Download or read book Merit Meaning and Human Bondage written by Nomy Arpaly and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-15 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps everything we think, feel, and do is determined, and humans--like stones or clouds--are slaves to the laws of nature. Would that be a terrible state? Philosophers who take the incompatibilist position think so, arguing that a deterministic world would be one without moral responsibility and perhaps without true love, meaningful art, and real rationality. But compatibilists and semicompatibilists argue that determinism need not worry us. As long as our actions stem, in an appropriate way, from us, or respond in some way to reasons, our actions are meaningful and can be judged on their moral (or other) merit. In this highly original work, Nomy Arpaly argues that a deterministic world does not preclude moral responsibility, rationality, and love--in short, meaningful lives--but that there would still be something lamentable about a deterministic world. A person may respond well to reasons, and her actions may faithfully reflect her true self or values, but she may still feel that she is not free. Arpaly argues that compatibilists and semicompatibilists are wrong to dismiss this feeling--for which there are no philosophical consolations--as philosophically irrelevant. On the way to this bittersweet conclusion, Arpaly sets forth surprising theories about acting for reasons, the widely accepted idea that "ought implies can," moral blame, and more.
Download or read book Moral Responsibility and Desert of Praise and Blame written by Audrey L. Anton and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges a basic assumption held by many responsibility theorists: that agents must be morally responsible in the retrospective sense for anything in virtue of which they deserve praise or blame (the primacy assumption). Anton sets out to defeat this assumption by showing that accepting it as well as the much more intuitive causality assumption renders us incapable of making sense of cases whereby agents seem to deserve praise and blame. She argues that retrospective moral responsibility is a species of causal responsibility (the causality assumption). Then, she illustrates several examples in which agents are not causally responsible for any morally relevant consequences, but they seem to be deserving of praise or blame nonetheless. Anton concludes that such cases are counterexamples to the primacy assumption, and turns her attention towards discerning what grounds desert of praise and blame if not retrospective moral responsibility. Anton advances the moral attitude account, whereby agents deserve praise and blame in virtue of moral attitudes they have in response to moral reasons. These moral attitudes must be sufficiently sincere, which means they reach a threshold that distinguishes such attitudes as eligible for praise and blame. Anton adds that whether one deserves praise or blame and to what degree is sensitive to the agent’s personal moral progress as well as the status quo of her society. This addition brings with it the welcome consequence that morality may be objective, but we are still justified in judging one another charitably based on personal and societal limitations.
Download or read book Partiality and Justice in Nursing Care written by Marita Nordhaug and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Partiality and Justice in Nursing Care examines the conflicting normative claims of partiality and impartiality in nursing care, looking in depth at how to reconcile reasonable concerns for one particular patient with equally important concerns for the maximisation of health-related welfare for all with relevant nursing-care needs, in a resource-limited setting. Drawing on moral philosophy, this book explores how discussions of partiality and impartiality in moral philosophy can have relevance to the professional context of clinical nursing care as well as in nursing ethics in general. It develops a framework for normative nursing ethics that incorporates a notion of permissible partiality, and specifies which concerns an ethics of nursing care should entail when balancing partialist and impartialist concerns. At the same time, Nordhaug argues that this partiality must also be constrained by both principled and context-sensitive assessments of patients’ needs, as well as of the role-relative deontological restriction of minimising harm, something that could be mitigated by institutional and organisational arrangements. This thought-provoking volume is an important contribution to nursing ethics and philosophy.
Download or read book The Court of Reason written by Beatrix Himmelmann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 2064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Proceedings present the contributions to the 13th International Kant Congress which was held at the University of Oslo, August 6-9, 2019. The congress, which hosted speakers from more than thirty countries and five continents, was dedicated to the topic of the court of reason. The idea that reason stands before itself as a tribunal characterizes the whole of Kant's critical project. Without such a court, reason falls into conflict with itself. With such a court in place, however, it may succeed in establishing the possibility and limits of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, law and science. The idea of reason being its own judge is not only pivotal to a proper understanding of Kant's philosophy, but can also shed light on the burgeoning fields of meta-philosophy and philosophical methodology. The 2019 Kant Congress put special emphasis on Kant's methodology, his account of conceptual critique, and the relevance of his ideas to current issues in especially political philosophy and the philosophy of law. Additional sections discussed a wide range of topics in Kant's philosophy. The Proceedings will provide anyone who is interested in exploring the variety of present-day work on Kant and Kantian themes with a wealth of fruitful inspiration.
Download or read book Moral Psychology written by Mark Alfano and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral psychology is the systematic inquiry into how morality works, when it does work, and breaks down when it doesn't work. In this comprehensive new textbook, Mark Alfano outlines the five central concepts in the study of moral psychology: agency, patiency, sociality, temporality, and reflexivity. Subsequent chapters each assess a key area of research, which Alfano relates both to the five central concepts and to empirical findings. He then draws out the philosophical implications of those findings before suggesting future directions for research. One of Alfano's guiding themes is that moral philosophy without psychological content is empty, whereas psychological investigation without philosophical insight is blind. He advocates and demonstrates a holistic vision that pictures moral psychology as a project of collaborative inquiry into the descriptive and normative aspects of the human condition. Featuring a glossary of technical terms, further reading sections and chapter-by-chapter study questions, this rich, systematic, and accessible introduction to moral psychology will be suitable for both undergraduates and researchers in philosophy, psychology and related fields.
