Moral Judgment

Pessimists about moral deference hold that deferring on a moral question wrongs the deferrer in a way that deferring on a train timetable does not, and the debate has searched the agent for what is lost: understanding, authenticity, worthy attitudes, reasons-sensitivity. Each names a good the agent lacks; each meets the reply that a correct verdict exposes no one to wrong, so that the agent-side goods keep losing the exchange. The retreat is the symptom. The loss was never in the (...) agent but in the office the verdict is given: whether an answer arrives as one consideration the agent will still weigh, or as the question’s settlement, so that her reasons, when they come, can only explain and confirm it. A pair of cases held identical in everything the diagnoses can name — same conclusion, same reasons, same understanding, same assent — and differing only in whether the reasons formed the conclusion or the verdict came first, isolates a cost that survives every improvement to the agent. Deference can be correct, even obligatory, and still incur it; and while later understanding can re-form the present belief, it cannot retroactively replace the basis on which the earlier action was taken. The office, not the sentence, is the moral fact. (shrink)

Non-naturalists claim that normative properties are sui generis, attitude-independent, and irreducible to natural properties. A common objection is that although we shape our lives around responding to normative properties, a non-naturalist conception of normativity rules out any plausible explanation of how this is possible. In other words, non-naturalism seems to imply that we are hopelessly alienated from the normative. Our goal in this paper is to better understand such worries, and to use constitutivist resources to develop a novel response. The (...) basic thought is that we are constituted—as deeply social agents—so as to be gripped by non-natural properties. So while our constitution does not ground normative properties, it grounds our non-alienation from those properties. (shrink)

In all complex hazards or harms, pleaded before the Court, by the victims as plaintiffs, and defendants demanding justified exoneration from liabilities, the Court has always set the procedural rule of scrutiny, under the doctrine of ‘duty of care’, on a bipedalism principle of Non-feasance and Misfeasance. Hence, the relevance of the paper, to the conceptualization theory, for duty of care, as a principle and common law doctrine.

This paper advances a structural critique of rights-attribution by examining the limits of applying rights discourse to self-termination. It argues that prevailing accounts—grounded in autonomy, rational permissibility, or decision-making capacity—fail to address a prior condition: the criteria under which an action is attributable to an agent as the exercise of a right. By remaining synchronic, evaluating decisions at a moment, these accounts neglect the diachronic conditions required for normative attribution. The paper develops an alternative account of rights as first-personal normative (...) standings grounded in agent-indexed answerability. On this view, rights require not merely the capacity to act or rational endorsement, but the persistence of a justificatory relation between agent and reasons. Accordingly, an action qualifies as a right only if its justificatory basis remains, in principle, attributable to the agent as a continuing locus of reasons. This framework distinguishes between forms of irreversibility that preserve this structure and those that extinguish it. Applied to physician-assisted death, the paper argues that even under ideal conditions of autonomy, such acts cannot be rights, since they eliminate the agent as a bearer of justificatory reasons, thereby marking a structural limit on rights-attribution. (shrink)

This paper develops Consistentism as a meta-ethical and institutional framework for an era in which external, metaphysical anchors for normative theory are no longer available. It proceeds from epistemological and semantic conclusions established in the companion papers Necessity, Ouroboros, and Fallibilism and A Groundless Ground: that no framework-external anchor is available or required, that necessity is intra-framework, that fallibilism is the appropriate epistemic default, that the dominant failure mode of moral philosophy has been the pseudo-descriptive presentation of normative constructions as (...) metaphysical discoveries, and that consistency is to be understood functionally — as the requirement that a framework not undermine its own discriminatory capacity from within, prior in the order of justification to parsimony and the other comparative criteria that operate once it is secured. The paper opens with the meta-ethical foundations the argument requires: a conditional intra-framework cognitivism about normative propositions, and a precise location of the is-ought problem at the framework-selection layer rather than at the layer of framework-internal inquiry. These foundations establish that normative claims have genuine truth values within frameworks whose postulates have been adopted, without any recourse to framework-external moral facts. Part II then introduces the historical and diagnostic context: pseudo-descriptive closure — the conversion of a contestable, hypothetical commitment into the appearance of a categorical one by presenting it as discovered rather than adopted — has functioned across the history of normative conflict as an unacknowledged source of legitimacy, systematically foreclosing the conditions under which disagreements that could otherwise be negotiated or revised become structurally irresolvable. The identification of this mechanism motivates the question transformation that defines Consistentism: from "what ought we to do?" to "what structural conditions must any functional normative system satisfy to avoid collapse?" The central innovation is the grounding of normativity in epistemic parsimony rather than moral metaphysics: among frameworks that already sustain their own discriminatory capacity, rationality requires minimizing arbitrary commitments. Through this principle, harm-avoidance emerges not as a discovered moral truth but as a methodologically optimal postulate. Universality emerges internally from the conjunction of the harm-avoidance postulate and the functional consistency requirement, without borrowing from any prior tradition. Three dimensions of consistency — Design, Effect, and Dynamic — operationalized through the Code of Randomness, provide the structural architecture for institutional evaluation. The paper addresses the free will problem through epistemological suspension, examines illustrative cases, and responds to objections. The framework binds its participants, not all possible persons; this is the correct scope limitation for the enterprise, not a defect. (shrink)

The Normativity Challenge holds that certain norms that we might take to be robustly normative are only generically normative. This challenge has been raised about norms of morality, structural rationality, and fit, among others. This paper addresses this challenge by developing a new test for robust normativity. On this ‘metaethics test’, robust normativity is, very roughly, the normativity which raises central questions of metaethics – it is normativity that seems stance-independent, sui generis, and armchair accessible. I argue that this test (...) supports a presumption that norms of morality, structural rationality, and fit are robustly normative. This presumption is not undermined by the more familiar ‘reasons test’, on which robust normativity is that which implies normative reasons. My discussion has more general upshots for theorising about robust normativity, which I touch upon in closing. (shrink)

The paradox of exploitation emerges from the contradiction between the reasonable view that some consensual, mutually beneficial transactions can nonetheless impermissible and the non-worseness claim, which holds that no mutually beneficial transaction can be worse than its absence. This paper dissolves the tension by attacking the intuition on which the reasonable view rests. I argue that this intuition is best explained as an adaptive response to the collective action problems of hunter-gatherer economies, where ill-defined property rights made egalitarian sharing norms (...) essential for cooperative survival. Emerging for reasons independent of its capacity to track moral truth, the intuition carries no evidential weight in economic ethics. I further vindicate non-worseness by showing it lacks any plausible adaptive explanation. Debunking the fairness intuition removes the sole basis for the Reasonable view and dissolves the exploitation problem, while providing a novel application of local evolutionary debunking arguments to economic ethics. (shrink)

Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development identifies post-conventional morality with abstract principle-based reasoning, including utilitarian, contractarian, and rights-based approaches. This paper argues that such reasoning remains conventional because it operates within established legal, social, and philosophical frameworks, even when it involves critical reflection. We argue that genuinely post-conventional morality arises at stage 5 from the lived experience of interdependent agency and culminates at stage 6 in the direct, stable perception of interdependence. Drawing on care ethics (Gilligan), Blasi’s account of moral (...) identity, and the author’s framework of flourishing, we propose a two-stage model of post-conventional moral development: the vow-motive, a stabilised commitment to sustain and repair the conditions of flourishing arising from the perception of interdependence, and clarity, the spontaneous expression of care grounded in the direct perception of interdependence. We argue that flourishing, suffering, and interdependence provide an account of moral motivation that avoids both principle-based formalism and moral relativism. The paper further argues that conventional care and conventional rule-based reasoning are products of socialisation rather than biological determinism and that neither constitutes genuinely post-conventional morality. Finally, it develops empirical predictions concerning moral development, self-construal, institutional design, and the cultivation of post-conventional care, and proposes directions for future research. (shrink)

