bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Emotivism
Authors: Smith Michael
Published: September 2018

Emotivists held that moral judgments express and arouse emotions, not beliefs. Saying that an act is right or wrong was thus supposed to be rather like saying ‘Boo!’ or ‘Hooray!’ Emotivism explained well the apparent necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation. If people judge it wrong to lie, and their judgment expresses their hostility, then it comes as no surprise that we can infer that they are disinclined to lie. Emotivism did a bad job of explaining the important role of rational argument in moral practice, however. Indeed, since it entailed that moral judgments elude assessment in terms of truth and falsehood, it suggested that rational argument about morals might be at best inappropriate, and at worst impossible.
Environmental ethics
Authors: Brennan Andrew
Published: September 2018

Theories of ethics try to answer the question, ‘How ought we to live?’. An environmental ethic refers to our natural surroundings in giving the answer. It may claim that all natural things and systems are of value in their own right and worthy of moral respect. A weaker position is the biocentric one, arguing that living things merit moral consideration. An ethic which restricts the possession of moral value to human persons can still be environmental. Such a view may depict the existence of certain natural values as necessary for the flourishing of present and future generations of human beings. Moral respect for animals has been discussed since the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers, while the significance to our wellbeing of the natural environment has been pondered since the time of Kant and Rousseau. The relation of the natural to the built environment, and the importance of place, is a central feature of the philosophy of Heidegger. Under the impact of increasing species loss and land clearance, the work on environmental ethics since the 1970s has focused largely on one specific aspect of the environment – nature in the wild.
Existentialist ethics
Authors: Cooper David E.
Published: September 2018

Central to existentialism is a radical doctrine of individual freedom and responsibility. On the basis of this, writers such as Sartre have offered an account of the nature of morality and also advanced proposals for moral conduct. Important in that account are the claims that (a) moral values are ‘created’ rather than ‘discovered’, (b) moral responsibility is more extensive than usually assumed, and (c) moral life should not be a matter of following rules. Existentialist proposals for conduct derive from the notion of authenticity, understood as ‘facing up’ to one’s responsibility and not ‘fleeing’ it in ‘bad faith’. Authenticity, many argue, entails treating other people so as to encourage a sense of freedom on their part, although there is disagreement as to the primary forms such treatment should take. Some have argued that we promote a sense of freedom through commitment to certain causes; others that this is best achieved through personal relationships.
Feminist ethics
Authors: Tong Rosemarie
Published: September 2018

Critics greet feminist ethics with suspicion, alleging that it is biased towards the interests of women. Feminist ethicists reply that it is traditional ethics which is biased. As they see it, for centuries traditional ethicists claimed to speak for all of humanity, when they were speaking only or primarily for men, and the most privileged of men at that. In contrast, although feminist ethicists openly admit that they proceed from the perspective of women’s experience, their paramount goal is simply to reconstruct traditional ethics so that it becomes more universal and objective by including women’s as well as men’s moral voices.

Far from being monolithic, feminist ethics encompasses a wide variety of woman-centred approaches to the moral life. Feminine approaches to ethics, with their stress on personal relationships and an ethics of care, put a premium on the value of human connection. Maternal approaches focus on one relationship in particular, that between mothers and children, as the paradigm for moral interaction. Lesbian approaches stress choice rather than duty, aiming to define the conditions in which lesbian women can flourish. Finally, specifically feminist approaches to ethics emphasize the political task of eliminating systems and structures of male domination and female subordination in both the public and the private domains.
Friendship
Authors: Badhwar Neera K.
Published: September 2018

Philosophical interest in friendship has revived after a long eclipse. This is due largely to a renewed interest in ancient moral philosophy, in the role of emotion in morality, and in the ethical dimensions of personal relations in general. Questions about friendship are concerned with issues such as whether it is only an instrumental value (a means to other values), or also an intrinsic value – a value in its own right; whether it is a mark of psychological and moral self-sufficiency, or rather of deficiency; and how friendship-love differs from the unconditional love of agapē. Other issues at stake include how – if at all – friendship is related to justice; whether the particularist, partialist perspective of friendship can be reconciled with the universalist, impartialist perspective of morality; and whether friendship is morally neutral.
Genetics and ethics
Authors: Chadwick Ruth
Published: September 2018

