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This book argues that Roe v. Wade's six‐month time span for abortion “on demand” polarized the American public, and obscured alternatives that could have gained broad public support. As a result, a predictable bureaucratic backlash to legal abortion has ensued that has placed legal abortion services out of reach for women who are poor, young, or live far from urban centers. Explores the origins of Roe's regulatory scheme and demonstrates that it resulted from concerns that have considerably less relevance in today's medical context. Endorses regulatory guidelines, first proposed by the American Bar Association in 1972, which would give states more flexibility in setting the time span for unrestricted abortion. Argues that the standard civil liberty defenses of abortion (i.e. privacy, involuntary servitude, self‐defense, religious freedom) offer better support for these guidelines than for Roe’s scheme, and that a time span for nontherapeutic abortions shorter than six months can both protect women's interests and advance important public interests. The book also critiques the individualism of “pro‐choice” post‐Roe abortion rights campaigns for failing to articulate how women's reproductive options depend on access to public services and resources and not only on being let alone. Urges reproductive rights activists to emphasize the interconnections both between social responsibility and respect for human life, and between the Samaritan obligations of pregnant women and those of other citizens. Explores feminist artwork on abortion to extrapolate tools for refocusing the abortion debate on these issues and for contesting the extremist tactics of the “pro‐life” movement.

Academic freedom, which allows members of institutions of higher learning to engage in intellectual pursuits without fear of censorship or retaliation, lies at the heart of the mission of the university. Recent years have seen growing concerns about threats to academic freedom, many brought about from the changing norms of, and demands on, the university. A number of new issues—including content warnings, safe spaces, social media controversies, microaggressions, and no platforming—have given rise to loud cries, in both scholarly and popular contexts, that academic freedom is under serious attack. Despite this, there is surprisingly little philosophical work on the topic of academic freedom, and even less that directly takes up some of these new challenges. The present volume fills both of these gaps in the current literature by bringing together leading philosophers from a wide range of areas of expertise to weigh in on both traditional and timely issues involving academic freedom. The volume includes an introduction and ten previously unpublished essays, divided into four main sections: The Rationale for Academic Freedom, on the fundamental values that undergird the case for academic freedom; The Parameters of Academic Freedom, on when and where academic freedom applies; Silencing and Beyond: Microaggressions, Content Warnings, and Political Correctness, on some of the new challenges to academic freedom grounded in sensitivity to the political and emotional needs of an increasingly diverse academy; and Protests, Civil Disobedience, and No Platforming, on conflicts between academic freedom and the enforcement of laws and regulations governing the functioning of the university.

Achievement is a central element in the best human lives. But just what is achievement? And why is achievement valuable? Achievements have a common structure: a process culminates in a product. But of course not just any process and product together makes an achievement. The process of an achievement is difficult, and it culminates in the product in a way that is competent. These two elements—difficulty and competent causation—are the two essential features of achievements, and are also sources of value for all achievements. The best account to capture their value is a perfectionist theory, according to which the exercise of our characteristically human capacities has intrinsic value. But not just any perfectionist account will do. Perfectionism must acknowledge that the will is among the characteristic capacities. This book investigates the nature and value of achievements, and proposes a new strand of perfectionism to account for their value.

Addiction seems to involve a significant degree of loss of control over behaviour, yet it remains mysterious how such a loss of control occurs and how it can be compatible with the retention of agency. This collection, which arose out of a conference held at the University of Oxford, brings together philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists with the aim of understanding this loss of control from a perspective informed by cutting-edge science and philosophical reflection. Individual chapters, by well-established names in philosophy of action, moral philosophy, neuroscience and psychology, illuminate the mechanisms involved in the loss of control and link these mechanisms to our understanding of agency and the moral responsibility of addicts.

