Morality, Emotions, and the Ideal Environmentalist: Toward A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Political Polarization

Americans are politically polarized in their views on environmental protection, and scholars have identified structural and cultural drivers of this polarity. Missing from these theories is a consideration of the emotional dynamics at play in environmentally relevant interactions between liberals and conservatives. Based on analyses of in-depth interviews conducted with 63 politically and socioeconomically diverse residents of four communities in Washington State, we find evidence of important common ground across the political spectrum. Our participants voice support and respect for environmental protection and convey a shared image of an ideal environmentalist: a conscious, caring, and committed individual who seeks to reduce their personal environmental impact. We see political differences arise when our participants evaluate their own relationship with the environment against this ideal environmentalist. Liberals are more likely to align with or admire the ideal environmentalist and conservatives are more likely to challenge or denigrate the ideal. Emotions and competing claims for moral worth, we suggest, play a role in making these political differences polarizing.

regulating motherhood through markets: Filipino women’s engagement with microcredit

The Philippines is a global leader in deploying microcredit to address poverty. These programmes are usually directed at women. Research on these programmes focuses on traditional economic indicators such as loan repayment rates but neglects impacts on women’s agency and well-being, or their position in the household and relationships with their partners and children. It is taken for granted that access to microcredit leads to enhanced gender freedoms. In line with the growing body of work in feminist scholarship that critiques the instrumentalist logic of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in relation to women, this research foregrounds stories from interviews with female borrowers in Zamboanga City in Southern Philippines to provide grounded illustrations of how microcredit is reshaping relationships between women and their families, women and poverty and women and the state. Borrowers used loans to meet their family’s needs even at the cost of harassment from creditors, indebtedness, increased workloads and conflict with partners. These narratives challenge the dominant neoliberal discourse of female empowerment through access to credit by exposing how microcredit is part of a complex set of regulations around ‘good motherhood’ and consumption, where women’s moral worth is based on their willingness and ability to lift their families out of poverty.

The Groundwork

This essay notes background in Kant’s first Critique, reviews the aims and arguments of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals section by section, and calls attention to several remaining questions and controversies. The Preface states the overall aim to identify the supreme principle of morality and to defend its claim to be rationally necessary. Section one uses common moral thought about duty and moral worth to identify the basic principle of a good will. Section two argues from the common idea of duty that this same principle is the supreme moral principle, that its requirements are expressed in several formulations, that this is the only possible Categorical Imperative, and that it presupposes that moral agents have autonomy of the will. The third section argues from a practical standpoint that we must take ourselves to be rational agents with autonomy of the will and therefore subject to the Categorical Imperative.

Beyond Bad Beliefs

Philosophers have recently come to focus on explaining the phenomenon of bad beliefs, beliefs that are apparently true and well-evidenced but nevertheless objectionable. Despite this recent focus, a consensus is already forming around a particular explanation of these beliefs’ badness called moral encroachment, according to which, roughly, the moral stakes engendered by bad beliefs make them particularly difficult to justify. This paper advances an alternative account not just of bad beliefs but of bad attitudes more generally according to which bad beliefs’ badness originates not in a failure of sufficient evidence but in a failure to respond adequately to reasons. I motivate this alternative account through an analogy to recent discussions of moral worth centered on the well-known grocer case from Kant’s Groundwork, and by showing that this analogy permits the proposed account to generalize to bad attitudes beyond belief. The paper concludes by contrasting the implications of moral encroachment and of the proposed account for bad attitudes’ blameworthiness.

Reasons First

The last fifty years or more of ethical theory have been preoccupied by a turn to reasons. The vocabulary of reasons has become a common currency not only in ethics, but in epistemology, action theory, and many related areas. It is now common, for example, to see central theses such as evidentialism in epistemology and egalitarianism in political philosophy formulated in terms of reasons. And some have even claimed that the vocabulary of reasons is so useful precisely because reasons have analytical and explanatory priority over other normative concepts—that reasons in that sense come first. Reasons First systematically explores both the benefits and burdens of the hypothesis that reasons do indeed come first in normative theory, against the conjecture that theorizing in both ethics and epistemology can only be hampered by neglect of the other. Bringing two decades of work on reasons in both ethics and epistemology to bear, Mark Schroeder argues that some of the most important challenges to the idea that reasons could come first are themselves the source of some of the most obstinate puzzles in epistemology—about how perceptual experience could provide evidence about the world, and about what can make evidence sufficient to justify belief. And he shows that along with moral worth, one of the very best cases for the fundamental explanatory power of reasons in normative theory actually comes from knowledge.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 16

This series is devoted to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes work being done at the intersection of ethical theory and metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The chapters included in the series provide a basis for understanding recent developments in the field. Chapters in this volume explore topics including expressivism about gender, inferential expressivism, moral worth, moral and aesthetic testimony, and normative supervenience.