The problem of partiality in 18th century moral philosophy

The dissertation traces the development of what I call “the problem of partiality” through the work of certain key figures in the British Moralist tradition: John Locke, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Third Earl of Shaftesbury), Francis Hutcheson, John Gay, David Hume, Joseph Butler, and Adam Smith. On the one hand, we are committed to impartiality as a constitutive norm of moral judgment and conduct. On the other hand, we are committed to the idea that it is permissible, or even obligatory, to expend disproportionate resources promoting the good of our loved ones over the good of strangers. However, these two commitments conflict with one another. This problem challenges us to provide an account of the scope and limits of reasonable partiality that does justice to both commitments. I argue that confronting this tension is a central project of early modern ethics. I offer a rereading of the British Moralist tradition, centered on debates about partiality, and thereby shift discussion of the tradition away from concerns about meta-ethics and moral epistemology, to issues of practical ethics. The topic of partiality remains central in contemporary ethics, as is evident in ongoing debates about the place of empathy in moral judgment, and the role of love in shaping our moral commitments. Though the aim of the dissertation is not to settle questions about the scope and limits of reasonable partiality, the focus here remains fixed on how the concept of partiality was problematized in our ethical thought, and how it informs our discussions in normative ethics and moral psychology. Alongside building a bridge between early modern scholarship and recent work in ethics, the dissertation casts light on two understudied figures in the British Moralist tradition – Cockburn and Gay – who contributed greatly to debates about partiality. By examining their contributions, I reconsider their place in the history of modern ethics and therefore provide a more contextualized account of philosophical thought in the period

The Problem of Partiality in 18th century British Moral Philosophy

The dissertation traces the development of what I call “the problem of partiality” through the work of certain key figures in the British Moralist tradition: John Locke, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Third Earl of Shaftesbury), Francis Hutcheson, John Gay, David Hume, Joseph Butler, and Adam Smith. On the one hand, we are committed to impartiality as a constitutive norm of moral judgment and conduct. On the other hand, we are committed to the idea that it is permissible, or even obligatory, to expend disproportionate resources promoting the good of our loved ones over the good of strangers. However, these two commitments conflict with one another. This problem challenges us to provide an account of the scope and limits of reasonable partiality that does justice to both commitments. I argue that confronting this tension is a central project of early modern ethics. I offer a rereading of the British Moralist tradition, centered on debates about partiality, and thereby shift discussion of the tradition away from concerns about meta-ethics and moral epistemology, to issues of practical ethics. The topic of partiality remains central in contemporary ethics, as is evident in ongoing debates about the place of empathy in moral judgment, and the role of love in shaping our moral commitments. Though the aim of the dissertation is not to settle questions about the scope and limits of reasonable partiality, the focus here remains fixed on how the concept of partiality was problematized in our ethical thought, and how it informs our discussions in normative ethics and moral psychology. Alongside building a bridge between early modern scholarship and recent work in ethics, the dissertation casts light on two understudied figures in the British Moralist tradition – Cockburn and Gay – who contributed greatly to debates about partiality. By examining their contributions, I reconsider their place in the history of modern ethics and therefore provide a more contextualized account of philosophical thought in the period

Towards a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility

Revisionism is the view that we would do well to distinguish between what we think about moral responsibility and what we ought to think about it, that the former is in some important sense implausible and conflicts with the latter, and so we should revise our concept of moral responsibility accordingly. There are three main challenges for a successful revisionist account of moral responsibility: (i) it must meet the diagnostic challenge of identifying our folk concept and provide good reason to think that significant features of this concept are implausible, (ii) it must meet the motivational challenge and explain why, in light of this implausibility, our folk concept ought to be revised rather than eliminated, and (iii) it must meet the prescriptive challenge and provide an account of how, all things considered, we ought to revise our thinking about moral responsibility. In order to meet (iii) revisionism must provide a prescriptive account of responsibility that is free of the problematic features of our folk concept identified in meeting the diagnostic challenge, is naturalistically plausible, normatively adequate, and justifies our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming. So, while the first of these three challenges is primarily concerned with the nature of our concepts, the latter two move to questions about whether or not, to use Dennett\u27s terms, we can defend and accept an account of moral responsibility worth wanting. In my dissertation I raise a new problem for revisionism, the normativity-anchoring problem. The heart of this problem is that the methodological commitments used to motivate revisionism and distinguish the view from conventional theorizing about moral responsibility make it uniquely difficult for revisionists to justify our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming. Following Manuel Vargas, who has thus far developed and defended the view most rigorously, revisionists endorse the following skeptical claim: it is possible that our intuitions fail to inform us about what responsibility is, and furthermore we lack good epistemic reasons for thinking that they ever do. For conventional theorists, the fact that a particular account of responsibility best aligns with our refined intuitions, beliefs, and theoretical commitments is reason enough, ceteris paribus, to endorse that view. But revisionists who endorse the skeptical claim must find some alternative method for arguing that their prescriptive account is one that we should in fact endorse. One alternative, suggested by Vargas himself, is to show that the prescriptive account in question justifies our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming, and preserves the work of the concept. However, I argue that Vargas\u27 own claim that the prescriptive account he offers promotes an independently valuable form of agency fails to bridge the gap between axiological claims about value and normative claims about how we should treat responsible agents. Moreover, bridging this gap looks to be a serious problem for any form of revisionism which shares the methodological commitments used to motivate the view thus far, and so further development of revisionism requires having a solution to the normativity-anchoring problem in hand. I go on to develop a new revisionist strategy that avoids the normativity-anchoring problem. I propose and defend a new methodological assumption (hereafter referred to as MAP) that I argue revisionists can and should accept, capable of preserving the skeptical spirit of revisionism while identifying a particular class of intuitions about moral responsibility as having a privileged epistemic status. In particular, I argue that revisionists can and should accept that widespread judgments about responsibility generated by concrete cases which elicit a strong affective response in the person making the judgment have a privileged epistemic status in our responsibility theorizing. My arguments in support of this assumption depend on an analogy between the responsibility judgments in question and the kinds of paradigmatic judgments which constrain our ethical theorizing more generally. Having established this analogy I then offer a series of companions in guilt style arguments for the claim that the epistemic status of these two kinds of judgments should stand and fall together. I conclude that the responsibility judgments in question should ultimately share the privileged status of the paradigmatic ethical judgments in question, and thus play an evidentiary role in our theorizing about moral responsibility. If these arguments are successful then acceptance of the methodological assumption I defend allows revisionists to avoid the normativity-anchoring problem while preserving the unique methodological spirit which motivates revisionism and sets it apart from conventional theorizing about moral responsibility

