•  42
    Kidney Transplantation Policy: Race and Distributive Justice
    Business and Professional Ethics Journal 12 (2): 19-37. 1993.
    Is the lower rate of kidney transplantation into African Americans medically and ethically justifiable? Or is it a form of racial discrimi nation comparable to if not worse than denial of employment opportunities, housing, and educational opportunities? This essay focusses on the medical problems associated with matching antigens in donors and recipients, and the implications of those problems for social justice.1 Racially discriminatory practices in bank lending, education, and hiring provide a…Read more
  •  24
    Hutcheson's Aesthetic Realism and Moral Qualities
    History of Intellectual Culture. 2006.
    Hutchesonʹs theories offer an objective referent for beauty linked with a subjective determination to be pleased. As Kenneth Winkler’s terminology suggests, Hutcheson is an eighteenth‐century aesthetic realist, a beauty realist, because the aesthetic object need not be identified with the natural object. I argue that this aesthetic realism helps to settle key disputes concerning moral qualities in the moral sense theory. The natural and automatic operation of the aesthetic and moral senses allow…Read more
  •  7
    Health Care Ethics (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 13 (4): 388-390. 1990.
  •  17
    Richard Price’s Contextualist Rationalism
    Studies in the History of Ethics 6 1-21. 2008.
    The British Moralists of the Eighteenth Century have been divided into rationalists and empiricists on the question of how moral judgments are formed. But this is too simple: there are various sorts of rationalism proposed, as well as Moral Sentimentalists, who believe in some kind of moral sense of approval, and welfarist empiricists, who focus on happiness promotion. None thought that the views of another cast into doubt the existence of moral truth. Their disputes about moral principles evide…Read more
  •  19
    Concessions to Moral Particularism
    Philosophy in the Contemporary World 8 (1): 53-58. 2001.
    In this paper I examine the particularist attack on deductive uses of moral principles, reviewing the critiques of the uniformity of moral reasons and impartiality in ethics, looking principally at arguments from Larry Blum, Jonathan Dancy, and Margaret Walker. I defend the action-guiding-ness of moral principles themselves, but consider various ways to accommodate the objections coming fromparticularism. I conclude that one objection to the impartialist theory of value must be conceded without …Read more
  •  21
    Thumos and the Daring Soul: Craving Honor and Justice
    Journal of Ancient Philosophy 2 (2). 2008.
  •  67
    Hume’s Philosophy of the Self (review)
    Hume Studies 30 (1): 191-197. 2004.
    A. E. Pitson’s Hume’s Philosophy of the Self is an ambitious study of the issues of self-awareness, self-reflection, agency, and the awareness of one’s being one self among others. Although uneven in results, Hume’s Philosophy of the Self offers admirable depth in its analyses. Argumentation is sustained by careful attention to the relevance of the entire philosophical corpus of Hume. Because ethical theory is interrelated with philosophy of mind, we need the sort of work Pitson undertakes.
  •  23
    Social Meliorism, Virtue, and Vice
    Southwest Philosophy Review 12 (2): 63-83. 1996.
  •  59
    Ethical Externalism and the Moral Sense
    Journal of Philosophical Research 27 585-600. 2002.
    This paper examines Hutcheson’s moral sense theory’s attack on internalism and his defense of an innovative version of externalism. I show that Hutcheson’s distinction between exciting and justifying reasons supports a type of externalist theory not anticipated by Brink, Smith, or McDowell. In Moral Sense Externalism, moral judgment relies upon the perceptions of a moral sense, and the felt quality of these perceptions introduces to judgment an affective dimension. Thus feeling is a constituitiv…Read more
  •  62
    The Moral Self and the Indirect Passions
    Hume Studies 23 (2): 195-212. 1997.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXIII, Number 2, November 1997, pp. 195-212 The Moral Self and the Indirect Passions SUSAN M. PURVIANCE David Hume1 and Immanuel Kant are celebrated for their clear-headed rejection of dogmatic metaphysics, Hume for rejecting traditional metaphysical positions on cause and effect, substance, and personal identity, Kant for rejecting all judgments of experience regarding the ultimate ground of objects and their rel…Read more
  •  29
    This article examines two questions pertaining to the extension of infertility treatment to postmenopausal women. First, what concepts and principles of infertility practice apply to assisted reproduction for the postmenopausal patient? Second, what role should these concepts play in the development of an ethical justification for extending women's reproductive lives past the menopausal boundary? The argument offered here supports their claim to infertility services on the basis of the formal pr…Read more
  •  55
    Shaftesbury on self as a Practice
    Journal of Scottish Philosophy 2 (2): 154-163. 2004.
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  •  32
    Health Care Ethics (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 13 (4): 388-390. 1990.
  •  44
    Moral Self-Striving and Sincerity (Redlichkeit)
    Idealistic Studies 38 (3): 185-192. 2008.
    Kant objects on principle to any duty of moral self-perfection that would aim at the moral self-perfection of another person. Yet, despite the apparent barrier posed by the introspective technique of self-perfecting effort, I argue that such a duty is both possible and desirable as a part of moral friendship. Through mutual sincere efforts at self-disclosure, we escape the prison of mutual distrust which otherwise characterizes social life and consolidate the very sincerity necessary for moral i…Read more
  •  24
    Age rationing, the virtues, and wanting more life
    Journal of Medical Humanities 14 (3): 149-165. 1993.
    The goal of this paper is to show that Callahan's reasons for withholding life extending care cannot be made out exclusively in terms of contemporary notions of distributive justice and fair allocation. I argue that by relying on a notion of justice which links the merit of the individual with the fairness of a social pattern of shares, Callahan imputes vice to the elderly as he denies them eligibility for life-prolonging care. Aristotle's doctrine of the mean is a useful tool for character eval…Read more
  •  78
    The Apriority of Moral Feeling
    Idealistic Studies 29 (1-2): 75-87. 1999.
    The apriority of moral feeling is an indispensable part of Kant's insistence on moral certainty as a foundation for ethics. Even though the moral feeling of respect cannot be the source of our knowledge of the authority of the moral law, moral feeling is a catalyst to self-criticism and moral self-confidence. It is argued that moral feeling reveals a nonempirical object, one's moral character. In fact, moral feeling plays a representational role that parallels sense experience, but does not deri…Read more