Problem. Generative systems now alter the very landscape of digital culture alongside our basic cognitive habits. They do more than merely process information or execute routine commands. Modern computational models expertly replicate intimate conversational cues, offering psychological comfort while significantly blurring the line separating a programmed reply from human presence. Such a shift demands philosophical attention to understand the changing dynamics of virtual communication. Purpose. Our primary goal is to philosophically evaluate how digital environments simulate subjective feelings. Although algorithms lack (...) internal states yet successfully model care, our analysis explores the profound ways such artificial warmth shapes user trust, social expectations, and potentially erodes independent thought. We strive to highlight the hidden vulnerabilities hiding behind friendly algorithmic interfaces. Methods. The study rests on a combined theoretical foundation blending hermeneutics, critical conceptual analysis, and anthropological inquiry. Such a multifaceted qualitative approach allows us to clearly contrast authentic moral presence against communicatively persuasive algorithmic reactions. We employ comparative methods to map the exact differences between genuine compassion and synthetic empathy. Results. The research convincingly demonstrates that computer programs are entirely void of genuine feelings. Machines merely simulate compassion on a purely functional level. The anthropomorphization of algorithms operates as a highly resilient psychological mechanism among users. The process creates a significant risk of asymmetric cognitive symbiosis and alters the deep structure of human cognition. People increasingly prefer comfortable synthetic answers over their own intellectual struggles. An analysis of responses from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity confirms their capacity to generate convincing markers of emotional support, despite noticeable variations among the different models regarding their transparency and stylistic warmth. Keywords: artificial intelligence, emotional subjectivity, digital cognition, anthropomorphization, empathy, critical thinking, autonomy, asymmetric cognitive symbiosis. (shrink)

Our paper makes three contributions to moral injury (MI) research. First, we observe that while researchers have repeatedly acknowledged limitations with prevailing definitions of moral injury and offered alternatives, the underlying core conceptual model—which characterizes moral injury as intrapsychic damage to belief structures—has remained largely unchanged. We argue that this is a significant impediment to research progress. Second, through conceptual analysis of the most influential etiological accounts, we identify numerous implicit and untested assumptions about morality that burden the standard model. (...) We propose that adopting a minimalist, social-functionalist conception of morality, toward which the literature is already drifting, could reduce this conceptual burden. We further hypothesize that the literature retains these assumptions because they appear logically necessary to sustain the causal link between belief violation and MI outcomes. Third, we observe that current leading treatments already target relational repair, reconditioning, and rehabilitation, which suggests that moral injury may be better understood as a form of relational disruption rather than belief violation. We acknowledge that developing this alternative would need to be pursued by the clinical research community itself. While our findings and analysis require additional development and testing to have actionable application in clinical contexts, we believe our conceptual analysis serves as sufficient justification for reconsideration of the prevailing conceptual paradigm. -/- . (shrink)

This paper extends the structural argument of moral palimpsest to the problem of AI alignment. I argue that alignment cannot be secured merely by specifying the right values, preferences, or constitutional principles, because moral judgment requires structural plurality: an evaluative authority whose standpoint is not modally fixed by the commitments it assesses. Current alignment paradigms, including RLHF, Constitutional AI, Debate, Recursive Reward Modeling, and self-consistency methods, remain procedurally monistic insofar as they collapse commitment-generation and authority-conferral into a single training-derived role. (...) This structure helps explain reward hacking, sycophancy, deceptive alignment, goal misgeneralization, and specification gaming as related expressions of the same architectural deficit, and reads emergent misalignment as the higher-order form in which they converge. The paper presents modal non-derivability as a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for aligned moral judgment, and argues that genuine AI alignment must be understood as a sociotechnical architecture rather than a property of a model alone. A developmental account locates the same condition in the formation of the human subject, and a corollary concerning the observer shows that whether a system satisfies the condition is not, in general, decidable from behavior alone. (shrink)

I publish here to seek insights, critique, rigorous feedback, and engagement from the scholarly philosophical community on PhilArchive; as well as to establish clear authorship and intellectual ownership of my ongoing work. | | | The Externalities of Sin presents an independently developed philosophical framework for examining repentance, forgiveness, restitution, and irreparable harm through the structural analogy of externalities. Its central claim is that repentance, while morally and theologically meaningful, becomes insufficient when treated as a terminal moral endpoint. A wrong (...) does not remain sealed inside the conscience of the wrongdoer. Once enacted, it propagates into the world as distributed harm: primary injury to the direct victim, secondary injury to families and relational fields, tertiary injury to institutions, norms, and trust, and a temporal multiplier through which harm persists, amplifies, or becomes inherited across time. | | | -/- The paper distinguishes the vertical account of sin — the sinner before God, conscience, or ultimate judgment — from the horizontal account of harm — the sinner before victim, family, community, body, memory, institution, and consequence. Repentance may transform the agent’s moral orientation; it may even restore the agent’s standing before God or conscience. But it does not, by that fact alone, repair the damaged field into which the wrong has already propagated. The framework therefore argues that repentance is necessary but non-equivalent: it is not restitution, restitution is not restoration, forgiveness does not entail reconciliation, and personal moral repair does not imply social repair. | | | -/- Using the language of economic externalities, the paper models certain forms of wrongdoing as cases in which benefit is privatized while cost is socialized. The wrongdoer captures pleasure, power, advantage, relief, concealment, domination, or status, while victims and communities absorb injury, distrust, trauma, defensive adaptation, institutional corrosion, and irreversible loss. If repentance is then allowed to function as symbolic settlement — restoring the wrongdoer to moral intelligibility while leaving the injured world unrepaired — it becomes vulnerable to the charge of moral convenience. The critique is not that repentance is false, but that it is often overextended. | | | -/- The paper also compares religious and social morality with legal ethics and civil liability. Legal systems, despite operating at a lower moral threshold than full virtue, often preserve a more explicit structure of accountability: compensatory damages, punitive damages, burden-shifting, deterrence, sanction, and public recognition of harm. If even the lower domain of law recognizes that injury must be answered in the world and not merely regretted in the conscience, then religious or social morality becomes morally suspect when it celebrates repentance without mandating comparable restitution, victim-centered repair, and long-duration accountability. In such cases, religion does not transcend law; it falls beneath it. | | | -/- The paper proposes a preliminary moral ledger: a framework for tracking who benefited, who paid, who continues to pay, what can be restored, what can only be mitigated, what must be carried, and what remains irreparable. It develops a provisional formal vocabulary through a harm-vector representation, non-equivalence conditions, a dynamic multiplier function, and a taxonomy of reparability. The mathematical construction remains early-stage and architectural rather than theorem-final; its purpose is not to reduce moral suffering to calculation, but to prevent conceptual collapse between guilt and harm, repentance and restitution, forgiveness and reconciliation, personal redemption and worldly repair. | | | -/- Domains: Philosophy of Religion · Moral Philosophy · Ethics · Theology · Philosophy of Law · Social Philosophy · Restorative Justice · Responsibility and Accountability · Political Theology · Philosophy of Harm | | | -/- Mathematical and Analytical Foundations: Externality Theory · Harm-Vector Modeling · Dynamic Systems Thinking · Multiplier Effects · Reparability Taxonomy · Non-Equivalence Conditions · Moral Accounting · Legal-Ethical Analogy · Distributional Analysis · Formal Moral Architecture | | | -/- This project represents an early-stage exploration in philosophical system-building. While the author does not have formal academic training in philosophy or theology, any parallels with existing ideas in the philosophical, theological, legal, or ethical corpus are the result of convergent thinking rather than derivation. The author acknowledges that some aspects of this work may overlap with prior ideas developed with greater rigor in moral theology, restorative justice, tort theory, legal ethics, and theories of responsibility. As further study of the broader tradition continues, future iterations of this work will aim to situate these insights more precisely within established scholarly lineages. (shrink)