After Injury explores the practices of forgiveness, resentment, and apology in three key moments when they were undergoing a dramatic change: early Christian history (for forgiveness), the shift from British eighteenth-century to Continental nineteenth-century philosophers (for resentment), and the moment in the 1950s postwar world in which ordinary language philosophers and sociologists of everyday life theorized what it means to express or perform an apology. The debates in those key moments have largely defined the contemporary study of these practices. The first premise of this book is that because these three practices are interlinked—forgiveness is commonly defined as a forswearing of resentment in response to an apology—it makes sense to study these practices together. The second premise is that each practice has a different historical evolution. It thus makes sense to identify a key moment to examine what is arguably the most important mutation in the evolution of each practice. After looking at the debates in those three key moments, After Injury takes up the important contemporary questions about each of the practices. For the practice of forgiveness, those questions center on whether forgiveness is possible, and what place it occupies in relation to retribution. For resentment, the questions involve the value and risks of holding on to what is admittedly the disabling emotion of resentment in order to affirm the injustice of the past. For the practice of apology, a key question is what to make of a shift from personal to collective, from private to public apologies.

The chapters of this book, which are by liberal and feminist philosophers, address whether marriage reform ought to stop with same-sex marriage. Some philosophers have recently argued that marriage is illiberal and should be abolished or radically reformed to include groups and friendships. In response, Chapter 1 argues that marriage law can be justified without illiberal appeal to an ideal relationship type, and Chapter 2 argues that the liberal values justifying same-sex marriage do not justify further extension. Other chapters argue for new legal forms for intimate relationships. Chapter 3 argues that piecemeal directives rather than relationship contracts should replace marriage, and Chapter 4 argues for separating marriage and parenting, with parenting rather than marriage becoming the family’s foundation. The fifth chapter argues for a non-hierarchical friendship model for marriage. The next one argues that polygamy should be decriminalized but that the liberal state need not recognize it, while Chapter 7 argues that polygamy could be legally structured to protect privacy and equality. The eighth chapter argues for temporary marriage as a legal option, while the chapter that follows argues that marital commitments are problematic instruments for securing romantic love. These essays challenge contemporary understandings of marriage and the state’s role in it.

Are there things we should value because they are, quite simply, good? If so, such things might be said to have “absolute goodness.” They would be good simpliciter or full stop—not good for someone, not good of a kind, but nonetheless good (period). They might also be called “impersonal values.” The reason why we ought to value such things, if there are any, would merely be the fact that they are, quite simply, good things. In the 20th century, G. E. Moore was the great champion of absolute goodness, but he is not the only philosopher who posits the existence and importance of this property. Against these friends of absolute goodness, this book builds on the argument he made in What is Good and Why, demonstrating that goodness is not a reason-giving property—in fact, there may be no such thing. It is, the book holds, an insidious category of practical thought, because it can be and has been used to justify what is harmful and condemn what is beneficial. Impersonal value draws us away from what is good for persons. The book's strategy for opposing absolute goodness is to search for domains of practical reasoning in which it might be thought to be needed, and this leads the book to an examination of a wide variety of moral phenomena: pleasure, knowledge, beauty, love, cruelty, suicide, future generations, bio-diversity, killing in self-defense, and the extinction of our species. Even persons, the book proposes, should not be said to have absolute value. The special importance of human life rests instead on the great advantages that such lives normally offer.

Reflection on the grounds for leniency towards children who commit crimes is the entry point into the development, in this book, of a theory of the nature of criminal responsibility and desert of punishment for crime. The book argues that child criminals are owed lesser punishments than adults thanks not to their psychological, behavioral, or neural immaturity but, instead, because they are denied the vote. This conclusion is reached through the development of theories of the nature of criminal culpability, desert for wrongdoing, strength of legal reasons, and what it is to have a say over the law, theories that produce a bridge between limited participation in government and criminal culpability. The cornerstone of this discussion is the proposed theory of criminal culpability. To be criminally culpable is for one’s criminal act to manifest a failure to grant sufficient weight to the legal reasons to refrain. The stronger the legal reasons, then, the greater the criminal culpability. Those who lack a say over the law, it is argued, have weaker legal reasons to refrain from crime than those who have a say. They are therefore reduced in criminal culpability and deserve lesser punishment for their crimes. Children are owed leniency, then, because of the political meaning of age rather than because of its psychological meaning. This position has implications for criminal justice policy, with respect to, among other things, the interrogation of children suspected of crimes and the enfranchisement of adult felons.