The identification of human genes poses problems about the use of resources, and about ownership and use of genetic information, and could lead to overemphasis of the importance of genetic make-up. Genetic screening raises problems of consent, stigmatization, discrimination and public anxiety. Counselling will be required, but whether this can facilitate individual choice is unclear. It will also involve problems of confidentiality. On the other hand genetic knowledge will pave the way for genetic therapies for hereditary disease. This raises the question whether a therapy which alters an individual at the genetic level is different in kind from conventional medical treatment. Genetic alterations passed on to future generations raise problems regarding consent. Genetic intervention could also be used to make ‘improvements’ in human genetic potential, leading to anxieties about eugenic attempts to design the species. Transgenics, the introduction of foreign genes into a genome, raises questions about the integrity of species boundaries and the assessment of risk.
Good, theories of the
Authors: Korsgaard Christine M.
Published: September 2018

‘Good’ is the most general term of positive evaluation, used to recommend or express approval in a wide range of contexts. It indicates that a thing is desirable or worthy of choice, so that normally, if you have reason to want a certain kind of thing, you also have reason to prefer a good thing of that kind.

A theory of the good may consist in a general account of the good, which is meant to apply to all good things; or in a definition of ‘good’, an account of how the term functions in the language. Theories of the good have metaphysical implications about the relations of fact and value. Many ancient and medieval philosophers believed in the ultimate identity of the real and the good. Modern philosophers reject this identification, and have held a range of positions: realists, for example, hold that the good is part of reality, while certain moral sense theorists hold that when we call something good we are projecting human interests onto reality; and emotivists hold that we use the term ‘good’ only to signify subjective approval.

Theorists of the good also categorize different kinds of goodness and explain how they are related. Good things are standardly classified as ends, which are valued for their own sakes, or means, valued for the sake of the ends they promote. Some philosophers also divide them into intrinsic goods, which have their value in themselves, and extrinsic goods, which get their value from their relation to something else. Various theories have been held about the relation between these two distinctions – about whether an end must be something with intrinsic value. Philosophers also distinguish subjective goods – things which are good for someone in particular – from objective goods, which are good from everyone’s point of view. Views about how these kinds of goodness are related have important implications for moral philosophy.

Usually, a theory of the good is constructed in the hope of shedding light on more substantive questions, such as what makes a person, an action, or a human life good. These questions raise issues about the relation between ethical and other values. For example, we may ask whether moral virtue is a special sort of goodness, or just the ordinary sort applied to persons. Or, since actions are valued as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, we may ask how these values are related to the action’s goodness or badness. We may also pose the question of whether a life that is good in the sense of being happy must also be a morally good or virtuous life. This last question has occupied the attention of philosophers ever since Plato.
Honour
Authors: Roberts Julian
Published: September 2018

Honour consists in living up to the expectations of a group – in particular, in keeping faith, observing promises, and telling truth. This restriction to a particular group is not easy to justify against the background of universalist theories of ethics, and neither does honour accord readily with the central modern concepts duty and utility. Honour requires a social context in which individuals can bind themselves, and has tended to be restricted to free, adult males, who alone have been thought to have the capacity to bind themselves in this way. Older traditions, however, regarded honour as the goal of all virtuous action; and newer thinkers have been rediscovering attractions in this view.
Impartiality
Authors: Cottingham John
Published: September 2018

On the one hand, most of us feel that we are permitted, even required, to give special consideration to the interests of ourselves and our loved ones; on the other hand, we also recognize the appeal of a more detached perspective which demands equal consideration for the interests of all. Among writers in the utilitarian tradition, some insist that the strictly impartial perspective is the only one that is ethically tenable, while others argue that a measure of institutionalized partiality can be justified as a means to maximizing welfare. An alternative tradition, stemming from Kant, sees the demand for impartiality as deriving from the importance of fairness and equal respect for persons, but tends to leave open the degree of partiality permitted. Finally, the Aristotelian conception of ethics offers a justification of partiality based on the structure of those virtuous dispositions of character (such as those involved in friendship and self-esteem) which are required for developing our distinctively human potentialities.
Logic of ethical discourse
Authors: Timmons Mark
Published: September 2018