Download or read book Responsibility from the Margins written by David Shoemaker and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-04-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Shoemaker presents a new pluralistic theory of responsibility, based on the idea of quality of will. His approach is motivated by our ambivalence to real-life cases of marginal agency, such as those caused by clinical depression, dementia, scrupulosity, psychopathy, autism, intellectual disability, and poor formative circumstances. Our ambivalent responses suggest that such agents are responsible in some ways but not others. Shoemaker develops a theory to account for our ambivalence, via close examination of several categories of pan-cultural emotional responsibility responses (sentiments) and their appropriateness conditions. The result is three distinct types of responsibility, each with its own set of required capacities: attributability, answerability, and accountability. Attributability is about the having and expressing of various traits of character, and it is the target of a range of aretaic sentiments and emotional practices organized around disdain and admiration. Answerability is about one's capacity to govern one's actions and attitudes by one's evaluative judgments about the worth of various practical reasons, and it is the target of a range of sentiments and emotional practices organized around regret and pride. Accountability is about one's ability to regard others, both evaluatively and emotionally, and it is the target of a range of sentiments and emotional practices organized around anger and gratitude. In Part One of the book, this tripartite theory is developed and defended. In Part Two of the book, the tripartite theory's predictions about specific marginal cases are tested, once certain empirical details about the nature of those agents have been filled in and discussed.
Download or read book Stricken by Sin Cured by Christ written by Jesse Couenhoven and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a discussion of responsibility and blame focused and shaped by St. Augustine's theology of sin and grace, and the controversies that surround those topics. It critically appropriates ideas central to an influential and controversial figure and doctrine, in conversation with expert readers of Augustine, recent philosophical treatments of free will and responsibility, and a broad array of theological voices.
Download or read book Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 8 written by Santiago Amaya and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes, investigating such questions as: · What does it mean to be an agent? · What is the nature of moral responsibility? Of criminal responsibility? What is the relation between moral and criminal responsibility (if any)? · What is the relation between responsibility and the metaphysical issues of determinism and free will? · What do various psychological disorders tell us about agency and responsibility? · How do moral agents develop? How does this developmental story bear on questions about the nature of moral judgment and responsibility? · What do the results from neuroscience imply (if anything) for our questions about agency and responsibility? OSAR thus straddles the areas of moral philosophy and philosophy of action, but also draws from a diverse range of cross-disciplinary sources, including moral psychology, psychology proper (including experimental and developmental), philosophy of psychology, philosophy of law, legal theory, metaphysics, neuroscience, neuroethics, political philosophy, and more. It is unified by its focus on who we are as deliberators and (inter)actors, embodied practical agents negotiating (sometimes unsuccessfully) a world of moral and legal norms. Volume 8 focuses on non-ideal agency and responsibility.
Download or read book Reasons why written by Bradford Skow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reasons Why first argues that what philosophers are really after, or at least should be after, when they seek a theory of explanation, is a theory of answers to why-questions. It then advances a thesis about what form a theory of answers to why-questions should take: a theory of answers to why-questions should say what it takes for one fact to be a reason why another fact obtains. The book's main thesis, then, is a theory of reasons why. Every reason why some event happened is either a cause, or a ground, of that event. Challenging this thesis are many examples philosophers have thought they have found of "non-causal explanations." Reasons Why uses two ideas to show that these examples are not counterexamples to the theory it defends. First is the idea that not every part of a good response to a why-question is part of an answer to that why-question. Second is the idea that not every reason why something is a reason why an event happened is itself a reason why that event happened. In the book's final chapter its theory of reasons why is extended to cover teleological answers to why-questions, and answers to why-questions that give an agent's reason for acting.
Download or read book Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6 written by David Shoemaker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a forum for outstanding new work in an area of vigorous and broad-ranging debate in philosophy and beyond. What is involved in human action? Can philosophy and science illuminate debate about free will? How should we answer questions about responsibility for action?
Download or read book The Obligation Dilemma written by Ishtiyaque Haji and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-07 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can you be morally obligated to do something? To renowned philosopher Ishtiyaque Haji, the answer is guardedly no. Regardless of whether determinism is true, he argues, there is a prima facie plausibility that there are no moral obligations. Powerfully and efficiently, Haji develops a conclusion that has major implications for how we conceive issues in moral responsibility and free will. The book develops the obligation dilemma as clearly as possible. The next step will be for further sustained philosophical work to solve it, assuming it can be resolved, inspired by Haji. In many respects, the obligation dilemma mirrors the well-known responsibility dilemma, where no one is morally responsible for anything. When suitably amended, the strongest recommendations in favor of, or in response to, the responsibility dilemma neither fully support nor undermine the obligation dilemma. Exposing the obligation dilemma's implications for responsibility, and its ramifications for forgiveness (something central to interpersonal relationships), underscores its urgency.