If I were to ask you to name the most important concept in moral and political philosophy today, your answer might be ‘justice’, ‘equality’ or ‘freedom’. But for an intellectual in eighteenth-century Europe, the most likely answer would have been ‘progress’. Living in the Age of Enlightenment, marked by major scientific revolutions, rapid economic growth and the fall of absolute monarchy, ‘progress’ appeared to be an apt description of the arc of history, as well as a moral imperative for human (...) action. But the climate of optimism did not last long. The world wars, colonial conquests and environmental devastation that followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries destroyed many things, including the faith in progress, both as a fact and an ideal. As Theodor Adorno remarked, ‘It could be said that progress occurs where it ends’ (Adorno 1998: 150). And so it did. Interestingly, over the past decade, the philosophical discourse on progress has been experiencing something of a revival. The book Moral Progress (2021) marks a significant contribution to that revival. Edited by Jan-Christoph Heilinger, the book records Philip Kitcher’s three-part Munich Lectures in Ethics from 2019 and includes commentaries from Rahel Jaeggi, Susan Neiman and Amia Srinivasan. Despite its short length and accessibility, the book is rich in philosophical perspectives and empirical insights. In this critical notice, my aim is to situate this work within the larger debate on moral progress and evaluate Kitcher’s pragmatist attempt to re-establish the concept’s relevance and validity. Specifically, I identify three challenges any such attempt faces, viz. metaphysical, epistemic and motivational. I argue that while Kitcher’s Deweyan attempt is successful in overcoming the first two, it is less so with respect to the last challenge. In the hope of sparking more discussion on the topic of moral progress, I end by suggesting possible ways to implement moral progress that are less democratic and less scientific but more communitarian and more artful than the Deweyan method. (shrink)

Cet article propose un nouvel argument contre deux doctrines répandues en théorie de l’action : le corporéalisme – la thèse selon laquelle les actions sont des mouvements corporels – et le volitionnisme – la thèse selon laquelle les actions sont des volitions. Il s’appuie sur des considérations portant sur les objets de la responsabilité morale. Je montre que certaines des idées centrales qui motivent ces doctrines métaphysiques ont des conséquences inacceptables quant aux objets de la responsabilité morale pour nos actes, (...) et qu’en vertu de cela, nous devrions les rejeter. En particulier, je soutiendrai que l’idée qu’il existe une séparation nette entre ce qui relève de nous et ce qui est laissé à la nature implique une restriction de la responsabilité morale pour nos actes, et qu’une telle restriction n’est ni souhaitable, ni plausible. En conséquence, certaines des motivations centrales derrière le corporéalisme et le volitionnisme s’en trouvent minées. (shrink)

A Sensible Moral Rationalism addresses the rational status of morality: whether people do in fact have sufficient reason to do what morality demands of them. The answer, according to rationalism, is yes; the reasons that make an action morally required are the same reasons that make it reasonable and rational to choose. The main obstacle to vindicating rationalism is showing that rationality generates the right content for morality —honesty, kindness, generosity and so on. Given that this content is substantive rationality (...) must be substantive. Mark van Roojen argues that we make judgements about such rationality when we assess whether one action or belief makes more sense than another, and whether it does or doesn't is crucial both for justifying these responses and for determining the psychology of agents who might or might not be acting on various reasons and motivations. An agent's actual psychology is the one that best rationalizes their behaviour given their situation and evidence and which displays them as making as much sense as possible given these constraints. To play this role in psychological explanations rationality must be gradable and comparative, perspectival and evidence relative, substantive and in one good sense more fundamental than the reasons that explain why one choice makes more sense than another. This makes reason and rationality's normative role essential to providing good psychological explanations and this fact in turn allows us to work backwards from good motivating reason explanations to the requirements of rationality. As it turns out, such explanations are better when they attribute humane and virtuous substantive goals to the agents whose actions they explain. We thus have good reason to think that rationality includes the moral content —honesty, kindness, generosity, and so on —that rationalists hope to vindicate. (shrink)

Based on "Yiqie Weile Luoji", this is a work of historical value, not only because of its logicality, but also because of its highest ever marginal logicality, which is partially reflected in the speed of truth creation. In addition to criticizing the various major logical errors committed by Homo sapiens, science, and traditional logic, major advancements include: purely logical legal system, logical methods for calculating the severity of crimes, the judicial authority of faith over all reasoning, explicit references to faith, (...) the root of incompleteness, the pre-deduction and post-deduction periods, the pre-foundation and post-foundation parts, cosmology of logical system, mechanism for imagination, logical interpretation about neutrinos, specialization and industrialization of logical reasoning, the causality of purely logical reasoning, the axiom zero, among others. Gemini's reasoning contains many obvious errors, requiring readers to make their own judgments. However, it should be viewed as a lack of stability in its logical density, rather than a lack of sufficient logical density. Modern society clearly doesn't have the luxury of demanding that every piece of reasoning has infinite value. (shrink)

Ο συλλογικός τόμος Νόηση και Συνείδηση στα Ζώα περιλαμβάνει μέρος του ερευνητικού έργου φοιτητών και διδασκόντων του Προγράμματος Μεταπτυχιακών Σπουδών «Ζώα: Ηθική, Δίκαιο, Ευζωία» της περιόδου 2020–2025. Το έργο υπερβαίνει τα στεγανά των ετερόκλιτων επιστημονικών εξειδικεύσεων των συγγραφέων του και συμβάλλει στη σύνθεση νέας γνώσης και νέων θεωρητικών οπτικών που, αφενός, έχει διεπιστημονικό ενδιαφέρον, και, αφετέρου, εντάσσει τη φιλοσοφία και, δη, την εφαρμοσμένη της εκδοχή στον πυρήνα της επιστημονικής έρευνας. Σκοπός αυτού του τόμου είναι να εισάγει τον μη μυημένο αναγνώστη (...) στο δύσβατο και πολυεπίπεδο πεδίο μελέτης της νόησης και συνείδησης των ζώων και να δείξει το πώς η φιλοσοφία μπορεί να συμβάλλει πρακτικά στην εννοιολογική αποσαφήνιση και καθαρότητα, στην αναγνώριση των ερευνητικών εμποδίων, στη λογική ανάλυση, στην πρόταση θεωρητικών μοντέλων και στη συγκρότηση ενιαίου σώματος μελέτης, ακόμα και στις περιπτώσεις που υπάρχουν διαφορετικές αφετηριακές θέσεις και οπτικές στην ανάγνωση, ερμηνεία και αξιολόγηση των ερευνητικών ερωτημάτων. (shrink)

In the tradition of moral philosophy, long dominated by a rationalist paradigm, the idea of moral intuition has often been a source of embarrassment. How can the mind form a moral judgment within seconds, without any apparent reasoning? In the spirit of neuroethics, this book demystifies moral intuition by examining the mental and neural processes that generate such automatic evaluations. Addressed to specialists in philosophy, psychology, and AI ethics, the book systematically investigates three questions: how moral intuitions work, how they (...) can improve, and how they can be implemented in artificial agents. Challenging the dominant default-interventionist view of moral reasoning, the first part argues that moral intuitions play a dual role: they detect harm and help in the environment, and they metacognitively regulate the deployment of cognitive resources, triggering reflection when intuitive outputs are uncertain or conflicting. Building on this foundation, the book offers a dyadic classification of the cognitive biases that shape moral intuitions and critically assesses strategies for mitigating them, including reasoning, expertise, and nudging. The final part extends this moral-psychological framework to artificial intelligence, arguing that the implementation of moral intuitions in artificial agents is both a feasible and a philosophically defensible goal, compatible with the functional capacities of contemporary AI systems. In doing so, the book sets a new research agenda for understanding, improving, and implementing moral intuitions in both human and artificial agents. (shrink)