Logic, as a discipline, is largely concerned with discovering principles and methods for evaluating the evidential strength between the premises and conclusions of arguments. Because the meanings of terms (and the concepts they express) that occur in arguments bear importantly on questions about evidential relations, much of the work on the topic of logic and ethics has been preoccupied with questions about the meanings of moral terms and concepts, and with the correct linguistic analysis of sentences that contain them. Taking logic to include issues about meaning (which has commonly been done by those who refer to the so-called ‘logic of moral discourse’) is to construe the subject broadly. But the field of logic is often construed quite narrowly to refer to the study of formal languages whose syntax, axioms and inference rules are sufficiently determinate to allow decisions about what counts as the theorem in such a language. On the narrower understanding of logic, the intersection of logic and ethics has mainly to do with work in deontic logic. This article takes up issues concerning the intersection of ethics and logic broadly construed. The intersection of logic and ethics concerns questions about the nature of moral reasoning. Some philosophers have attempted to deduce substantive moral conclusions from factual statements – in particular, to derive ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’ statements. If one can successfully carry out such deductions, then moral reasoning is guided properly by consideration of nonmoral facts from which moral conclusions can be derived. However, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume is often credited with arguing that no such deductions are correct; that there is a gap between factual ‘is’ statements and moral ‘ought’ statements. There is disagreement over whether or not Hume’s negative claim is correct; but even if it is, there may still be logical features of moral concepts that impose constraints on proper moral reasoning.

One such widely discussed constraint is the thesis of universalizability, according to which relevantly similar cases must receive the same moral evaluation. One implication of this thesis is that moral judgments about particular cases entail universal moral principles and so some have argued that all correct moral reasoning must be understood in terms of subsuming particular cases under general moral principles. Although many philosophers have accepted this subsumptive model of moral reasoning, it has come under attack by philosophers who argue that proper moral reasoning is primarily a matter of sensitively discerning the morally relevant details of a case under consideration and rendering a moral judgment about it without the guidance of principles.
Moral luck
Authors: Statman Daniel
Published: September 2018

The term ‘moral luck’ was introduced by Bernard Williams in 1976 to convey the idea that moral status is, to a large extent, a matter of luck. For example, that Bob grows up to be vicious and Tom to be virtuous depends very much on their different family conditions and educational background. Following Williams, Thomas Nagel widened the scope of moral luck. The position taken by both stands in stark contrast to the widely-held view, influenced by Kant, that one is morally accountable only for what is under one’s control, so that moral accountability is not a matter of luck. This idea is so deeply entrenched in our modern concept of morality that rejecting it would call for a rethinking and reformulation of the most basic notions of morality. Some have argued that the paradox of moral luck provides a strong reason to abandon traditional moral theories, and lends support to virtue ethics.
Moral pluralism
Authors: Weinstock Daniel M.
Published: September 2018

Moral pluralism is the view that moral values, norms, ideals, duties and virtues are irreducibly diverse: morality serves many purposes relating to a wide range of human interests, and it is therefore unlikely that a theory unified around a single moral consideration will account for all the resulting values. Unlike relativism, however, moral pluralism holds that there are rational constraints on what can count as a moral value. One possible, though not necessary, implication of moral pluralism is the existence of real moral dilemmas. Some philosophers have deemed these to be inconceivable; in fact, however, they do not constitute a serious threat to practical reason. Another possible implication of moral pluralism is the existence within a society of radically different but equally permissible moralities. This poses a challenge for political philosophy, and might justify a liberal view that particular conceptions of the good life ought not to be invoked in the formulation of public policy.
Moral sense theories
Authors: Taylor Jacqueline
Published: September 2018

In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes argued that since good and evil are naturally relative to each individual’s private appetites, and man’s nature is predominantly selfish, then morality must be grounded in human conventions. His views provoked strong reactions among British moral philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moral sense theories comprise one set of responses. A moral sense theory gives a central role to the affections and sentiments in moral perception, in the appraisal of conduct and character, and in deliberation and motivation. Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson argued that we have a unique faculty of moral perception, the moral sense. David Hume and Adam Smith held that we cultivate a moral sensibility when we appropriately regulate our sympathy by an experience-informed reason and reflection.
Moral standing
Authors: Kuflik Arthur
Published: September 2018

Towards whom is it appropriate to direct fundamental moral consideration? This is the question of moral standing. Many different answers have been offered: all and only those creatures that are themselves capable of extending moral concern and consideration; all humans, whether capable of functioning as moral agents or not; humans plus certain other ‘higher’ animals (such as gorillas, chimpanzees and porpoises) that can think, reason and be self-aware; creatures capable of feeling sensations such as pain, no matter how otherwise rudimentary their psychological existence; living beings, whether sentient or not; ‘holistic’ entities such as political states, cultural traditions, biological species, natural ecosystems.

The moral standing issue has great significance both practically and theoretically. Earnestly reconsidering who, or what, counts morally could change what we eat, how we clothe ourselves, the extent to which we spread out over the land. Even those who believe that only humans count morally must still address the theoretically challenging question of what it is about humans that warrants such exclusive concern.

