Virtue Ethics and Action Guidance

Theological ethicists rarely allow the virtues to perform the heavyweight work of guiding action. This article contests this tradition and argues that, and demonstrates how, virtue ethics provides a practicable method of normative action guidance. The article contends that there are five interrelated but distinct modes of virtue action guidance. The first three modes—dialogue, emulation, and substituted judgment—invite the agent to take counsel with moral exemplars. The interrogative and discovery modes direct agents to morally deliberate using thick accounts of the virtues.

Eudaimonism about Virtue and Qualified Agent Right Action: Some Prospects for Environmental Virtue Ethics

<p>In this thesis, I aim to show that virtue oriented approaches to environmental ethics are in a position to provide satisfying answers to two central ethical questions: “What kind of person should I be?”, and “What should I do?” I argue that two such approaches – Rosalind Hursthouse’s environmental virtue ethics and Philip Cafaro’s account of environmental vice – provide insights about how we ought to be with regard to the environment, in terms of character and attitudes. I then defend Hursthouse’s account of right action against several objections. First, I respond to the worry that a shortage of environmental exemplars might count against Hursthouse, by showing that non-virtuous agents can conceive of what to do by seeking to avoid acting from environmental vices. Second, I respond the worry that her account of right action fails to generate the right result for non-virtuous agents in some cases, by showing that such cases can be accounted for by appeal to the distinction between action guidance and action assessment. Third, I consider the worry that her theory will fail to provide concrete action guidance. Theories which seek to provide concrete action guidance in all contexts face serious problems of their own, I respond. Further, I maintain that Hursthouse is not ruled out from providing the sort of action guidance her critics are interested in.</p>

Eudaimonism about Virtue and Qualified Agent Right Action: Some Prospects for Environmental Virtue Ethics

<p>In this thesis, I aim to show that virtue oriented approaches to environmental ethics are in a position to provide satisfying answers to two central ethical questions: “What kind of person should I be?”, and “What should I do?” I argue that two such approaches – Rosalind Hursthouse’s environmental virtue ethics and Philip Cafaro’s account of environmental vice – provide insights about how we ought to be with regard to the environment, in terms of character and attitudes. I then defend Hursthouse’s account of right action against several objections. First, I respond to the worry that a shortage of environmental exemplars might count against Hursthouse, by showing that non-virtuous agents can conceive of what to do by seeking to avoid acting from environmental vices. Second, I respond the worry that her account of right action fails to generate the right result for non-virtuous agents in some cases, by showing that such cases can be accounted for by appeal to the distinction between action guidance and action assessment. Third, I consider the worry that her theory will fail to provide concrete action guidance. Theories which seek to provide concrete action guidance in all contexts face serious problems of their own, I respond. Further, I maintain that Hursthouse is not ruled out from providing the sort of action guidance her critics are interested in.</p>

Dispensing with the Subjective Moral ‘Ought’

There are cases in which, intuitively, an agent’s action is both morally right in one sense and morally wrong in another sense. Such cases (along with other intuitions about blameless wrongdoing and action-guidance) support distinguishing between the objective moral ‘ought’ and the subjective moral ‘ought.’ This chapter argues against drawing this distinction on the grounds that the prescriptions delivered by an adequate objective moral theory must be sensitive to the mental states of agents. Specifically, an adequate theory of the objective moral ‘ought’ must respect a strong ought-implies-can principle—morally ought implies agentially can—in order to prescribe actions to real-life agents. An agent’s mental states determine what is agentially possible for that agent; thus, what an agent objectively morally ought to do is in part determined by the agent’s mental states. This chapter describes the structure of a compelling non-ideal moral theory that is both objective and mental state-sensitive. This non-ideal theory illuminates the shortcomings of extant objectivist and subjectivist moral theories and illustrates how we can dispense with the subjective moral ‘ought.’

Tornado Warning Guidance and Graphics: Implications of the Inclusion of Protective Action Information on Perceptions and Efficacy

Effective warning messages should tell people what they should do, how they should do it, and how to maximize their health and safety. Guidance essentially delivers two types of information: 1) information that instructs people about the actions to take in response to a threat, and 2) information about how and why these recommended protective actions will reduce harm. However, recent research reported that while automated tornado warnings, sent by the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center via the account @NWStornado on Twitter, included useful information about the location of the threat, the potential impacts, and populations at risk, it failed to provide content that would contribute to successful protective actions. In this experimental study we investigate how the inclusion and presentation of protective action guidance affects participant perceptions of a tornado warning message and their perceived ability to act upon the information (i.e., self- and response-efficacy). We find that the inclusion of protective action guidance results an increase in the participants’ understanding of the message, their ability to decide what to do, and their perceived self- and response-efficacy. Knowing how to take action to protect oneself, and believing the actions will make oneself safe, are key motivators to taking action when faced with a significant threat. Future warning research should draw from other persuasive messaging and health behavior theories, and should include self- and response- efficacy as important causal factors. It should also look across additional hazards to determine if these outcomes differ by the length of forewarning and hazard type.

Can imagination be unconscious?

Our ordinary conception of imagination takes it to be essentially a conscious phenomenon, and traditionally that’s how it had been treated in the philosophical literature. In fact, this claim had often been taken to be so obvious as not to need any argumentative support. But lately in the philosophical literature on imagination we see increasing support for the view that imagining need not occur consciously. In this paper, I examine the case for unconscious imagination. I’ll consider four different arguments that we can find in the recent literature—three of which are based on cases and one that is based on considerations relating to action guidance. To my mind, none of these arguments is successful. I conclude that the case for postulating unconscious imagining has not yet been well motivated.

Genealogical Solutions to the Problem of Critical Distance: Political Theory, Contextualism and the case of Punishment in Transitional Scenarios

In this paper, I argue that one approach to normative political theory, namely contextualism, can benefit from a specific kind of historical inquiry, namely genealogy, because the latter provides a solution to a deep-seated problem for the former. This problem consists in a lack of critical distance and originates from the justificatory role that contextualist approaches attribute to contextual facts. I compare two approaches to genealogical reconstruction, namely the historiographical method pioneered by Foucault and the hybrid method of pragmatic genealogy as practiced by Bernard Williams, arguing that they both ensure an increase in critical distance while preserving contextualism’s distinctiveness. I also show, however, that only the latter provides normative action-guidance and can thus assist the contextualist theorist in the crucial task of discerning how far certain contextual facts deserve their justificatory role. I prove this point by showing how a pragmatic genealogy of the practice of punishment can inform the contextualist’s reflection about the role this practice should play in a transitional scenario, i.e. in the set of circumstances societies go through in the aftermath of large-scale violence and human rights violations.

Visual experience in the predictive brain is univocal, but indeterminate

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience (Clark, 2015). Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic (Block, 2018; Holton, 2016).While Clark (2018) proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that (like us) models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed.

The Subject Matter of Metaethics

Moral practice is picked out by a distinctive moral terminology as used in discourse, thought, and action-guidance. One mark of this use is that it serves to give recommendations for action whose force is independent of the desires of both judger and subject. The task of metaethics is to provide a systematic account of the metasemantics, psychology, metaphysics, and epistemology of moral practice. This will involve, at least, an account of those facts about our uses of moral expressions in virtue of which they have the meanings they do. Metaethical theories are to be judged by their ability to accommodate (that is, make purpose-relative sense of) the important forms and assumptions of moral practice, within the terms of our wider understanding of the world and our place in it. I take this understanding to be provided by naturalism, although this is a working assumption rather than an indubitable axiom.