Michael Cholbi

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

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.

Here I pursue two main aims: (1) to articulate and defend a Kantian conception of duties to self, and (2) to explore the ramifications of such duties for the moral justification of paternalism. I conclude that there is a distinctive reason to resent paternalistic intercessions aimed at assisting others in fulfilling their duties to self (or the self-regarding virtues necessary thereunto), based on the fact that the goods realized via their fulfillment are historical, i.e., their value depends on an individual's casual contribution to their fulfillment.

Thanks to recent scholarship, Kant is no longer seen as the dogmatic opponent of suicide he appears at first glance. However, some interpreters have recently argued for a Kantian view of the morality of suicide with surprising, even radical, implications. More specifically, they have argued that Kantianism requires that those with dementia or other rationality-eroding conditions end their lives before their condition results in their loss of identity as moral agents, and requires subjecting the fully demented or those confronting future dementia to non-voluntary euthanasia. Properly understood, Kant’s ethics has neither of these implications. wrongly assumes that rational agents’ duty of self-preservation entails a duty of self-destruction when they become non-rational. further neglects Kant’s distinction between duties to self and duties to others and wrongly assumes that duties can be owed to rational agents only during the time of their existence.

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.

Many contributors to debates about professional conscience assume a basic, pre-professional right of conscientious refusal and proceed to address how to ‘balance’ this right against other goods. Here I argue that opponents of a right of conscientious refusal concede too much in assuming such a right, overlooking that the professions in which conscientious refusal is invoked nearly always operate as public cartels, enjoying various economic benefits, including protection from competition, made possible by governments exercising powers of coercion, regulation, and taxation. To acknowledge a right of conscientious refusal is to license professionals to disrespect the profession’s clients, in opposition to liberal ideals of neutrality, and to engage in moral paternalism toward them; to permit them to violate duties of reciprocity they incur by virtue of being members of public cartels; and to compel those clients to provide material support for conceptions of the good they themselves reject. However, so long...

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

Ethical debates about assisted dying typically assume that only medical professionals should be able to provide patients with assisted dying. This assumption partially rests on the unstated principle that assisted dying providers may not be motivated by pecuniary considerations. Here I outline and defend a mixed provider model of assisted dying provision that contests this principle. Under this model, medically competent non-physician professionals could receive fees for providing assisted dying under the same terms and conditions as physicians can in those juris- dictions where medically assisted dying is lawful. The mixed provider model blunts objections to assisted dying rooted in supposed clashes with medical values. In addition to generating a market likely to expand access to assisted dying, the mixed provider model would not create markets that are unjust because they are “noxious” in Satz’ sense or because they raise “semiotic” concerns about the value of human life.

One principal challenge to the rationalist thesis that the demands of morality are requirements of rationality has been that posed by the "rational egoist." In attempting to answer's the egoist's challenge, some rationalists have supposed that an adequate reply must take the form of a deductive argument that "converts" the egoist by showing that her position is contradictory, arbitrary, or violates some precept that defines practical rationality as such. Here I argue (a) that such rationalist replies will fail to persuade the egoist to adopt a recognizably moral way of life; (b) that this failure can be traced to epistemic assumptions that underlie typical rationalist replies; (c) that egoist conversion can better be understood by rejecting these assumptions and seeing egoist conversion as akin to a paradigm shift in the sciences; and (d) that conceptualizing egoist conversion as a paradigm shift accords with empirical psychological evidence regarding the acquisition and modification of individuals' moral attitudes and beliefs.

Philosophers have harbored doubts about the possibility of moral expertise since Plato. I argue that irrespective of whether moral experts exist, identifying who those experts are is insurmountable because of the credentials problem: Moral experts have no need to seek out others’ moral expertise, but moral non-experts lack sufficient knowledge to determine whether the advice provided by a putative moral expert in response to complex moral situations is correct and hence whether an individual is a bone fide expert. Traditional accounts of moral expertise require that moral experts give reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification, an account which, I argue, is too lean in allowing for the possibility of a moral expert who is motivationally indifferent to her own moral judgments and advice. Yet even if the proposition that a moral expert is an individual who provides reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification and is necessarily motivated by that advice exhausts the necessary and sufficient conditions for moral expertise, this proposition cannot function as an applicable criterion for non-experts to use in appraising would-be experts’ claims to expertise. The credentials problem thus remains unanswered.