Develops deontic logic against the background of a rigorous theory of agency in branching, or indeterministic, time. It is often assumed that the notion of what an agent ought to do can be identified with that of what it ought to be that the agent does. The book provides a framework in which this assumption can be formulated precisely and shown to be mistaken. In its place, it offers an alternative account of what agents ought to do that relies on an analogy between action in indeterministic time and choice under uncertainty, as it is studied in decision theory. This alternative account is then related to issues involving conditional obligation, group obligation, act utilitarianism, and rule utilitarianism.

Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of will and compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness of will and self-control are possible is of great practical significance. Taking the problem of weakness of will as her starting point, Jeanette Kennett builds an admirably comprehensive and integrated account of moral agency which gives a central place to the capacity for self-control. Her account of the exercise and limits of self-control vindicates the common-sense distinction between weakness of will and compulsion and so underwrites our ordinary allocations of moral responsibility. She addresses with clarity and insight a range of important topics in moral psychology, such as the nature of valuing and desiring, conceptions of virtue, moral conflict, and the varieties of recklessness (here characterised as culpable bad judgement) — and does so in terms which make their relations to each other and to the challenges of real life obvious. Agency and Responsibility concludes by testing the accounts developed of self-control, moral failure, and moral responsibility against the hard cases provided by acts of extreme evil.

Constitutivism is the view that we can derive substantive normative conclusions from an account of the nature of action. Agency and the Foundations of Ethics explains the constitutivist strategy and argues that the attractions of this view are considerable: constitutivism promises to resolve longstanding philosophical puzzles about the metaphysics, epistemology, and practical grip of normative claims. Yet constitutivism faces a challenge: it must employ a conception of action that is minimal enough to be independently plausible, but substantial enough to yield robust normative results. The current versions of constitutivism fall short on this score. However, we can generate a successful version by employing a more nuanced theory of action. Drawing on recent empirical work on human motivation as well as a model of agency indebted to the work of Nietzsche, the book argues that every episode of action aims jointly at agential activity and power. An agent manifests agential activity if she approves of her action, and further knowledge of the motives figuring in the etiology of her action would not undermine this approval. An agent aims at power if she aims at encountering and overcoming obstacles or resistances in the course of pursuing other, more determinate ends. These structural features of agency both constitute events as actions and generate standards of assessment for action. Using these results, the book shows that we can extract substantive normative claims from facts about the nature of agency.

We live in a world where CEOs give themselves million pound bonuses even as their companies go bankrupt and ordinary workers are laid off; where athletes make millions while teachers struggle to survive; a world where rewards are often unfairly meted out. This book examines one of today's most pressing moral issues: how to distribute rewards and public recognition without damaging the social fabric. How should we honor those whose behavior and achievement is essential to our overall success? Is it fair or right to lavish rewards on the superstar at the expense of the hardworking rank-and-file? How do we distinguish an impartial fairness from what is truly just? The author builds his answer to these questions around the ancient conflict between Ajax and Odysseus over the armor of the slain warrior Achilles. King Agamemnon arranges a speech contest to decide the issue. Ajax, the loyal workhorse, loses the contest, and the priceless armor, to Odysseus, the brilliantly deceptive strategist who will lead the Greeks to victory. Deeply insulted, Ajax goes on a rampage and commits suicide, and in his rage we see the resentment of every loyal worker who has been passed over in favor of those who are more gifted, or whose skills are more highly valued. How should we deal with the “Ajax dilemma?” The author argues that while we can never create a perfect system for distributing just rewards, we can recognize the essential role that wisdom, compassion, moderation, and respect must play if we are to restore the basic sense of justice on which all communities depend.

