scholarly journals Meat Eating and Moral Responsibility: Exploring the Moral Distinctions between Meat Eaters and Puppy Torturers

Utilitas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 398-415
Author(s):  
C. E. Abbate
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Meat Eating ◽  
Average Consumer ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Harmful Behavior ◽  
Do So

AbstractIn his influential article on the ethics of eating animals, Alastair Norcross argues that consumers of factory raised meat and puppy torturers are equally condemnable because both knowingly cause serious harm to sentient creatures just for trivial pleasures. Against this claim, I argue that those who buy and consume factory raised meat, even those who do so knowing that they cause harm, have a partial excuse for their wrongdoings. Meat eaters act under social duress, which causes volitional impairment, and they often act from deeply ingrained habits, which causes epistemic impairment. But puppy torturers act against cultural norms and habits, consciously choosing to perform wrongful acts. Consequently, the average consumer of factory raised meat has, while puppy torturers lack, a cultural excuse. But although consumers of factory raised meat aren't blameworthy, they are partially morally responsible for their harmful behavior – and for this, they should feel regret, remorse, and shame.

Translation and Its Affects

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
William A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Language ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Language Competence ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Do So

Vanity Fair (1848) famously opens with a departure. As Becky Sharpe flounces off from Miss Pinkerton's academy, she takes leave of her patron by telling her “in a very unconcerned manner … and with a perfect accent, ‘Mademoiselle, je viens vous faire mes adieux.’” Miss Pinkerton, we learn, “did not understand French, she only directed those who did: but biting her lips and throwing up her venerable and Roman-nosed head … said, ‘Miss Sharp, I wish you a good morning’” (7). This performance of befuddlement on the part of a respectable schoolmistress bespeaks a whole collection of Victorian cultural norms about language competence in general and about the French language in particular. Even though the action is set in a period when Becky's speaking “French with purity and a Parisian accent … [was] rather a rare accomplishment” (11), the novel was written for a mid-nineteenth-century audience that could mainly count on middle-class young ladies to have acquired this degree of refinement—or at least to aspire to do so.

scholarly journals Reconciling Practical Knowledge with Self-Deception

Mind ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 128 (512) ◽  
pp. 1205-1225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Marcus
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Correct Description ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Do So

Abstract Is it impossible for a person to do something intentionally without knowing that she is doing it? The phenomenon of self-deceived agency might seem to show otherwise. Here the agent is not (at least in a straightforward sense) lying, yet disavows a correct description of her intentional action. This disavowal might seem expressive of ignorance. However, I show that the self-deceived agent does know what she's doing. I argue that we should understand the factors that explain self-deception as masking rather than negating the practical knowledge characteristic of intentional action. This masking takes roughly the following form: when we are deceiving ourselves about what we are intentionally doing, we don't think about our action because it's painful to do so.

Double-Effect Donation Disputed

2021 ◽  
pp. 002436392110381
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Cavanaugh
Keyword(s):  
Organ Donation ◽  
Healthy Individual ◽  
Living Donor ◽  
Double Effect ◽  
Vital Organ ◽  
Dead Donor Rule ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Living Person ◽  
Do So

In “Double Effect Donation,” Camosy and Vukov argue that “there are circumstances in which it is morally permissible for a healthy individual to donate their organs even though their death is a foreseeable outcome”. They propose that a living donor could ethically donate an entire, singular, vital organ while knowing that this act would result in death. In reply, I argue that it is not ethical for a living person to donate an entire, singular, vital organ. Moreover, mutatis mutandis, it is not ethical for surgeons and others to perform such a deadly operation. For to do so is “intentionally to cause the death of the donor in disposing of his organs”. Such an act violates the dead donor rule which holds that an entire, singular, vital organ may be taken only from a corpse. Contrary to Camosy and Vukov’s claims, double-effect reasoning does not endorse such organ donation.

A Positive View of Freedom?

