Juha Räikkä

Political compromises are common. Parties that seek to influence society must inevitably make them. Populists often criticize such compromises, as compromising implies that an ideal outcome will not be achieved. In general, political compromises evoke strong emotions, particularly when they are perceived as problematic—morally or otherwise. In this paper, I will examine whether the moral norms that govern compromise are specific to it. I evaluate Fabian Wendt's view that “deontic restrictions”—limits on what we are morally permitted to do—are not specific to the morality of compromise. I offer critical remarks on Wendt's argument, though I do not claim that his position fails. However, I argue that there is a sense in which the rules of compromise are specific. When compromises are regarded as morally bad, certain moral norms play a particularly prominent role. These norms are more frequently invoked than others and, in this respect, function as specific rules that mark the limits of compromise.

Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing have raised various ethical questions. Following many other authors, we distinguish between traditional conspiracy theories and the new conspiracism. This paper poses the question, What is the ethical status of the new conspiracism? We argue that the new conspiracism faces specific ethical problems. The new conspiracism has two forms: (1) the doubt-sowing branch and (2) the agitating branch. We argue that the doubt-sowing new conspiracists are culpably ignorant and can thus be morally blamed. The agitating new conspiracists have additional problems, as they take privileges they should not take and degrade political debates. We argue that people who participate in public political debates and blame others should make assertions and nothing else, as their audience has not consented to lax talk that does not assert anything. The speakers determine the illocutionary status of their sayings, and when they make wrong choices, they are morally responsible for those choices. The agitating new conspiracists are free-riders; they are responsible for speech acts that are not genuine assertions and whose main function is to signal one’s political side.

The unequal distribution of goods seems to be a permanent phenomenon both nationally and globally. Although the historical details of the roots of inequality may vary slightly from country to country, one of the main causes is the so-called ‘Matthew effect’, which refers to the accumulation of advantages. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. In this paper, I argue that although the Matthew effect has a bad moral reputation, this effect is inherently neither bad nor good. I introduce four variants of the effect, which represent the most common usages of the term by researchers, and point out that they all have instances that are morally unproblematic. However, I also argue that, in many cases, there are convincing moral reasons to try to reduce the accumulation of advantages. The intuition that the Matthew effect is ethically problematic has good grounds in specific common cases. Therefore, I argue that the Matthew effect deserves its bad reputation.

According to Derek Parfit's well‐known argument, a version of utilitarian moral theory implies the so‐called Repugnant Conclusion. This version of utilitarianism states that other things being equal, it is better if there is a greater total sum of whatever makes life worth living. This view appears to implicate that a world where there is an immense total sum of whatever makes life worth living but where individual people have an exceedingly low quality of life is better than a world where there are considerably less people and a smaller total sum of whatever makes life worth living but where individual people have a high quality of life. Parfit finds the conclusion hard to accept. However, a Swedish philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö has recently replied to Parfit, arguing that, in fact, the Repugnant Conclusion is perfectly acceptable. Tännsjö's reply, in turn, has been criticized by another Swede, Gustaf Arrhenius. In my paper I evaluate both Tännsjö's reply and Arrhenius' criticism and find both of them insufficient.

The article discusses the relationship between the notion of a moral right to personal self‐determination, the notion of a moral right to know and the notion of a moral right not to know. In particular, the author asks under what conditions, if any, the right to self‐determination implies a right to have information or a right not to have information. The conclusions he defends are theoretical in character rather than concrete norms and directions, and they are intended to be relevant in many contexts, not only in the context of information concerning, say, medical decisions. Yet the author restates the question concerning the right to have and especially the right not to have genetic knowledge about one's own genes on the basis of a right to self‐determination. He argues that a right (not) to have genetic information can be defended on the ground of a right to self‐determination, but that this kind of defense presupposes several normative, and controversial, arguments.

_Many philosophers have pointed out that a compromise that is fair in one sense can be unfair in another. In this paper, I will briefly introduce different ways in which compromises can be “fair” and then analyze them. In particular, I compare the importance of what I call (a) split-the-difference fairness and (b) end-state fairness. I will defend split-the-difference fairness against an important objection—that a person’s false belief about her fair share does not change what her fair share actually is. To allow such a notion would be rather like allowing her false belief to alter what is actually true. Nevertheless, I aim to provide support for the idea that sometimes it may make sense to consider people’s actual beliefs, even if they are false. However, I do not take a strong position on the question of what the most important sense of fairness is with regard to compromises.__ _ _Keywords_: Compromise, fairness, distribution, agreement, false beliefs.

