Vital Force

Chapter 5 addresses the moral theory suggested by the African tradition according to which one is obligated to promote (or honour) liveliness in oneself and others. This sort of principle has been advanced by philosophers such as Noah Dzobo, Bénézet Bujo, and Laurenti Magesa. Vitalism is a globally under-explored approach to right action that deserves much more consideration. However, the chapter concludes that it cannot account for some comparatively uncontroversial moral claims salient in the African tradition. Sometimes settling for majoritarian rule and avoiding reconciliation in respect of criminal justice would best promote (or honour) liveliness, and yet most African philosophers would judge these actions to be wrong to some degree. The chapter also argues that vitalism cannot account for certain intuitions with a global scope; forbidding interracial marriage and deceiving people might best promote (or honour) liveliness, but ethicists around the world would judge these actions to be pro tanto immoral.

Reconsidering Ontology’s Relevance

This chapter and the next are methodological, focused on how to justify a moral theory. Many African philosophers believe that ethical claims follow immediately from ‘external’, metaphysical ones about human nature that must be established first. For example, Kwame Nkrumah maintains that an egalitarian ethic follows directly from a prior physicalist ontology, and Kwame Gyekye contends that his ‘moderate communitarian’ morality is derived from a certain conception of the self. Chapter 2 shows how these and similar rationales fail to clear the ‘is/ought gap’, as it is known in Western meta-ethics, and also how strategies one might use to bridge the gap do not work. It concludes that a more suitable way to defend a moral theory is to argue ‘internally’ to morality by appealing to intuitions, i.e., by determining which comparatively more controversial general principle of right action easily entails and best explains less controversial particular moral claims.

For the Common Good

The foundations of research ethics are riven with fault lines emanating from a fear that if research is too closely connected to weighty social purposes an imperative to advance the common good through research will justify abrogating the rights and welfare of study participants. The result is an impoverished conception of the nature of research, an incomplete focus on actors who bear important moral responsibilities, and a system of ethics and oversight highly attuned to the dangers of research but largely silent about threats of ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable medical practices and health systems. In For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics, Alex John London defends a conception of the common good that grounds a moral imperative with two requirements. The first is to promote research that generates the information necessary to enable key social institutions to effectively, efficiently, and equitably safeguard the basic interests of individuals. The second is to ensure that research is organized as a voluntary scheme of social cooperation that respects its various contributors’ moral claims to be treated as free and equal. Connecting research to the goals of a just social order grounds a framework for assessing and managing research risk that reconciles these requirements and justifies key oversight practices in non-paternalistic terms. Reconceiving research ethics as resolving coordination problems and providing credible assurance that these requirements are being met expands the issues and actors that fall within the purview of the field and provides the foundation for a more unified and coherent approach to domestic and international research.

Seeking Purity, Avoiding Pollution: Strategies for Moral Career Building

This study builds theory on how people construct moral careers. Analyzing interviews with 102 journalists, we show how people build moral careers by seeking jobs that allow them to fulfill both the institution’s moral obligations and their own material aims. We theorize a process model that traces three common moral claiming strategies that people use over time: conventional, supplemental, and reoriented. Using these strategies, people accept or alter purity and pollution rules, identify appropriate jobs, and orient themselves to specific audiences for validation of their moral claims. People’s careers are punctuated by reckonings that cause them to reconsider how their strategies fulfill their moral and material aims. Experiences of gender and racial discrimination, access to alternate occupational identities, and timing of entry into the occupation also shape people’s movement between strategies. Over time, people combine these moral claiming strategies in different ways such that varying moral careers emerge within the same occupation. Overall, our study shows how people can build moral careers by actively revising purity and pollution rules while holding fast to institutional moral obligations. By theorizing careers as an ongoing series of moral claiming strategies, this research contributes novel ideas about how morals weave through and organize relationships between people, careers, and institutions.

Moral relativism and subjectivism

This chapter explores the claim that ethics is subjective or relative. In other words that there are no moral absolutes and that moral claims always vary depending on the dominant norms at the time. The chapter explains the difficulties with claims of this kind. It also considers how ethics can appreciate diversity within society and be tolerant, while holding on to moral absolutes.