Is a bad will a weak will? Cognitive dispositions modulate folk attributions of weakness of will

In line with recent efforts to empirically study the folk concept of weakness of will, we examine two issues in this paper: (1) How is weakness of will attribution [WWA] influenced by an agent’s violations of best judgment and/or resolution, and by the moral valence of the agent’s action? (2) Do any of these influences depend on the cognitive dispositions of the judging individual? We implemented a factorial 2x2x2 between–subjects design with judgment violation, resolution violation, and action valence as independent variables, and measured participants’ cognitive dispositions using Frederick’s Cognitive Reflection Test [CRT]. We conclude that intuitive and reflective individuals have two different concepts of weakness of will. The study supports this claim by showing that: a) the WWA of intuitive subjects is influenced by the action’s (and probably also the commitment’s) moral valence, while the WWA of reflective subjects is not; b) judgment violation plays a small role in the WWA of intuitive subjects, while reflective subjects treat resolution violation as the only relevant trait. Data were collected among students at two different universities. All subjects (N=710) answered the CRT. A three-way ANOVA was first conducted on the whole sample and then on the intuitive and reflective groups separately. This study suggests that differences in cognitive dispositions can significantly impact the folk understanding of philosophical concepts, and thus suggests that analysis of folk concepts should take cognitive dispositions into account

Hegel and the Ethics of Brandom’s Metaphysics

In order to develop his pragmatist and inferentialist framework, Robert Brandom appropriates, reconstructs and revises key themes in German Idealism such as the self-legislation of norms, the social institution of concepts and facts, a norm-oriented account of being and the critique of representationalist accounts of meaning and truth. However, these themes have an essential ethical dimension, one that Brandom has not explicitly acknowledged. For Hegel, the determination of norms and facts and the institution of normative statuses take place in the context of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’). By engaging with some of the more ontologically and ethically substantive points raised by Hegel, I argue that, from a Hegelian perspective, Brandom’s project regarding the social determination of truth and meaning cannot be divorced from ethics, specifically, the ethical dimension of social recognition. Furthermore, I argue that, in real situations (as opposed to ideal ones), claims to normative authority cannot be considered independently from the legitimacy of those claims, a legitimacy that Brandom is unable to reasonably explain. Finally, I argue that a Hegelian solution to the problems facing Brandom’s framework calls into question the unity of reason that is at the core of Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics

When Church Teachings and Policy Commitments Collide: Perspectives on Catholics in the U.S. House of Representatives

This article investigates the influence of religious values on domestic social policy-making, with a particular focus on Catholics. We analyze roll call votes in the 109th Congress and find that Catholic identification is associated with support for Catholic Social Teaching, but both younger Catholics and Republican Catholics are found less supportive. In followup interviews with a small sample of Catholic Republicans, we find that they justify voting contrary to Church teaching by seeing its application to domestic social issues as less authoritative than Church moral teachings on issues like abortion

The Tenuous Case for Conscience

If there is any single theme that has provided the foundation of modern liberalism and has infused our more specific constitutional commitments to freedom of religion and freedom of speech, that theme is probably “freedom of conscience.” But some observers also perceive a progressive cheapening of conscience– even a sort of degradation. Such criticisms suggest the need for a contemporary rethinking of conscience. When we reverently invoke “conscience,” do we have any idea what we are talking about? Or are we just exploiting a venerable theme for rhetorical purposes without any clear sense of what “conscience” is or why it matters? This essay addresses two questions. The first is discussed briefly: what is “conscience”? What do we have in mind when we say that someone acted from “conscience”? A second question receives more extended discussion: granted its importance to the individuals who assert it, still, why should “conscience” deserve special respect or accommodation from society, or from the state? That question forces us to consider the metaethical presuppositions of claims of conscience. The discussion suggests that claims to conscience may be defensible only on certain somewhat rarified moral and metaethical assumptions. The discussion further suggests that shifts in such assumptions have transformed the meaning of claims to “freedom of conscience,” so that such claims typically now mean almost the opposite of what they meant when asserted by early champions of conscience such as Thomas More, Roger Williams, and John Locke

First personal modes of presentation and the structure of empathy

I argue that we can understand the de se by employing the subjective mode of presentation or, if one’s ontology permits it, by defending an abundant ontology of perspectival personal properties or facts. I do this in the context of a discussion of Cappelen and Dever’s recent criticisms of the de se. Then, I discuss the distinctive role of the first personal perspective in discussions about empathy, rational deference, and self-understanding, and develop a way to frame the problem of lacking prospective access to your future self as a problem with your capacity to imaginatively empathize with your future selves

Values-Based Leadership: A Shift in Attitude

To genuinely refer to leadership as “values-based,” a shift in attitude is required and the “ethics of care” must be embraced. This modification will ostensibly involve a subjective commitment to reason consistently and prudently, to care for others, and to dedicate oneself to reconsider his or her actions and behaviors