Restraining Situational Luck

This chapter examines circumstantial luck, or the luck of being in circumstances where a moral response or course of action is called for. The anti-anti-luckist programme is maintained for circumstantial luck as well as resultant luck. The argument proceeds, first, through an examination of Good Cases, calling for praiseworthiness. The fact that a well-intentioned agent is not in a position to collect praise for performing a meritorious act does not generate any serious moral concern. We can still praise this inactive agent for her dispositions if we wish to, and morality does not insist, in any case, upon equal opportunities for collecting praise. These lessons are then transferred to Bad Cases, calling for blameworthiness. The chapter also engages in detail with Michael Zimmerman’s argument involving situational luck, which combines circumstantial luck with constitutive luck. Zimmerman’s radical argument suggests that one agent should be no more blameworthy than another agent if they are separated only by luck, whether of the resultant, circumstantial, or constitutive variety. It is suggested here that Zimmerman’s argument misfires, due to an inconsistency between two principles he relies upon: the ‘Control Principle’ and the ‘No-Difference Claim’.

Be Honest: Individuals’ Moral Responsibility within the COVID-19 Context

We recognise that people lie to health professionals for several reasons. However, these incidents endanger the well-being of the professionals and bring us to the question of whether people have an exclusive moral duty to always profess the truth about their health and other facts, particularly in a pandemic crisis. This review argues that an honest patient is a key to undertaking their roles as health professionals and delivering the best services possible to meet the needs of the patient. Greater awareness and comprehension of the potential ramifications of dishonesty, not only helps establish the moral obligation, to tell the truth, particularly in a pandemic situation, but also translates into a better relationship with health professionals. It also enforces an ethical solidarity on every single of us to show tangible moral response to ensure that those most vulnerable to risks from the pandemic illness such as health professionals are protected as far as possible.

Can Suicide Preserve One’s Dignity? Kant and Kantians on the Moral Response to Cognitive Loss

Kantian defenders of suicide for the soon-to-be demented claim that killing oneself would protect rather than violate a person’s inherent worth. The loss of cognitive functions reduces someone to a lower moral status, so they believe that suicide is a way of preserving or preventing the loss of dignity. I argue that they misinterpret Kant’s examples and fail to appreciate the reasons behind his absolute prohibition on suicide. Although Kant says that one may have to sacrifice one’s life to fulfill a moral duty, suicide is not morally equivalent to self-sacrifice because it involves treating oneself merely as a means. Furthermore, people facing the onset of dementia would not protect their dignity by killing themselves while they are still rational and would not avoid a demeaning existence.

Climate in the Boardroom: Struggling to Reconcile Business as Usual & the End of the World as We Know It

How does one witness to businesspeople about climate change? Climate change is a problem for the collective and the long term, whereas business often requires a ruthless focus on the individual and the quarter. Climate change is an ethical catastrophe whose solution almost certainly requires a profoundly moral response, but talk of morality in the boardroom is often regarded with profound suspicion. Reconciling these tensions has forced me to navigate between worlds in an ongoing attempt to persuade businesspeople that solving climate change is both an economic and a moral necessity, and that the purpose of business is not only to make money but also to support the institutions that will enable us to build a sustainable world. This has not always been easy.

A wonderful analogy between Augustine’s definition of moral-value- functional sense of response-action and Philo’s definition of truth-functional sense of implication in logic

The paper is dvoted to interdisciplinary research at the intersection of symbolic logic, mathematical ethics, and philosophical theology. By comparing definitions of relevant functions, a surprising analogy is discovered between the well-known Philo’s precise definition of implication in logic (classical one) and Augustine’s precise definition of God’s morally good reaction to human actions. The moral-value-table-representation of Augustinian doctrine is compared with moral-value-table-representations of Pelagius’ and Leo Tolstoy’s views of adequate moral-response-actions.

Shame, Justice, and Decolonization: A Reply to Catherine Lu

This paper discusses two possible difficulties with Catherine Lu’s powerful analysis of the moral response to our shared history of colonial evil; both of thesedifficulties stem from the rightful place of shame in that moral response. The first difficulty focuses on efficacy: existing states may be better motivated by shame atthe past than by a shared duty to bring about a just future. The second focuses on equity: it is, at the very least, possible that shame over past misdeeds ought to bebrought into the conversation about present duties, in a manner more robust than Lu’s analysis allows.

Animals, Ethics and Aesthetics

Mainstream theories which argue for enhanced ethical status of animals with appeals to sentience or intelligence have depicted aesthetics in a negative sense. This paper supports a different outlook. We explore reasons why aesthetic appreciation of animals is portrayed as subjective and sentimental, concerned only with superficial and external features. Aesthetic qualities, as understood here, are not intended as criteria for admission to a moral community or as a guide for veterinary professionals when prioritizing therapy. The case for measuring the extent of an animal’s beauty or attractiveness in order to establish its entitlement to moral status or rights is a non-starter. Nevertheless, aesthetic traditions, we argue, play a significant role in our moral response to animals and objectives to protect them. As a corrective to misunderstandings regarding the status of aesthetics in deliberation about moral obligations to animals a case for the integration of ethics and aesthetics is developed.