Moral Uncertainty for Deontologists

Defenders of deontological constraints in normative ethics face a challenge: how should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain whether some course of action would violate a constraint? The most common response to this challenge has been to defend a threshold principle on which it is subjectively permissible to act iff the agent's credence that her action would be constraint-violating is below some threshold t. But the threshold approach seems arbitrary and unmotivated: what would possibly determine where the threshold should be set, and why should there be any precise threshold at all? Threshold views also seem to violate ought agglomeration, since a pair of actions each of which is below the threshold for acceptable moral risk can, in combination, exceed that threshold. In this paper, I argue that stochastic dominance reasoning can vindicate and lend rigor to the threshold approach: given characteristically deontological assumptions about the moral value of acts, it turns out that morally safe options will stochastically dominate morally risky alternatives when and only when the likelihood that the risky option violates a moral constraint is greater than some precisely definable threshold (in the simplest case, .5). I also show how, in combination with the observation that deontological moral evaluation is relativized to particular choice situations, this approach can overcome the agglomeration problem. This allows the deontologist to give a precise and well-motivated response to the problem of uncertainty

Action, Deontology, and Risk: Against the Multiplicative Model

Deontological theories face difficulties in accounting for situations involving risk; the most natural ways of extending deontological principles to such situations have unpalatable consequences. In extending ethical principles to decision under risk, theorists often assume the risk must be incorporated into the theory by means of a function from the product of probability assignments to certain values. Deontologists should reject this assumption; essentially different actions are available to the agent when she cannot know that a certain act is in her power, so we cannot simply understand her choice situation as a “risk-weighted” version of choice under certainty

Reasons to Care about Reasons for Action: A Response to Paul S. Davies

In eschewing the specialty-standards of neuro-babble and philosophical neologism, Paul S. Davies (2016) argues with courageous clarity. He connects issues in neuroscience and epistemology to problems surrounding agency. I agree with many of his claims, but I think they need more context and precision for application. This is because his argument as it stands now affects only a limited set of theories, and a hidden modality in thesis 3 tempers his argument further. And perhaps most urgently, if his theory fails to address “top-down”1 mental processes or social dimensions of knowledge, his argument fails to meet even his own goals set out in the paper

Public Health and Personal Choice: The Ethics of Vaccine Mandates and Parental Refusal in the United States

In January 2019 The World Health Organization (WHO) released its list Ten threats to global health in 2019. For the first time ever, vaccine hesitancy, “the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccine services” is officially on the list.1 Although great progress has been made in reducing or eradicating various diseases such as polio, measles, and whooping cough (pertussis), the number of parents refusing vaccination for their children is growing rapidly in what is now often referred to as the “anti-vaccination movement” ( or “anti-vax movement”). This is causing a threat to public health as the lowered proportion of vaccine uptake within communities is triggering a reversal of the progress made by vaccination thus far through a weakening herd immunity, putting everyone at a greater risk of contracting and spreading infectious diseases.2 According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), so far in 2019 the United States has already faced three outbreaks of the measles, a disease previously considered eliminated in the United States, in New York City, New York state, and Washington state.3 Each outbreak was found in areas with particularly low vaccination rates.4https://thekeep.eiu.edu/lib_awards_2019_docs/1006/thumbnail.jp

Bin Laden’s formation of the self: a comparative analysis

Following the 9/11 and similar al-Qaeda attacks, one of the principle questions we ask as a Western Society is why? Researchers on religious terrorism generally agree that psychopathic labelling and descriptions are both unhelpful and inaccurate. Instead what is needed is a look at the broader sociological context. As a result, this paper utilises Foucault’s technologies of the self (formation of the self) as a framework to explore the self transformations and teleology of Osama bin Laden’s actions based on a comparative analysis with the biblical character of Moses. This analysis will include a number of important parallels which include: the rejection of wealth for self gain and privilege, self formation and transformation through trial and suffering, a spokesperson for a captive and oppressed people, as well as being the instrument of God’s wrath through the delivering of the plague of terror. Such insights can contribute to understanding the broad dimensions of this social context that extends well beyond the political domain

Public Health and Personal Choice: The Ethics of Vaccine Mandates and Parental Refusal in the United States

In January 2019 The World Health Organization (WHO) released its list Ten threats to global health in 2019. For the first time ever, vaccine hesitancy, “the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccine services” is officially on the list.1 Although great progress has been made in reducing or eradicating various diseases such as polio, measles, and whooping cough (pertussis), the number of parents refusing vaccination for their children is growing rapidly in what is now often referred to as the “anti-vaccination movement” ( or “anti-vax movement”). This is causing a threat to public health as the lowered proportion of vaccine uptake within communities is triggering a reversal of the progress made by vaccination thus far through a weakening herd immunity, putting everyone at a greater risk of contracting and spreading infectious diseases.2 According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), so far in 2019 the United States has already faced three outbreaks of the measles, a disease previously considered eliminated in the United States, in New York City, New York state, and Washington state.3 Each outbreak was found in areas with particularly low vaccination rates.4https://thekeep.eiu.edu/lib_awards_2019_docs/1006/thumbnail.jp

A Formal Theory of Action

Book Reviews: Janusz Czelakowski, Freedom and Enforcement in Action. A Study in Formal Action Theory, vol. 42 of the Trends in Logic book series, Springer, Dordrecht, 2015, 261 pages, Print ISBN 978-94-017-9854-9, Online ISBN 978-94-017-9855-6. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9855-6

Communication, Language and Autonomy

In my contribution I want to describe a notion of autonomy in social terms namely in discursive practices. I already presented autonomy as grounded on the Sellarsian “metaphor” of the game of giving and asking for reasons reinterpreted by Robert Brandom. The model was centered mostly on practices of justification starting from an inferentialist view of the propositional content. However, I think that together with speech acts in ordinary language we must provide a description of the role of prelinguistic practices for autonomy. This further step is implied by the fact that it is important to clarify the dimension of “readiness” to give or ask for reasons on which Swindler rightly insists in his Introduction to my book Autonomy. A Matter of Content. Autonomy develops in a language game that is connected with cooperation. The language game I want to point out is similar to the functional approach of Wittgenstein but starts from a Fregean perspective and takes into consideration neurobiological processes which bridge the gap between brain and world and represent the “motor” of our activity in the world