To try to resolve this difficult issue, philosophers have pursued several different strategies. Some work from plausible convictions about particular cases (such as ‘"Normal" healthy adult humans have moral standing, if anyone does’) and then, subject to the demand for principled consistency, try to extrapolate to a more general account of what confers moral standing. Others try to articulate a broad view of the general nature of moral consciousness (as involving, for example, the disposition to empathize with others or promote their good) and work back from that to an account of the most basic conditions of the possibility of being conscientiously considered (for instance, having feelings with which others can empathize or a good which they can take into account).
Morality and emotions
Authors: Nussbaum Martha C.
Published: September 2018

Emotions such as anger, fear, grief, envy, compassion, love and jealousy have a close connection to morality. Philosophers have generally agreed that they can pose problems for morality in a variety of ways: by impeding judgment, by making attention uneven and partial, by making the person unstable and excessively needy, by suggesting immoral projects and goals.

The place of emotions in moral theories depends on whether they are conceived of merely as impulses without thought or intentional content, or as having some sort of cognitive content. Plato argued that emotions form a part of the soul separate from thought and evaluation, and moved, in the course of his writings, from a sceptical view of their contribution to morality to a more positive appraisal. Aristotle connected emotions closely with judgment and belief, and held that they can be cultivated through moral education to be important components of a virtuous character. The Stoics identified emotions with judgments ascribing a very high value to uncontrolled external things and persons, arguing that all such judgments are false and should be removed. Their cognitive analysis of emotion stands independent of this radical normative thesis, and has been adopted by many philosophers who do not accept it.

Modern theories of emotion can be seen as a series of responses and counter-responses to the Stoic challenge. Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche all accepted many of the Stoics’ normative arguments in favour of diminishing the role played by emotions in morality; they differed, however, in the accounts of emotion they proposed. Focusing on compassion or sympathy, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith and Schopenhauer all defended the role of some emotions in morality, returning to a normative position closer to Aristotle’s (though not always with a similarly cognitive analysis).

Contemporary views of emotion have been preoccupied with the criticism of reductive accounts that derive from behaviourist psychology. By now, it is once again generally acknowledged that emotions are intelligent parts of the personality that can inform and illuminate as well as motivate. Philosophers’ views have been enriched by advances in cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and anthropology. Feminist accounts of emotion differ sharply, some insisting that we should validate emotions as important parts of moral character, others that emotions shaped by unjust conditions are unreliable guides.
Morality and identity
Authors: Singer Ira
Published: September 2018

Philosophers have drawn connections between morality and identity in two ways. First, some have argued that metaphysical theories about personal identity – theories about what makes one the same person over time – have important consequences for what ought to matter to a rational agent. Second, others have argued that understanding the concrete identities of persons – the social contexts and personal commitments that give life substance and meaning – is essential if moral philosophy is to address real human concerns.

How are metaphysical questions about personal identity supposed to bear on morality? The thought is that what unifies a series of experiences into a single life illuminates what we are, and what we are helps determine how we ought to live. More broadly, it is natural to seek coherence in our metaphysical and our moral views about persons. This pursuit of a comprehensive account has its dangers; perhaps we will tailor a metaphysical view to fit our moral prejudices, or distort moral philosophy and judgment to fit a false metaphysics. But the pursuit has its attractions too; perhaps we will come to understand what we are, and how we ought to live, in a single package.

Philosophers who attend to concrete rather than metaphysical identity characterize persons as committed by social and historical circumstances to a particular range and ordering of values, and as committed by proximity and affection to a particular circle of other persons. These concrete and individual characteristics at least constrain what morality can reasonably demand. But this interpretation suggests that morality stands back from the rich texture of each life, and moderates its demands to accommodate that life. Some philosophers think of morality instead as part of the texture, as intimately connected to, rather than constrained by, concrete identity.
Paternalism
Authors: Arneson Richard
Published: September 2018

Restriction of people’s liberty of action is paternalistic when it is imposed for the good of those whose liberty is restricted and against their will. The argument in favour of paternalism is that, if one can prevent people from harming themselves, there is no reason not to do so. Versions of the ethical creed of liberalism tend to oppose paternalism. One argument is that as a practical matter the policy of permitting paternalism tends to do more harm than good in the long run, or at least less good than a strict refusal to countenance paternalism would achieve. Another argument appeals to a right of autonomy which paternalism is held to violate whether or not its consequences on the whole are undesirable. Paternalist advocacy can be ‘hard’ or ‘soft’; soft paternalism is the doctrine that paternalism can only be justifiable when the individual action that is being restricted was not chosen in a substantially voluntary way.
Practical reason and ethics
Authors: O'Neill Onora
Published: September 2018

Practical reason is reasoning which is used to guide action, and is contrasted with theoretical reason, which is used to guide thinking. Sometimes ‘practical reason’ refers to any way of working out what to do; more usually it refers to proper or authoritative, hence reasoned, ways of working out what to do.