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-161
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Positive View ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
External Influences ◽  
Positive Valence ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Persuasive Definition ◽  
Do So

This chapter reviews the textual evidence that Nietzsche retains a positive conception of “freedom.” Interpretive proposals due to Gemes and Poellner are shown not to be borne out by the texts. The chapter concludes that Nietzsche offers a “persuasive definition” of freedom, attaching the term’s positive valence to a sense of freedom unfamiliar in the modern Humean or Kantian traditions, but having echoes in Spinoza: “freedom” as acting from one’s inner nature rather than from external influences, something one can only do if fated to do so. The Spinoza-type view is shown not to be a kind of Control view of free will, so not one that vindicates moral responsibility.

Linguistic Alterity and the Multiplicitous Self: Critical Phenomenologies in Latina Feminist Thought

Hypatia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-436
Author(s):  
Elena Flores Ruíz
Keyword(s):  
Gloria Anzaldua ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
State Terror ◽  
Social Violence ◽  
Strategic Reading ◽  
Cultural Violence ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
Do So

Latina feminists like Gloria Anzaldúa and Mariana Ortega have developed anti‐essentialist accounts of selfhood that are responsive to the problem of alterity and hermeneutic alienation experienced by multiplicitous subjects, understood as those who must navigate between multiple cultural norms and often conflicting interpretive traditions (due to colonial legacies and intersectional oppressions). These accounts can be fortified by examining the sense of inarticulacy that arises from having to name conditions of existence undergirded by social and historical contradictions and ambiguities—especially under the experiential stress of gendered social violence, cultural trauma, and state terror. To address phenomenological accounts of “linguistic terrorism” and the role language plays in multiplicitous accounts of selfhood, I turn to a strategic reading of Nietzsche's existential conception of the self as a living multiplicity, and to his related account of the impoverishment of language. In doing so, I argue more generally that philosophies of agency that critique agential narratives of rupture, instability, and interpretive loss (as part of liberal emancipatory projects) often do so without sufficient attunement to the ways concepts of alterity and liminality operate in North–South contexts or Latina feminist thought. I end by highlighting the critical, decolonial impetus of these concepts as responses to cultural violence.

scholarly journals Moral Responsibility and Merit

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt King
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
General Account ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Do So

In the contemporary moral responsibility debate, most theorists seem to be giving accounts of responsibility in the "desert-entailing sense." Despite this agreement, little has been said about the notion of desert that is supposedly entailed. In this paper I propose an understanding of desert sufficient to help explain why the blameworthy and praiseworthy deserve blame and praise, respectively. I do so by drawing upon what might seem an unusual resource. I appeal to so-called Fitting-Attitude accounts of value to help inform a conception of desert or merit, one that can be usefully applied to discussions of moral responsibility. I argue that the view, which I call, Desert as Fittingness (or DAF), merits additional attention. I do so by making two claims: First, that it does better than extant Fitting Attitude accounts of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness; second, that it has an initial plausibility with respect to informing a general account of desert. While these reasons are insufficient to show the view is true, they do make the case for taking the view seriously.

scholarly journals Relationship between moral responsibility for zoonotic pandemics outbreaks and industrial animal farms

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 695-713
Author(s):  
Josip Guc
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Weakest Link ◽  
Animal Farms ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Livestock Health ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Moral Blame ◽  
Do So

The responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic was first ascribed to persons associated with the Huanan Seafood Market. However, many scientists suggest that this pandemic is actually a consequence of human intrusion into nature. This opens up a whole new perspective for an examination of direct and indirect, individual and collective responsibility concerning this particular pandemic, but also zoonotic pandemics as such. In this context, one of the key issues are the consequences of factory-farming of animals, which contributes to circumstances in which zoonotic pandemics emerge. Moreover, it is part of a larger economic system, global capitalism, whose logic implies certain coercion toward its participants to keep it essentially unchanged and therefore to make sure that livestock health remains ?the weakest link in our global health chain? (FAO). However, even though the precise answer to the issue of moral responsibility for zoonotic pandemics outbreaks in general and the COVID-19 pandemic in particular cannot be given, it is possible to list certain indicators and make a framework helpful in ascribing moral responsibility to certain persons. The paper intends to do so by examining the notion of responsibility and by applying it to the issues mentioned. The results of this analysis show that it is misleading to place moral blame on people involved in actions that directly caused the animal-to-human transmission of a certain virus or on humanity as a whole.