À la table d'Apollon : de l'abondance à la modération dans Francion

The first edition of the Histoire comique de Francion by Charles Sorel (1623) contains numerous references to the eating and drinking. My study examines narrative sequences focused on a fluctuation between deprivation and abundance, frustration and jouissance. In addition to the domain of food, I consider allusions to sexuality and knowledge, insofar as they share the same narrative paradigm, and shed light on each other. This analysis also shows how Sorel relates ambivalent references to food to some of his moral claims, expressed through subversive uses of the tradition of comic fiction. The four books added for the 1626 and 1633 editions of Francion can be perceived as a wavering attempt to displace Bacchus, who presides over the protagonist’s birth and is emblematic of the various immoderations in the first edition.

Identity, Fidelity, and Cross-Cultural Relationships in Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly

Almayer’s Folly (1896) by Joseph Conrad challenged the conventions of the fictional romance while confronting the need of native-born Malayans and other Asian individuals to find voice and identity in an imperial context. Along with the narrative voice in this text are the many other voices of those who have been colonized. Fidelity to one’s identity and openness to relationships across cultures lies at the crux of this study. Conrad’s critics of the 1950s and 1960s dismissed his first novel as a romance with a weak subplot. However, that subplot, about Almayer’s daughter Nina and her love affair, sets forth moral claims of loyalty and fidelity that must be taken into account. For her relation- ship with a Malay prince expresses a love that is binding and enduring, one that crosses boundaries and divisions and is an apt model for our culturally convergent world. Conrad creates a dialectic of intercultural subjectivities to make a point about identity, loyalty, and self-fashioning. Whereas Almayer is portrayed as foolish and inflexible, his daughter, Nina, faces significant issues of identity, as she has to choose between the traditional, indigenous heritage of her mother and her father’s modern European aspirations. With Almayer’s Folly, Joseph Conrad showed himself to be an international novelist who could develop a story with an inter-racial and intercultural cast of characters.

Using and Abusing Moorean Arguments

Metaethical Mooreanism is the view that without being able to explain how we know certain moral claims we can nevertheless be sure that we do know them. In this article I focus on the Moorean argument against moral error theory. I conclude that it fails. To show this failure, I first distinguish Moorean claims from Moorean arguments, and then so-called presumptive support from dialogical support. With these distinctions in place, I argue that the key Moorean claim requires dialogical support in order to be used within the Moorean argument against moral error theory, but metaethical Mooreans have provided only presumptive support for the Moorean claim. Not only is this presumptive support inadequate for fending off the moral error theory, it is doubtful that Mooreans can actually provide dialogical support for the key Moorean claim.

A DEFENSE OF HUMEAN PROPERTY THEORY

ABSTRACT Two rival approaches to property rights dominate contemporary political philosophy: Lockean natural rights and egalitarian theories of distributive justice. This article defends a third approach, which can be traced to the work of David Hume. Unlike Lockean rights, Humean property rights are not grounded in pre-institutional moral entitlements. In contrast to the egalitarian approach, which begins with highly abstract principles of distributive justice, Humean theory starts with simple property conventions and shows how more complex institutions can be justified against a background of settled property rights. Property rights allow people to coordinate their use of scarce resources. For property rules to serve this function effectively, certain questions must be considered settled. Treating existing property entitlements as having prima facie validity facilitates cooperation between people who disagree about distributive justice. Lockean and egalitarian theories endorse moral claims that threaten to unsettle property conventions and undermine social cooperation.

Discursive Justice in and With Future Generations

Most discussions of intergenerational justice focus on distributive justice between generations. Much of contemporary thinking about justice, though, focuses on how people might reason together in a respectful and egalitarian manner—with, that is, justice in political discourse. This chapter seeks to apply this latter sort of theorizing to the intergenerational context. It identifies two ways in which discursive justice might be applicable to that context. First, the present generation might wrong future generations by making discursive justice more difficult in the future; it might, for instance, create a future in which political agents must display greater virtue—both intellectual and moral—than present generations have had to demonstrate. Second, if we accept that agents may have interests that outlive themselves, then one generation might wrong another by failing to listen to the claims that persist through time and across generations. This discussion is compatible with the conclusion that moral claims generally diminish in importance over time; as the world in which a given generation’s moral commitments were made changes, so too does the moral pull of those commitments diminish.