The Anvil of Neglect and the Hammer of Exploitation

This chapter explores tensions in research ethics between three moral pitfalls: sanctioning wrongdoing, avoiding the ravages of neglect, and not saddling a narrow range of actors with overly demanding moral requirements. These tensions are illustrated by the way an argument from Alan Wertheimer repurposes core commitments of the field to argue that research ethics should avert the harms of widespread neglect by weakening some of the protectionist demands of morality and permitting the violation of norms against exploitation, unfairness, and injustice. Although Wertheimer’s proposal is likely to be met with skepticism in the field, the problems it raises reflect shortcomings in research ethics and, most importantly, the failure of the field to connect this activity to social institutions that serve a larger moral purpose.

Liberal Self-Determination in a World of Migration

This book focuses on three key questions regarding the movement of persons across international borders: (1) What gives some residents of a liberal society a right to be considered citizens of that society such that they have a claim to make decisions with regard to its political future? (2) Do citizens of a liberal society have a prima facie right to exclude prospective immigrants despite their commitment to the values of freedom and equality? And (3) if citizens have this prima facie right to exclude prospective immigrants, are there moral requirements regarding how they may exercise it? The book therefore tackles the most pressing philosophical questions that arise for a theory that does not endorse a human right to immigrate: the questions of who exercises self-determination in the area of immigration, why they have such a right in the first place, and how they should go about exercising it.

The Moral Habitat

The Moral Habitat is a book in three parts that begins with an investigation of three understudied imperfect duties which together offer some important and challenging insights about moral requirements and moral agency: that our duties only make sense as a system; that actions can be morally wrong to do and yet not be impermissible; and that there are motive-dependent duties. In Part Two, these insights are used to launch a substantial reinterpretation of Kant’s ethics as a system of duties, juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect, that can incorporate what we learn from imperfect duties and do much more. The system of duties provides the structure for what I call a moral habitat: a made environment, created by and for free and equal persons living together. It is a dynamic system, with duties from the juridical and ethical spheres shaping and being affected by each other, each level further interpreting the system’s core anti-subordination value initiated in Kant’s account of innate right. The structure of an imperfect duty is exhibited in a detailed account of the duty of beneficence, including its latitude of application and demandingness. Part Three takes up some implications and applications of the moral habitat idea. Its topics range from the adjustments to the system that would come with recognizing a human right to housing to meta-ethical issues about objectivity and our responsibility for moral change. The upshot is a transformative, holistic agent- and institution-centered, account of Kantian morality.

Non-Naturalism and Reasons-Firstism: How to Solve the Discontinuity Problem by Reducing Two Queerness Worries to One

A core tenet of metanormative non-naturalism is that genuine or robust normativity—i.e., the kind of normativity that is characteristic of moral requirements, and perhaps also of prudential, epistemic and even aesthetic requirements—is metaphysically special in a way that rules out naturalist analyses or reductions; on the non-naturalist view, the normative is sui generis and metaphysically discontinuous with the natural (or descriptive or non-normative). Non-naturalists agree, however, that the normative is modally as well as explanatorily dependent on the natural. These two commitments—discontinuity and dependence—at least initially pull in opposite directions, and one of the central challenges to non-naturalism is how to reconcile them. In this paper I spell out the most pressing version of this discontinuity problem, as I propose to call it, and I go on to offer a novel solution. Drawing on the ideology of reasons-firstism, I formulate an account of normative explanation which reconciles the two commitments, and I argue that competing accounts either do not solve the problem or are implausible on independent grounds.

Implementation of the principle of justice in the adversarial model of criminal procedure

For a correct understanding of the content of justice, it is necessary to determine, what is it in an adversarial model of the process – a principle, a task, general conditions of judicial consideration of a criminal case, moral requirements for procedural decisions of a judge (judges) or a participant’s right guaranteed by a public hearing of a case within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial court created based on national legislation? The study presents the results of research, within the framework of which international legal acts, national legislation of various countries of the Anglo-Saxon and continental legal systems, sentences and appealed decisions of officials were studied, a questionnaire among employees of criminal prosecution bodies, lawyers and judges, and a survey of participants in criminal proceedings were conducted. In conclusion, there is a need to recognize justice precisely by the principle of the criminal process with the allocation of general and special criteria.

