Grief

What does it mean to have faith? If you have absolute proof God did not exist, would it change your moral duty to others? In this work of philosophical short story fiction God, literally, lives in a temple as a being among the people. He has guided and instructed them for centuries until, one day, he declares he has nothing more to teach, and leaves. The local clergy go into a period of grief while the cities fall into lawless chaos. The clergy/narrator, likewise, falls into a deep depression as he sees the temples and religious infrastructures quickly fall into disarray. He meets at the “first temple” with the remaining leaders who are equally distraught and lack answers. He burns his religious belongings and falls into a deep depression. His church is ransacked and later turned into an elementary school. In the end, narrator gets a job working at a museum.

Offsetting, Denialism, and Risk

In Climate Matters John Broome defends two claims. First, if you live a “normal life” in a rich country, you will probably cause significant harm by your emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG), violating a moral duty of harm-avoidance. Second, you can satisfy this duty by offsetting your emissions. Some would deny Broome’s first claim on the grounds that an individual’s emissions of GHG do no harm. Broome calls this position “IndividualDenialism” (ID) and in a recent paper he attempts to refute it. I explain how, if Broome’s refutation of ID were successful, it would undermine his claim that you can satisfy your duty of harm avoidance by offsetting. I suggest an alternative defence of the claim that you can satisfy your individual duty to reduce your carbon footprint by offsetting. This alternative defence assumes that your duty to reduce your carbon footprint derives from a duty of risk-avoidance.

A Puzzle of Enforceability: Why do Moral Duties Differ in their Enforceability?

When someone is poised to fail to fulfil a moral duty, we can respond in a variety of ways. We might remind them of their duty, or seek to persuade them through argument. Or we might intervene forcibly to ensure that they act in accordance with their duty. Some duties appear to be such that the duty-bearer can be liable to forcible interference when this is necessary to ensure that they comply with them. We’ll call duties that carry such liabilities enforcement-apt. Not all duties seem to be enforcement-apt. Some, for example, accept that a person in a monogamous marriage has a moral duty to refrain from infidelity, but deny that a spouse can be compelled to comply with their duty to be faithful without transgressing her rights. More controversially, some think that our duties to assist others in severe need are not enforcement-apt. What could explain the contrast between duties that are enforcement-apt while and those that are not? We’ll call this the puzzle of enforceability and our paper considers three broad strategies for responding to it. The first strategy takes the form of identifying some substantive feature or features that are necessary and/or sufficient for a duty to possess some enforcement status. We consider a range of candidate explanations of this sort but find that none are plausible. The second strategy rejects the idea that there are genuinely enforcement-inapt duties and instead seeks to explain why there can nonetheless be marked differences amongst duties concerning how they can be enforced and who can enforce them. We find that this strategy too is largely unsuccessful. The third strategy offered seeks an explanation of differences in enforcement status by appeal to the broader social costs of enforcing certain kinds of duties. We find that this approach holds some promise but note that it requires adopting a controversial set of moral commitments. We conclude by considering our options in the absence of a solution to our puzzle.

Personal principles for a roadmap to educational recovery in the 'Covid decade'

The Government's roadmap to recovery from the educational deficit caused by Covid-19 appears to pivot, primarily, on 'catch-up' plans and 'discipline hubs'. Despite continuous teaching online and in Covid-restricted classroom formats, teachers have been urged to act like 'absolute heroes' and abide by their 'moral duty' to keep schools open. However, neither appeals to 'heroic' duty nor Nolan's Seven Principles of Public Life, are likely to provide the conceptual underpinning required of a roadmap to meet the complex challenges of children's new learning needs or enhance their wellbeing. This article offers an alternative approach to educational principles for navigating the unchartered territory of the 'Covid decade' now unfolding.

Happiness Issue – Moral Aspects of its Biochemical Enhancement

The search for happiness is something that constitutes human existence from its beginning, and even though people have achieved unimaginable progress in science and technologies, they still have not found the secret of being happy. Transhumanist authors, headed by Mark Walker, believe we can reach happiness biochemically using specific drugs and without considerable side effects. They consider it to be our moral duty because it would increase the prosocial behaviour of people enhanced in that way, following research showing that the happier people are, the more useful it is for society. In this paper, we critically respond to the vision of biochemical enhanced happiness (bio-happiness). We follow the classic and modern authors in our analysis of what happiness is, and based on this analysis, we want to demonstrate why the biochemical enhancement of happiness is not a moral imperative these days. On the contrary, we offer the reasoning why such a vision of bio-happiness is not morally right, and why it bears the risk of losing the connection between happiness and finding the meaningfulness of life. We critically evaluate the absence of spirituality in the transhumanist understanding of man and the devaluation of her/his intrinsic values.

試析西方倫理學中的孝養義務

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 在西方倫理學中，孝養義務是指（成年）子女對父母尤其是對年邁父母所具有的提供保障、照料、陪伴及滿足其他合理需求的道德責任。與之相關的理論有感恩理論、友誼理論和特殊善理論。對於親子關係的模式、孝養義務的來源、孝養義務的具體要求、以及孝養義務何時能夠結束等問題，三種理論給出了各不相同的回答。本文嘗試探討這三種理論，並對其各自存在的問題給出批評和可能的回應。 In the Western tradition, filial obligation dictates that adult children have a moral duty to provide financial and psychological support to their aging parents. In addition, children are required to meet their parents' “reasonable demands” under given circumstances. There are three accounts of filial obligations that provide specific answers to questions concerning parent-child relationships, such as on what grounds and when filial obligation is encouraged and required. In this paper, the author explores the idea of filial obligation in the West and offers a critical response to the issues involved.

Covid-19 and our Duty to Die

When considering our own death, we normally weigh its impact on the people we love and care about, as well as worrying about the way in which our life might end, hoping that not too much suffering precedes it. However, such view, despite necessary, is a passive understanding of death, interpreted as something that merely happens to us, where we would have some control over timing if physician-assisted dying were legal in our countries. But what if our relation to death would not end there? What if special medical needs, such as the emergency situation resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, could have a direct impact on us creating a moral duty to end our lives? That is the thesis that will be advocated for in this paper: a moral duty to die will arise in some people to save resources that will help others get through Covid-19. It is important to indicate that the duty to die is personally acknowledged and self-imposed, thus nobody can be coerced to carry it out; for autonomy would be lost and such action should be considered an instance of incitement to die, therefore being morally blameworthy.

France, Italy and Diplomatic End of Italo-Ethiopian War in League of Nations (May—July 1936)

The article is devoted to the policy of France towards Italy and Ethiopia at the final stage of the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935—1936 and the question of the elimination of anti-Italian sanctions in the League of Nations. It was revealed that the great powers were mainly interested in restoring normal relations with Italy, while the defense of Ethiopia’s independence was only a “moral duty” for them, and in the clash of moral factors and real politics, the real interests of states won undoubtedly. It is argued that, taking ad-vantage of France’s interest in restoring stable Franco-Italian relations, Italy actually destroyed the political agreements of early 1935 and moved on to political rapprochement with Germany, which significantly changed the entire international situation in Europe and actually opened the way for the outbreak of World War II. In addition, for France, a significant political loss was the drop in the authority of the League of Nations, due to the helplessness of this organization in the face of aggression against one of the members of the League. The study is based on publications of Soviet, French, Italian and German diplomatic documents, documents of the League of Nations, memoirs of political figures of that era, as well as un-published documents from the Archives of the German Information Bureau (Germany).