Climate change conspiracy theories raise many questions. Some of the questions are philosophical in nature. They include issues such as how to define “conspiracy theory” (a conceptual question), what the ethical status of conspiracy theorizing is (a moral question), and how decision-makers should deal with climate change conspiracy theories (a practical question). One way to define “climate change conspiracy theory” is to say that they are explanations that (1) refer to conspiracies, (2) are not in line with more or less unanimous views of the climate scientists, and (3) offer clearly insufficient evidence in support of the alleged conspiracies: Relevant experts find the evidence so bad that the theories are not considered even as competing explanations. Climate change conspiracy theories are ethically problematic. The theories tend to reduce individual persons’ commitment to cut down their carbon footprint. More generally, conspiracy theories undermine trust toward epistemic authorities and social institutions generally. There is no agreement on what the right policy toward climate change conspiracy theories would be, but there are many options. Increasing social trust is among them.

In this article I shall undertake a preliminary exploration of the notion of second best. I shall follow a three-step strategy. First, I shall introduce some applications of the theorem of the second best in different fields of philosophy and social sciences. Secondly, I shall make several conceptual distinctions related to the theorem. I aim to show that there are certain theoretical results that are similar but not identical to the theorem of the second best, and that the notion of second best is often used quite loosely. Finally, I shall try to shed some light on the question of how the theorem is description-sensitive. The overall aim of the paper is to pay attention to the generality of the problem of the second best and stress the importance of the theorem in political theory in particular.

Cultural appropriation, also called cultural borrowing, has been the topic of much discussion in recent years. Roughly speaking, cultural appropriation happens when someone outside of a cultural or ethnic group takes or uses some object that is characteristic or in some way important to the group without the group’s permission. Individuals who find cultural appropriation unproblematic have often argued that if we express moral criticism of the use of traditional Sami outfits by non-Sami, then we are logically committed to criticize all kinds of habits that are clearly acceptable –such as using jeans, eating pizza or drinking tea. However, we will argue that in many cases that objection is problematic. We point out that if one social habit or practice is prohibited by existing social conventions but another is not, then there is a convention difference between the cases. The convention difference is in turn a morally relevant difference, or so we aim to show. We refer to “moderate conventionalism,” according to which existing social conventions are morally relevant facts that should be taken into account when choosing how to act, whatever the content of the conventions happens to be. The claim is analogous with the traditional view that laws have some moral relevance and binding force independent of their content. _Keywords:_ cultural appropriation, conventionalism, moderate conventionalism, convention difference

Since the advent of neuroimaging technologies, their limits and possibilities have captivated scientists and philosophers. Thus far, the debate has largely concerned technical limits of our capacity to “read minds.” This paper extends the discussion concerning the limitations of neuroimaging to issues that are not dependent on technical issues or on our understanding of the complexity of brain activities. The author argues that there is a serious chance that brain scanning cannot replace usual intentional assertions, and that neuroimaging has principled limits. The information that people usually receive by neuroimaging is different in kind from the information they hear from what others tell them. To assert something is to act in a certain way, and scanners do not usually scan actions, but brain activities and the neural correlates of actions. Although it is possible to scan “mental assertions,” our usual assertions are not accompanied by separate “mental assertions.”

Black magic (henceforth BM) is acting in an attempt to harm human beings through supernatural means. Examples include the employment of spells, the use of special curses, the burning of objects related to the purported victim, and the use of pins with voodoo dolls. For the sake of simplicity, we shall focus on attempts to kill through BM. The moral attitude towards BM has not been, as far as we know, significantly discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy. Yet the topic brings up interesting questions and poses challenges, occasionally even reaching the level of paradoxes. Ideas of respecting persons, in particular, will be seen to be challenged by this form of magic. The notion of respecting persons will be treated here broadly and pluralistically. Indeed part of the interest in the discussion will be the unfolding of the diverse ways in which this term should be understood, and the contrasts between its various uses. Often, as we shall see, respect for persons and disrespect for them, in different senses, will co‐exist, and the dilemma will be one where avoiding some forms of disrespect will involve us in disrespect in other senses.

In Albert Camus' 1950 play Just Assassins, terrorists are at work in nineteenth-century Russia. They kill people, and they all believe that there is a superior moral reason for doing so. But they also know that killing is wrong. In their own view, they are innocent criminals; innocent, because their action is justified, but criminals, because they kill. So tacitly they conclude that they deserve punishment that will remove the regret from their shoulders. Their execution, by the same despotic authorities they are attacking, completes their actions: regret, caused by justified killing, gets its counterpart. Regret is an interesting mental phenomenon. Some people say that feeling regret is irrational, or even that it is immoral. But surely the usual opinion is that in some situations regret is an appropriate way to react. An interesting question is what it means to say that sometimes it is 'appropriate' to feel regret. Do we have a moral obligation to feel regret sometimes? How could one have an obligation to feel anything, since, at least seemingly, feelings are not voluntary acts. If we do have a moral obligation to feel regret in some cases, does it follow that all good people are emotionally "hot," while "cool" persons, who are not able to feel deep regret, are bad?