On many accounts practical reasoning is solely instrumental: it identifies ways of reaching certain results or ends, but has nothing to say about which ends should be pursued or which types of action are good or bad, obligatory or forbidden. Instrumental reasoning is important not only for ethics and politics, but for all activities, for example, in working out how to travel to a given destination.

Other accounts of practical reason insist that it is more than instrumental reasoning: it is concerned not only with working out how to achieve given ends, but with identifying the ethically important ends of human activity, or the ethically important norms or principles for human lives, and provides the basis for all ethical judgment.

No account of objective ethical values can be established without showing how we can come to know them, that is, without showing that some form of ethical cognitivism is true. However, ethical cognitivism is not easy to establish. Either we must show that some sort of intuition or perception provides direct access to a realm of values; or we must show that practical reasoning provides less direct methods by which objective ethical claims can be established. So anybody who thinks that there are directly objective values, but doubts whether we can intuit them directly, must view a plausible account of practical reason as fundamental to philosophical ethics.
Pragmatism in ethics
Authors: Tiles J.E.
Published: September 2018

Two components of the pragmatist outlook shape its ethical philosophy. It rejects certainty as a legitimate intellectual goal; this generates a nondogmatic attitude to moral precepts and principles. It holds, secondly, that thought (even that exercised in scientific inquiry) is essentially goal-directed in a way that makes the refinement of the control we exercise over how we act (for example, in drawing conclusions) integral to achieving any cognitive goal such as that of truth. This makes it possible to treat scientific inquiry as a model of how we might respond to moral problems and the reasonableness and impartiality required of a scientific inquirer as a paradigm of what may be expected in reaching moral judgments. This view of the nature of thought also inclines pragmatists to assess proposed solutions to moral conflicts in terms of consequences. But although human desires are taken as the raw material with which moral thinking must deal, it is not assumed that people’s desires (what they take pleasure in) are fixed and can be used as a standard by which to assess consequences. Pragmatism is thus free to revert to a classical mode of thought (such as Aristotelianism) in which claims about human nature function as norms – a use which is made, for example, of the claim that humans are essentially social creatures.
Recognition
Authors: Honneth Axel
Published: September 2018

The concept of recognition has played an important role in philosophy since ancient times, when the good life was thought to depend partly on being held in regard by others. Only Hegel, however, made recognition fundamental to his practical philosophy. He claimed that human self-consciousness depends on recognition, and that there are different levels of recognition: legal or moral recognition, and the forms of recognition constituted by love and the state. A similar tripartite distinction can be used to ground a plausible modern account of ethics.
Self-control
Authors: Quinn Philip L.
Published: September 2018

A human person or self possesses powers that can come into conflict. Reason may have to struggle to overcome contrary desire. Self-control may be characterized as the ability to regulate or resolve such conflict correctly. A well-ordered self has self-control; a disordered self lacks it. When an agent lacks self-control, inner conflict often results in the victory of evil over good. Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant have painted portraits of the disordered self. They are alike in portraying its actions as stemming from appetites or desires that are not properly ruled by some ‘higher part’ of the self. These philosophers have also proposed accounts of the well-ordered self. They are alike in depicting it as a self in which a part of the self connected with reason or wisdom governs a ‘lower part’ associated with appetites or desires.
Self-respect
Authors: Stark Cynthia A.
Published: September 2018

Persons are said to respect themselves when they have an appropriate sense of their own worth either as persons generally or as individuals occupying particular roles. In respecting themselves as persons, people may recognize their worth as persons (‘recognition’ self-respect) or value the positive aspects of their character (‘evaluative’ or ‘appraisal’ self-respect). On the ‘subjective’ view of self-respect, persons have self-respect so long as they value themselves according to their own standards of worthiness. On the ‘objective’ view, there are certain attitudes or actions that show self-respect, regardless of whether the agents exhibiting them are conforming to their own standards. Self-respect plays a central role in the ethical philosophy of Kant and the political philosophy of Rawls. Kant maintains that persons have a duty to respect themselves, which consists in regarding themselves as equal in moral status to other persons. Rawls holds that a just society must provide the social bases of self-respect for all citizens, for without self-respect, their lives are severely diminished. In this same spirit, some critiques of oppression emphasize the injustice of robbing people of their self-respect, which is often a consequence, it is claimed, of being oppressed.
Moral sentiments
Authors: Wallace R. Jay
Published: September 2018

Moral sentiments are those feelings or emotions central to moral agency. Aristotle treated sentiments as nonrational conditions, capable of being moulded into virtues through habituation. The moral sense theorists of the Enlightenment took sentiments to provide the psychological basis for our common moral life. Kantian approaches deny the primacy of sentiments in moral personality, and treat moral sentiments as conditioned by our rational grasp of moral principles.

