democratic politics? While a number of theorists have criticized celebrity involvement in politics (Meyer 2002; Mills 1957; Postman 1987) none so far have examined this issue using the tools of social epistemology, the study of the effects of social interactions, practices and institutions on knowledge and belief acquisition. This paper will draw on these resources to investigate the issue of celebrity involvement in politics, specifically as this involvement relates to democratic theory and its implications for democratic practice. We will argue that an important and underexplored form of power, which we will call epistemic power, can explain one important way in which celebrity involvement in politics is problematic. This is because unchecked uses and unwarranted allocations of epistemic power, which celebrities tend to enjoy, threaten the legitimacy of existing democracies and raise important questions regarding core commitments of deliberative, epistemic, and plebiscitary models of democratic theory. We will finish by suggesting directions that democratic theorists could pursue when attempting to address some of these problems.

How should academics respond to the work of immoral intellectuals? This question appears to be one that is of increasing concern in academic circles but has received little attention in the academic literature. In this paper, we will investigate what our response to immoral intellectuals should be. We begin by outlining the cases of three intellectuals who have behaved immorally or at least have been accused of doing so. We then investigate whether it is appropriate to admire an immoral person for their intellectual contributions. We will argue that such admiration can be a fitting response to the intellectual achievements of an immoral person but only if the person has indeed done something important. However, we then identify two moral reasons against openly admiring immoral intellectuals. First, that such admiration may give the appearance of condoning the immoral acts of the intellectual. Second, that such admiration may lead to emulation of the intellectual’s problematic ideals. This may be enough to persuade us of the moral reasons to avoid engaging with the work of unimportant and easily replaceable intellectuals in our research and our teaching. However, for more important intellectual figures we have weighty educational reasons to cite them and include them in our courses. This leads to a tension, which we attempt to resolve by proposing ways to accommodate the moral reasons against admiring immoral intellectuals and the intellectual reasons to include them in our courses, though we conclude on the pessimistic note that this tension may not be entirely resolvable.

Is it appropriate to honor artists who have created great works but who have also acted immorally? In this article, after arguing that honoring involves identifying a person as someone we ought to admire, we present three moral reasons against honoring immoral artists. First, we argue that honoring can serve to condone their behavior, through the mediums of emotional prioritization and exemplar identification. Second, we argue that honoring immoral artists can generate undue epistemic credibility for the artists, which can lead to an indirect form of testimonial injustice for the artists’ victims. Third, we argue, building on the first two reasons, that honoring immoral artists can also serve to silence their victims. We end by considering how we might respond to these reasons.

It has been claimed, by David Heyd, that in order for an act to count as supererogatory the agent performing the act must possess altruistic intentions (1982 p.115). This requirement, Heyd claims, allows us to make sense of the meritorious nature of acts of supererogation. In this paper I will investigate whether there is good reason to accept that this requirement is a necessary condition of supererogation. I will argue that such a reason can be found in cases where two people act in the same way but with only the person who acted with altruistic intent counting as having performed an act of supererogation. In such cases Heyd’s intention requirement plays an important role in ruling out acts that intuitively are not supererogatory. Despite this, I will argue that we should reject Heyd’s requirement and replace it with a moral intention requirement. I will then investigate how to formulate this requirement and respond to two objections that might be raised against it.

What is the motivational profile of admiration? In this article, I will investigate what form of connection between admiration and motivation there may be good reason to accept. A number of philosophers have advocated a connection between admiration and motivation to emulate. I will start by examining this view and will then present objections to it. I will then suggest an expanded account of the connection between admiration and motivation, according to which, admiration involves motivation to promote the value that is judged to be present in the object of admiration. Finally, I will examine the implications of this account for the use of admiration in education.

Suppose, we could take a pill that would turn us into morally better people. Would we have a duty to take such a pill? In recent years, a number of philosophers have discussed this issue. Most prominently, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have argued that we would have a duty to take such a pill. In this article, I wish to investigate the possible limits of a duty to take moral enhancement drugs through investigating the related question of whether it would be desirable to create a world populated entirely with morally perfect people. I argue, drawing on the work of Bernard Williams, Susan Wolf, and Michael Slote, that we have reason to be grateful that we do not live a world in which everyone is morally perfect, as this would prevent people from dedicating their lives to valuable nonmoral projects. I then argue that this thought should serve as a limitation on attempts to morally improve people through the use of technology. Finally, I explore the implications of this discussion for some of the less ambitious forms of moral enhancement currently being explored in the literature. I argue that these forms of enhancement give us no reason to worry about preventing valuable, morally imperfect ways of life. In fact, by acting as a shortcut to moral development, they might serve as an aid to help people fulfill valuable nonmoral goals in a way that is morally permissible.

How should feminists view acts of self-sacrifice performed by women? According to a long-standing critique of care ethics such acts ought to be viewed with scepticism. Care ethics, it is claimed, celebrates acts of self-sacrifice on the part of carers and in doing so encourages women to choose caring for others over their own self-development. In doing so, care ethics frustrates attempts to liberate women from the oppression of patriarchy. Care ethicists have responded to this critique by noting limits on the level, form, or scope of self-sacrifice that work to restrict its role in their theories. While we do not here take issue with the initial feminist critiques of self-sacrifice, we suspect that the strategies offered by Care ethicists in response are importantly flawed. Specifically, these responses undervalue the positive roles that self-sacrifice can play in fighting patriarchal oppression. As a result, in attempting to restrict an oppressive norm, these responses risk foreclosing on valuable means of resistance. Our aim is to explore these positive roles for self-sacrifice and thereby rehabilitate its standing with feminists.

Many accept that there are some acts that are ‘supererogatory’ or ‘beyond the call of duty’. Risking one’s life to save others or dedicating one’s life to helping the needy are often thought to be examples of such acts. Accepting the possibility of acts of this sort raises interesting problems for moral philosophy, as many moral theories appear to leave no room for the supererogatory. While these problems are increasingly recognized in moral philosophy, there remain a number of debates that have failed to pay sufficient attention to the existence of acts of this sort. In this thesis I investigate the implications of accepting the possibility of supererogation for three of these debates. The first issue I investigate is the relationship between morality and self-interest. One popular view is that supererogatory acts are those that demand too much sacrifice from those who could perform them. However, I argue that looking at self-reported accounts and empirical psychological studies of moral exemplars gives us good reason to reject this view, as it has the implausible implication that those with less developed moral consciences are excused from obligations that apply to those with more developed moral sensibilities. We should accept, then, that performing an act of supererogation may be in line with an agent's self-interest. The next debate I examine concerns the connection between moral judgements and motivation. Motivational judgement internalists claim that there is a necessary connection between moral judgements and motivation. However, it is often unclear which moral judgements this view is supposed to cover. The claim is made about judgements of 'moral goodness', 'moral rightness' and 'moral requirement'. I argue that internalists need to restrict their claim to moral obligation judgements. I then examine how to give an account of the relationship between moral obligations and reasons for action. It is often claimed that moral reasons are overriding. A related view is moral rationalism, which holds that agents have most reason to act in line with their moral requirements. I start by examining the differences between these two views before looking at what form of either view it is plausible to hold if we accept the existence of supererogation. I finish by looking at whether accepting the existence of supererogatory acts goes far enough or whether there is a need to make room for additional deontic categories, such as suberogation, quasi-supererogation or forced supererogation. I will argue that none of the arguments put forward in defence of these claims show that there is a need to make room for these additional categories.