Due Care

This chapter explores the imperfect duty of non-negligence or due care. It is a complex secondary duty that regulates the performance of primary duties. Its norms of attention and execution are responsive to a primary duty’s interpreted value. Due care often requires motivational capacities that track moral value across complex circumstances of action—a claim inconsistent with a dictum that duties cannot impose requirements that depend on motive. Middle Work 3 argues that the dictum depends on a rejectable view of motive, one modeled on a modular account of simple desires. The idea of a system motive is introduced as an affective organization that make an agent responsive to a region of value. This makes a moral motive an agential response to moral value and moral agency a motive-involved competence. We can then have a motive-involved duty without having a duty to have a motive.

Schopenhauer on Compassion as the Basis of Morality

This chapter presents five claims that are involved in Schopenhauer’s view that compassion is the basis of morality and whose truth is examined in the book. In this chapter it is argued in particular that if, in opposition to him, positive feelings of pleasure and joy are taken to exist in their own right like negative feelings of pain and suffering, compassion cannot be the only moral motive. It must be supplemented by attitudes like sympathy with positive feelings and benevolence. These attitudes are like compassion in being based on empathy. Other claims of his that are examined in the book are that compassion involves identifying with another, that justice is a form of compassion, and that compassion can be universal.

Virtue and Duty in Thomas Reid’s Moral Philosophy

Based on the material of T. Reid’s ethical conception, it is shown that in the moral-philo­sophical teaching, built around the concepts of duty, obligation, the concept of virtue also re­tains its significance. Although Reid consciously conceptualizes morality through norms and duties, the concept of virtue plays an important role in his teaching. Without virtue, it is im­possible to achieve two ends specific to human nature – the individual’s own good on the whole and what appears to be our duty. Reid shows that the person’s virtue coincides with her good on the whole, or happiness. This goal, however, can only be achieved when a hu­man being combines it with the fulfillment of duty for duty’s sake rather than for self-inter­est. In connection with the principle of respect for duty, Reid sees the role of virtue in that it is a necessary condition for the fulfillment of duty and of moral obligation. It is virtue as a quality of the moral agent, manifested in his power to distinguish between good and evil, to make judgments concerning one’s own duty and to act according to one’s understanding-conviction, that makes the act performed virtuous and proper through the motive. Through the concept of virtue Reed grasps the idea, important to Early Modern ethics, that every duty is internally binding through a moral motive.

Moral motives, police legitimacy and acceptance of force

PurposeThis study extends legitimacy theory by examining individualizing and binding moral motives and perceptions of police.Design/methodology/approachData are drawn from an online survey of the public (N = 961). OLS regression is used to predict global perceptions of legitimacy, as well as department legitimacy and acceptance of force in an experimental vignette that manipulates procedural justice.FindingsThe binding moral motive is associated with greater global and department legitimacy and acceptance of force. The individualizing moral motive is associated with reduced global legitimacy and acceptance of force, and with department legitimacy when procedural justice is low. Perceptions of legitimacy mediate the effects of the binding moral motive on acceptance of force and of the individualizing moral motive when procedural justice is low.Research limitations/implicationsThis study identifies novel antecedents of police legitimacy and acceptance of force (i.e. binding and individualizing moral motives).Social implicationsThis study provides insight into public attitudes regarding use of force.Originality/valueThis study is the first to propose and test a link between binding and individualizing moral motives and perceptions of police.

Rethinking the Purity of Moral Motives in Business: Kant Against Moral Purism

Moral purism is a commonly held view on moral worthiness and how to identify it in concrete cases. Moral purists long for a moral world in which (business) people—at least sometimes—act morally worthy, but in concrete cases they systematically discount good deeds as grounded in self-interest. Moral purism evokes moral cynicism. Moral cynicism is a problem, both in society at large and the business world. Moral cynicism can be fought by refuting moral purism. This article takes issue with moral purism. The common strategy to tackle moral purism is to reject the exclusion thesis which states that self-interest and the ‘pure’ moral motive (and thus moral worthiness) exclude each other. We develop a different strategy. We argue that moral purists are mistaken in the way they judge moral worthiness in concrete cases. They employ the wrong procedure and the wrong criteria. We develop a proper procedure and proper criteria. We build on Kant, who we argue is unfairly regarded as the champion of moral purism. In order to see how Kant can develop a consistent (non-purist) philosophy, the exclusion thesis must be embedded in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Properly embedded, Kant turns out to be both anti-purist and anti-cynical.

Adorno on Kierkegaard on Love for the Dead

This article employs Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia to clarify Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard. Adorno finds in Kierkegaard’s view of love for the dead both the consummate reified fetish of our instrumentalizing exchange society, and the only unmutilated relation left to us in our otherwise thoroughly damaged lives. Adorno’s negative dialectics emerges as the melancholy science resulting from a disfigured mourning’s present impossibility, upholding a material moral motive rooted in the unmournability of historical catastrophe. Yet this very melancholia also proves to be the last unlikely refuge of hope—in a Kierkegaardian sense—for a future redemption.