The Moral Habitat

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Herman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Imperfect Duty ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Moral Change ◽  
Imperfect Duties ◽  
Living Together ◽  
Kant's Ethics ◽  
Moral Requirements ◽  
Kantian Morality

The Moral Habitat is a book in three parts that begins with an investigation of three understudied imperfect duties which together offer some important and challenging insights about moral requirements and moral agency: that our duties only make sense as a system; that actions can be morally wrong to do and yet not be impermissible; and that there are motive-dependent duties. In Part Two, these insights are used to launch a substantial reinterpretation of Kant’s ethics as a system of duties, juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect, that can incorporate what we learn from imperfect duties and do much more. The system of duties provides the structure for what I call a moral habitat: a made environment, created by and for free and equal persons living together. It is a dynamic system, with duties from the juridical and ethical spheres shaping and being affected by each other, each level further interpreting the system’s core anti-subordination value initiated in Kant’s account of innate right. The structure of an imperfect duty is exhibited in a detailed account of the duty of beneficence, including its latitude of application and demandingness. Part Three takes up some implications and applications of the moral habitat idea. Its topics range from the adjustments to the system that would come with recognizing a human right to housing to meta-ethical issues about objectivity and our responsibility for moral change. The upshot is a transformative, holistic agent- and institution-centered, account of Kantian morality.

Tracking Value and Extending Duties

2021 ◽  
pp. 164-178
Author(s):  
Barbara Herman
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Imperfect Duty ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Moral Change ◽  
Imperfect Duties ◽  
Perfect Duties ◽  
Exercise Of Discretion

This chapter shows how both perfect and imperfect duties require both agents and institutions to take responsibility for tracking moral value across their respective contexts of right and duty. The casuistry that belongs to perfect duties is contrasted with the exercise of discretion essential to acting on an imperfect duty. A defense of juridical imperfect duties is offered. Citizens and officials of the state acting under the auspices of a juridical right or duty may need to exercise the kind of discretion that is the mark of an imperfect duty. Questions about moral change in the content and locus of duties are introduced.

Ethical issues in tuberculosis screening and the use of new drugs for prisoners

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 57-60
Author(s):  
B. S. Elger ◽  
F. Mirzayev ◽  
S. Afandiyev ◽  
E. Gurbanova
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Multidrug Resistant ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Right ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Tuberculosis Screening ◽  
Tb Treatment ◽  
International Human

SETTING: Prisons are known to have extremely high tuberculosis (TB) and multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB prevalence and poor treatment outcomes.OBJECTIVE: To examine the screening and M/XDR-TB treatment with new TB drugs in prisons from the perspective of international ethical and legal requirements.DESIGN: WHO recommendations on TB screening in prisons and M/XDR-TB treatment as well as the international human rights law on prisoners were analysed.RESULTS: Prisoners have a human right to access at least the same level of TB care as in their communities. Screening for TB in prisons, which may run contrary to a given individual's choice to be tested, may be justified by the positive obligation to prevent other prisoners from contracting a possibly deadly disease. Introduction of new TB drugs in prisons is necessary, ethically sound and should start in parallel with introduction in a civilian sector in strict compliance with the WHO recommendations.CONCLUSION: Access to screening for TB, as well as effective treatment according to WHO recommendations, must be ensured by countries on the basis of international human rights conventions.

scholarly journals Change and Moral Development in Kant’s Ethics

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Kyle Curran
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Moral Change ◽  
Kant's Ethics

This paper is concerned with an ambiguous aspect of Kant’s ethics, namely, how moral change is possible. Kant conceives that change is possible, indeed desirable, without making clear the mechanism by which this change occurs. I conclude that one’s moral development must come about through the autonomous rationality of humanity. This allows for the moral law to be held at all times and for the rejection of immoral sentiments and inclinations. Further, it is constant soulsearching that allows one to keep a check on their maxims, facilitating the development of a moral disposition.

Kant on the Moral Cultivation of Feelings

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Moral Cultivation ◽  
Moral Duties ◽  
Kant's Ethics ◽  
Kantian Morality

Kant’s ethics is traditionally portrayed as unequivocal on one issue: natural drives, including feelings, emotions, and inclinations, are intrinsically at odds with morality. However, this does not entail that there is no moral role for them in Kant’s ethics. For instance, he writes ‘while it is not in itself a duty to share the sufferings (as well the joys) of others, it is a duty to sympathize actively in their fate’ [6:456–7].This statement is not only in conflict with traditional portrayals of his ethics, but more importantly it may seem surprising for Kantian morality to endorse the claim that we have duties, albeit indirect, to cultivate feelings of sympathy in order to use them as a means to moral ends. The aim of this chapter is to spell out and defend the claim that the cultivation of certain emotions is one of our moral duties.

Due Care

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-70
Author(s):  
Barbara Herman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Imperfect Duty ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Moral Motive

This chapter explores the imperfect duty of non-negligence or due care. It is a complex secondary duty that regulates the performance of primary duties. Its norms of attention and execution are responsive to a primary duty’s interpreted value. Due care often requires motivational capacities that track moral value across complex circumstances of action—a claim inconsistent with a dictum that duties cannot impose requirements that depend on motive. Middle Work 3 argues that the dictum depends on a rejectable view of motive, one modeled on a modular account of simple desires. The idea of a system motive is introduced as an affective organization that make an agent responsive to a region of value. This makes a moral motive an agential response to moral value and moral agency a motive-involved competence. We can then have a motive-involved duty without having a duty to have a motive.