A central issue is whether moral sentiments incorporate moral beliefs. Accounts which affirm a connection with moral beliefs point to the complex intentionality (object-directedness) of such states as resentment or indignation. Against this, some observe that moral emotions may be felt inappropriately.

Of special interest are the sentiments of guilt and shame. These seem to reflect different orientations towards moral norms, and questions arise about the degree to which these different orientations are culturally local, and whether either orientation is superior to the other.
Sport and ethics
Authors: Hyland Drew A.
Published: September 2018

Ethical controversies have formed some of the liveliest debate in the philosophy of sport. Some of the issues arise out of the very nature of sport as a rule-governed activity, especially since the breaking of those rules often presents opportunities for competitive advantage. Other debates concern over-emphasis on winning, which can lead to various forms of cheating. The ‘problem of winning’ is clearly related to the larger problem of competition itself, which has led to lively dialogue over whether competition in athletics inevitably causes alienation. Finally, one of the most provocative controversies has been over the question of performance-enhancing drugs and whether they should be banned.
Supererogation
Authors: Trianosky Gregory Velazco Y
Published: September 2018

Supererogatory actions are usually characterized as ‘actions above and beyond the call of duty’. Historically, Catholic thinkers defended the doctrine of supererogation by distinguishing what God commands from what he merely prefers, while Reformation thinkers claimed that all actions willed by God are obligatory. In contemporary philosophy, it is often argued that if morality is to permit us to pursue our own personal interests, it must recognize that many self-sacrificing altruistic acts are supererogatory rather than obligatory. The need for some category of the supererogatory is particularly urgent if moral obligations are thought of as rationally overriding. There are three main contemporary approaches to defining the supererogatory. The first locates the obligatory/supererogatory distinction within positive social morality, holding that the former are actions we are blameworthy for failing to perform, while the latter are actions we may refrain from performing without blame. The second holds that obligatory actions are supported by morally conclusive reasons, while supererogatory actions are not. On this approach the personal sacrifice sometimes involved in acting altruistically counts against it from the moral point of view, making some altruistic actions supererogatory rather than obligatory. The third approach appeals to virtue and vice, holding that obligatory actions are those failure to perform which reveals some defect in the agent’s character, while supererogatory actions are those that may be omitted without vice.
Technology and ethics
Authors: Mitcham Carl , Nissenbaum Helen
Published: September 2018

Only within the modern period have philosophers made a direct and sustained study of ethics and technology. Their work follows two philosophical traditions, each marked by distinct styles: the Continental or phenomenological tradition, and the Anglo-American or analytical tradition.

Hans Jonas (1979) articulated one of the basic premises of Continental approaches when he argued for technology as a special subject of ethics: because technology has fundamentally transformed the human condition, generating problems of global magnitude extending into the indefinite future, it calls for a new approach to ethics. Jonas’ basic premise is expressed variously in the works of Karl Marx, Max Scheler, José Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger and others.

Work within the Anglo-American tradition tends not to deal with technology as a whole but to be organized around particular technologies, such as computing, engineering, and medical and biological sciences. It draws on concepts and principles of traditional ethical theory at least as a starting point for analyses. Although each of the technologies has a unique set of problems, certain themes, such as responsibility, risk, equity and autonomy, are common to almost all.

Social scientists have also raised important issues for the field of ethics and technology. Their work has yielded two dominant schools of thought: technological determinism and social constructivism.
Universalism in ethics
Authors: O'Neill Onora
Published: September 2018

The claim that ethical standards or principles are universal is an ancient commonplace of many ethical traditions and of contemporary political life, particularly in appeals to universal human rights. Yet it remains controversial. There are many sources of controversy. Universalism in ethics may be identified with claims about the form, scope or content of ethical principles, or with the very idea that ethical judgment appeals to principles, rather than to particular cases. Or it may be identified with various claims to identify a single fundamental universal principle, from which all other ethical principles and judgments derive. These disagreements can be clarified, and perhaps in part resolved, by distinguishing a number of different conceptions of universalism in ethics.
Virtue ethics
Authors: Crisp Roger
Published: September 2018

Virtue ethics has its origin in the ancient world, particularly in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. It has been revived following an article by G. E. M. Anscombe critical of modern ethics and advocating a return to the virtues.