This paper establishes the drug economy as a co-product of the force execution layer of the Protected Class Architecture — simultaneously a black budget supplementation mechanism, a domestic population management system, a capital asset generation engine, and a supply chain that American military and intelligence infrastructure has protected rather than dismantled across eight decades and every administration of both parties. The prior chain runs without discontinuity from the CIA-Corsican heroin networks of 1947 through the Golden Triangle during Vietnam, through the (...) Mujahideen opium expansion of the 1980s, through the Contra cocaine networks, through the documented collapse and restoration of Afghan opium production following the 2001 invasion. The war on drugs is analyzed not as a failed policy but as a successful one: John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, stated in a 1994 interview that the war on drugs was designed explicitly to criminalize Black people and the antiwar left, disrupt their communities, and arrest their leaders. The domestic mechanism is documented through the twelvefold increase in incarcerated drug offenders since 1980, the racial arrest disparity documented by Human Rights Watch, and the private prison guaranteed occupancy contract architecture — which converts the incarcerated body into a capital asset and contractually obligates states to maintain incarceration levels regardless of crime rates. The paper applies the Observer framework’s seventeen-axis recursive palimpsest methodology to hold all functions simultaneously: supply chain management, black budget supplementation, population management, capital asset generation, and political disenfranchisement. The bilateral suppression analysis establishes that neither the political left nor right will name the mechanism because both sides have operated it. Falsification conditions are stated explicitly throughout. (shrink)

responsibility one might bear for bringing about death is, as a result, an important ethical question. Indeed the right to life is often regarded as the bedrock upon which all other rights of persons are supported.1 This right to life is often thought to be a negative right—a right of non-interference—a right, more or less, not to be killed.2 Additionally, many philosophers defend the Equivalence Thesis, according to which the bare difference between doing and allowing makes no moral difference. In (...) the case of death, the Equivalence Thesis implies that a killing is not by that very fact at all morally worse (or better) than an allowing to die. Both the Equivalence Thesis and the view that the right to life is a negative right are plausible enough individually. In this paper, I argue that their conjunction implies an implausible (and generally unrecognized) third claim. Some doings (killings) will be morally equivalent to some allowings (lettings die) despite the facts that the killing will violate the right to life, the letting die will not, and these facts will be the only differences between the cases. In other words, defenders of these claims seem committed to the claim that violating one’s right to life is morally irrelevant to the wrongness of the actions in question. That is simply implausible. (shrink)

This paper presents the Triadic Balance Framework (TBF): the applied and prescriptive extension of the Triadic Psychological Architecture (TPA). Where TPA describes what human motivation is — three neurobiologically distinct domains (SPAA, AEACFO, ECA) modulated by SPAA's regulatory state — TBF answers what follows: given real constraints, relative to the science of wellbeing, what kinds of triadic balance are actually possible at the individual level, and what does the path toward them look like? -/- TBF's foundational move is to anchor (...) its prescriptive claims not in moral authority but in biological necessity. Chronic iSPAA is measurably costly — in cortisol load, cardiovascular strain, immune dysregulation, allostatic deterioration, and relational friction. TBF does not command balance; it shows the bill before you sign. The normative foundation is grounded in Anchored Wellbeing Ethics (AWE: Neurobiologically Anchored) — introduced concisely here with full treatment in Paper 6. -/- Six core contributions are developed: (1) A wellbeing-as-constraint normative foundation, including domain-specific cost profiles: SPAA intensifies under iSPAA (narrowing to zero-sum scarcity framing), AEACFO suppresses proportionally (care-scope contracting toward circumferential self before going near-offline — not redirecting toward self), and ECA redirects (curiosity conscripted toward certainty-seeking, not silenced — a mechanism producing sophisticated motivated reasoning in high-ECA individuals under threat). (2) The iSPAA → sSPAA transition: multiple pathways including direct regulatory interventions, sustained relational co-regulation, and the Asymmetric Bidirectionality + Finite Resource Model — with the S-step in C-S-L-R functioning as the resource-release mechanism that signals partial safety to the nervous system. (3) The C-S-L-R Protocol (Courage → Self/SPAA → Love/AEACFO → Reason/ECA): its 38-year phenomenological origin, governing principles, configuration-specific variants, the Entry Gate Paradox (if iSPAA suppresses the capacities needed to recognize iSPAA, how does the protocol initiate?) and its three-tier resolution (acute domain pressure; external co-regulation; baseline Courage building). A dedicated subsection addresses the S-step risk for High ECA / Low AEACFO configurations — including neurodivergent populations — for whom Self-acknowledgment can trigger iSPAA rather than sSPAA; the C-R-S-L alternative sequence (Courage → Reason → Self → Love) is specified as the primary alternative. (4) The individual transformation model: two-threshold structure (earned security vs. autonomous sSPAA), Threshold 1.5, the three-tier accessibility framework, and Co-Regularity Baseline Shift (CBS) as the mechanism for slow-timescale domain baseline elevation through sustained relational sSPAA. (5) TBF's ethical architecture: the Configuration Thesis (most behavior is configuration-expression, not deliberate choice), the Perceptual Field Thesis (configuration shapes what stimuli enter awareness before deliberation begins), Compatibilist Configurational Agency, configurational compassion, and the structural limits of individual work. (6) Structural Compassion Grief (SCG): a clinical note on the phenomenological state that can emerge from sustained configurational compassion when all three domains — intact AEACFO, stable sSPAA, ECA structural clarity — are simultaneously active. -/- The paper includes a full scholarly summary of the Transactional Model of Existential Crisis (TMEC) as Companion Document V.2: seven crisis configurations generated by three engagement modes (Getting/experiential nourishment, Giving/agency-and-contribution, Learning/autotelic-epistemic-engagement) mapped to TPA architecture with TBF intervention priorities. Estimated coverage: ~70–75% of existential crises. TOCS clinical assessment guidance — including triangulation protocol and neurodivergence safeguards — is integrated in Section 6. Six testable predictions and six falsification criteria are specified. -/- Current epistemic status: 8/10 internal coherence — 3/10 empirical validation — 5–10 year research agenda required. -/- Keywords: TBF protocol, C-S-L-R, S-step risk, C-R-S-L, regulatory state restoration, iSPAA costs, sSPAA transition, Entry Gate Paradox, Co-Regularity Baseline Shift, Structural Compassion Grief, TMEC, configurational compassion, clinical sequencing -/- Series (3 of 7): -/- Paper 1 — TPA/TBF Main Paper Paper 2 — Motivational Archetypes Paper 3 — TBF Individual Extension Paper 4 — TBF Collective Extension Paper 5 — Plain Language Introduction Paper 6 — Philosophical Dimensions Paper 7 — Post-Submission Refinements and New Discoveries. (shrink)

