Jon Garthoff

This essay makes a case that the ethical phenomena of accountability and recognition are not, as is widely believed, grounded in the psychological capacity of self-conscious reflective thought characteristic of persons. We know this because we have relationships of accountability and recognition with some animals who are clearly not self-conscious in that sense. On the other hand, not all conscious animals are capable of accountability or recognition. Thus we must focus on a capacity intermediate between mere conscious awareness and self-consciousness in order to explain accountability and recognition.

In this essay I explore the need for a conception of beatitude within secular ethical theory. In the gospels and Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, beatitude is claimed to consist in closeness to God or heaven, in participating – to the extent humans are thought capable of this – in the divine. This notion may appear to be among the most dispensable when theorizing ethics apart from theology. But I think a complete secular ethics will include a conception of beatitude, and in this essay I attempt to explain why. This ambition may be less surprising if it is viewed also as an entry into the increasingly popular topic of meaningfulness. The phenomenon of secular beatitude theorized here is a type of meaningfulness; the term “beatitude”, however, enjoys benefits over already-secular terms like “meaningful”. These include (i) more clearly denoting a state of being, as contrasted with merely denoting a property of a life or a project; (ii) more clearly denoting an ideal to be approximated, rather than a quantity to be produced; and (iii) more clearly denoting a state or property that consists in relating fittingly to something that is both objectively valuable and external to oneself. As I explain in this essay, theorizing meaningfulness as secular beatitude opens a middle path between a speculative cosmic and a deflated subjectivist conception of the meaning to be found in human life.

The moral status of mature human persons entitles them to consensual relationships and to equal social status. This moral status is plausibly grounded in the possession of critical reason, and it contrasts with the most minimal moral status, which is grounded in consciousness. The latter entitles beings not to be harmed, but it does not entitle them to equal or consensual relations. The essay defends a moral status intermediate between these, one that entitles beings to _intelligible_ relations: we must address ourselves _to_ them and attend to how they understand their treatment. This does not entail consensuality. It does involve _accountable_ relationships, but this is compatible with social hierarchy. Judgment, not critical reason, underlies the intermediate moral status, and so this intermediate status is distinct from that of mature human persons. There are at least three types of moral status, accordingly, and these constitute both a hierarchy and a developmental sequence.

This chapter articulates a “dynamic approximation” model of the acquisition and maintenance of the individual virtues. This model incorporates elements of Talbot Brewer’s account of virtue acquisition as a dialectical activity, in which attention is repeatedly and indefinitely refocused on a value, over time enabling both deeper engagement with it and deeper appreciation of it. The model also adapts elements of John Rawls’s ideal theory of political justice, applying these in a novel way to the case of individual justice. These elements include holding fixed broad contours of human psychology for the purpose of articulating ideals and emphasizing conditions where characteristic threats and obstacles to justice are resisted and overcome. The focus here is on the individual virtue of justice, and the chapter discusses three families of threats and obstacles to its acquisition and maintenance.

This chapter argues against ‘standing egalitarianism’, the idea that there is a unique locus of ethical standing or status, and urges also that we should resist the idea that all entities who have ethical standing have it equally. It does so by engaging with Korsgaard’s recent work on animals and challenging its distinctive grounds for resisting standing egalitarianism. Drawing on the work of Tyler Burge, it argues for a different theory of the origin of value: values that matter came into the world with the first conscious beings; reasons were first possessed by the first judging beings; and moral obligations were first possessed by the first critically rational beings.

This essay investigates John Rawls's understanding of societal cooperation in his latest work, where he presents a family of conceptions of political justice as the object of consensus in an ideally just society. This contrasts with both Rawls's 1971 position in A Theory of Justice and the original 1993 edition of Political Liberalism, each of which presents a single conception of justice as the focus of consensus. This change ramifies through his theory in ways that have not been fully explored. Rawls's arguments for his favoured conception of justice—justice as fairness—must also be re-understood in light of this change. This essay explains why this is significant by explaining those ramifications and their attendant re-understandings of Rawls's arguments. The essay furthermore clarifies the role of stability within Rawls's approach, articulating an account of both the principal aspects of Rawlsian stability and the characteristic threats to this type of stability. It closes by offering an alternative conception of a well-ordered society which is needed to complement Rawls's own.