Download or read book Questions of Character written by Iskra Fileva and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection features 26 new essays on character from first-rate scholars in philosophy, psychology, economics, and law. The essays are elegantly written and combine forceful argumentation with original ideas on a wide range of questions, such as: "Is Aristotle's theory of character a moral theory?," "Are character traits in tension with personal autonomy", "How do traits differ from mental disorders?," "What is the role of gossip in character attribution?," and "Can businessmen be virtuous?" The chapters are organized thematically into 5 sections, each prefaced by its own special introduction. In the introductions, the editor brings out often unexpected connections among different lines of argument pursued by the authors and raises important questions for further discussion. The collection as a whole offers students of character a unique opportunity to engage with some of the best contemporary work on the topic.
Download or read book Free Will and Moral Responsibility written by Justin Caouette and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Determinism is, roughly, the thesis that facts about the past and the laws of nature entail all truths. A venerable, age-old dilemma concerning responsibility distils to this: if either determinism is true or it is not true, we lack “responsibility-grounding” control. Either determinism is true or it is not true. So, we lack responsibility-grounding control. Deprived of such control, no one is ever morally responsible for anything. A number of the freshly-minted essays in this collection address aspects of this dilemma. Responding to the horn that determinism undermines the freedom that responsibility (or moral obligation) requires, the freedom to do otherwise, some papers in this collection debate the merits of Frankfurt-style examples that purport to show that one can be responsible despite lacking alternatives. Responding to the horn that indeterminism implies luck or randomness, other papers discuss the strengths or shortcomings of libertarian free will or control. Also included in this collection are essays on the freedom requirements of moral obligation, forgiveness and free will, a “desert-free” conception of free will, and vicarious legal and moral responsibility. The authors of the essays in this volume are philosophers who have made significant contributions to debates in free will, moral responsibility, moral obligation, the reactive attitudes, philosophy of action, and philosophical psychology, and include John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Michael McKenna, Alfred Mele, and Derk Pereboom.
Download or read book Ad Infinitum written by John Turri and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infinitism is an ancient view in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification, according to which there are no foundational reasons for belief. The view has never been popular, and is often associated with skepticism, but after languishing for centuries it has recently begun a resurgence. Ad Infinitum presents new work on the topic by leading epistemologists. They shed new light on infinitism's distinctive strengths and weaknesses, and address questions, new and old, about its account of justification, reasoning, epistemic responsibility, disagreement, and trust, among other important issues. The volume clarifies the relationship between infinitism and other epistemological views, such as skepticism, coherentism, foundationalism and contextualism, and it offers novel perspectives on the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of regresses and reasons.
Download or read book The Idea of Freedom written by Dai Heide and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-25 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kant describes the concept of freedom as "the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason." Kant's theory of freedom thus plays a foundational and unifying role in all aspects of his philosophy and is thus of significant interest to historians of Kant's philosophy. Kant's theory of freedom has also played a significant role in contemporary debates in metaphysics, normative ethics, and metaethics. This volume brings historians of Kant's philosophy into conversation with contemporary metaphysicians and ethicists with the aim of representing the current state of scholarship on Kant's and Kantian accounts of freedom while at the same time opening new avenues of exploration. The Idea of Freedom includes papers by leading scholars on a range of historical and contemporary topics centrally related to the Kantian theory of freedom, including transcendental idealism, determinism, Kant's normative ethical theory, Kant's conception of cognition, Kant's theory of beauty, Kant's conception of logic, and many others.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Free Will written by Robert Kane and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Free Will is intended to be a sourcebook and guide to current work on free will and related subjects. Its focus is on writings of the past forty years, in which there has been a resurgence of interest in traditional issues about the freedom of the will in the light of new developments in the sciences, philosophy and humanistic studies. Special attention is given to research on free will of the first decade of the twenty-first century since the publication of the first edition of the Handbook. All the essays have been newly written or rewritten for this volume. In addition, there are new essayists and essays surveying topics that have become prominent in debates about free will in the past decade, including new work on the relation of free will to physics, the neurosciences, cognitive science, psychology and empirical philosophy, new versions of traditional views (compatibilist, incompatibilist, libertarian, etc.) and new views (e.g., revisionism) that have emerged. The twenty-eight essays by prominent international scholars and younger scholars cover a host of free will related issues, such as moral agency and responsibility, accountability and blameworthiness in ethics, autonomy, coercion and control in social theory, criminal liability, responsibility and punishment in legal theory, issues about the relation of mind to body, consciousness and the nature of action in philosophy of mind and the cognitive and neurosciences, questions about divine foreknowledge, providence and human freedom in philosophy of religion, and general metaphysical questions about necessity and possibility, determinism, time and chance, quantum reality, causation and explanation.
Download or read book Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 4 written by David Shoemaker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a forum for outstanding new work in an area of vigorous and broad-ranging debate in philosophy and beyond. What is involved in human action? Can philosophy and science illuminate debate about free will? How should we answer questions about responsibility for action?