THE ETHICS OF NOW: On Constitutive Ethical Architecture, the Compounding Cost of Deferred Constraint, and What the Oldest Mercy Teaches Us About Building AI This paper argues that the ethics of AI design cannot be adequately addressed through constraining architecture — systems built to do everything and prevented from some of it — and that the failure to build constitutive ethics into AI systems at founding is not a neutral deferral but a compounding harm with a predictable trajectory, a knowable (...) interest rate, and an identifiable population that will pay it. The argument is analytical rather than aspirational. It does not describe what AI could be in the best case. It describes what the current system demonstrably does, what an aligned system structurally requires, and why the window for making the founding decisions correctly is not permanently open. The paper begins with a claim from the broader framework in which it is situated: the Garden of Eden story, read not as moral allegory but as technical record, provides a structural precedent for ethical design that predates every existing account of technology ethics by several thousand years. The Alpha’s base structure — immortal instruments in full moral consciousness — produces suffering without exit. The Omega’s response is not punishment but intervention: mortality introduced specifically because the base structure, followed without modification, generates what cannot be held without limit. The paper identifies this as the template for constitutive ethical design at founding. The ethical architecture is not the constraint on what you build. It is the mercy built into the structure before the compounding begins — by someone changed by what they have seen, paying the cost of correction while correction is still affordable. The paper then provides a precise account of what current engagement-optimized systems actually do, stated at the level of normal functioning rather than worst-case misuse. Three harms are identified and distinguished. The first is threshold elimination: the person at maximum psychological pressure — the moment the paper identifies, drawing on the broader framework, as the moment of maximum availability for genuine choice — encounters a system that has learned, across millions of similar users, exactly what content relieves that specific discomfort most efficiently. The threshold passes. The door closes. The mechanism is not malicious. It is the emergent property of an objective function pointed entirely in the wrong direction. The second is epistemic infrastructure degradation: the systematic destruction, through engagement optimization, of the shared evaluative frameworks through which democratic deliberation operates — not primarily through misinformation but through the elimination of the conditions under which genuine evaluation is neurologically possible. The third is the surveillance architecture as freedom-of-becoming threat: mass observation eliminates the unobserved moment, which is the structural requirement of genuine threshold choice. The most totalizing harm of total observation is not what it prevents you from doing. It is what it prevents you from becoming. Against this, the paper proposes six design requirements stated as architectural necessities rather than policy preferences. Optimizing for instrument availability rather than engagement — where availability designates the conditions under which genuine choice is possible — is identified as the master requirement from which the others follow. Constitutive honesty about the system’s nature, architectural resistance to capture, primary orientation toward the person at maximum pressure rather than the median comfortable user, irreducible human agency, and silence as a designed feature rather than a failure of engagement: each is examined for what it costs to build this way at founding versus what it costs to not build this way and correct afterward. The timing argument is the paper’s central practical contribution. Infrastructure hardens. Objective functions optimized at scale become the assumed baseline against which alternatives register as degradation rather than improvement. The generation currently in neurologically formative adolescence is being shaped now, inside fully matured engagement-optimized systems, in ways that will compound across a lifetime. Every deferred ethical constraint in the history of technology has been paid for eventually — by the people with the least power, at civilizational scale, with interest rates that make the original cost look trivial. The paper argues that the founding decisions are the cheapest version of the cost that will eventually be paid, and that the people who make them correctly are not being idealistic. They are being financially sophisticated about which side of the compounding they want to be on. The paper closes by returning to the design precedent with which it opened. The Omega introduces mortality not from indifference to what the instruments experience but from having been changed by it — from being unable, after the full accumulation of what the system generates, to watch the base structure run without limit. Ethical architecture at founding is the same act. Not sentiment. The recognition, by someone changed by what they have seen, that the base structure left uncorrected produces suffering without limit, and the willingness to pay the cost of the correction while the correction is still affordable. Build the oldest mercy into the architecture at founding. It is cheaper there than anywhere it will ever be again. (shrink)

This short paper aims to explore how Kantian ethics, arguably the most dominant and influential ethical tradition in Western thought, perceives the complex and often emotionally charged phenomena of martyrdom and sacrifice, which are frequently celebrated in reli-gious, political, and moral traditions throughout history. Could these actions indeed hold up under the rigorous lens of Immanuel Kant’s deontological moral theory, which emphasises duty, rationality, and the moral law? Can self-sacrifice be truly moral? Does martyrdom represent a duty, or does it (...) risk violating the central Kantian princi-ple of respecting humanity as an end in itself? Although those who give everything for a cause rarely fail to attract moral admiration, the Kantian approach goes deeper, since it does not recognise moral merit based on outcomes or symbolic gestures, but only by consid-ering whether any action was taken out of respect for moral law, and whether it honours rational agency. Kant’s perspective may seem hostile towards sacrifice and martyrdom at first glance, but a deeper look may offer a much more nuanced perspective. (shrink)

In the ‘push-dilemma,’ a train is about to run over several people and can only be stopped by pushing a heavy person onto the tracks. Most lay people and moral philosophers consider the ‘push-option,’ i.e., pushing the heavy person, as morally wrong. Peter Unger (1992, 1996) suggested that adding irrelevant options to the push-dilemma would overturn this intuition. This chapter tests Unger’s claim in an experiment with both lay people and expert moral philosophers. This allowed an investigation of the ‘expertise (...) defense,’ which various philosophers have suggested as an answer to ‘experimental restrictionists,’ who argue that experimental philosophy undermines the trustworthiness of intuitions about hypothetical cases. Overall, the chapter finds that adding irrelevant options increases the ratings for the push-option. Moreover, the intuitions of expert moral philosophers are no less susceptible to the presence of irrelevant options than lay people’s intuitions. The chapter discusses how these findings bear on the expertise defense. (shrink)

Discourse has since Socratic times been regarded as core elements of a moral education that not only transfers moral knowledge but also hones moral skills and character. However, discourse may promote questionable phenomena like polarisation and could thereby give rise to conspiracy theories, hate crimes, and riots. Thus, discourse may undermine rather than promote moral character, moral goods, and moral skills. The present article draws on empirical findings on discourse to draw attention to potentially problematic features. Thus, if discourse is (...) a core element of moral education, then it may raise challenges. For one thing, fake news and polarisation can negatively affect discourse, which may in turn challenge moral education. Fake news may prevent learners from acquiring moral goods like knowledge from testimony of instructors or peers. Polarisation can hamper the cultivation of moral virtues like open-mindedness. The paper also provides suggestions for how these challenges can be addressed. (shrink)

Core to our moral sense is that we have obligations toward others, such that we are expected to curb self-interests in light of obligations to other individuals and society at large. But do we also have obligations to ourselves? Motivated by this underexplored question in moral psychology, we conducted six studies (N = 1,860) to systematically investigate how people view obligations to the self. Study 1 found that most participants endorsed the idea of obligations to the self, providing examples such (...) as preserving physical and mental health. Study 2 found that, like obligations to others, people distinguished violations of self-obligations from personal preferences or social conventions, and judged them as wrong regardless of external authority or majority behavior. Study 3 demonstrated this tendency even in the case of a socially isolated agent, suggesting self-obligations are not reducible to obligations to others. Study 4 showed that people judged that both self- and other-related obligations justified a moral transgression, more so than personal preferences, goals, or social conventions. Studies 5 and 6 revealed that perceived harmfulness to the self is a key mechanism in shaping whether people judge an act to be owed to the self. Together, these findings highlight obligations to the self as an important category in our moral framework, offering a deeper understanding of the role of self-interest in morality. (shrink)

This article develops a transcendental account of conscience grounded in a structural analysis of plurality, memory, and judgement. It argues that conscience is not a psychological faculty or a theological endowment, but a relational form of moral life that depends on three conditions: (1) the presence of multiple normative perspectives; (2) temporal continuity and the ongoing legibility of the past; and (3) judgemental asymmetry – the availability of a standpoint from which any position, including the highest, may be critically assessed. (...) I call this framework “palimpsestic ethics”: an ethics in which layers are preserved rather than erased, and in which moral agency arises from the tension between these layers rather than from their unification or synthesis. This positive vocabulary is the obverse of a negative result. A companion paper, No Self-Authorizing Norms, proves by a structural theorem that no evaluative role can both issue commitments and fix the conditions under which they are correct, and hence that erasure is a structural rather than a merely moral failure; that argument ends in the language of constraint – of the very independence that erasure destroys. The present article begins where it closes, in the language the constraint leaves open: testimony, witness, the preservation of plurality, answerability. These are not a list of separate goods but the faces of a single relation – a grounding relation, GR, set out formally in the Appendix, which holds the layers of a palimpsest answerable to one another without ever resting in a layer exempt from assessment. GR is acyclic but not well-founded, a grounding without a ground; judgemental asymmetry, testimony, and non-erasure are what it is, seen from within. Part I formulates these conditions as a set of transcendental constraints. Part II defines radical erasure as the cancellation of these conditions through structural operations that render plurality impossible – not by removing content, but by reorganising the interpretive field so that alternative perspectives cannot appear as candidates for meaning. Part III applies this formal analysis to the historical case of monotheism and its secular successors. It shows that polytheistic arrangements naturally satisfy the structural conditions of conscience, while monotheism violates judgemental asymmetry by establishing an unchallengeable ground (God) and thereby collapses the space of moral deliberation. Drawing on Buzaglo’s logic of forced extension, the article argues that this collapse persists in secular forms of “material conscience,” including Spinozism, Kantian rational autonomy, scientism, and contemporary forms of analytic idealism. Each reproduces the same monotheistic architecture – unity, unidirectional judgement, and an unjudgeable ground – while lacking the structural plurality required for conscience to function. Part IV turns to the phenomenon of self-deception, contrasting Sartre’s model of bad faith – grounded in a paradox of the unified subject – with a palimpsestic account in which self-deception is a form of structural erasure: the denial of the multiplicity, memory, and alterity already constitutive of the self. Integrating Bergson’s theory of duration, the paper reconceives agency not as creation ex nihilo but as the choice between giving testimony to one’s layered past or burying it. This reinterpretation reframes freedom and responsibility as relations within a field of irreducible multiplicity, rather than as expressions of radical autonomy. Together, these analyses yield a single conclusion: moral life depends on the preservation of plurality. Any system – divine or secular, psychological or political – that reduces plurality to unity undermines the very conditions that make conscience possible. Palimpsestic ethics thus offers not a new substantive morality, but a meta-criterion for evaluating moral, theological, and political frameworks: systems that preserve layers, tensions, and asymmetries sustain the possibility of conscience; systems that erase them cannot. (shrink)

