Moral Appraisal for Everyone: Neurodiversity, Epistemic Limitations, and Responding to the Right Reasons

De Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the reasons an agent is responsive to (de re or de dicto), but rather whether she is responsive to the reasons it is reasonable to expect her to be responsive to, irrespective of their content. I argue that this account does a better job of dealing with neuroatypical agents, while agreeing with the De Re Significance accounts on more ordinary cases.

Resultant Luck and the Irrelevance Intuition

This chapter investigates the ‘Irrelevance Intuition’, which is the intuition that judgements of blameworthiness containing any element of resultant luck are irrelevant for judging agents. It deploys a number of claims against the Irrelevance Intuition. It holds that our interest in outcomes is fundamental, and these outcomes must in principle be relevant to the moral appraisal of agents who have acted wrongly (‘Relevance Claim’). It denies an agent a complaint against the fact her blameworthiness may exceed the blameworthiness of an identically motivated agent whose act caused less harm on the grounds that this agent had the option of not acting wrongly in the first place (‘Denial Claim’). And it holds that agents acting from descriptively identical mental states may differ in badness as a result of how their acts turn out on the grounds that their mental states differ in badness (‘Determination Claim’). The Determination Claim confirms that the main argument given for the Restricted Account is thoroughly externalist. The Restricted Account makes some allowance for acts prompted by ignorance or irrationality, and for acts that turn out in entirely unforeseeable ways.

Kant and Consequentialism in Context: The SecondCritique’s Response to Pistorius

Commentators disagree about the extent to which Kant’s ethics is compatible with consequentialism. A question that has not yet been asked is whether Kant had a view of his own regarding the fundamental difference between his ethical theory and a broadly consequentialist one. In this paper I argue that Kant does have such a view. I illustrate this by discussing his response to a well-known objection to his moral theory, namely that Kant offers an implicitly consequentialist theory of moral appraisal. This objection was most famously raised by Mill and Schopenhauer, but also during Kant’s time by Pistorius and Tittel. I show that Kant’s response to this objection in the second Critique illustrates that he sees the fundamental difference between his moral theory and a broadly consequentialist one to be one that concerns methodology.

Humanizing War in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 5 examines the integration of the concept of humanity as a legal category into the laws of war in the late nineteenth century. It looks at the writings of Francis Lieber, Johann Caspar Bluntschli, and Gustave Moyner, all of whom were influential publicists and highly articulate voices in the early stages of codification of the laws of war. The chapter highlights the tensions that resulted from integrating the humanity concept into the background paradigm of regular war, and it examines more broadly the deeper transformations in international legal theory that enabled this to happen. The channeling of the humanitarian agenda through international law produced a novel understanding of the laws of war as constituted by two fundamental principles in tension, necessity and humanity. This persistent duality continues to confuse our moral appraisal of the laws of war up to the present.