What we call moral progress can for the most part be seen as the history of the replacement of hierarchical visions in favor of equality. Yet, we currently use nonhuman animals as means to our ends – in fact, we treat them in ways that we would deem profoundly immoral were they human beings. Is such a position warranted? This book's aim is to show that it is not. I argue that, just like the past justifications of intra‐human discrimination, the justifications of discrimination against nonhumans are indefensible. I first discuss the problem of moral status in the context of rational, nonreligious ethics; then, after criticizing the philosophical sources of the present double standards, I challenge both the appeal to species membership and the appeal to mental complexity as defenses of humanism – the limiting of equal basic moral protection to human beings. I then turn to the task of redefining the moral community without inconsistency or prejudice. The argument I put forward is not a freestanding one, but rather is derived from the most universally accepted of contemporary ethical doctrines – human rights theory. What I claim is that, if we take the egalitarianism of such theory seriously, we cannot but extend the institutionalized protection of the basic interests in life, freedom, and welfare, to (most) nonhuman animals. I conclude that, at the social level, such a reform would require the constitutional abolition of the mere property status of nonhuman animals, and the prohibition of all the practices that are today made possible by such status.

It is commonly assumed that serious philosophical reflection on animals goes back only a few hundred years, to the Utilitarians or to the rise of Darwinism. This volume shows that, to the contrary, animals have been a subject of controversy and reflection in all periods of the history of philosophy. We trace the story from Greek and Indian antiquity through the Islamic and Latin medieval traditions, to Renaissance and early modern thought, ending with contemporary ideas about animals. Two main questions that arise throughout the volume are: What capacities can be ascribed to animals, and How should we treat them? Notoriously ungenerous attitudes toward animals, for instance in Aristotle and Descartes, are shown to have been more nuanced than often supposed, while remarkable defenses of benevolence toward animals are unearthed in late antiquity, India, the Islamic world, and Kant. The book also includes philosophical exploration of such topics as cannibalism, animal instinct, and the scientific testing of animals. A series of interdisciplinary reflections sheds further light on human attitudes toward animals, looking at their depiction in visual artworks from China, Africa, and Europe, as well as the rich tradition of animal fables beginning with Aesop.

Aristotle is the father of virtue ethics, and virtue ethics is hot. Yet Aristotle’s accounts of the individual virtues remain opaque, for most contemporary commentators of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics have focused upon other matters. By contrast, this book takes Aristotle’s detailed description of the individual virtues to be central to his ethical theory. Working through the Nicomachean Ethics virtue by virtue, explaining and generally defending Aristotle’s claims, the book brings each of Aristotle’s virtues alive. A new Aristotle emerges, an Aristotle fascinated by the details of the individual virtues. Justice and friendship hold special places in Aristotle’s virtue theory. Many contemporary discussions place justice and friendship at opposite, perhaps even conflicting poles of a spectrum. Justice seems to be very much a public, impartial, and dispassionate thing, while friendship is paradigmatically private, partial, and passionate. Yet in Aristotle’s view they are actually symbiotic. Justice is defined in terms of friendship, and good friendship is defined in terms of justice. Virtue ethics is not only about being good; it is also about becoming good. The book reconstructs Aristotle’s account of moral development. Certain character types serve as stages of moral development. Certain catalysts and mechanisms lead from one stage to the next. Explaining why some people cannot make moral progress specifies the preconditions of moral development. Finally, the book describes Aristotle’s quest to determine the ultimate goal of moral development: happiness.

Aristotle holds that we desire things because they appear good to us – a view still dominant in philosophy now. But what is it for something to appear good? This book argues that Aristotle understands appearances of goodness as literal quasi-perceptual appearances, operations of a psychological capacity responsible for phenomena like dreams and visualization: phantasia (‘imagination’). It then uses Aristotle’s detailed accounts of phantasia and its relation to perception and thought to gain new insight into some of the most debated areas of his philosophy: his accounts of emotions, akrasia, ethical habituation, character, deliberation, and desire. The result is a new – and controversial – interpretation of Aristotle’s moral psychology: one which greatly restricts the role of reason in ethical matters, and gives an absolutely central role to pleasure.