Ethics Alert

(If one of your papers has recently become available online and you would like me to link to it in the next Ethics Alert, then please send me an email or an email attachment (.doc or .rtf) with the relevant information, following the format used below. The relevant information should be properly formatted so that it can be simply cut and pasted into a post. And please make the subject of your email read: “Ethics Alert.”)

Procurable from the author:

Justin D’Arms, Relationality, Relativism, and Realism About Moral Value. Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies (Book Symposium on P. Railton, Facts Values and Norms).

Justin D’Arms, Two Arguments for Sentimentalism. Forthcoming in Philosophical Issues 15.

Justin D’Arms (with Daniel Jacobson), Anthropocentric Constraints on Human Value. Forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaethics 1.

Justin D’Arms (with Daniel Jacobson), Sensibility Theory and Projectivism. Forthcoming in  Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, D. Copp ed.

Alan Thomas, Values, Reasons and Perspectives. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1996-7. Two agents in a morally dilemmatic situation can agree on the values in that situation and their bearing on decision but come to different all things considered verdicts about what to do. It is argued that Sen's notion of evaluator relativity in which outcomes differ in value according to whether one is the proposed author or viewer of the proposed action can be adapted to solve the problem.  Practical reasons are perspectival in a more radical way than judgements of value, but still objective. Adapting Sen's insight by explaining it as a claim about reasons not values solves the paradox while remaining cognitivist about values and impartialist about reasons.

Alan Thomas, Minimalism and Quasi-Realism. Philosophical Papers, (November, 1997), pp. 233-239. Expressivism's problem in solving the Frege/Geach problem concerning unasserted contexts is evaluated in the light of Blackburn's own methodological commitment to assessing philosophical theories in terms of costs and benefits. Projectivism is supposed to be a local and contrastive thesis or the central metaphor of projection makes no sense. So in competition with minimalism, projectivism must - at least for non-contested areas of thought and language - presuppose non-minimal truth. Why globally revise logic, in order solely to explain the problem of unasserted contexts, when a rival view can do so much better according to the standards set by the quasi-realist? Why do so when a notion of non-minimal truth and a classical explanation of logic are already available to you, given the local and contrastive claims of quasi-realism?

Alan Thomas, Consequentialism and the Subversion of Pluralism. In Brad Hooker, Elinor Mason and Dale Miller (eds) Morality, Rules and Consequences, EdinburghUniversityPress (2000). This paper critically analyses Brad Hooker's attempt to undercut pluralism by arguing that any plausible set of prima facie duties can be derived from a more fundamental rule consequentialist principle. It is argued that this conclusion is foreshadowed by the rationalist and epistemologically realist interpretation that Hooker imposes on his chosen methodology of reflective equilibrium; he is not describing pluralism in its strongest version and a more plausible version of pluralism is described and defended.

Alan Thomas, Internal Reasons and Contractualist Impartiality. Utilitas, volume 14, number 2 July pp. 135-154, (2002). This paper interprets Bernard Williams's claim that all practical reasons must meet the internal reasons constraint. It is argued that this constraint is independent of any substantive Humean claims about reasons and its rationale is a content scepticism about the capacity of pure reason to supply reasons for action. The dispute between Williams and McDowell is separately discussed and identified in terms of psychologism, which Williams was happy to adopt for practical reasons, McDowell not, and whether appeal to the content of the reasons of a phronimos gives any purchase on the contents of an agent's reasons.  The final sections attempt a positive reconciliation of the internal reasons account with the motivation for external reasons, namely, securing practical objecitivy in the form of a commitment to impartiality. Impartiality is given a contractualist interpretation in the limited sense that socialised agents have a central disposition to hold those reasons that are defensible to reasonable interlocutors, but this is not a substantive constraint on their content. Such a commitment plays a structural role in motivation illustrated by the analogy of the internalisation of a relativised a priori principle.

Alan Thomas, Reasonable Partiality and the Agents' Personal Point of View. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, vol 8, nos 1-2, April pp. 25 - 43, (2005). It is argued that reasonable partiality is the only view that is compatible with our best account of the nature of self-knowledge. That account rules out any instrumental relationship between moral demands and moral character, but that familiar claim is given an unfamiliar explanation. Ethical transparency is the feature that my virtues do not exhibit themselves to me in self-knowledge, but take me transparently to the way in which they saliently represent the world as containing evaluative properties calling for various forms of response. It is concluded that reasonable partiality grounded in the nature of the virtues is the only reflective account of morality compatible with the most plausible account of the nature of self-knowledge. The demands of impartiality are  incompatible with a condition of having a personal point of view, namely, that a self can stand in a non-alienated relation to itself via its capacity for self-knowledge.

Alan Thomas, Practical Reasoning and Normative Relevance. Journal of Moral Philosophy, vol. 4 no. 1, April, (2007).  A putative problem for the moral particularist is that he or she fails to capture the normative relevance of certain considerations that they carry on their face, or the intuitive irrelevance of other considerations. It is argued in response that mastery of certain topic specific truisms about a subject matter is what it is for a reasonable interlocutor to be engaged in a moral discussion, but the relevance of these truisms has nothing to do with the particularist/generalist dispute. Given that practical reasoning is plausibly a form of abductive reasoning, and is therefore non-monotonic, any arbitrary addition of information can change the degree of support evidence offers for a conclusion. Given this arbitrariness, it is no objection to the particularist if he or she represents the 'normative landscape as flat' in a way that does not display the 'obvious' relevance of certain considerations. Appealing to a distinction between practical reasoning and moral reasoning does not help to resurrect this pseudo-problem for particularism.

Procurable from the publisher:

Daniel Jacobson, Review of Henry R. West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 275pp., $29.95 (pbk). Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Lynette Reid, Review of Alan Cribb’s Health and the Good Society: Setting Healthcare Ethics in Social Context, Oxford University Press, 2005, 236pp., $85.00 (hbk). Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Comments

[Jamie]

Dan Jacobson's review of Henry West's book is available at the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews web site; here is a permanent link.
(Those are clickable links; on my browser it's very hard to tell that, but they work.)

[Doug Portmore]

Those in the post work too. It's just for some reason the formatting got messed up when I did some cutting and pasting and so the links appear in black, not blue. But if you scroll over them, you'll find that the pointer turns to a hand and you can click on them.

[Doug Portmore]

I tried to fix the contrast issue between links and non-links. Let me know if anyone thinks that I've gone overboard.

[Jamie]

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood the "Procurable from the Publisher", and I didn't see the highlighting.

I like the new contrast; I think it's much clearer this way.