Some have argued that virtue ethics constitutes a third option in moral theory additional to utilitarianism and Kantianism. Utilitarians and Kantians have responded vigorously, plausibly claiming that their views already incorporate many of the theses allegedly peculiar to virtue ethics.

Virtue theory, the study of notions, such as character, related to the virtues, has led to the recultivation of barren areas. These include: What is the good life, and what part does virtue play in it? How stringent are the demands of morality? Are moral reasons independent of agents’ particular concerns? Is moral rationality universal? Is morality to be captured in a set of rules, or is the sensitivity of a virtuous person central in ethics?

From virtue ethics, and the virtue theory of which it is a part, have emerged answers to these questions at once rooted in ancient views and yet distinctively modern.
Promising
Authors: Scanlon T.M.
Published: September 2018

Promising is often seen as a social practice with specific rules, determining when a promise has been made and requiring that duly made promises be kept. Accordingly, many philosophers have sought to explain the obligation to keep a promise by appealing to a duty to abide by such rules, whether because of the social benefits of the practice or because fairness requires one to abide by it. Others see breaking a promise as a direct wrong to the person whose expectations are disappointed.
Axiology
Authors: Smith Barry , Thomas Alan
Published: September 2018

Axiology is the branch of practical philosophy which studies the nature of value. Axiologists study value in general rather than moral values in particular and frequently emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of values while at the same time adopting different forms of realism about values. Historically, three groups of philosophers can be described as axiologists: the original Austrian and German schools of value phenomenologists; American theorists of value who offered an account of value which reduces it to human interests; and an English school, influenced by Austro-German phenomenology, which included such diverse figures as G.E. Moore, Hastings Rashdall and W.D. Ross. Recent philosophy has seen a resurgence of interest in value realism in the broadly axiological tradition.
Information technology and ethics
Authors: Nissenbaum Helen
Published: September 2018

Information technology ethics is the study of the ethical issues arising out of the use and development of electronic technologies. Its goal is to identify and formulate answers to questions about the moral basis of individual responsibilities and actions, as well as the moral underpinnings of public policy.

Information technology ethics raises new and unique moral problems because information technology itself has brought about dramatic social, political, and conceptual change. Because information technology affects not only how we do things but how we think about them, it challenges some of the basic organizing concepts of moral and political philosophy such as property, privacy, the distribution of power, basic liberties and moral responsibility.

Specific questions include the following. What are the moral responsibilities of computer professionals? Who is to blame when computer software failure causes harm? Is computer hacking immoral? Is it immoral to make unauthorized copies of software? Questions related to public policy include: what constitutes just policy with respect to freedom of speech, association, and the exercise of other civil liberties over computer networks? What determines the extent and limits of property rights over computer software and electronic information? What policies adequately protect a right to privacy?

The list of questions shifts in response to developments in information technology. One noteworthy example is the rise in prominence of questions about communication and information in response to the explosive growth of high-speed digital networks. This shift has subsumed the field commonly called ‘computer ethics’ under the broader rubric of ‘information technology ethics’.
Egoism and altruism
Authors: Kraut Richard
Published: September 2018

Henry Sidgwick conceived of egoism as an ethical theory parallel to utilitarianism: the utilitarian holds that one should maximize the good of all beings in the universe; the egoist holds instead that the good one is ultimately to aim at is only one’s own. This form of egoism (often called ‘ethical egoism’) is to be distinguished from the empirical hypothesis (‘psychological egoism’) that human beings seek to maximize their own good. Ethical egoism can approve of behaviour that benefits others, for often the best way to promote one’s good is to form cooperative relationships. But the egoist cannot approve of an altruistic justification for such cooperation: altruism requires benefiting others merely for their sake, whereas the egoist insists that one’s ultimate goal must be solely one’s own good.

One way to defend ethical egoism is to affirm psychological egoism and then to propose that our obligations cannot outstrip our capacities; if we cannot help seeking to maximize our own well being, we should not hold ourselves to a less selfish standard. But this defence is widely rejected, because psychological egoism seems too simple a conception of human behaviour. Moreover, egoism violates our sense of impartiality; there is no fact about oneself that justifies excluding others from one’s ultimate end.

