Michael Cholbi

The metatethical position known as motive internalism (MI) holds that moral beliefs are necessarily motivating. Adina Roskies (in Philosophical Psychology, 16) has recently argued against MI by citing patients with injuries to the ventromedial (VM) cortex as counterexamples to MI. Roskies claims that not only do these patients not act in accordance with their professed moral beliefs, they exhibit no physiological or affective evidence of being motivated by these beliefs. I argue that Roskies' attempt to falsify MI is unpersuasive because the evidence used to attribute the relevant moral beliefs to VM patients is insufficient: Contra Roskies, that VM patients are proficient moral reasoners does not establish the presence of these moral beliefs. In addition, the linguistic evidence Roskies cites (a) is vulnerable to methodological worries about its reliability or authenticity, (b) does not override counterevidence derived from the patients' nonlinguistic behavior, and (c) is undermined by VM patients' inability to correctly attribute moral beliefs to others. I conclude with a proposal about how MI should be interpreted, given that it is not falsified by empirical evidence of the sort put forth by Roskies.

Samuel Scheffler has recently defended what he calls the ‘afterlife conjecture’, the claim that many of our evaluative attitudes and practices rest on the assumption that human beings will continue to exist after we die. Scheffler contends that our endorsement of this claim reveals that our evaluative orientation has four features: non-experientialism, non-consequentialism, ‘conservatism,’ and future orientation. Here I argue that the connection between the afterlife conjecture and these four features is not as tight as Scheffler seems to suppose. In fact, those with an evaluative orientation that rejects these four features have equally strong moral reasons to endorse the existence of the collective afterlife

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

According to rational will views of paternalism, the wrongmaking feature of paternalism is that paternalists disregard or fail to respect the rational will of the paternalized, in effect substituting their own presumably superior judgments about what ends the paternalized ought to pursue or how they ought to pursue them. Here I defend a version of the rational will view appealing to three rational powers that constitute rational agency, which I call recognition, discrimination, and satisfaction. By appealing to these powers, my version of the rational will view can rank the wrongfulness of paternalistic acts in terms of the extent to which such acts (a) amount to supplanting the paternalized individual’s identity as a rational agent with that of the paternalist, and (b) the degree of mistrust the paternalistic act shows in the paternalized individual’s rational agency. My rational powers account thus provides a more complete account of why paternalism is a powerful, but not decisive or absolute, objection to an act or policy. My rational powers account also provides powerful explanations of why rational suasion deflects charges of paternalism; why consenting to intercessions in one’s rational agency negates paternalism; why we ordinarily believe that strong paternalism is more objectionable than weak paternalism; and why we ordinarily believe that hard paternalism is more objectionable than soft paternalism.

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.

Evidence from the Apology, Crito, Protagoras, and Gorgias is mustered in defense of the claim that for Socrates, dialectic typifies just punishment: Dialectic benefits the punished by making her more just, since it disabuses her of the false beliefs that stand in the way of her acquiring knowledge of justice. Though painful and disorienting to the interlocutor, having one’s opinions refuted by Socrates—who is wiser than his interlocutors due to his awareness of the vastness of his ignorance—is in fact a benefit. Socrates’ attitude toward his own pending death sentence, his claim that the virtues are unified around wisdom, and his opposition to vengeance or retaliation as a moral motive, all underscore how dialectical engagement is a paradigm instance of just Socratic punishment.

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

Kant's view that we have only indirect duties to animals fails to capture the intuitive notion that wronging animals transgresses duties we owe to those animals. Here I argue that a suitably modified Kantianism can allow for direct duties to animals and, in particular, an imperfect duty to promote animal welfare without unduly compromising its core theoretical commitments, especially its commitments concerning the source and nature of our duties toward rational beings. The basis for such duties is that animal welfare, on my revised Kantian view, is neither a conditioned nor unconditioned good, but a final and nonderivative good that ought to be treated as an end-in-itself. However, this duty to promote animal welfare operates according to a broadly consequentialist logic that both accords well with our considered judgments about our duties to animals and explains differences between these duties and duties owed to rational agents

Critics often charge that Kantian ethics is implausibly rigoristic: that Kantianism recognizes a set of perfect duties, encapsulated in rules such as ‘don’t lie,’ ‘keep one’s promises,’ etc., and that these rules apply without exception. Though a number of Kantians have plausibly argued that Kantianism can acknowledge exceptions to perfect duties, this acknowledgment alone does not indicate how and when such exceptions ought to be made. This article critiques a recent attempt to motivate how such exceptions are to be made, namely, the constitutive approach developed by Tamar Schapiro. I argue that the constitutive approach is vulnerable to the objection that it is too permissive, justifying many morally dubious exceptions to perfect duties. I conclude by briefly outlining an alternative ‘fine print’ approach to the rigorism objection that appears to avoid the objection leveled at Schapiro’s approach, focusing on how modifying the constituents of agents’ maxims can change the deontic status of an act of a generally impermissible kind