Neuroethics

2021 ◽  
pp. 405-420
Author(s):  
Georg Northoff
Keyword(s):  
Deep Brain Stimulation ◽  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Brain Stimulation ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Deep Brain

Neuroethics, located at the interface of conceptual and empirical dimensions, carries major implications for psychiatry, such as the neuroscientific basis of ethical concepts as moral agency. Drawing on data in neuroscience, this chapter highlights issues central to psychiatric ethics. First, it addresses a reductionistic model of the brain, often conceived as purely neuronal, and then it discusses empirical data suggesting that the brain’s activity is strongly aligned to its respective social (e.g., relation to others) and ecological (e.g., relation to the environment and nature) contexts; this implies a relational rather than reductionist model. Second, it suggests that self (e.g., the experience or sense of a self) and personhood (e.g., the person as existent independent of experience) must also be understood in such a social and ecological and, therefore, relational and spatio-temporal sense. Ethical concepts like agency, therefore, cannot be limited solely to the person and brain, but must rather be understood in a relational and neuro-ecological/social way. Third, it discusses deep brain stimulation as a treatment that promotes enhancement. In sum, this chapter presents findings in neuroscience that carry major implications for our view of brain, mental features, psychiatric disorders, and ethical issues like agency, responsibility, and enhancement.

Rising from the ordinary: Virtue, the justice motif and moral change

2020 ◽  
pp. 146349962093205
Author(s):  
Susanne Brandtstädter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Northern China ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Anthropology ◽  
Moral Change ◽  
Social Rule ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Practical Principle ◽  
Social Dynamic ◽  
Chinese Peasant

Justice understood as a practical principle and virtue has remained an understudied subject in the anthropology of morality. Moral anthropology has explored the moral or ethical as a space of freedom and creativity, whereas justice has often been associated with rule-following or even the law. In contrast, my paper explores justice as a virtue whose social dynamic can initiate moral change in ordinary life. This virtue, as I understand it, comprises not only a disposition to conform to established norms but also a capacity to reformulate these in the pursuit of social justice. My ethnography of Chinese peasant lawyers’ moral agency suggests that their understanding of justice as an essentially social, rule-governed and outcome-oriented virtue can grant new insights into the dynamics of moral innovation that arise in ordinary life. The peasant lawyers of rural northern China pursue moral change through combining moral reasoning about justice with principled action for justice and the provision of benefits for victims of injustice. It is the concern with the consequences of principled action that distinguishes justice as a social virtue from the other virtues, and the justice motif from alternative drivers of social change.

scholarly journals Visitor Restrictions, Palliative Care, and Epistemic Agency: A Qualitative Study of Nurses’ Relational Practice During the Coronavirus Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 233339362110517
Author(s):  
Kim McMillan ◽  
David K. Wright ◽  
Christine J. McPherson ◽  
Kristina Ma ◽  
Vasiliki Bitzas
Keyword(s):  
Palliative Care ◽  
End Of Life ◽  
End Of Life Care ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
Epistemic Agency ◽  
Relational Practice ◽  
Philosophy Of Palliative Care ◽  
Pandemic Response

Efforts to curb spread of COVID-19 has led to restrictive visitor policies in healthcare, which disrupt social connection between patients and their families at end of life. We interviewed 17 Canadian nurses providing palliative care, to solicit their descriptions of, and responses to, ethical issues experienced as a result of COVID-19 related circumstances. Our analysis was inductive and scaffolded on notions of nurses’ moral agency, palliative care values, and our clinical practice in end-of-life care. Our findings reveal that while participants appreciated the need for pandemic measures, they found blanket policies separating patients and families to be antithetical to their philosophy of palliative care. In navigating this tension, nurses drew on the foundational values of their practice, engaging in ethical reasoning and action to integrate safety and humanity into their work. These findings underscore the epistemic agency of nurses and highlight the limits of a purely biomedical logic for guiding the nursing ethics of the pandemic response.

Liberal Self-Determination in a World of Migration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luara Ferracioli
Keyword(s):  
Prima Facie ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Liberal Society ◽  
Human Right ◽  
International Borders ◽  
Future 2 ◽  
Philosophical Questions ◽  
Moral Requirements ◽  
Key Questions

This book focuses on three key questions regarding the movement of persons across international borders: (1) What gives some residents of a liberal society a right to be considered citizens of that society such that they have a claim to make decisions with regard to its political future? (2) Do citizens of a liberal society have a prima facie right to exclude prospective immigrants despite their commitment to the values of freedom and equality? And (3) if citizens have this prima facie right to exclude prospective immigrants, are there moral requirements regarding how they may exercise it? The book therefore tackles the most pressing philosophical questions that arise for a theory that does not endorse a human right to immigrate: the questions of who exercises self-determination in the area of immigration, why they have such a right in the first place, and how they should go about exercising it.

Kant and Contemporary Ethics

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Philip Stratton-Lake
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Moral Judgement ◽  
Ethical Theories ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Kant's Ethics ◽  
Moral Requirements

It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which Kant has influenced contemporary ethics. Whether or not one is sympathetic to his moral theory, one cannot ignore it, or the various ethical theories which draw their inspiration from it. Debates which have centred on Kantian themes include debates about whether moral requirements are categorical imperatives, whether they have an overriding authority, whether the various moral judgements we make can be codified, the role of duty in moral motivation, whether there are moral actions which are beyond the call of duty, the relation of morality to autonomy, and the very nature of moral judgement. The pervasiveness of Kant's influence makes it very difficult to write anything comprehensive on his relation to contemporary ethics, and I do not intend to attempt such an ambitious task here. Rather, in what follows I shall focus mainly on three distinctive features of Kant's ethics, which correspond roughly to the three chapters of the Groundwork.

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