Philosophy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.