Reflections on Equality, Value and Paradox

I consider two difficulties which have been presented to egalitarianism: Parfit’s “Levelling Down Objection” (LDO) and my “Paradox of the Baseline” (POB). I show that making things worse for some people even with no gain to anyone is actually an ordinary and indeed necessary feature of our moral practice, yet nevertheless the LDO maintains its power in the egalitarian context. I claim that what makes the LDO particularly forceful in the case against egalitarianism is not the very idea of making some people worse off with no gain to others, but the disrespect for (non-egalitarian) value inherent in egalitarianism; and similarly that the POB is a reductio of choice (or luck)-egalitarianism because of its inversion of the intuitively correct attitude to the generation of value. I conclude that in the light of the absurdity and paradox so frequently lurking in moral and social life, and particularly with the complexity of modern life and obliquity of change, we need to be much more modest than egalitarians have been in putting forth ambitious moral and social models.

Black Magic and Respecting Persons -- Some Perplexities

Black magic (henceforth BM) is acting in an attempt to harm human beings through supernatural means. Examples include the employment of spells, the use of special curses, the burning of objects related to the purported victim, and the use of pins with voodoo dolls. For the sake of simplicity, we shall focus on attempts to kill through BM. The moral attitude towards BM has not been, as far as we know, significantly discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy. Yet the topic brings up interesting questions and poses challenges, occasionally even reaching the level of paradoxes. Ideas of respecting persons, in particular, will be seen to be challenged by this form of magic. The notion of respecting persons will be treated here broadly and pluralistically. Indeed part of the interest in the discussion will be the unfolding of the diverse ways in which this term should be understood, and the contrasts between its various uses. Often, as we shall see, respect for persons and disrespect for them, in different senses, will co-exist, and the dilemma will be one where avoiding some forms of disrespect will involve us in disrespect in other senses.</p

A Unified Account of the Moral Standing to Blame

Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: 1. One’s blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent’s wrongdoing. 3. One must be warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the wrongdoing. 4. The target’s wrongdoing must some of “one’s business”. These conditions are often proposed as both conditions on one and the same thing, and as marking fundamentally different ways of “losing standing.” Here I call these claims into question. First, I claim that conditions (3) and (4) are simply conditions on different things than are conditions (1) and (2). Second, I argue that condition (2) reduces to condition (1): when “involvement” removes someone’s standing to blame, it does so only by indicating something further about that agent, viz., that he or she lacks commitment to the values that condemn the wrongdoer’s action. The result: after we clarify the nature of the non-hypocrisy condition, we will have a unified account of moral standing to blame. Issues also discussed: whether standing can ever be regained, the relationship between standing and our "moral fragility", the difference between mere inconsistency and hypocrisy, and whether a condition of standing might be derived from deeper facts about the "equality of persons"

Szczęśliwe nieszczęście przemyślane na nowo: dalsze uwagi

In a previous work I considered the philosophically neglected phenomenon of “Fortunate Misfortune” (or FM). This follows from the way in which sometimes what seems an obvious misfortune turns out, in fact, to be actually good fortune. The paradox, in a certain class of cases, is this: if a seemingly unfortunate aspect of a life has proven to be beneficial overall, then it has not been a real misfortune. However, certain aspects of actual lives seem to be obvious misfortunes, irrespective of what follows. Often, saying both that the life-aspects under consideration are misfortunes and denying that they are, seem unacceptable. In the present paper I aim to survey some of the conceptual, moral and social implications of cases of Fortunate Misfortune. This will be mostly done in the form of questions, exploring the perplexities FM brings up and the challenges it hence poses for further work.We wcześniejszych tekstach omówiłem pomijane przez filozofów zjawisko „szczęśliwego nieszczęścia” (SN). Wiąże się ono z tym, że niekiedy coś, co wydaje się jawnym nieszczęściem, przyjmuje faktycznie szczęśliwy obrót. Paradoks, występujący w określonej klasie przypadków, jest następujący: jeśli na pozór niefortunny aspekt życia okazuje się w ostatecznym rozrachunku dobrodziejstwem, to nie był prawdziwym nieszczęściem. Jednakże pewne aspekty życia wydają się jawnymi nieszczęściami, niezależnie od tego, jakie mają następstwa. Powiedzenie zarówno, że rozważane tu aspekty życia są nieszczęściem i zaprzeczenie, że nimi są, wydaje się często nie do przyjęcia. W tym eseju przedstawiam wybrane pojęciowe, moralne i społeczne konsekwencje przypadków szczęśliwego nieszczęścia, stawiając pytania, rozważając zagadki, do których prowadzi SN oraz formułując wyzwania, z którymi trzeba się będzie zmierzyć w przyszłości