Obesity and Responsibility

Author(s):  
Beth Dixon

This chapter explores whether obese individuals are morally responsible for their condition of obesity. The main argument is that some who are classified as obese are exempt from moral responsibility for two possible reasons. Either food situationism may interfere with an individual’s capacity to detect the moral considerations that favor healthy eating. Or, structural inequalities may interfere with an individual’s capacity to act on moral considerations that favor healthy eating. The account of situated moral agency employed here makes it possible to resist the false dichotomy of saying that either all obese individuals are morally responsible for being obese or that they are exempt from responsibility altogether. If moral exemptions apply in the way suggested, then a large number of individuals who are obese do not deserve to be the targets of moral blame, nor do they deserve the moral indignation that is sometimes directed toward them.

Author(s):  
Dane Leigh Gogoshin

Contrary to the prevailing view that robots cannot be full-blown members of the larger human moral community, I argue not only that they can but that they would be ideal moral agents in the way that currently counts. While it is true that robots fail to meet a number of criteria which some human agents meet or which all human agents could in theory meet, they earn a perfect score as far as the behavioristic conception of moral agency at work in our moral responsibility practices goes.


Author(s):  
Lisa Herzog

This chapter asks whether we can hold on to the picture of the morally responsible subject as we knew it in the face of evidence from social psychology about the impact of contexts on human behaviour. Some theorists have taken this to present a major challenge to moral theorizing. However, the chapter argues that, while we should acknowledge the malleability of human behaviour, we should not give up the notion of responsible agency. Rather, we need to broaden our theoretical horizon in order to include individuals’ co-responsibility for the contexts in which they act. This argument is a general one, but it is of particular relevance for organizations: it is our shared responsibility to turn them into contexts in which moral agency is supported rather than undermined.


This is the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. The papers were drawn from the fourth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held November 2–4, 2017. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to agency and responsibility: the threat of neuroscience to free will; the relevance of resentment and guilt to responsibility; how control and self-control pertain to moral agency, oppression, and poverty; responsibility for joint agency; the role and conditions of shame in theories of attributability; how one might take responsibility without blameworthy quality of will; what it means to have standing to blame others; the relevance of moral testimony to moral responsibility; how to build a theory of attributabiity that captures all the relevant cases; and how thinking about blame better enables us to dissolve a dispute in moral philosophy between actualists and possibilists.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110008
Author(s):  
Maharaj K. Raina

Greatness, a relative concept, has been historically approached in different ways. Considering greatness of character as different from greatness of talents, some cultures have conceptualized greatness as an expression of human spirit leading to transcending existing patterns and awakening inner selves to new levels of consciousness, rising above times and circumstances, and to change the direction of human tide. Individuals characterized by such greatness working with higher selves, guided by moral and ethical imperatives, and possessing noble impulses of human nature are considered to be manifesting spiritual greatness. Examining such greatness is the goal of this article. Keeping Indian tradition in focus, this article has studied how greatness has been conceptualized in that particular tradition and the way in which life and times have shaped great individuals called Mahāpuruşha who exhibited extraordinary moral responsibility relentlessly in pursuit of their visions of addressing contemporary major issues and changing the direction of human life. Four Mahāpuruşha, who possessed such enduring greatness and excelled in their thoughts and actions to give a new positive direction to human life, have been profiled in this article. Suggestions have also been made for studies on moral and spiritual excellence to help realize our true human path and purpose.


2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Levy

Whatever its implications for the other features of human agency at its best — for moral responsibility, reasons-responsiveness, self-realization, flourishing, and so on—addiction is universally recognized as impairing autonomy. But philosophers have frequently misunderstood the nature of addiction, and therefore have not adequately explained the manner in which it impairs autonomy. Once we recognize that addiction is not incompatible with choice or volition, it becomes clear that none of the Standard accounts of autonomy can satisfactorily explain the way in which it undermines fully autonomous agency. In order to understand to what extent and in what ways the addicted are autonomy-impaired, we need to understand autonomy as consisting, essentially, in the exercise of the capacity for extended agency. It is because addiction undermines extended agency, so that addicts are not able to integrate their lives and pursue a Single conception of the good, that it impairs autonomy.


Author(s):  
Kelly J. Murphy
Keyword(s):  

Abstract:“Masculinity, Moral Agency, and Memory: The Spirit of the Deity in Judges, Samuel, and Beyond” examines the use of the “spirit of Yahweh/Elohim” in Judges and 1–2Samuel as it relates to questions of masculinity, moral agency, and memory. The article argues that the presence of the “spirit” stories in the narratives of the so-called judges and the figures of Saul/David reflect different conceptions of ancient masculinities, and sometimes function to challenge the masculine ideals of earlier memories from ancient Israel in order to pave the way for the institution of monarchy in the final form of the texts. Additionally, the article examines later interpretations of the stories and how they have been interpreted and used to promote certain contemporary ideas about masculinity while also often ignoring the troubling implications about moral agency vis-a-vis the way that the “spirit of Yahweh/Elohim” functions in the narratives.


2006 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Christian Moe

The wars that dissolved Yugoslavia – were they religious wars? Why are conflicts increasingly coded as religious, rather than as, for example, social or ethnic? What constitutes a ‘religious’ or ‘holy’ war. This article attempts an inventory of important cat­egories and hypotheses generated in the relevant literature so far, with a few critical notes along the way. The author considers the role assigned to religion in structural, cultural, and actor-oriented explanations of the Yugoslav wars. Structural and cultural explanations downplay the role of human agency and, hence, of moral responsibility; actor-oriented approaches focus on it.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 182-187
Author(s):  
Poonam Dhanda ◽  
Alok Kumar Mishra

The study is absolutely an observational study used to measure empowerment of persons with disabilities through the improvement of entrepreneurial quality, development and imagination. Further research is expected to create, assess, evaluate, the significance of present study in other developing nations. India is frequently depicted as a developing yet a youthful nation. As the nation enters its 65th year of autonomous presence the depiction of youth does not appear to be excessively suitable. It can now be termed youthful by reason of the way that half of its billion or more populace comprises of persons underneath 25 years old and 65% of the populace is beneath 35 years. Every single differently abled individual has a leftover potential force than their non-disabled companions. Six to seven rate of populace in India is individuals with inability almost 8 to 9 crore individuals the number is expanding with mishaps and maturing. About 33% of aggregate number of individuals in India is influenced with some kind of incapacity.


Author(s):  
Rajesh Heynickx

In this article it is demonstrated that an analysis of how building metaphorswere used in the Flemish Catholic discourse of the interwar years can offermore insight into the way a community of believers tries to establish a culturalcohesiveness. The main argument is that in a period of deep transformations,building metaphors could become "instruments" for Catholics whowanted to defend and promote a traditional dimension of their religion.Building metaphors allowed Catholics to stress the stability of their own ideology(the fundaments) and to formulate their own cultural project (buildingplan). By analysing such strategic use of building metaphors in artistic andphilosophical discourses, it can become possible to shed more light on the roleneo-thomism, a main philosophical current in interwar Flanders, played inartistic debates and more specific in discussions on the modernisation of religiousart.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-122
Author(s):  
Nina A Tsyrkun

The article explores the balance of the two basic cultural constructs - individualism and collectivism - and the way it is represented in the American cinema of 2015-2016 as exemplified by a number of films set in the past, present and future. The author comes to the conclusion that in the face of a global peril the idea of individual moral responsibility inevitably leads to the role of collectivism as the essential survival condition.


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