scholarly journals Debunking (the) Retribution (Gap)

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 1315-1328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven R. Kraaijeveld
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Complex Systems ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Moral Question ◽  
Implicit Biases ◽  
Retributive Punishment ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Moral Blame ◽  
Do So

Abstract Robotization is an increasingly pervasive feature of our lives. Robots with high degrees of autonomy may cause harm, yet in sufficiently complex systems neither the robots nor the human developers may be candidates for moral blame. John Danaher has recently argued that this may lead to a retribution gap, where the human desire for retribution faces a lack of appropriate subjects for retributive blame. The potential social and moral implications of a retribution gap are considerable. I argue that the retributive intuitions that feed into retribution gaps are best understood as deontological intuitions. I apply a debunking argument for deontological intuitions in order to show that retributive intuitions cannot be used to justify retributive punishment in cases of robot harm without clear candidates for blame. The fundamental moral question thus becomes what we ought to do with these retributive intuitions, given that they do not justify retribution. I draw a parallel from recent work on implicit biases to make a case for taking moral responsibility for retributive intuitions. In the same way that we can exert some form of control over our unwanted implicit biases, we can and should do so for unjustified retributive intuitions in cases of robot harm.

The Cognitive Unconscious in Native American Embodied Knowing

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-106
Author(s):  
Shay Welch ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Procedural Knowledge ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Knowing How ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Embodied Knowing ◽  
Cognitive Unconscious ◽  
Do So

In this paper, I address only one small parallel between one subsection of Western epistemology and cognitive theory and Native American epistemology. I draw the connection between the recent theories of embodied cognition and distinctive Native modes of embodied implicit procedural knowing, such as blood memory, vision questions, and non-binary logical systems. My reason for doing so is twofold. First, I show how these distinctive ways of knowing within Native worldviews are not mere mystical claims that can be cast aside in favor of more ostensibly “rational” knowing practices. To do so, I utilized Mark Johnson’s account of the cognitive unconscious to demonstrate how and that Native embodied knowing practices and knowledge sources are easily explicable when examined though a phenomenological cognitive lens. Second, I highlight one small respect in which Native epistemologies are conceived of procedurally. Embodied forms of knowing are merely one facet of the procedural performative nature of Native American epistemology but they are highly demonstrative of the fact that procedural ways of knowing—knowing-how—account for deeply implicit ways of knowing that are lacking from other procedural knowledge accounts that are often hamstrung without such an accompanying account of knowing-how beyond counterfactual knowledge.

scholarly journals Vox Peritorum: Capitalizing on Confidence and Projection to Characterize Expertise

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Joachim Grüning ◽  
Joachim Israel Krueger
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Integrative Approach ◽  
Future Research ◽  
High Confidence ◽  
Social Projection ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Theoretical Premise ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Joint Study ◽  
Do So

Theory and research seek to isolate the properties of experts in judgment and decision-making tasks. Confidence in judgment and social projection have emerged as two important meta-judgmental markers. The joint utility of these two indicators of expertise has not been considered yet. We show that the joint study of individual and contextual differences in confidence and projection offers new opportunities to understand expertise. Our theoretical premise is that experts can solve difficult tasks, and do so with high confidence while knowing that few others accomplish this. In a reanalysis of data from Prelec and colleagues (2017) we show that expert judgments are accompanied by higher confidence and less social projection than judgments made by non-experts. Only among experts, confidence and projection are weakly correlated. Moreover, experts align their rate of projection with the difficulty of the judgment task. The present results support a new and integrative approach to the study of experts and expert judgment. We discuss the limitations of the present work and point to future research questions.

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