Moral aspirations and ideals

My aim is to vindicate two distinct and important moral categories – ideals and aspirations – which have received modest, and sometimes negative, attention in recent normative debates. An ideal is a conception of perfection or model of excellence around which we can shape our thoughts and actions. An aspiration, by contrast, is an attitudinal position of steadfast commitment to, striving for, or deep desire or longing for, an ideal. I locate these two concepts in relation to more familiar moral concepts such as duty, virtue, and the good to demonstrate, amongst other things, first, that what is morally significant about ideals and aspirations cannot be fully accommodated within a virtue ethical framework that gives a central role to the Virtuous Person as a purported model of excellence. On a certain interpretation, the Virtuous Person is not a meaningful ideal for moral agents. Second, I articulate one sense in which aspirations are morally required imaginative acts given their potential to expand the realm of practical moral possibility

Reply to critics

This article responds to the four contributors to the book symposium on Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience. Those four contributors are Thomas Hill Jr, David Lefkowitz, William Smith, and Daniel Weinstock . Hill examines the concepts of conviction and conscience (Chapters 1 and 2); Smith discusses conviction and then analyses the right to civil disobedience and my humanistic arguments for it (Chapter 4); Weinstock explores democratic challenges for civil disobedience (Chapter 5); and Lefkowitz assesses the merits of a legal demands-of-conviction excuse for civil disobedience (Chapter 5). This ‘Reply to Critics’ addresses them in turn

Is religious conviction special?

Religious moral convictions are not special when it comes to their 1) cultural trappings, 2) epistemic pedigree, or 3) epistemic status within the communities that hold them. Although many religious moral convictions differ from many non-religious moral convictions in all three respects, neither type of conviction differs categorically from the other in any one of these respects

Two tales of civil disobedience : a reply to David Lefkowitz

In his article ‘In Defence of Penalizing (but not Punishing) Civil Disobedience’, David Lefkowitz (2017) neatly maps out the differences between his and my defences of the moral right to civil disobedience. We disagree, first, about its grounds and, second, about its scope. Concerning the grounds, I argue that the right to civil disobedience is grounded in people’s rights to freedom of expression and conscientious action. By contrast, Lefkowitz, like Raz (1979) and others, argues that it is grounded in people’s political participation rights, that is, broadly, their rights to have an equal say over lawmaking. Concerning the scope, I argue that the right to civil disobedience provides people with defeasible normative protection against all forms of state interference with their acts of civil disobedience including penalisation. By contrast, Lefkowitz argues that the right protects against punishment, but not against penalisation for civil disobedience. Let me take each disagreement in turn. With respect to the grounds, Lefkowitz and I might try to call a truce and agree that, like many other rights, the right to civil disobedience is grounded in a plurality of values and interests

The civil disobedience of Edward Snowden : reply to William Schueuerman

This paper responds to William Scheuerman’s analysis of Edward Snowden as someone whose acts fit within John Rawls’s account of civil disobedience understood as a public, non-violent, conscientious breach of law performed with overall fidelity to law and a willingness to accept punishment. This paper rejects the narrow Rawlsian notion in favour of a broader notion of civil disobedience understood as a constrained, conscientious and communicative breach of law that demonstrates opposition to law or policy and a desire for lasting change. The paper shows that, according to Rawls’s unduly narrow conception, Edward Snowden is not a civil disobedient. But, according to the more plausible, broader conception, he is. The paper then identifies some advantages of the broader conception in contemporary analyses of new forms of disobedience including globalised disobedience and digital disobedience

'Don’t call people “rapists" : on the social contribution injustice of punishment’

We wrong a person as a social being when we deny him minimally adequate opportunities to contribute socially to other people’s survival and wellbeing. We can call this kind of wrong social contribution injustice. In the morally fraught domain of criminal justice, we perpetrate this injustice in many ways, including in our tendency to see people who have committed offences as social threats. One way that we exhibit this tendency in our use of classificatory terms such as ‘murderer’ and ‘rapist’ that essentialise people’s wrongdoing. We also engage in more concrete, material forms of social contribution injustice when we give people criminal records they can never spend, impose punishments that stretch or sever their social bonds, and deny them support when they are trying to reintegrate after punishment. We also do social contribution injustice to the dependents and affiliates of many of the people we punish. Much of this injustice is contingent on our practices, policies, and general attitudes toward offending

Can the law help us to be moral?

The moral value of law can take many forms. It is instrumentally valuable when it coordinates interaction, provides moral advice and leadership, models the virtues, and motivates us to be moral. It is intrinsically valuable when it constitutes the collective moral conscience of citizens, embodies an ideal form of communal life, and expresses the moral integrity of the community. We analyse all of these potential values of law and assess their moral significance. In doing so, we are careful to distinguish between (a) the general concept of law and (b) the actual law of any particular legal system. We argue that, although in principle law does have the potential to help us to be moral in each of the ways noted, many actual legal systems are conducive to great immorality and injustice. Being moral and living well under such regimes is likely to be much harder than it would be otherwise, even in the absence of any legal system