Simon Keller

In meeting legal or professional fiduciary obligations, a fiduciary can sometimes come to share a special moral relationship with her beneficiary. Special moral relationships produce special moral obligations. Sometimes the obligations faced by a fiduciary as a result of her moral relationship with her beneficiary go beyond the obligations involved in the initial fiduciary relationship. How such moral obligations develop is sometimes under the control of the beneficiary, or of an outside party. As a result, the fiduciary can be the target of a distinctive kind of moral manipulation; it is sometimes possible to force a fiduciary to perform a particular act by placing her into circumstances under which she is morally obliged to perform it, because all her other options are morally unacceptable. This is moral blackmail. Moral blackmail is a powerful force within many sorts of human interactions. By understanding the ways in which fiduciaries become vulnerable to moral blackmail, we can better understand the pressures faced by fiduciaries in keeping their personal and professional lives separate, the dynamics of certain kinds of employment negotiations, and the injustice that results when women take on the bulk of the work within caring professions.

To show affective empathy is to share in another person's experiences, including her emotions. Most philosophers who write about emotions accept the broadly cognitivist view that emotions are rationally connected with beliefs. We argue that affective empathy is also rationally connected with belief; you can only share in another's emotions insofar as you can share certain of her beliefs. In light of that claim, we argue that affective empathy brings both epistemic dangers and epistemic benefits, that the ideal of universal empathy cannot be built upon affective empathy, and that affective empathy cannot be the basis of morality.

We prize loyalty in our friends, lovers and colleagues, but loyalty raises difficult questions. What is the point of loyalty? Should we be loyal to country, just as we are loyal to friends and family? Can the requirements of loyalty conflict with the requirements of morality? In this book, originally published in 2007, Simon Keller explores the varieties of loyalty and their psychological and ethical differences, and concludes that loyalty is an essential but fallible part of human life. He argues that grown children can be obliged to be loyal to their parents, that good friendship can sometimes conflict with moral and epistemic standards, and that patriotism is intimately linked with certain dangers and delusions. He goes on to build an approach to the ethics of loyalty that differs from standard communitarian and universalist accounts. His book will interest a wide range of readers in ethics and political philosophy.

Wie wird in unterschiedlichen Berufsfeldern Vertrauen geweckt und stabilisiert? Der vorliegende Studienband, der im Rahmen des interdisziplinaren Zurcher Forschungsprojektes "Vertrauen verstehen. Grundlagen, Formen und Grenzen des Vertrauens" entstanden ist, gibt darauf bereichsspezifische Antworten. Auf der Basis bisheriger Forschung werden typische Formen und Probleme professioneller Vertrauenskommunikation beleuchtet. Im Fokus sind die Bereiche Medizin, Psychotherapie, Seelsorge, (Religions-)Padagogik sowie Managementlehre. Der multiperspektivische Blick ermoglicht es, unterschiedliche Formen von Vertrauenskommunikation und spezifische Vertrauensprobleme genauer zu beschreiben und besser zu verstehen.

This chapter considers David Lewis's views about toleration, deterrence, punishment, and obligations to the distant poor, and asks what overall perspective in social and political philosophy we might take him to hold. It tries to make Lewis's views clear and emphasizes points suggestive of his overall perspective. The chapter highlights that Lewis's major claim about toleration does not take him as far as he thinks, and his major suggestion about punishment does not ultimately succeed on its own terms. Each of Lewis's papers in social and political philosophy begins with a puzzle about what we really think, or about how one of our practices can be justified, or about how we can achieve a shared goal. The author provides a putatively Lewisian picture of moral philosophy. Lewis's work in the philosophy displays his familiar cleverness, originality, and idiosyncrasy, and it contains distinctive and underappreciated contributions on several important questions.

Something enhances an individual's welfare if it makes her better off, or serves her best interests. The dissertation is an investigation into the nature of welfare, and the role that the notion of welfare should play in moral and political theory. Much discussion of these questions, I suggest, is predicated on some unhelpful assumptions about what welfare is, along with an impoverished conception of the sort of philosophical work that it can do. The main goal of the dissertation is to show that welfarism , according to which considerations of welfare have some sort of unrivalled place in ethical theory, is far more promising than is commonly believed. ;In the first two chapters, I develop a theory of welfare and criticize some of its rivals. I distinguish well-being---a measure of how things are going for an individual at a time---from success---a measure of how things go for an individual over an extended period---and suggest that these are mutually incommensurable aspects of individual welfare, each of which is susceptible to a subjectivist theoretical treatment. The third chapter offers a formulation and sympathetic discussion of welfarism; I claim, among other things, that the welfarist need not be a utilitarian or consequentialist. ;The second half of the dissertation is concerned with welfarist accounts of distributive justice and political freedom. In Chapter Four I argue that the well-known problem of expensive tastes does not offer a good reason to abandon welfarist theories of distributive justice, and in Chapter Five I outline a broad strategy for articulating and defending a kind of welfarist egalitarianism. In the sixth and final chapter I discuss some puzzles about the role that the notion of freedom is granted in political debate, and argue that the value of freedom, properly understood, is not in conflict with the value of welfare