Antti Kauppinen

At the first Online Philosophy Conference back in 2006, I offered some pretty thorough comments on Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder's x-phi studies on valuing. While they suggested that our concept of valuing involves moral considerations, I argue here that we can explain the observed asymmetries in attribution of values by appeal to the Principle of Charity, even if the concept of valuing is purely psychological and descriptive. Roughly, to make sense of people with conflicted attitudes, we tacitly attribute to them background attitudes that make them come out as lovers of the good as well as believers of truths and as rational as possible.

Moral philosophy is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is a fruitful research project in which ethicists investigate a range of different kinds of questions from the abstract metaethical puzzles concerning the meaning of moral language to the concrete ethical problems such as how much we should do to help other people. Yet, even if different answers to all these questions are intensively debated in moral philosophy, there is surprising little explicit reflection of what the appropriate ways of doing moral philosophy are. What are we entitled to assume as the starting-points of our ethical inquiry? What is the role of empirical sciences in ethics? Is there just one general method for doing moral philosophy or should different questions in moral philosophy be answered in different ways? Are there argumentative structures and strategies that we should be encouraged to use or common problematic argumentative patterns that we should avoid? This volume brings together leading moral philosophers to consider these questions systematically. The chapters investigate the prospects of empirical ethics, outline new methods of ethics, evaluate recent methodological advances, and explore whether different areas of moral philosophy are methodologically continuous or independent of one another.

Eriarvoisuuspuheella voidaan viitata moniin eri asioihin. Usein sillä tarkoitetaan hyvien asioiden epätasaista jakautumista. Ei kuitenkaan ole itsessään huono asia, että joillakin menee paremmin kuin toisilla. Silloin kun taloudellinen eriarvoisuus on ongelma, kyse on sen syistä tai seurauksista. On kuitenkin myös itsessään moraalisesti ongelmallinen eriarvoisuuden muoto, jota kutsun erivertaisuudeksi. Siinä on kyse joidenkin herruudesta ja ylivallasta toisiin nähden tai siitä, että joitakin suositaan järjestelmällisesti toisten kustannuksella. Erivertaisuus ei sovi yhteen jokaisen yksilön moraalisen tasa-arvoisuuden kanssa, joten se on itsessään huono asia. Oikeudenmukaisuus vaatii kansalaisten tasavertaisuutta, jota merkittävä taloudellinen eriarvoisuus uhkaa monella tavalla.

Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best kind of narrativist views actually encourage us to pursue a variety of different projects, as long as they are mutually supportive. When interpreted in the most plausible way, prudentially good-making narrative coherence arises precisely out of this kind of unity in diversity. Well-roundedness and narrative coherence are thus not inherently in tension, but are both good-making holistic features of lives.