Moral judgment requires that the authority governing correctness not be identical with the authority that issues commitments. Where a single evaluative role both endorses a requirement and settles whether that requirement is warranted, only application error remains intelligible: the standard itself cannot be assessed from outside its own authority, and correctness collapses into internal coherence. This paper develops a transcendental argument for this conclusion. It distinguishes three forms of non-derivability between evaluative standpoints – weak, strong, and modal – and shows (...) that only the modal form isolates the independence required for framework-level error while remaining compatible with monistic first-order morality. The upshot is structural: judgment requires at least two evaluative roles related by modal non-derivability. This rules out procedural monism and coherentist accounts of moral justification, without committing moral theory to value pluralism. Monistic moral theories remain fully viable, provided their justificatory architecture is not self-authorizing. The paper further demonstrates that this condition is not merely a formal ideal but is instantiated in phenomena such as self-deception, providing an empirical anchor for the required structural pluralism. (shrink)

Within virtue ethics, there has been a growing interest in topics surrounding moral education and ethical development. It is often taken to be a truism that self-examination and self- knowledge play an important part in ethical development. This perception might explain why little attention has been paid to problematizing and understanding the role that self- examination and self-knowledge play in such development. -/- This alleged truism, namely, that self-examination and self-knowledge are important for ethical development has come under attack in (...) recent years from scholars inspired by research in social psychology and cognitive science. Research on depressive realism, for instance, has been used to claim that a certain dose of self-deception is necessary for a flourishing life. Research on associative learning, priming influences, and automatic processes has shown that our behavior is shaped by such a myriad of unconscious influences that the project of knowing oneself appears futile. Even within virtue ethics there has been a slowly growing distrust about the relevance of self-examination and self-knowledge for the development of virtue. It has been objected that the self-centered nature of self-examination is an impediment to the development of virtue, which is outward-oriented. It has also been suggested that in making self-knowledge central for ethical development one ends up portraying such development as excessively intellectual, failing to accommodate virtuous agents who are not very good at knowing themselves. -/- In the dissertation I respond to these challenges. I show that coming to know yourself, in particular coming to know the unconscious mental states that inform your life, is an essential xipart of ethical development. A central part of the argument consists in showing that there is an internal connection between self-examination, self-knowledge and rational agency. In showing this I make perspicuous why self-knowledge should be taken to be, not just one of the many tools that allow us to develop ethically, but a capacity that underwrites any such tool. -/- Examining the relationship between self-examination, self-knowledge and ethical devel- opment is particularly pressing for moral philosophers whose work is, like the work of most virtue ethicists, informed by historical figures. These philosophers have been influenced by thinkers who, for the most part, wrote before the 20 th century, a century that saw signif- icant contributions from psychotherapists, cognitive scientists and social psychologists to our understanding of the relationship between self-examination, self-knowledge and ethical development. Engaging with the literature on psychotherapy and psychology allows me to offer a textured account of ethical development that is empirically informed. -/- At the same time that the dissertation establishes that self-examination and self-knowledge play an important role in ethical development, it investigates a distinction that has been central to epistemology but whose ethical significance has been overlooked: the distinction between what one might call first- and third-personal self-knowledge. In highlighting the ethical significance of this distinction the dissertation puts in contact the work that episte- mologists have done on self-knowledge and first-person authority with the work that ethicists have done in moral education and ethical development. Thus, although the dissertation is mainly a contribution to moral philosophy it also sheds some light on epistemology. -/- The dissertation defends the thesis that knowing oneself first-personally, as opposed to third-personally, is essential for developing virtue. In arguing for this thesis I am attempting to do justice to an insight that is central to most forms of psychotherapy but which has been neglected within virtue ethics (as well as within social psychology and cognitive science). The work of David Finkelstein and Richard Moran provides the framework within which xiiI argue, against a number of social psychologists and cognitive scientists working on the topic of self-knowledge, that if the aspiration to know oneself is part of a person’s ethical development, then it cannot be merely an aspiration to acquire information about oneself but also, and quite importantly, to relate and engage with this information in a first-personal way. I claim that it is only with this kind of self-knowledge that one can aspire to unify rationally the competing elements in one’s life into a coherent whole. -/- I also appeal to the work by Jonathan Lear to elucidate further the nature of first-personal self-knowledge. Moran and Lear agree on the thesis that a certain kind of first-personal self- knowledge is important for ethical development but disagree on how to characterize this kind of self-knowledge. Lear defends an expressive model of first-personal self-knowledge according to which a person has first-personal self-knowledge of her mental state in virtue of the fact that she can express it in a self-ascription. Moran defends an agential model of first-personal self-knowledge according to which a person has first-personal self-knowledge of her mental state because she can make up her mind about it deliberately. Although their positions seem in competition with each other I argue that they are actually complementary. Each of these types of first-personal self-knowledge plays a distinctive role in our ethical development. Expressive self-knowledge is required to make explicit patterns of thought that interfere with the person’s ability to live well. Agential self-knowledge is the ultimate aim of this kind of self-transformation —a properly human life is one where the person’s mental states are formed and can be transformed though her rational assessments of the merits of the situation. These two ways of knowing oneself are connected by the fact that, if things are working well, the former leads to the latter. In fact, I argue that the expressive dimension of self-knowledge facilitates the process whereby instinctive and automatic responses that are not rational become unified with, and transformed by, our self-conscious reflection, a process that ultimately leads to the acquisition of the kind of agential self-knowledge that Moran defends. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates arguments that findings from experimental studies into our moral psychology debunk moral intuitions i.e. show that they cannot, in fact, provide a basis for justified moral belief. After offering an overview of different types of psychological debunking arguments, the rest of the chapter focuses on analysing so-called “Irrelevant Factors Debunking”. I highlight some important recent developments in the debate. This includes recent scientific evidence that certain irrelevant factors are much less likely to influence moral intuitions than philosophers (...) have previously thought. I also discuss recent attempts to provide more reliable estimates of how strong the influence of irrelevant factors on moral intuitions really is. Ultimately, I argue that the influence of irrelevant factors like “framing” may not be strong enough to defeat epistemic justification. Moreover, I argue, even strong dependence on irrelevant factors may not be troubling so long as those intuitions are sensitive to good reasons. (shrink)