Morality seems to require us to attend to the good of others, but does not require that we assign any importance to our own good. Standard forms of consequentialism thus appear vulnerable to the compulsory self-benefit objection: they require agents to benefit themselves when doing so is entailed by the requirement of maximizing overall impersonal good. Attempts to address this objection by appealing to ideally motivated consequentialist agents; by rejecting maximization; by leveraging consequentialist responses to the more familiar special relationships and demandingness objections; or by appealing to dual rankings of moral and all-things-considered reasons fall short of adequately answering this objection. A satisfactory response to the compulsory self-benefit objection is elusive because of consequentialism struggles to account for directed options (in this case, an option not to maximize one’s own good but not that of others) and for moral considerations that do not rest on the value of outcomes or states of affairs.

_Suicide_ was selected as a Choice _Outstanding Academic Title_ for 2012! _Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions_ is a provocative and comprehensive investigation of the main philosophical issues surrounding suicide. Readers will encounter seminal arguments concerning the nature of suicide and its moral permissibility, the duty to die, the rationality of suicide, and the ethics of suicide intervention. Intended both for students and for seasoned scholars, this book sheds much-needed philosophical light on one of the most puzzling and enigmatic human behaviors.

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

Respect appears to generate a puzzling self-other asymmetry: Respect for others can demand that we avoid knowledge of others or ignore that knowledge in deciding how we treat others. This demand for epistemic distancing lies behind the imperatives not to violate others’ privacy or to treat them paternalistically. Self-respect, in contrast, mandates that we pursue knowledge of ourselves and that we choose and act light of that self-knowledge. Individual agents thus do not have a duty to epistemically distance themselves from themselves; a fortiori, they have self-regarding duties to reduce such distance. This article elaborates this asymmetry and offers a plausible solution to it, rooted in the distinctive importance that self-knowledge (and acting in the world on the basis of that self-knowledge) has for self-respecting rational agents: Self-respecting agents have reasons to have others defer to their ‘surfaces’ or self-presentations in order to inhibit making themselves vulnerable to others in ways that undermine their self-respect by subordinating their wills to the wills of others. A measure of control over what others know about us and over what they do with that knowledge thus undergirds self-respect by enabling self-knowledge to play the role that it should play in the lives of self-respecting agents. Epistemic distancing thus operates in concert with the ways in which self-respecting agents value and pursue epistemic intimacy with themselves.

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

This article addresses the question of whether the arguments for a duty to die given by John Hardwig, the most prominent philosophical advocate of such a duty, are sound. Hardwig believes that the duty to die is relatively widespread among those with burdensome illnesses, dependencies, or medical conditions. I argue that although there are rare circumstances in which individuals have a duty to die, the situations Hardwig describes are not among these.After reconstructing Hardwig's argument for such a duty, highlighting his central premise that ill, dependent, or aged individuals can impose unfair burdens upon others by continuing to live, I clarify precisely what Hardwig intends by his thesis that many of us have a duty to die. I then show that an important disanalogy exists between an uncontroversial example in which an individual has a duty to die and the situations in which Hardwig proposes individuals have a duty to die. More specifically, in situations where a duty to die exists, an individual's having a duty to die logically implies that those she burdens have a right to kill that individual in self-defense. I then suggest that the burdens that ill, dependent, or aged individuals impose on their families, loved ones, or caregivers do not constitute the kind of threat that warrants the latter killing the former in self-defense. Hence, the duty to die is much rarer than Hardwig supposes

Introduction Cholbi, Michael (et al.) Pages 1-10 Assisted Dying and the Proper Role of Patient Autonomy Bullock, Emma C. Pages 11-25 Preventing Assistance to Die: Assessing Indirect Paternalism Regarding Voluntary Active Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide Schramme, Thomas Pages 27-40 Autonomy, Interests, Justice and Active Medical Euthanasia Savulescu, Julian Pages 41-58 Mental Illness, Lack of Autonomy, and Physician-Assisted Death Varelius, Jukka Pages 59-77 Euthanasia for Mental Suffering Raus, Kasper (et al.) Pages 79-96 Assisted Dying for Individuals with Dementia: Challenges for Translating Ethical Positions into Law Downie, Jocelyn (et al.) Pages 97-123 Clinical Ethics Consultation and Physician Assisted Suicide Adams, David M. Pages 125-147 License to Kill: A New Model for Excusing Medically Assisted Dying? Huxtable, Richard (et al.) Pages 149-168 Medically Enabled Suicides Cholbi, Michael Pages 169-184 Saving Lives with Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Organ Donation After Assisted Dying Shaw, David M. Pages 185-192 Implanted Medical Devices and End-of-Life Decisions Gill, Michael B. Pages 193-215 Everyday Attitudes About Euthanasia and the Slippery Slope Argument Feltz, Adam Pages 217-237 “You Got Me Into This…”: Procreative Responsibility and Its Implications for Suicide and Euthanasia Weinberg, Rivka Pages 239-252 .

