Michael Cholbi

abstract Ryan Tonkens proposes that my Kantian approach to suicide intervention with respect to the mentally ill (2002) wrongly assumes that the suicidally mentally ill are rational and are therefore rational agents to whom Kantian moral constraints ought to apply. Here I indicate how the empirical evidence concerning the suicidally mentally ill does not support Tonkens' criticism that the suicidally mentally ill are irrational. In particular, that evidence does not support the conclusion that such individuals are systemically practically irrational so as to undermine the attribution of at least minimal rational autonomy to them. A Kantian moral framework, albeit one developed in a non-ideal direction, remains applicable to such individuals.

Conservatives commonly claim that systems of formal education are biased against conservative ideology. I argue that this claim is incorrect, but not because there is no bias against conservatives in formal education. A wide swath of psychological evidence linking personality and ideology indicates that conservatives and liberals differ in their learning orientations, that is, in the values, motivations, and beliefs they bring to learning tasks. These differences in operative epistemologies explain many demographic phenomena relating educational achievement and political ideology. Systems of formal education thus disadvantage conservatives, especially in the later stages of formal education. Conservatives are therefore ‘selected against’ in the process of formal education, not due to their values or ideology but because their learning orientations are not especially conducive to academic success beyond a certain point. However, because the bias against conservatives in not ideological in origin, a case cannot be made that conservatives are victims of institutional injustice. This bias against conservatives in formal education could be mitigated were the purposes of formal education radically modified (the education of the military class in Plato’s Republic serves as a model). But such a model of formal education would ill serve the needs of modern, industrialized, information-driven societies.

Philosophical discussions of the morality of suicide have tended to focus on its justifiability from an agent’s point of view rather than on the justifiability of attempts by others to intervene so as to prevent it. This paper addresses questions of suicide intervention within a broadly Kantian perspective. In such a perspective, a chief task is to determine the motives underlying most suicidal behaviour. Kant wrongly characterizes this motive as one of self-love or the pursuit of happiness. Psychiatric and scientific evidence suggests that suicide is instead motivated by a nihilistic disenchantment with the possibility of happiness which, at its apex, results in the loss of the individual’s conception of her practical identity. Because of this, methods of intervention that appeal to agents’ happiness, while morally benign, will prove ineffective in forestalling suicide. At the same time, more aggressive methods violate the Kantian concern for autonomy. This apparent dilemma can be resolved by seeing suicide intervention as an action undertaken in non-ideal circumstances, where otherwise unjustified manipulation, coercion, or paternalism are morally permitted.

Numerous studies indicate that racial minorities are both more likely to be executed for murder and that those who murder them are less likely to be executed than if they murder whites. Death penalty opponents have long attempted to use these studies to argue for a moratorium on capital punishment. Whatever the merits of such arguments, they overlook the fact that such discrimination alters the costs of murder; racial discrimination imposes higher costs on minorities for murdering through tougher sentences, and it imposes lower costs on whites for murdering minorities by dispensing weaker sentences. These cost differentials constitute an injustice not simply to actual minority defendants in capital cases, nor simply to the actual minority victims of murder, but to all members of minority communities. I here offer two arguments for a moratorium on capital punishment: The first draws upon evidence of racial discrimination against minority defendants in capital cases, and claims that such discrimination modifies the costs of murder in such a way that minority individuals do not enjoy equal status under the law. The second draws upon the evidence regarding racial discrimination in relation to the race of victims, and claims that such discrimination modifies the costs of murder in such a way that minority individuals do not enjoy the equal protection of the law. Thus, by not assigning equal costs to murder, the American criminal justice system fails to provide racial minorities the equality under the law and discounts the value of their lives and liberties. A moratorium is the least unjust response to such a social injustice. I also reply to the criticism that a moratorium prevents us from executing deserving murderers.

T.M. Scanlon has recently proposed what I term a ‘double attitude’ account of blame, wherein blame is the revision of one’s attitudes in light of another person’s conduct, conduct that we believe reveals that the individual lacks the normative attitudes we judge essential to our relationship with her. Scanlon proposes that this account justifies differences in blame that in turn reflect differences in outcome luck. Here I argue that although the double attitude account can justify blame’s being sensitive to outcome luck, it cannot justify allocating blame differently when agents with the same attitudes differ only with respect to the luck-based outcomes of their actions. However, Scanlon’s own contractualist theory of morality can be invoked to show that the double attitude account is compatible with blame-based sanctions (e.g., compensation mandated when negligence or reckless result in harm) being sensitive to outcome luck. The resultant view of blame and luck remains desert-based while making sense of the common intuition that differences in outcome luck can matter to how lucky and unlucky individuals are justifiably treated.