Philosophical defenses of parents’ rights typically appeal to the interests of parents, the interests of children, or some combination of these. Here I propose that at least in the case of biological, non-adoptive parents, these rights have a different normative basis: namely, these rights should be accorded to biological parents because of the compensatory duties such parents owe their children by virtue of having brought them into existence. Inspried by Seana Shiffrin, I argue that procreation inevitably encumbers the wills of children in otherwise morally objectionable ways. Such subjection generates duties to compensate children, even if the child’s life is on balance a benefit to her. The right to procreate is thus conditioned on prospective parent’s willingness to compensate for the harms of procreation. And because parents bear such compensatory duties, they must be accorded permissions (i.e., rights) to fulfill these duties. These rights include familiar exclusionary rights to promote children’s welfare, etc. Moreover, because subjecting children to harms or the risks thereof violates their autonomy, parental duties (and rights) include the provision of education and other goods that enable their subsequent autonomy as adults. Grounding parental rights in compensatory procreative duties avoids problems associated with appeals to the interests of children (e.g., that these interests do not seem to generate exclusive parental rights) or to the interests of parents (e.g., that these interests do not appear strong enough to permit the creation of a new, vulnerable human individual).

Defends Kantian paternalism: Interference with an individual’s liberty for her own sake is justified absent her actual consent only to the extent that such interference stands a reasonable chance of preventing her from exercising her liberty irrationally in light of the rationally chosen ends that constitute her conception of the good. More specifically, interference with an individual’s liberty is permissible only if, by interfering, we stand a reasonable chance of preventing that agent from performing actions she chose due to distorted reasoning and which would result in that agent’s rationally chosen ends not being as fully realized as they would have been had she so acted. Applied to suicide intervention Kantian paternalism implies that such intervention is justified to the extent that it prevents a person from ending her life when, due to distorted reasoning, she engages in suicidal behavior that is at odds with her rationally chosen ends.

Utilitarians are supposed to have difficulty accounting for our obligation to keep promises. But utilitarians also face difficulties concerning our obligation to make promises. Consider any situation in which the options available to me are acts A, B, C… n, and A is utility maximizing. Call A+ the course of action consisting of A plus my promising to perform A. Since there appear to be a wide range of instances in which A+ has greater net utility then A, utilitarianism obligates us to make far more promises than even the most expansive views concerning our obligations to make promises would acknowledge.

Ockham appeared to maintain that God necessarily knows all true propositions, including future contingent propositions, despite the fact that such propositions have determinate truth values. While some commentators believe that Ockham’s attempt to reconcile divine omniscience with the contingency of true future propositions amounts to little more than a simple-minded assertion of Ockham’s Christian faith, I argue that Ockham’s position is more sophisticated than this and rests on attributing to God a dual knowledge property: God not only knows every true proposition, but knows its modal properties as well. Future contingent propositions are determinately true when actualized, not timelessly, and God’s knowledge of their truth values is knowledge of when the truth value of a proposition is actually determined.

Embarrassed by the apparent rigorism Kant expresses so bluntly in 'On a Supposed Right to Lie,' numerous contemporary Kantians have attempted to show that Kant's ethics can justify lying in specific circumstances, in particular, when lying to a murderer is necessary in order to prevent her from killing another innocent person. My aim is to improve upon these efforts and show that lying to prevent the death of another innocent person could be required in Kantian terms. I argue (1) that our perfect Kantian duty of self-preservation can require our lying to save our own lives when threatened with unjust aggression, and (2) that Kant's understanding of moral duty was that duties are symmetrical , such that if one has a duty to perform a given action on one's own behalf or to protect one's own rational nature, then one also has a duty to perform similar acts on other's behalf or to protect their rational nature. Thus, that the individual protected against aggression by means of deception is not oneself should be of no consequence from a Kantian perspective. Lying to the murderer is thus an extension of the Kantian requirement of self-defense.

Preface Introduction PART I 1 Kant’s pursuit of the Supreme Principle of Morality 2 The Categorical Imperative and the Kantian theory of value, part I 3 The Categorical Imperative and the Kantian theory of value, part II 4 Dignity 5 Freedom, reason, and the possibility of the Categorical Imperative PART II 6 Objections to the Formula of Universal Law 7 Three problems in Kant’s practical ethics 8 Reason and sentiment: Kantian ethics in a good human life Conclusion Index

In “On duties to oneself,” Marcus G. Singer argued that, contrary to long established philosophical tradition, there are no duties to oneself. Singer observes that to have a duty is to be accountable to someone for that duty’s fulfillment, and while she to whom a duty is owed may release the person who has the duty from being bound to fulfill it, the latter cannot release herself from the duty. For releasing oneself from a duty is no different from simply opting not to fulfill it, which would make the duty no more than a mere option and rob it of its categorical character. Singer thus argues that (a) A has a duty against herself; (b) if A has a duty against herself, then A is accountable to herself for the duty’s performance; (c) if A has a duty against herself, A can release herself from the duty; and (d) because a person is accountable to the individual owed the duty for its fulfillment, no one can release herself from an obligation, form an inconsistent set

