Mike Martin

Twenty-five years ago the ethical position briefly sketched inToward Reunion in Philosophy seemed novel and exciting. For some reason White's ideas about ethics were not taken up and developed by others. (Even a recent extension of Quine's system to ethics seems either to ignore or to be unaware of White's early suggestions. This task was left for White himself over two decades later. Whether his latest development of his ethical position will become as widely discussed and influential as Quine's epistemological view on which it is based is uncertain. But until many of the problems raised above are answered “corporatism” is not perhaps a metaethical position that deserves to become popular. The promise ofToward Reunion of a viable Quinean metaethics has not been fulfilled

If we are responsible for taking care of our health, are we blameworthy when we become sick because we failed to meet that responsibility? Or is it immoral to blame the victim of sickness? A moral perspective that is sensitive to therapeutic concerns will downplay blame, but banishing all blame is neither feasible nor desirable. We need to understand the ambiguities surrounding moral responsibility in four contexts: (1) preventing sickness, (2) assigning financial liabilities for health care costs, (3) giving meaning to human suffering, and (4) interacting with health care professionals. We also need to distinguish different kinds of blame, explore the interplay of justice and compassion in avoiding unjustified blaming of victims, and work toward a unified moral-therapeutic perspective that encourages individuals to accept responsibility while avoiding destructive forms of blaming

‘Marital faithfulness’ refers to faithful love for a spouse or lover to whom one is committed, rather than the narrower idea of sexual fidelity. The distinction is clearly marked in traditional wedding vows. A commitment to love faithfully is central: ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part… and thereto I plight [pledge] thee my troth [faithfulness]’. Sexual fidelity is promised in a subordinate clause, symbolizing its supportive role in promoting love's constancy: ‘and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her/him.’.

The study of engineering ethics tends to emphasize professional codes of ethics and, to lesser degrees, business ethics and technology studies. These are all important vantage points, but they neglect personal moral commitments, as well as personal aesthetic, religious, and other values that are not mandatory for all members of engineering. This paper illustrates how personal moral commitments motivate, guide, and give meaning to the work of engineers, contributing to both self-fulfillment and public goods. It also explores some general frameworks for thinking about these commitments and calls for further exploration of them.

Creativity in science and engineering has moral significance and deserves attention within professional ethics, in at least three areas. First, much scientific and technological creativity constitutes moral creativity because it generates moral benefits, is motivated by moral concern, and manifests virtues such as beneficence, courage, and perseverance. Second, creativity contributes to the meaning that scientists and engineers derive from their work, thereby connecting with virtues such as authenticity and also faults arising from Faustian trade-offs. Third, morally creative leadership is important at all levels of science and engineering.

It is now commonplace to call persons sick when their wrongdoing becomes entrenched, extensive, and extreme. This mixing of moral and therapeutic categories seems incoherent if we uncritically embrace a morality-therapy dichotomy: Behavioral problems like alcoholism are either moral or therapeutic matters, but not both. This paper dissolves the dichotomy by arguing that chronically abusive drinking is simultaneously a sickness and wrongdoing. Alcoholism is at least partly a self-inflicted impairment of responsible agency that has unhealthy consequences and usually requires therapeutic interventions. Morality and therapy are not inherently opposed. Morality enjoins compassionate helping and nonjudgemental therapy, and therapy is rooted in moral values of caring and respect. The polarized positions of Herbert Fingarette in Heavy Drinking and George E. Vaillant in The Natural History of Alcoholism are reconciled by paying close attention to their accounts of the condition, causes, consequences, and cure of alcoholism

Positive psychologists aspire to study the moral virtues, as well as positive emotions, while retaining scientific objectivity. Within this framework, Martin Seligman, a founder of positive psychology, offers an empirically-based argument for an ancient and venerable theme: happiness can be increased by exercising the virtues. Seligman's project is promising, but it needs to pay greater attention to several methodological matters: greater care in defining happiness, so as to avoid smuggling in value assumptions of the sort suggested by the title of his book, Authentic Happiness; more attention to the gap between happiness as overall satisfaction and specific gratifications ; the danger of sliding to subjectivism by equating self-assessments of virtue with objectively-justified values of the sort Aristotle had in mind; awareness of how “positive” emotions and attitudes presuppose value assumptions