Incompleteness and Moral Change

This chapter argues that the objectivity and determinacy of moral requirement can be maintained even though the moral habitat system of duties is subject to progressive change and amendment. Like engineering or medicine, it has the structure of a practical science with fundamental laws and values and a deliberative pragmatics for absorbing new knowledge and taking on new tasks. There is no complete or ideal system of duties. A significant upshot of this is that individuals have an imperfect duty to be agents of moral change. They must attend to moral practices and give voice to faults they see. Responding explicitly to a region of concern can have due care priority over unilaterally making things better. It is part of the idea of the moral habitat project to expect moral change as an ongoing collective project of responsiveness to its defining set of moral values.

Framing the Question (What We Can Learn From Imperfect Duties)

The chapter describes the difficulties encountered in understanding imperfect duties and the misdirection that comes with taking beneficence as their paradigm example. It argues that we get a clearer view of what the duties are like by instead examining three less theorized imperfect duties—gratitude, duties about gifts, and the duty of due care. Each of the duties raises difficulties for conventional accounts of moral requirement that are explored and resolved in three sections called “Middle Work.” Together they reveal the distinctive theoretical demands and deliberative structure of imperfect duties and make it clear why they are important.

Demandingness as an Objection to Norms

A moral requirement to be universally benevolent could be very demanding, i.e. it could take great sacrifices of the agent’s welfare to live up to it. It has been argued that this is an objection to its validity, but this is denied in this chapter. Any reasonable morality will comprise norms that are quite demanding, e.g. a norm to let ourselves be tortured to death when this is necessary to prevent a million or billion from suffering the same fate. However, the fact that a moral norm is demanding could mean that you are not blameworthy if you fail to comply with it. This fact could also be a pragmatic reason for you not to try to comply with this norm but with a less demanding norm if your failure to comply will have bad consequences.

Collective Responsibility in the Cooperative Governance of Climate Change

This paper sets out a proposal for framing collective responsibility as a central element within the cooperative governance of climate change. It begins by reconstructing the analysis of climate change as a Tragedy of the Commons in the economic literature and as a Problem of Many Hands in the ethical literature. Both formalizations are shown to represent dilemmatic situations where an individual has no rational incentive to prevent the climate crisis and no moral requirement to be held responsible for contributing to it. Traditionally both dilemmas have been thought to be solvable only through a vertical structure of decision-making. Where contemporary research in political economy has undergone a “governance revolution”, showing how horizontal networks of public, private, and civil society actors can play an important role in the management of the climate crisis, little research has been carried out in the ethical field on how to secure accountability and responsibility within such a cooperative structure of social agency. Therefore, this paper contributes by individuating some conditions for designing responsible and accountable governance processes in the management of climate change. It concludes by claiming that climate change is addressable only insofar as we transition from a morality based on individual responsibility to a new conception of morality based on our co-responsibility for preventing the climate crisis.

Wild Animals and Duties of Assistance

Is there a moral requirement to assist wild animals suffering due to natural causes? According to the laissez-faire intuition, although we may have special duties to assist wild animals, there are no general requirements to care for them. If this view is right, then our positive duties toward wild animals can be only special, grounded in special circumstances. In this article I present the contribution argument which employs the thought that the receipt of benefits from wild animals is one such kind of special circumstance. If this argument is correct, then the circle of moral agents required to assist some wild animals is significantly widened.

Equipoise and ethics in educational research

Does the moral requirement that medical research comparing the effectiveness of two treatment methods be done only when there is community level equipoise also apply to research in teaching and learning comparing the effectiveness of two instructional methods? This article argues that it does. It evaluates three claims that the requirement does not apply to research in teaching and learning. One is the idea that the equipoise standard mixes up the ethical rules for practice with those for research. So it applies neither to research in medicine nor research in teaching and learning. The second is the idea that research in teaching and learning is different than research in medicine. The ethical basis for the equipoise requirement in medical research does not exist for research in education and so does not apply. Finally, the point is sometimes made that satisfying the equipoise requirement can be outweighed or more than compensated for by other factors when evaluating the ethics of research. For example, the knowledge gained about the comparative merits of different methods of teaching and learning might be so significant that it offsets any moral demand for equipoise or uncertainty.

On Medical Duty in the Face of Collapse in Medicine: Ethical and Philosophical Aspect of the Problem

The article deals with the category of a doctor’s professional duty. The author raises the question of the limits of the doctor’s responsibility to patients in the context of the 2020 pandemic. The category of medical duty is considered in retrospect, after which the author correlates the historical ideas about the proper behaviour of a doctor with the modern working conditions of doctors. The article discusses the question of the internal motivation of the doctor to follow the professional duty, based on the internal orientation of the individual — “to have” or “to be”. The article states that the orientation “to be”, implemented in the doctor’s professional activity, can only be a free choice of the individual. Thus, the category of medical duty transforms from external requirements to the figure of a doctor into a moral requirement of a doctor to himself.

Instinct and Hesitation in the Work of Arthur Hugh Clough

The processes of composition and revision put impulse and inspiration into contact with calm reflection in a way that is continuous with the other kinds of human activity Clough describes in his poems—including Dipsychus and The Bothie—where instinct and hesitation have their competing advantages and exert their rival claims. This chapter explores the drafts of Clough’s poems, many of which were heavily revised and remained incomplete at the time of his death. It shows that revision is not solely a technical requirement for Clough; understood more broadly as an ongoing process of self-checking and self-correction, it is a moral requirement in leading a responsible, virtuous life.

Animalhood, interests, and rights*

A being to which intentional states – such as desires or preferences – may be ascribed is a being capable of having (actual) interests, whereas to be the subject of interests of some kind is both a necessary and sufficient condition to be the holder of individual rights. After clarifying the sense in which, according to the ‘interest-theory’, the notion of a rights-subject specifies a distinctive normative status, this article will highlight the importance of distinguishing between subjectivity-dependent interests capable of being attributed to conscious beings, on the one hand, and biologically structured needs of conscious and nonconscious living beings, on the other. This distinction allows one to see that the moral requirement of recognizing legal rights for (individual) animals ought not to be conflated with biocentric demands of ecological justice. However, the argument thus delineated will not, without more, answer the crucial question of which specific legal rights ought to be ascribed to nonhuman animals. The article closes with an exploration of the need for holding onto the distinction between rights-subjecthood and personhood by analyzing some implications of Tooley's ‘particular-interest principle’.