This essay provides an account of the virtue of decency in the context of both ethics and politics. This virtue is distinctive because it is keyed to the moral status of thinking animals. Decency is not unique in being keyed to a moral status. As this essay explains and supports, humaneness is keyed to the status of conscious animals more generally, whereas justice is keyed to the moral status of conscious persons more specifically. Decency is less discussed than these virtues, in part due to a common failure to distinguish it from justice. John Rawls is an important exception, and this essay recovers Rawls's understanding of decency as a special case. Its account generalizes far beyond Rawls's conception, however, by emphasizing a contrast between capacities of thought and critical reason. This essay is part of a larger project of carefully distinguishing thought from critical reason in order to explain central phenomena in ethical theory.

In this essay I distinguish categories of animals by their mental capacities. I then discuss whether punishment can be appropriate for animals of each category, and if so what form punishment may appropriately take for animals of each category. The aim is to illuminate each type of punishment through comparison and contrast with the others. This both forestalls the overintellectualization of punishment which arises from viewing humans as the only paradigm case and forestalls the underintellectualization of human punishment which results from making no essential reference, in an account of human punishment, to the human capacity for specifically critical reasoning.

The claim that corporations are not people is perhaps the most frequently voiced criticism of the United States Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. There is something obviously correct about this claim. While the nature and extent of obligations with respect to group agents like corporations and labor unions is far from clear, it is manifest in moral understanding and deeply embedded in legal practice that there is no general requirement to treat them like natural persons. Group agents may be denied rights to marry, vote, or run for public office. More generally the need to guard against discrimination, the core injustice in racism and sexism, has no direct application to the case of group agents. There is also something obviously incorrect about the claim that corporations are not people. The legal practice of treating some group agents as persons under law is ancient, found already in Roman law at the time of Justinian. In this essay I propose that reflection on this tension reveals that fundamental revision to the doctrine of legal personhood is needed. More specifically I propose that legal personhood be decomposed into at least two elements—standing and liability—and that legal systems reject the principle that an entity possesses one just in case it possesses the other. The import of this change ramifies broadly. Decomposing legal personhood not only enables a satisfactory account of the status of corporations and labor unions, who as such have liability but not standing, it also enables a satisfactory account of the status of those who as such have standing but not liability: severely mentally disabled persons, very young children, and non-human animals with phenomenal consciousness but lacking capacities to understand reasons and justifications.

In this essay I articulate and defend a thesis about the nature of morality called “the embodiment thesis”. The embodiment thesis states that moral values underdetermine the obligations and entitlements of individual persons, and that actual social institutions must embody morality by specifying these moral relations. I begin by presenting two thought experiments that elucidate and motivate the embodiment thesis. I then proceed by distinguishing the embodiment thesis from a Rawlsian doctrine about the nature of justice, from the doctrine of moral relativism, and from solutions to the coordination problem of rational choice theory.

In this article I articulate two pairs of theses about the relationship between the right and the good and I sketch an account of morality that systematically vindicates all four theses, despite a nearly universal consensus that they are not all true. In the first half I elucidate and motivate the theses and explain why leading ethical theorists maintain that at least one of them is false; in the second half I present the outlines of an account of the relationship between the right and the good satisfying all four theses

The two leading traditions of theorizing about democratic legitimacy are liberalism and deliberative democracy. Liberals typically claim that legitimacy consists in the consent of the governed, while deliberative democrats typically claim that legitimacy consists in the soundness of political procedures. Despite this difference, both traditions see the need for legitimacy as arising from the coercive enforcement of law and regard legitimacy as necessary for law to have normative authority. While I endorse the broad aims of these two traditions, I believe they both misunderstand the nature of legitimacy. In this essay I argue that the legitimacy of a law is neither necessary nor sufficient for its normative authority, and I argue further that the need for legitimacy in law arises regardless of whether the law is coercively enforced. I thus articulate a new understanding of the legitimacy and authority of law.