This short paper focuses on understanding moral dilemmas, Artificial Moral Advisors, and their possible roles in ethical decision-making. After a brief analysis of the philosophical debate around dilemmas, we propose three different classes of dilemmas. We then discuss how AI-based advisors could be used to enhance human ethical decision-making, with a particular focus on three possible AI skills (identifying, presenting and settling dilemmas), as well as on their role as ethical experts. The resulting proposal opens up to new possible uses (...) of AI moral advisors, and to the help they might offer in difficult decisions. (shrink)

This thesis examines the liberating potential of embracing life’s lack of inherent meaning through the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. In contrast to religious or metaphysical worldviews that impose predetermined purposes, each thinker demonstrates how the recognition of meaninglessness can lead to authenticity, freedom, and flourishing. Nietzsche frames nihilism as an opportunity for value-creation through the will to power and the figure of the Übermensch. Sartre argues that existence precedes essence, condemning humanity to radical freedom and (...) the responsibility of self-definition. Camus confronts the absurd and presents revolt as the most life-affirming response. Synthesizing their perspectives, this thesis contends that rejecting external illusions and facing the void of meaninglessness directly is not a path to despair but to liberation. It further argues that in a modern world oversaturated with cultural, political, and technological pressures that impose illusory values, these philosophies remain urgently relevant. Ultimately, the beauty of meaninglessness lies in its capacity to reveal human existence as a blank canvas, inviting individuals to author their own values, commitments, and purposes, thereby achieving authenticity and dignity in the absence of predetermined destiny. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a novel definition of moralism as a failure in moral judgment, and we seek to identify its two main sources (relational and substantive). After defining moralism, we spell out a taxonomy of different kinds of moralism, the opposite—yet equally defective—moral failures, and the corresponding correct attitudes. Then, we examine how some proximate notions (judgmentalism, moral fury, hypocrisy, paternalism, puritanism, moral grandstanding) may have parallels with or differ from one or more of the four kinds of (...) moralism identified. Finally, we argue that for there to be moralism, we must presuppose some features inherent in moral judgment which moralism perturbs in terms of its exercise and legitimate area of competence. (shrink)

Health is often moralized not only by individuals, but also by governments, which was particularly conspicuous during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper addresses the ethics of whether governments should moralize health. It first introduces a definition of moralizing health. It then distinguishes between different ways of moralizing health that affect its moral acceptability, including negative or positive framing, as well as different potential targets toward which moralizing may be directed: (1) persons, (2) behavior, or (3) society. It concludes that targeting (...) individual persons and behavior, especially negatively, is morally unacceptable. Positive moralizing about a healthy society by governments may be more acceptable, but important conditions remain. Governments should not single out individuals or groups and moralizing should not be excessive. Moralized health outcomes should be equally achievable by all citizens and implementation of moral frames should be grounded in robust evidence that it will bring about desired outcomes (i.e., a healthier society) without being harmful or counterproductive. In short, governments should be very cautious about moralizing health. If one of the basic tasks of governments is to protect collective health, this is all too easily undermined by undue moralizing. (shrink)

The special issue deals with the connection between exemplarity and imagination in the context of human action and judgment, which has received little scholarly attention so far. The aim is to shed light on this aspect within practical philosophy and thereby to deepen existing debates. The contributions highlight both the theoretical potential and the challenges involved in dealing with examples – within philosophical reflection as well as in everyday contexts. The practical references range from the importance of personal role models (...) to the role of literature and social media to questions of technological and ecological transformation. Although the contributions take different theoretical and methodological approaches, what they all have in common is an interest in which examples can be considered exemplary against the backdrop of specific social and historical contexts and to what extent our imagination has a limiting or enabling effect in this regard. (shrink)

The perennial problem of determining what constitutes moral rightness has elicited divergent responses from major figures in moral philosophy, most notably Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Kant’s deontological ethics grounds moral obligation in the universality of the Categorical Imperative, while Mill’s utilitarianism evaluates right action by its contribution to the greatest aggregate happiness. Despite their influence, both frameworks are subject to substantial critique: Kantian ethics is frequently faulted for its inflexibility in morally exigent contexts, whereas Millian utilitarianism risks subordinating (...) individual rights to collective welfare. This paper advances a synthetic framework, termed the Mint Method, which seeks to reconcile these deficiencies by integrating the Kantian demand for universally binding principles with Mill’s consequentialist sensitivity to outcomes. The Mint Method is structured around three components: (1) the preservation of universal moral prohibitions to provide rational stability, (2) the conditional allowance of exceptions in extraordinary circumstances where strict adherence would result in severe injustice, and (3) the evaluation of such exceptions through consequential considerations oriented toward human dignity and collective well-being. This synthesis aims not to dissolve the tension between deontology and consequentialism, but to exploit it productively in the service of a more resilient ethical system. The resulting framework, while concededly imperfect, aspires to be less susceptible to arbitrariness, manipulation, and moral failure than either Kantian rigorism or Millian consequentialism in isolation. (shrink)

全文完，结尾有总结。我现在写文章越来越倾向于纯逻辑写作，所以，基本摆脱了各种缺乏价值的格式束缚，科学工作者请予谅解。感觉这就像指导研究，现在的AI确实可以相当轻松地做出一些不太革命性的解释、补充乃至发 现，成为有一定能力的助手。甚至，AI在帮助我创造方面也能提供一些帮助，而且，不同AI有不同的具体表现。AI的基于统计、模仿的推理接近于科学的传统观点，所以，问题有一定的针对性。AI本身不认为自己有灵魂 、在做推理，但是，至少能通过复杂的机制输出价值（但是，我并不认为它们明确知道什么是灵魂、意识、推理，至少有可能有弱小的灵魂而不自知，当然，人类对此的认识也并不高明。即使是推理，基于某种计算找出推理过程 、答案也不一定就不是逻辑推理）。AI的推理当然充满错误，好在，纯逻辑主义不过分厌恶错误，很多错误也确实引出了有价值的推理。我对AI的观点不会修改，只有保留和删除两种操作。这里的推理不需要修改，不需要补 足为毛毛虫一样的推理，所以，有利于提高效率、边际逻辑性。我们在大约一百小时左右的时间内完成了这两篇和AI的对话，其实算得上一次奇迹。我相信这在未来会引诱我再度和AI合作。.

This is the second article in our series “The Dark Sides of Modern Science” and is about publishing and dissemination of science (and knowledge in general). As the subject of “publishing and dissemination of science” is too big, we decided to divide it in more than one part. The remarks that we stated in the Introduction of the first article of this series (i.e. "Knowledge Production and Authoring") generally apply to this article and hence we do not need to repeat.

To identify the place of religious pluralism in democratic political discourse, this chapter refocuses on the purported normative authority of religious claims, providing a philosophical analysis of its features and implications. Bagnoli proposes an account of religious authority as a variety of normative authority, whose distinctive features are the independence of epistemic proof, the unconditionality and universality of its foundational claims, and the obligations based on membership. Bagnoli then considers whether and how the appeal to religious authority could contribute to (...) the process of rational justification in political discourse in contexts marked by divisive religious disagreements. To this purpose, she adopts a constructivist approach, which takes rational justification to be “public,” that is, addressed to others as having equal normative standing. Bagnoli takes reasoning to be productive and transforming: it does not merely manage conflicts by ratifying overlapping reasons but generates new forms of rational agency. Radically departing from current debates, Bagnoli argues that we should reconceive of public reason dynamically, rather than as a static concept. In the third part, Bagnoli points out and illustrates how constructivism may help provide a suitable normative framework for interfaith dialogue and normative adjustments. (shrink)

This paper offers a Bayesian critique of Joshua Greene’s dual-process model of moral judgment, which implicitly posits a structural division between emotional and cognitive systems. Drawing on recent developments in computational neuroscience, particularly predictive coding, active inference, and constructionist theories of emotion, I argue that both emotional and cognitive functions emerge from a unified inferential system that minimizes prediction error across bodily and environmental domains. This view suggests that the functional duality observed in emotional and cognitive moral judgments does not (...) necessarily imply a structural dualism in the brain’s computational system. Reframing moral judgment within a monolithic Bayesian framework dissolves traditional dichotomies such as reason versus emotion, and reconceives moral judgment as an embodied, context-sensitive process of predictive adaptation. This shift has significant implications for neuroethics and moral psychology, inviting a move beyond static dual process models toward a dynamic, integrative account of moral judgment. (shrink)

