Sarah Stroud

Why is it wrong to lie? This chapter offers a clarification of what such questions presuppose. It then canvasses some natural potential answers drawn from leading moral theories. These often seek to ground the wrongness of lying in the wrongness of (intentional) _deception_, given that when we lie we are typically aiming to induce a false belief in our interlocutor (i.e., to deceive him). The present chapter offers a different diagnosis of the wrongness of lying. The account highlights the structural parallels between _telling someone something_ and _promising someone something_: both are voluntary acts in which the speaker takes on responsibilities vis-à-vis her addressee which she did not have before. The proposal is that lies, like insincere promises, are wrong in virtue of being _faithless pledges_. The chapter thus resurrects in a somewhat different form W. D. Ross’s suggestion that lying violates the _pro tanto_ duty of fidelity.

When you share a personal relationship with someone, you often have duties concerning that person which you don’t have with respect to unrelated others. In that sense, personal relationships seem to make a moral difference. But _how_—that is, by what mechanism—do they make that difference? This chapter offers a precise formulation of the hypothesis that personal relationships do make a moral difference, and it presents four distinct models of how they could do that. Three of these models may look familiar. The fourth sources the moral impact of personal relationships in the _actions_ which become possible only when you have a personal relationship with someone.

This chapter highlights and assesses an important form of argument that has often been deployed in debates over moral demandingness. 'They can’t take that away from me' arguments claim to identify something which morality cannot ask us to give up — something which morality allegedly cannot take away from us. Does any argument of this kind succeed? This chapter investigates that question by sketching and critiquing three such arguments from the contemporary literature, including a well-known argument of Bernard Williams’. It also considers a further impediment to the scope or power of such arguments, namely how little they show even if they succeed. The closing suggestion is that those eager to resist extreme moral demands ought to object at an earlier stage to the arguments which seem to generate such demands.

What is the role of emotions in akratic action? Proposing that emotions are non‐conceptual perceptions of values, the author argues that such states have the capacity not just to cause but also to render intelligible actions that are contrary to one's better judgement. Akratic actions prompted by an emotion may even be more rational than following one's evaluative judgement, for the perception might enable the agent to better track the reasons she has, compared to the judgement. By contrast, akratic actions in which no emotion is involved (cases of ‘cool’ akrasia) are genuinely puzzling and of dubious intelligibility.

This chapter probes Barry Stroud's steadfast opposition to metaphysical subjectivism about value. Stroud argues in his work that global subjectivism about evaluative matters is literally untenable: the chapter shows how this starting conclusion emerges from three key aspects of evaluative thought pressed by Stroud. The cognitivism, irreducibility, and indispensability of evaluative thought seem together to rule out noncognitivist, error-theoretic, and reductive response-dependent construals of the evaluative domain, thereby closing off a wide variety of routes to value subjectivism. The chapter suggests, however, that the conviction that evaluative matters somehow constitutively depend on us may survive Stroud's determined attempts at excision. The chapter also considers the relation of Stroud's work to mainstream contemporary metaethics, noting that—contrary to what one might suppose—Stroud does not see his arguments as supporting moral realism. In fact, Stroud's negative conclusion about value subjectivism is liable to unsettle both poles of contemporary metaethical debate.

Among the many practical failures that threaten us, weakness of will or akrasia is often considered to be a paradigm of irrationality. The eleven new essays in this collection give a rich overview of the current debate over weakness of will and practical irrationality more generally. Issues covered include classical questions such as the distinction between weakness of will and compulsion, the connection between evaluative judgement and motivation, the role of emotions in akrasia, rational agency, and the existence of the will. They also include new topics, such as group akrasia, strength of will, the nature of correct choice, the structure of decision theory, the temporality of prudential reasons, and emotional rationality. The essays advance two central tasks: exploration of the implications of akrasia and other putatively irrational phenomena for the nature of practical reason and rationality; and consideration of possible explanations for such phenomena. The former intersects with recent theorizing about the nature of practical reason in general, and the latter with work in the philosophy of mind about the kinds of mental states and entities we need to posit in order adequately to understand human action.