Kant's claim that the rational will has absolute value or dignity appears to render any prudential suicide morally impermissible. Although the previous appeals of Kantians (e. g., David Velleman) to the notion that pain or mental anguish can compromise dignity and justify prudential suicide are unsuccessful, these appeals suggest three constraints that an adequate Kantian defense of prudential suicide must meet. Here I off er an account that meets these constraints. Central to this account is the contention that some suicidal agents, because they are unable to fashion a rational conception of their own happiness, are diminished with respect to their dignity of humanity, and as a result, lack the pricelessness that makes prudential suicide wrong on a Kantian view.

The various jurisdictions worldwide that now legally permit assisted suicide (or voluntary euthanasia) vary concerning the medical conditions needed to be legally eligible for assisted suicide. Some jurisdictions require that an individual be suffering from an unbearable and futile medical condition that cannot be alleviated. Others require that individuals must be suffering from a terminal illness that will result in death within a specified timeframe, such as six months. Popular and academic discourse about assisted suicide paradigmatically focuses on individuals with ‘physical,’ i.e., non-psychiatric medical conditions, such as cancer or AIDS. Here I defend analyses of the notions of unbearable suffering, futility, and terminality that imply that, regardless of which of these medical conditions is invoked, at least some individuals with severe and persistent psychiatric illnesses satisfy these conditions and ought to be classified as legally eligible for assisted suicide. The legal and moral case for a right to assisted suicide is therefore not in principle weaker for the severely psychiatrically disordered than for those with ‘typical’ terminal or futile medical conditions.

Suicide is a controversial ethical issue in large part because the reasonings of and above appear plausible but support contradictory conclusions. in effect asks: Why should we be granted an exemption to the prohibition on human killing when the person we kill is ourselves? What makes killing oneself so special? on the other hand starts from the intuition that there is something special or distinctive about the moral relationship we stand in to ourselves, a relationship that can at least sometimes morally justify suicide. The reasoning of and thus establishes the contours of the ethical debate concerning the permissibility of suicide and explains why suicide is one of the most hotly debated issues in bioethics.

Hazing is a widespread moral phenomenon that has attracted little theoretical discussion. Here are my purposes are two fold: First, I provide a characterization of hazing that captures the features relevant to analyzing and evaluating hazing from a moral point of view. Hazing is harmful or humiliating transaction between members of a coveted group and an individual seeking membership in said group where the transaction bears no intrinsic relationship to the group’s mission. Second, I provide an analysis of the moral wrongs of hazing that is broadly Kantian in spirit. The wrongfulness of hazing cannot be captured in terms of familiar categories of wrongdoing wherein individuals are treated as mere means (e.g., deception or coercion). However, hazing has no place in Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, for as a form of social interaction, it exploits and endorses an inequality between the hazer and the hazed that is antithetical to the equality of rational worth characteristic of social interaction in the Kingdom of Ends. In addition, hazing amounts to an invitation for a person to trade their humanity or self-respect in exchange for full inclusion in a group or organization. Issuing such an invitation, I claim, violates a Kantian duty to treat others’ humanity as an end in itself, violating a duty not to “give scandal” by tempting others to act in ways they will later have grounds to rationally regret.

Motivational internalism (MI) holds that, necessarily, if an agent judges that she is morally obligated to ø, then, that agent is, to at least some minimal extent, motivated to ø. Opponents of MI sometimes invoke depression as a counterexample on the grounds that depressed individuals appear to sincerely affirm moral judgments but are ‘listless’ and unmotivated by such judgments. Such listlessness is a credible counterexample to MI, I argue, only if the actual clinical disorder of depression, rather than a merely hypothetical example of such listlessness, is the source of this listlessness. However, empirical evidence concerning depression shows that, to the extent that the depressed are motivationally listless at all, they are abnormally listless only with respect to an important class of non-moral judgments, namely, their prudential normative judgments (i.e., those concerning their own happiness and well-being), not their moral judgments. Hence, depressed individuals do not constitute a counterexample to MI. This conclusion has important methodological implications concerning how supporters and opponents of MI can best defend their respective theses.

In “What is Wrong with Rational Suicide,” Pilpel and Amsel develop a counterexample that allegedly confounds attempts to condition the moral permissibility of suicide on its rationality. In this counterexample, a healthy middle aged woman with significant life accomplishments, but no dependents, disease, or mental disorder opts to end her life painlessly after reading philosophical texts that persuade her that life is meaningless and bereft of intrinsic value. Many people would judge her suicide “a bad mistake” despite its meeting “robust” conditions for rationality. Hence, Pilpel and Amsel conclude, even robust conditions for the rationality of suicide “fail to do their job: to exclude intuitively unacceptable suicides from being permissible.” I argue here that this counterexample fails to cast doubt on philosophical attempts to account for the moral permissibility of suicide in terms of its rationality.