In this essay I review an underappreciated strand of thought according to which the best Kantian moral theory has less in common with paradigmatically deontological theories and more in common with virtue theories than is standardly maintained. I then argue this program should be continued further, to provide not only a virtue-based account of moral judgment but also a virtue-based account of moral worth. I make a case that this fusion of Kantian theory with virtue theory provides the best account of moral rules, and I close by suggesting that it generates a promising new understanding of moral rights

In his essay “The Integration of the Ethic of the Respectful Use of Animals into the Law”, David Favre begins to articulate a new framework for understanding the legal status of nonhuman animals. The present essay supports the broad contours of Favre’s framework, but raises challenges for some of the framework’s elements. The first half questions Favre’s claim that possession of DNA and the capacity for life underlie the need for a more robust conception of animal legal standing. The second half questions Favre’s prior proposal that animals be deemed persons under law and questions his pragmatic suggestion that judges and scholars refrain from specific speculations about the moral status of animals

There is disagreement among contemporary theorists regarding human well-being. On one hand there are “substantive good” views, according to which the most important elements of a person’s well-being result from her nature as a human, rational, and/or sentient being. On the other hand there are “agent-constituted” views, which contend that a person’s well-being is constituted by her particular aims, desires, and/or preferences. Each approach captures important features of human well-being, but neither can provide a complete account: agent-constituted theories have difficulty accounting for the normativity of their claims, and substantive good theories have difficulty accounting for how a person’s actually adopted aims shape what is good for her and hence what she has reason to do. I articulate and defend a hybrid view that equals these approaches in systematicity and completeness of explanation yet seeks to surpass them in coherence with our ordinary judgments about what human well-being consists in. This hybrid view maintains, with agent-constituted theories, that a person’s well-being is (1) significantly constituted by her actually adopted aims; (2) deeply contingent; (3) agent-relative; (4) significantly dependent on spatially and temporally remote events; and (5) significantly independent of her experiences. The hybrid view also maintains, with substantive good theories, that a person’s well-being is (6) in part determined by facts independent of her aims, desires, and preferences; (7) such that all her aims are subject to critical evaluation and revision; and (8) constituted by her aims only if these aims are choiceworthy

Despite great advances in recent scholarship on the political philosophy of John Rawls, Rawls’s conception of stability is not fully appreciated. This essay aims to remedy this by articulating a more complete understanding of stability and its role in Rawls’s theory of justice. I argue that even in A Theory of Justice Rawls maintains that within liberal democratic constitutionalism judgments of relative stability typically adjudicate decisively among conceptions of justice and is committed to more deeply than to the substantive content of justice as fairness. This essay thus emphasizes the continuity of Rawls’s thought over time and motivates the position that Rawlsian stability is as philosophically significant and distinctively Rawlsian as justice as fairness itself.

Recently there has been a somewhat surprising interest among Kantian theorists in the moral standing of animals, coupled with a no less surprising optimism among these theorists about the prospect of incorporating animal moral standing into Kantian theory without contorting its other attractive features. These theorists contend in particular that animal standing can be incorporated into Kantian moral theory without abandoning its logocentrism: the claim that everything that is valuable depends for its value on its relation to rationality. In this essay I raise doubts about the prospects for accommodating animal moral standing within a logocentric Kantianism. I argue instead that the best way to incorporate animal moral standing into Kantian theory is to admit more radical departures from Kant’s position by maintaining that consciousness is a locus of moral standing independent from rationality. I propose that we should attribute moral standing to all conscious animals because the capacity of consciousness is the criterion distinguishing individuals whose well-being generates reasons from individuals whose well-being fails to do so. We need such a criterion because we speak of the well-being of things, such as artifacts and meteorological phenomena, which clearly lack moral standing. Having already argued against the Kantian view that the criterion of moral standing is rationality, I proceed to argue that consciousness is also superior to its other principal rival for the criterion of moral standing: life. On the view that emerges from this discussion, we have obligations to show concern for conscious individuals by treating their well-being as providing us with reasons for action; the view thus endorses the criterion of moral standing typically advanced by utilitarians. On this view we also have a distinct class of obligations to show respect for conscious rational individuals; the view thus endorses the Kantian claim that persons have a distinctive moral status in virtue of their possession of rational capacities. In this essay thus begin to show how a principal insight of each leading approach to modern moral theory may be captured in a unified theory