Poznanie i rozumienie natury dziecka warunkiem skutecznego oddziaływania edukacyjnego

Childhood is a special period in human life, and it is characterized by a specific logic of thinking. The way the child perceives and understands the world as regards its material, non-material, and social aspects, is entirely different from that of an adult person. The child experiences emotions and applies moral requirements in his own way. The presented study aims to show the specific functioning of children in the surrounding world. It also undertakes to indicate the possible role of educators in the field of getting to know the essence and nature of a child.

Radical Evil and the Nature of Virtue

This chapter situates Kant’s conception of virtue against the thesis of radical evil, according to which although human beings have a predisposition to virtue, they nevertheless have a propensity to moral evil. Section 1 of the chapter explains Kant’s conception of the “original predisposition to good” as presented in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Section 2 discusses the predispositions to moral feeling, conscience, love of humanity, and respect that Kant posits as presuppositions of being subject to moral requirements. The thesis of radical evil is explained in section 3. Kant’s concept of virtue is the topic of section 4, the propensities to evil (frailty, impurity, and depravity) are discussed in section 5, and in section 6 the task of acquiring virtue by overcoming affects and passions leading to moral evil is explained. The chapter ends with a brief comparison of Kant’s conception of virtue with Aristotle’s.

God, Moral Requirements, and the Limits of Freedom

This article addresses James Sterba’s recent argument for the conclusion that God’s existence is incompatible with the degree and amount of evil in the world. I raise a number of questions concerning the moral principles that Sterba suggests God would be required to follow, as well as with respect to the analogy he draws between the obligations of a just state and the obligations of God. Against Sterba’s proposed justified divine policy of constraint on human freedom, I ask: What would motivate a perfect being to create human beings who imagine, intend, and freely begin to carry out horrific actions that bring harm to other human beings, to nonhuman animals, and to the environment? I argue that the rationale is lacking behind the thought that God would only interfere with the completion of the process of human beings’ bringing to fruition their horrifically harmful intended outcomes, rather than creating beings with different psychologies and abilities altogether. I end by giving some friendly proposals that help to support Sterba’s view that God, by nature, would be perfectly morally good.

THE PROBLEM OF ESTABLISHING PROCEDURAL LIMITS OF LIABILITY

The article is devoted to the consideration of the characteristics of one of the most important means of ensuring the procedural order – procedural responsibility. The potential of this type of legal responsibility is largely due to the quality of its normative legal consolidation. In solving this problem, it is necessary to develop answers to a number of interrelated questions, including the establishment of its limits. Not only the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of the application of procedural liability measures, but also the legality of state-compulsory influence in the course of the relevant legal processes depends on its qualitative resolution. In the course of the practical solution of the problem of establishing the limits of procedural responsibility, it is necessary to take into account their species classification, which will help in choosing its optimal boundaries. The limits of procedural responsibility are determined by the legislator through the use of appropriate criteria. They are factors external to the procedural responsibility itself, by means of which the volume of state-compulsory influence applied to the subjects who committed procedural offenses is determined. They must include in their unity both legal imperatives and moral requirements. The main attention is paid to the means that, according to the author, should be used in the legislative consolidation of the limits of procedural responsibility. It should be borne in mind that they differ in certain dynamics. This property allows you to react to changes in the course of dispatch of the corresponding types of legal processes.

Kant's Justification of Ethics

Kant’s arguments for the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law continue to inspire work in contemporary moral philosophy. Many prominent ethicists invoke Kant, directly or indirectly, in their efforts to derive the authority of moral requirements from a more basic conception of action, agency, or rationality. But many commentators have detected a deep rift between the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, leaving Kant’s project of justification exposed to conflicting assessments and interpretations. In this major re-reading of Kant, Owen Ware defends the controversial view that Kant’s mature writings on ethics share a unified commitment to the moral law’s primacy. Using both close analysis and historical contextualization, Owen Ware overturns a paradigmatic way of reading Kant’s arguments for morality and freedom, situating them within Kant’s critical methodology at large. The result is a novel understanding of Kant that challenges much of what goes under the banner of Kantian arguments for moral normativity today.