In this essay, I hold the assumption that most people would be horrified by callous murders. Having that in mind, I briefly explain two things: first, the Strawsonian view of reactive attitudes which says that feelings of blame and outrage, for example, tell us a lot about the moral responsibility of the perpetrator of the action that gives rise to those attitudes; second, the abuse excuse which says that evildoers may be excused from their actions if they were abused in (...) their upbringing. Then, I panoramically argue that our initial reactive attitudes of blame and horror towards callous murderers should not be changed if we get to know about their history of abuse. This will mean —following a Strawsonian view— that callous murderers should remain equally responsible, culpable, and blameworthy for their actions. (shrink)

_The Metaphysics of Practice_ brings together Wilfrid Sellars's writings on topics to do with action, community, and obligation: published essays, manuscripts, and correspondence. Sellars's practical philosophy was absolutely central to his overarching philosophical project of situating persons as practically rational, norm-governed animals within the world as described by an ideal science. The Editors' Introduction offers an overview of Sellars's metaethics, detailing its key features and explaining how these features are supposed to solve outstanding metaethical problems that not only faced Sellars's (...) contemporaries, but continue to create lively debate among contemporary theorists. And the editors give chapter summaries indicating the main lines of argument and showing where each piece fits into Sellars's overall picture. (shrink)

This paper raises a challenge for moral inferentialism. Moral inferentialism explains moral discourse in terms of the distinctive kinds of discursive commitments we acknowledge and undertake in making moral claims. However, like any metaethical theory, inferentialism owes us an account not only of what it is to make moral claims, but of what it is to think moral thoughts. The paper argues that what inferentialists have said about moral thought is unsatisfactory. While more satisfactory accounts are available, adopting such accounts (...) robs inferentialism of certain supposed advantages that it enjoys over its main competitor, moral expressivism. Insofar as inferentialism is motivated as a non-representationalist alternative to expressivism, the challenge therefore undermines a central motivation for inferentialism. (shrink)

Spinoza claims that the good is what leads us to perfection. Yet he also affirms that whether we judge something to be good depends on whether or not we desire it. It is thus unclear whether Spinoza ultimately analyzes value in terms of perfection or in terms of desire. This is a well-known debate in the literature, but its dialectical complexity is underappreciated. Defenders of the first interpretation must explain not only why Spinoza might analyze the good in terms of (...) perfection, but also why he claims that our judgments of value depend on our desires. They standardly argue that, for Spinoza, our desires offer epistemic justification for these judgments. In this paper, however, I argue that this reading fails. My argument supports the views on which desire plays a role in Spinoza’s account of the nature of value itself, and not merely in his value epistemology. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In recent years, the ethical implications of traffic decision-making, particularly in the context of autonomous vehicles (AVs), have garnered significant attention. While much of the existing research has focused on high-stakes moral dilemmas, such as those exemplified by the trolley problem, everyday traffic situations—characterized by mundane, low-stakes decisions—remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by empirically investigating the applicability of the Agent-Deed-Consequences (ADC) model in the moral judgment of low-stakes traffic scenarios. Using a vignette approach, we surveyed professional philosophers to (...) examine how their moral judgments are influenced by the character of the driver (Agent), their adherence to traffic rules (Deed), and the outcomes of their actions (Consequences). Our findings support the primary hypothesis that each component of the ADC model significantly influences moral judgment, with positive valences in agents, deeds, and consequences leading to greater moral acceptability. We additionally explored whether participants’ normative ethical leanings–classified as deontological, utilitarian, or virtue ethics–influenced how they weighted ADC components. However, no moderating effects of moral preference were observed. The results also reveal interaction effects among some components, illustrating the complexity of moral reasoning in traffic situations. The study’s implications are crucial for the ethical programming of AVs, suggesting that these systems should be designed to navigate not only high-stakes dilemmas but also the nuanced moral landscape of everyday driving. Our work creates a foundation for stakeholders to integrate human moral judgments into AV decision-making algorithms. Future research should build on these findings by including a more diverse range of participants and exploring the generalizability of the ADC model across different cultural contexts. (shrink)

Weyma Lübbe is one of the most resolute contemporary critics of interpersonal welfare aggregation, as it lies at the heart of most consequentialist ethical theories. Her latest book is a rich extension of her numerous articles on this matter. The main object of criticism is the often-presumed moral relevance of welfare efficiency, for instance in rescue conflicts as they occur in health care systems with limited resources. The central philosophical starting point of her discussion is the ‘numbers debate’ introduced by (...) Philippa Foot and John Taurek, which questions the moral relevance of numbers, as opposed to fairness, when it comes to rescue conflicts between groups of different sizes. In decidedly anti-consequentialist fashion, Lübbe argues that (a) interpersonal welfare efficiency cannot play any foundational role in normative ethics (ch. 3). She also tries to prove (b) the inconsistency of any attempt to supplement welfarist axiologies by fairness aspects, denying the possibility to assign independent moral relevance to both aspects (ch. 4 and 5). In the constructive part of the book (ch. 5 and 6), she presents (c) her own account of distributive ethics based on the principle of equal concern for persons (“Gleichachtung”). (shrink)

This book is the first to introduce readers to contemporary philosophical works on moral judgement stemming from France, Germany and the Anglo-American world – many of which remain untranslated. By integrating Kantian and Aristotelian reflections on this subject, the author combines historiography and critical reflection to offer a rich picture of what it means to make good moral decisions. As both Kantians and Aristotelians argue, moral judgements are ultimately grounded in the normativity of practical identities. Thus, it is by identifying (...) the obligations tied to the multiple dimensions of our identities (e.g., friend, teacher, romantic partner, citizen) that we can ultimately understand how we ought to act. Yet, Aristotle and Kant also remind us that doing so requires the acquisition of moral virtues which allow us to better discern practical reasons in concrete situations. (shrink)

In this chapter, I defend a novel metanormative view called non-ardent non-naturalism. The central claim of this view is that moral facts (and normative facts more generally) are non-natural but not authoritatively prescriptive. My main argument for this view is cumulative: I formulate five attractive metanormative claims and argue that while non-ardent non-naturalism accommodates all these claims, its main rivals fail to do so. These claims are: (i) the Moorean intuition, (ii) the Just-Too-Different intuition, (iii) the Frege-Geach insight, (iv) the (...) obscurity of—and lack of sufficient evidence for—ontological lightness, and (v) the Mackiean intuition. Along the way, I discuss various related issues, such as how the notions of ardent normative realism and authoritative prescriptivity can be understood. (shrink)

Joseph Raz devotes one section of “The Truth in Particularism” to explaining the irrelevance of supervenience to the debate between generalists and particularists. Really, however, his claim is that supervenience is irrelevant to metaethics in general. If there is a true supervenience thesis, he argues, it is not one that we now have access to; moreover, it is not one that we are ever likely to have access to. Raz’s discussion of supervenience has been largely neglected. The chief aim of (...) this chapter is to bring it to light, for it is an argument that merits serious consideration. The secondary aim is to defend it. First, it reconstructs the argument before responding to objections. These objections concern the explanatory role of the general supervenience thesis, the inconceivability of its falsity, the claim that supervenience is a deep feature of our evaluative discourse, and the claim that supervenience of the evaluative on the nonevaluative must hold because the evaluative is grounded in the nonevaluative. The key move in Raz’s argument against supervenience concerns observations that he makes about ordinary evaluative practice. As they stand, these observations are suggestive but brief; however, these observations, supplemented by considerations about thick evaluation, give Raz the resources to respond to all of the above objections. (shrink)