There is, however, a different form of egoism, which flourished in the ancient world, and is not vulnerable to this criticism. It holds that one’s good consists largely or exclusively in acting virtuously, and that self-interest properly understood is therefore our best guide.
Fact/value distinction
Authors: Crisp Roger
Published: September 2018

According to proponents of the fact/value distinction, no states of affairs in the world can be said to be values, and evaluative judgments are best understood not to be pure statements of fact. The distinction was important in twentieth-century ethics, and debate continues about the metaphysical status of value, the epistemology of value, and the best characterization of value-judgments.
Genetic modification
Authors: Tester Mark , Craig Edward
Published: September 2018

Genetic modification is the heritable alteration of the genetic make-up of an organism. As a natural process this is as old as genes themselves, and has been utilized by human beings since the beginnings of agriculture. Recently, the term has come to apply specifically to newly developed DNA technologies, where the genome of an organism is modified using artificial techniques. These rely on the ability to cut DNA precisely, isolate desired fragments and insert them into a single cell of another organism. From this transformed cell a new multicellular organism can be regenerated. There is a wide range of applications of the new technology, from employing yeast to synthesize human insulin, to making crops resistant to pest and diseases. However, it has also attracted much opposition. It has been criticized for being unnatural, for posing an unassessable risk to the environment and to human health, and for providing an instrument for!the manipulation of human genetic make-up that might invite serious abuse.
Integrity
Authors: Davis Ann
Published: September 2018

The possession (or lack) of integrity is something that all morally serious people care about and think important. In both personal relationships and public life, to describe someone as exhibiting a lack of integrity is to offer a damning diagnosis. It carries the implication that this individual is not to be relied upon, that in some fundamental way they are not someone who we can, or should, view as being wholly or unequivocally there. The foundations of self and character are not sound; the ordering of values is not coherent.

Important as the notion of integrity is, it is nevertheless difficult to characterize with precision. Attempts to analyse it seldom do justice to its complexity, or adequately reflect the diverse concerns that generate and sustain either philosophers’ or non-philosophers’ interest in it. Contemporary interest in the notion of integrity has a number of different, often overlapping, sources. It has been accorded a leading role in the debate between consequentialists and non-consequentialists; revived interest in virtue-ethics has naturally focused attention on it; and its connection with unity or coherence of personality make it central for moral psychology.

As well as occupying a central position in three major topics within academic moral philosophy, integrity has also come to wider prominence in at least two ways: as a virtue increasingly missed in public life; and as a transcultural virtue that reflects a world that has become increasingly morally pluralistic.

The notion of integrity, though complex, elusive, and analytically intractable, is one that goes to the core of our moral thinking, both in theoretical and practical terms.
Infinity in ethics
Authors: Vallentyne Peter
Published: September 2018

Puzzles can arise in ethical theory (as well as decision theory) when infinity is involved. The puzzles arise primarily in theories – such as consequentialist theories – that appeal to the value of actions or states of affairs. One important question is whether one source of value (such as major aesthetic pleasures) can be infinitely more valuable than another (such as minor gustatory pleasures). Another question concerns what morality requires when there is an infinite number of feasible options and no option is maximally valuable. In such cases, morality can demand no more than that we ‘almost maximize’ or (more weakly) that we do enough, or ‘satisfice’. An ethical puzzle can arise when time is infinitely long. Is a state of affairs with two units of value at each time more valuable than a state of affairs with one unit at each time (even though both produce infinite amounts of value)? Other related puzzles can arise when time is finite but infinitely divisible. It should be noted that related puzzles can also arise when probabilities are involved.
Legal ethics
Authors: Tur Richard
Published: September 2018

Legal ethics can be considered from at least three related viewpoints. First, as ‘professional ethics’, it is a corpus of rules, principles and standards, often embodied in a written code and disseminated, applied and enforced by appropriate governing bodies as a guide to the professional conduct of lawyers. Legal professions set up specific institutions and officers to monitor and assist practitioners and to accumulate experience and expertise in applying detailed provisions in morally complex situations. For some commentators this is primarily regulation or administration and not ethics at all, but for others it is ethics in action or ‘applied ethics’. ‘Applied ethics’ is the second aspect of legal ethics, distinguished from ethics in general by the focus on ethical issues in the context of legal practice, including confidentiality, conflict of interest or acting for a morally disreputable client. Interesting though such questions may be in themselves, some writers do not acknowledge that they are truly questions of ethics, because the duties and privileges of specialist functional groups generally and lawyers in particular are not universalizable. For others, including some feminist ethicists, the ‘agent as such’ does not exist and we all encounter moral difficulties and problems, if we encounter them at all, only in the context of some specific relationship or role, for example in the role of a lawyer. Legal ethics thus requires an analysis of role morality. The third aspect of legal ethics is as an integral element in general philosophical and legal education.