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

Poverty in many societies is racialized, with poverty concentrated among particular racial groups. This article aims (a) to provide a philosophical account of how racialized poverty can represent an unjust form of inequality, and (b) to suggest the general direction that policies aiming to reduce racialized poverty ought to take in light of this account. (a) As a species of inequality, racialized poverty (whether absolute or relative) is not intrinsically morally objectionable. However, it can be extrinsically objectionable because it is caused by past or current racial injustice, undermines the value of specific goods to the impoverished, or contributes to objectionable deficiencies in impoverished groups’ political efficacy. (b) Racialized poverty is strongly intergenerational, tending to replicate itself between generations within racial groups. This suggests that approaches to its alleviation that offer income security to all members of those groups, rather than targeted opportunity to subsets of such groups, are both more just and more effective. In particular, societies with racialized poverty should strongly consider policies such as income guarantees, which act to counteract the income volatility that contribute to intergenerational racial poverty.

Grief seems difficult to locate within familiar emotion taxonomies, as it not a basic emotion nor a hybrid thereof. Here I propose that grief is better conceptualized as an emotionally rich attentional phenomenon rather than an emotion or sequence of emotions. In grieving, that another person has died, the loss incurred by the grieving, etc., occupy the forefront of the grieving subject’s consciousness while other candidate facts for their attention recede into the background. The former set of facts thus sist near the top of their mental “priority structures” throughout a grief event. The hypothesis that grief is attentional helps to explain several common phenomenological features of grief experience, underpins a credible ‘metaphysics’ of grief, accounts for the extent to which grief is susceptible to choice and agency, and addresses a recent puzzle regarding our reasons to grieve and our apparent proclivity toward ‘resilience’ in the face of grief.

The achievement of intentional learning is a powerful paradigm for the objectives and methods of the teaching of philosophy. This paradigm sees the objectives and methods of such teaching as based not simply on the mastery of content, but as rooted in attempts to shape the various affective and cognitive factors that influence students’ learning efforts. The goal of such pedagogy is to foster an intentional learning orientation, one characterized by self-awareness, active monitoring of the learning process, and a desire for publicly certified expertise. I provide a number of examples of philosophy-specific teaching strategies that follow this paradigm.

Much of the literature on the desirability of immortality (inspired by B. Williams) has considered whether the goods of mortal life would be exhausted in an immortal life (whether, i.e., immortality would necessarily end in tedium). However, there has been very little discussion of whether the bads of mortal life would also be exhausted in an immortal life, and more generally, how good immortal life would be on balance, particularly in comparison to a mortal life. Here I argue that there are compelling reasons to favor a mortal over an immortal life because a mortal life offers a higher ceiling for well-being and assigns our agency a greater role in how our lives turn out.

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.

Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives is the first book to offer students the full breadth of philosophical issues that are raised by the end of life. Included are many of the essential voices that have contributed to the philosophy of death and dying throughout history and in contemporary research. The 38 chapters in its nine sections contain classic texts and new short argumentative essays, specially commission for this volume by world-leading contemporary experts. Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying introduces students to both theoretical issues as well as urgent practical issues raised by human mortality, enabling instructors to adapt it to a wide array of institutions and student audiences. As a pedagogical benefit, PowerPoints, discussion questions, and test questions for each chapter are included as online ancillary materials.

Assertions of statements such as ‘it’s raining, but I don’t believe it’ are standard examples of what is known as Moore’s paradox. Here I consider moral equivalents of such statements, statements wherein individuals affirm moral judgments while also expressing motivational indifference to those judgments (such as ‘hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don’t care’). I argue for four main conclusions concerning such statements: 1. Such statements are genuinely paradoxical, even if not contradictory. 2. This paradoxicality can be traced to a form of epistemic self-defeat that also explains the paradoxicality of ordinary Moore-paradoxical statements. 3. Although a simple form of internalism about moral judgment and motivation can explain the paradoxicality of these moral equivalents, a more plausible explanation can be provided that does not rely on this simple form of internalism. 4. The paradoxicality of such statements suggests a more credible understanding of the thesis that those who are not motivated by their moral judgments are irrational.

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.