War for the Wrong Reasons: Lessons from Law

In Ethics for Enemies, Frances Kamm argues that, under certain conditions, it is mor-ally permissible for a state to launch a war for opportunistic reasons. We consider how law might shed light on Kamm’s argument. Part I addresses the application of criminal and tort law to individual acts of violence analogous to the acts of war analyzed by Kamm. It primarily argues that these bodies of law rely on a framework for determining legal permissibility that runs counter to, and perhaps demonstrates weaknesses in, Kamm’s framework for assessing moral permissibility. Part II considers the law of war. It maintains that, although modern law permits certain opportunistic acts of war, the law does so on terms that cut against Kamm’s claim as to their moral permissibility

The Guilty Mind

The doctrine of mens rea can be expressed in this way: MRP: If A is culpable for performing phi, then A performs phi intentionally in circumstances in which it is impermissible to perform phi. The Sermon on the Mount suggests the following principle: SMP: If A intends to perform phi in circumstances in which it would be impermissible for A to perform phi, then A’s intending to perform phi makes A as culpable as A would be were A to perform phi. MRP and SMP are principles representative of intentionalism, a family of views that emphasizes the importance of intention to judgments about culpability. This essay examines an intentionalist’s defense of MRP with respect to lying, strict criminal liability, and the distinction between intention and foreseeability, along with a defense of SMP with respect to failed attempts, and self-defens

Unraveling Moral Reasoning in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: How Emotional Detachment Modifies Moral Judgment

In the last decade, scientific literature provided solid evidence of cognitive deficits in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients and their effects on end-life choices. However, moral cognition and judgment are still poorly investigated in this population. Here we aimed at evaluating both socio-cognitive and socio-affective components of moral reasoning in a sample of 28 ALS patients. Patients underwent clinical and neuropsychological evaluation including basic cognitive and social cognition measures. Additionally, we administered an experimental task including moral dilemmas, with instrumental and incidental conditions. Patients’ performances were compared with a control group [healthy control (HC)], including 36 age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy subjects. Despite that the judgment pattern was comparable in ALS and HC, patients resulted less prone to carry out a moral transgression compared to HC. Additionally, ALS patients displayed higher levels of moral permissibility and lower emotional arousal, with similar levels of engagement in both instrumental and incidental conditions. Our findings expanded the current literature about cognitive deficits in ALS, showing that in judging moral actions, patients may present non-utilitarian choices and emotion flattening. Such a decision-making profile may have relevant implications in applying moral principles in real-life situations and for the judgment of end-of-life treatments and care in clinical settings

MoCa: Measuring Human-Language Model Alignment on Causal and Moral Judgment Tasks

Human commonsense understanding of the physical and social world is organized around intuitive theories. These theories support making causal and moral judgments. When something bad happens, we naturally ask: who did what, and why? A rich literature in cognitive science has studied people's causal and moral intuitions. This work has revealed a number of factors that systematically influence people's judgments, such as the violation of norms and whether the harm is avoidable or inevitable. We collected a dataset of stories from 24 cognitive science papers and developed a system to annotate each story with the factors they investigated. Using this dataset, we test whether large language models (LLMs) make causal and moral judgments about text-based scenarios that align with those of human participants. On the aggregate level, alignment has improved with more recent LLMs. However, using statistical analyses, we find that LLMs weigh the different factors quite differently from human participants. These results show how curated, challenge datasets combined with insights from cognitive science can help us go beyond comparisons based merely on aggregate metrics: we uncover LLMs implicit tendencies and show to what extent these align with human intuitions.Comment: 34 pages, 7 figures. NeurIPS 202

The Morality of Price/Quality and Ethical Consumerism

Hussain claims that ethical consumers are subject to democratic requirements of morality, whereas ordinary price/quality consumers are exempt from these requirements. In this paper, we demonstrate that Hussain’s position is incoherent, does not follow from the arguments he offers for it, and entails a number of counterintuitive consequences

It\u27s Not the Thought that Counts

The article considers a central question about discrimination – are an actor’s intentions relevant to whether an action wrongfully discriminates – and takes issue with a familiar answer to this question. If one thinks of “discrimination” in its literal sense, as simply drawing distinctions among people on the basis of possessing or lacking some trait, it becomes clear that discrimination is ubiquitous and often benign. The challenge is to distinguish when discrimination is permissible and when it is not. One common answer to this question is that it is the intentions of the actor who adopts or enacts a law, policy or decision that are crucial. Legal doctrine, both constitutional and statutory, reflects this view by treating the actor’s intentions as centrally important. But is the moral claim on which it rests defensible; are intentions morally relevant to whether discrimination is wrong? The article argues that the actor’s intent in enacting a law, adopting a policy or making a decision is irrelevant to the moral assessment of whether the law, policy or decision wrongfully discriminates. The article begins in Part I by drawing an analogy to a debate in the philosophical literature about the Doctrine of Double Effect in order to press the point that the focus on intentions confuses assessment of the wrongfulness of the action with assessment of the moral blameworthiness of the actor. The article goes on to argue that when we look more closely at instances of discrimination, we see that it is not the aims of the actor that render the action wrongful, rather it is what the actor does, whether intentional or unintentional, that matters. Parts II and III raise and reply to objections to the arguments advanced in Part I. In particular, Part II explores the argument that the actor’s intent is necessary to determine whether or not a law or policy distinguishes among people on the basis of a suspect trait. Part III explores objections meant to show that bad intentions contribute, at the very least, to rendering an action wrongful. The article finishes by concluding that, as far as discrimination is concerned, it is not the thought that counts

War and Moral Consistency

Provides an opinionated overview of some recent debates within the ethics of war