I begin by proposing and explicating a plausible articulation of the view that morality is overriding. I then argue that it would be desirable for this thesis to be sustained. However, the prospects for its vindication will depend crucially on which moral theory we adopt. I examine some schematic moral theories in order to bring out which are friendly and which unfriendly to moral overridingness. In light of the reasons to hope that the overridingness thesis can be sustained, theories apparently incompatible with it – I argue that consequentialism is one – have a count against them.

Contemporary discussions of moral expertise have raised a host of problems for the very idea of a “moral expert.” This article interrogates the conception of moral expertise that such discussions seem to assume and proposes instead that we understand moral expertise as a species of practical skill. On this model, a skilled moral agent is more similar to a skilled pianist than she is to a theoretical expert (for instance, an expert on the War of 1812). The article argues both that it is more natural to understand the moral “expert” as excelling in a form of skilled practice and that such a conception would render moot many of the concerns which preoccupy contemporary discussions.

In this new kind of introduction to ethical theory, Daniel Muñoz and Sarah Stroud present 50 of the field's most exciting puzzles, paradoxes, and thought experiments. Over the course of 11 chapters, the authors cover a huge variety of topics, starting with the classic debate between utilitarians and deontologists and ending on existential questions about the future of humanity. Every chapter begins with a helpful introduction, and each of the 50 entries includes references for further reading and questions for reflection. Among the entries are such classics as the Ring of Gyges, Jim and the Villagers, the Repugnant Conclusion, JoJo, "One Thought Too Many," the Miners Puzzle, the Gentle Murder Paradox, Nowheresville, the Experience Machine, and the Trolley Problem. The book also explores several more recent topics of interest, such as doxastic wronging and the ethics of AI, so that even advanced students are likely to discover something new. Each entry can be read on its own, and the writing is accessible and conversational throughout, making this an ideal resource for undergraduate teaching. Readers at any level can pick up this book and see for themselves how fascinating-and puzzling-ethical theory can be.

A philosophical treatment of irrationality should at the same time leave space for irrational forms of thought and action and illuminate what is defective about them. While Davidson's analysis of weakness of the will is justly famous, some of Davidson's general philosophical commitments in fact conspire to make it especially difficult for him to account for irrationality. Davidson's conviction that irrationality must involve inconsistency, together with his rather circumscribed understanding of inconsistency, make it questionable whether he can leave the right kind of space for irrational phenomena that seem nonetheless to exist.

This chapter highlights and assesses an important form of argument that has often been deployed in debates over moral demandingness. 'They can’t take that away from me' arguments claim to identify something which morality cannot ask us to give up — something which morality allegedly cannot take away from us. Does any argument of this kind succeed? This chapter investigates that question by sketching and critiquing three such arguments from the contemporary literature, including a well-known argument of Bernard Williams’. It also considers a further impediment to the scope or power of such arguments, namely how little they show even if they succeed. The closing suggestion is that those eager to resist extreme moral demands ought to object at an earlier stage to the arguments which seem to generate such demands.

Disagreement and the implications thereof have emerged as a central preoccupation of recent analytic philosophy. In epistemology, articles on so-called peer disagreement and its implications have burgeoned and now constitute an especially rich subject of discussion in the field. In moral and political philosophy, moral disagreement has of course traditionally been a crucial argumentative lever in meta-ethical debates, and disagreement over conceptions of the good has been the spark for central controversies in political philosophy, such as the limits of legitimate state authority and public reason. Philosophers of language have also been keen to take up disagreement as a tool, for instance in motivating or exploring the merits of contextualist or relativist semantics for certain areas of discourse, such as matters of taste, aesthetic evaluation, and epistemic discourse.

This paper investigates how we can most effectively argue that partiality toward certain people and not others is morally permissible. Philosophers who strongly insist that morality must leave room for partiality have not made explicit their basis for this conclusion; the present paper comparatively assesses a variety of possible argument strategies which could be deployed in this regard. One promising strategy exploits the acknowledged force of the argument from “the personal point of view,” here interpreted as referring specifically to an agent’s projects. If moral demands must be tempered in light of the special significance to an agent of his own projects, then perhaps the agent’s partial attachments to other people should also receive a measure of protection from impartial moral claims. The case is bolstered by noting the ubiquity of plural or collective agency in contexts of close personal relations: often the two agents in such relationships together pursue joint projects and even constitute a plural agent. This approach does justify special moral treatment of one’s co-agents, although it does not match our initial conception of partiality in all respects.