Grief is our emotional response to the deaths of intimates, and so like many other emotional conditions, it can be appraised in terms of its rationality. A philosophical account of grief's rationality should satisfy a contingency constraint, wherein grief is neither intrinsically rational nor intrinsically irrational. Here I provide an account of grief and its rationality that satisfies this constraint, while also being faithful to the phenomenology of grief experience. I begin by arguing against the best known account of grief's rationality, Gustafson's strategic or forward-looking account, according to which the practical rationality of grief depends on the internal coherence of the component attitudes that explain the behaviors caused by grief, and more exactly, on how these attitudes enable the individual to realize states of affairs that she desires. While I do not deny that episodes of grief can be appraised in terms of their strategic rationality, I deny that strategic rationality is the essential or fundamental basis on which grief's rationality should be appraised. In contrast, the heart of grief's rationality is backward-looking. That is, what primarily makes an episode of grief rational qua grief is the fittingness of the attitudes individuals take toward the experience of a lost relationship, attitudes which in turn generate the desires and behaviors that constitute bereavement. Grief thus derives its essential rationality from the objects it responds to, not from the attitudes causally downstream from that response, and is necessarily irrational when the behaviors that constitute an individual's grieving are inappropriate to the object of that grief. So while the strategic rationality of an episode of grief contributes to whether it is on the whole rational, no episode of grief can be rational unless the actions that constitute grieving accurately gauge the change in a person's normative situation wrought by the loss of her relationship with the deceased.

Though Kant calls the prohibition against suicide the first duty of human beings to themselves, his arguments for this duty lack his characteristic rigor and systematicity. The lack of a single authoritative Kantian approach to suicide casts doubt on what is generally regarded as an extreme and implausible position, to wit, that not only is suicide wrong in every circumstance, but is among the gravest moral wrongs. Here I try to remedy this lack of systematicity in order to show that Kant's position on suicide is more appealing and credible than it seems at first glance. Kant in fact offers three distinct lines of argument against suicide. The first, the chief argument in his Lectures on Ethics, holds that suicide violates the divine will, for in willing our own deaths we usurp God's right to determine the duration of our existence; as God's property, we are not entitled to end our own lives willfully. The second, rooted in the Groundwork, holds that suicide is incompatible with a system of willed ends conceived analogously with a system of nature, so a maxim to commit suicide cannot be coherently willed as a universal practical principle. The third argument, drawn from the Metaphysics of Morals, holds that because suicide obliterates the rational will from the world, and as the rational will is the source of moral worth, suicide cannot be consistently willed by beings subject to moral requirements. To authorize oneself to take one's own life, Kant claims, is to attempt 'to withdraw from all obligation.' We cannot, under the color of morality, seek to cancel the will that authorizes all obligation in the first place. This third argument is demonstrably superior to the other two in being both more philosophically plausible in its own right and more Kantian in flavor.

Christine Korsgaard has argued recently that the thesis that reasons are "essentially public" undermines the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons, thus refuting egoism by rejecting its commitment to the universal availability of agent-relative reasons. I conclude that Korsgaard's invocation of the essential publicity of reasons trades on ambiguities concerning the "sharing" of reasons and so does not refute egoism and does not ground moral normativity. Her account of the publicity of reasons shows that solipsism is incoherent, but the egoist need not be a solipsist, nor is she an incompetent user of moral language or the language of reasons.

Legal statutes prohibiting felons from voting result in nearly 4 million Americans, disproportionately African-American and male, being unable to vote. These felony disenfranchisement (FD) statutes have a long history and apparently enjoy broad public support. Here I argue that despite the popularity and extensive history of these laws, denying felons the right to vote is an unjust form of punishment in a democratic state. FD serves none of the recognized purposes of punishment and may even exacerbate crime. My strategy is not to argue for this conclusion directly. Rather, I consider seven arguments for the moral legitimacy of FD, each of which will be found lacking. My emphasis falls not on the legal or constitutional questions associated with FD, but with its moral justification within a broadly liberal political framework. These arguments draw upon a variety of philosophical outlooks; three justify FD by appealing to justice or desert, three others justify FD based on its allegedly beneficial social consequences, and a final argument is a hybrid of both sorts of considerations. Not only do all these arguments fail, but eliminating FD could have salutary effects on our present climate of political discourse.

The traditional debate about moral dilemmas concerns whether there are circumstances in which an agent is subject to two obligations that cannot both be fulfilled. Realists maintain there are. Irrealists deny this. Here I defend an alternative, methodologically-oriented position wherein the denial of genuine moral dilemmas functions as a regulative ideal for moral deliberation and practice. That is, moral inquiry and deliberation operate on the implicit assumption that there are no genuine moral dilemmas. This view is superior to both realism and irrealism in accounting for moral residue and other crucial phenomenological dimensions of our experience of moral dilemmas.