In the discussion of such social questions as "how should alcoholics be treated by society?" and "what kind of people are responsible in the face of the law?", is "disease" a value-free or value-laden notion, a natural or a normative one? It seems, for example, that by the utterance 'alcoholism should be classified as a disease' we mean something like the following: the condition called alcoholism is similar in morally relevant respects to conditions that we uncontroversially label diseases and, therefore, we have a moral obligation to consider alcoholism a disease. So there are grounds to think that, in the discussion of social questions, our concept of disease is strongly value-laden. However, it does not follow that the medical concept of disease is likewise value-laden. In this paper I distinguish between the medical and social concepts of disease, arguing that the naturalist-normativist debate is concerned with the former, but not the latter. Therefore, we need not settle the naturalist-normativist debate in order to conclude that the social concept of disease is value-laden.

According to the so-called presumption of equality, a person who does not know whether there is an acceptable reason for differential treatment should just presume the similarity of the cases and treat them equally. If we assume that the presumption of equality is an acceptable moral principle, at least when the allocation cannot be postponed and an equal distribution of goods is possible, then an important question arises: when exactly does the allocator have sufficient reasons for differential treatment and is not relevantly ignorant? This is a question about the required strength of the “acceptable reasons” for differential treatment. It has been commonplace to think that the presumption of equality demands that the reasons that refute the presumption must be very strong and that differential treatment requires that there is a proper justification for the claim that the cases are relevantly different. I will argue, however, that refuting the presumption and solving the issue are two separate matters. A person can have good enough reasons for rejecting the presumption that the cases are relevantly similar without having reasons that she could present as a full justification for the claim that the cases are relevantly different. A precondition of the applicability of the presumption of equality is ignorance, but not ignorance in the sense of “not having a full justification”.

Guilt feelings are an important part of our emotional life that is relevant to moral philosophy, and guilt feelings raise many theoretically interesting questions. One such question is the problem of how it is possible that sometimes people seem to feel guilty because of an act they have committed even if they believe that the act is not wrong and that it does not have any moral costs. A person raised in a religious family may have been taught that going to the theater is wrong, and even if she has rejected this taboo years ago, she may still feel guilty when attending theater. At least, this seems to be the case. If it is the case, then one must explain how it is possible that a person may feel guilty without believing that she is guilty, i.e. that (1) she is responsible for the act and that (2) the act is wrong or has moral costs. Suppose, however, that it is not possible to feel guilty while believing that one is not guilty. Then one must explain why it seems that sometimes—in taboo cases—one can feel that she is guilty and at the same time believe that she is not guilty. In this paper I evaluate some of the usual solutions to the problem and explicate their problems.

The topic of the paper is the justness of the so-called global redistributive wars — wars whose prime purpose would be the correction of global economic and power structures that are said to cause suffering in poor countries. My aim is to comment on Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument concerning the implications of Thomas Pogge’s theory of global poverty. Pogge has argued that affluent coun-tries uphold global institutional structures that have a significant causal role in leading to the poverty-related deaths of millions of peo-ple who live in poor countries. According to Pogge, rich countries harm the citizens of poor countries. The argument by Lippert-Rasmussen is important, as it suggests that Pogge’s theory of the causes of global poverty, if correct, has a strange implication, namely, the implication that poor countries are or at least could be entitled to a military attack against rich countries. In this paper I will try to show that Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument is not fully compelling, and I will argue that it is not clear whether a global redistributive war would meet the principle of just cause. (The paper is here: http://www.kantiana.ru/upload/iblock/0ff/2014_12_01_raikka.pdf)

I will argue that the fairly common assumption that brain imaging may compromise people’s privacy in an undesirable way only if moral crimes are committed is false. Sometimes persons’ privacy is compromised because of failures of privacy. A normal emotional reaction to failures of privacy is embarrassment and shame, not moral resentment like in the cases of violations of right to privacy. I will claim that if (1) neuroimaging will provide all kinds of information about persons’ inner life and not only information that is intentionally searched for, and (2) there will be more and more application fields of fMRI and more and more people whose brains will be scanned (without any coercion), then, in the future, shame may be an unfortunately common feeling in our culture. This is because failures of privacy may dramatically increase. A person may feel shame strongly and long, especially if his failure is witnessed by people who he considers relatively important, but less than perfectly trustworthy.