Robust Alternatives and Responsibility

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Allen
Keyword(s):  
Moral Significance ◽  
Frankfurt Case

AbstractThe Principle of Robust Alternatives (PRA) states that an agent is responsible for doing something only if he/she could have performed a ‘robust’ alternative: another action having a different moral or practical value. Defenders of PRA maintain that it is not refuted by a ‘Frankfurt case’, given that its agent can be seen as having had such an alternativeprovided that we properly qualify that for which she is responsible. I argue here against two versions of this defense. First, I show that those who maintain that a ‘Frankfurt agent’ is responsible forvoluntarily performing his/her action must attach moral significance to his/her luck. I proceed to discuss Carl Ginet's strategy of temporally qualifying ascriptions of responsibility, arguing that his counterexample to the principle that ‘If an agent is responsible for doing A @ t, then he/she is responsible for doing Asimpliciter’ is disanalogous to a Frankfurt case.

Moral Responsibility for Unwitting Omissions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Kay Nelkin ◽  
Samuel C. Rickless
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Common Sense Morality ◽  
And Control

Unwitting omissions pose a challenge for theories of moral responsibility. For common-sense morality holds many unwitting omitters morally responsible for their omissions, even though they appear to lack both awareness and control. People who leave dogs in their car on a hot day or forget to pick something up from the store as they promised seem to be blameworthy. If moral responsibility requires awareness of one’s omission and its moral significance, it appears that the protagonists of these cases are not morally responsible. This chapter considers and rejects a number of influential views on this problem, including a view that grounds responsibility for such omissions in previous exercises of conscious agency, and “Attributionist” views that ground responsibility for such omissions in the value judgments or other aspects of the agents’ selves. The chapter proposes a new tracing view that grounds responsibility for unwitting omissions in past opportunities to avoid them.

Near-Death Experiences and the Religious Metacultures of Western Modernity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Schlieter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Significance ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Religious Meaning ◽  
Near Death Experiences ◽  
Being Religious

Building on earlier conceptions of “metacultures,” this chapter defines four metacultures that are important for Western near-death discourse: Christian, Gnostic–Esoteric, and the Spiritualist–Occult, being religious in outlook; the fourth, however, the Naturalist metaculture, is of a nonreligious nature. The three former metacultures assign religious meaning to the content of near-death experiences, affirming by and large the soul’s survival of death. The chapter argues that this meaning has (a) ontological, (b) epistemic, (c) intersubjective or communicative, and (d) moral significance. Naturalist metaculture is defined as offering pharmacological, neurological, or psychological explanations of near-death experiences, usually declaring their content to be hallucinatory.

Spinoza’s Ethical Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Garrett
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Philosophical Naturalism ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Virtuous Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Good And Evil

This chapter analyzes Spinoza’s ethical theory in the context of his philosophical naturalism, his doctrine that the actual essence of each thing is its striving for self-preservation (conatus), and his psychology of the emotions as it concerns both “bondage to the passions” and the active emotions such as intellectual joy. It explains how Spinoza’s ethical precepts are expressed chiefly through demonstrated propositions about good and evil, virtue, the guidance of reason, and “the free man.” Particular attention is given to questions about (1) the meaning of ethical language, (2) the nature of the good, (3) the practicality of reason, (4) the role of virtuous character, (5) the requirements for freedom and moral responsibility (especially in light of his necessitarianism), and (6) the possibility and moral significance of altruism. The chapter concludes by briefly assessing the significance of Spinoza’s ethical theory and its place in the history of ethics.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Moral Experience ◽  
Object Relations Theory ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Ideological Criticism ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Psychological Dimensions

Although it is widely observed that a consequential “turn to ethics” took place in the field of literary criticism beginning in the late 1980s, this book argues that a broader cultural privileging of psychological and therapeutic frameworks has led to a displacement of the importance of moral reflection and moral judgment in the literary field. Between the pervasive influence of psychology on intellectual paradigms and cultural life, and the critique of morality within ideological criticism, key elements of the moral life, and of moral experience within the time of a life, have been lost to view. This introduction maps out the recent work on ethics in literary studies, introduces the moral significance of British object relations theory (an outlier among the psychological frameworks under analysis), and concludes by discussing Kant and Nietzsche’s divergent understandings of the psychological dimensions of moral life.

Torts and Other Wrongs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Strict Liability ◽  
Private Law ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Reasonable Person ◽  
Reasonable Person Standard ◽  
The Law

Torts and Other Wrongs is a collection of eleven of the author’s essays on the theory of the law of torts and its place in the law more generally. Two new essays accompany nine previously published pieces, a number of which are already established classics of theoretical writing on private law. Together they range across the distinction between torts and other wrongs, the moral significance of outcomes, the nature and role of corrective and distributive justice, the justification of strict liability, the nature of the reasonable person standard, and the role of public policy in private law adjudication. Though focused on the law of torts, the wide-ranging analysis in each chapter will speak to theorists of private law more generally.

Thomas Aquinas on Sexual Difference: The Metaphysical Biology and Moral Significance of Human Sexuality

Pro Ecclesia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-215
Author(s):  
Paul Gondreau
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Human Sexuality ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Biological Design ◽  
Moral Excellence ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
The Mean ◽  
And Gender

Thomas Aquinas offers for his time a novel take on human sexual difference, in that he grounds human sexuality in what we might term a metaphysical biology and accords it a privileged role in the moral life. Though his biology is drawn from Aristotle, which leads Aquinas to make problematic statements on sexual difference, he nonetheless offers a perspective that remains deeply relevant and significant for today. His method or approach of tethering sexual difference first and foremost to our animal-like biological design remains perennial, particularly at a time when many seek to dismiss biology as irrelevant to sexual identity and gender difference. The latest findings of the emerging field of neurobiology, which have uncovered structural differences between the male and female brains, offer key support to Aquinas’s approach. Even more important, he holds, in an unprecedented move, that sexual design and inclination provide a veritable source of moral excellence. He goes so far as to locate the mean of virtue in our sexual design and appetites.

scholarly journals The Moral Significance of Death in Georg Simmel’s Metaphysics of Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
Andrea Staiti
Keyword(s):  
Life Expectancy ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Cultural Forms

In this paper I discuss the significance of Simmel’s conception of death as presented in his capstone workLebensanschauung(1918). I argue for Simmel death is the form of all cultural forms and that it has a transcendental, form-giving function for life in its concrete unfolding. I conclude with a brief examination of the thought of immortality and some suggestions about how Simmel’s conception of death has a bearing on current issues such as the increment of life-expectancy in developed countries.

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