Ethical Theory and Moral Practice最新文献

The United States carceral system, as currently designed and implemented, is widely considered to be an immoral and inhumane system of criminal punishment. There are a number of pressing issues related to this topic, but in this essay, I will focus upon the problem of prison violence. Inadequate supervision has resulted in unsafe prison conditions where inmates are regularly threatened with rape, assault, and other forms of physical violence. Such callous disregard and exposure to unreasonable risk constitutes a severe violation of the rights of prisoners by the state. While there have been numerous legal, political, and activist efforts to draw attention to this issue—with the goal of reforming and making prisons safer—my goal is different. I argue that inmates who are victims of prison violence should have their sentences automatically reduced. Two distinct arguments are advanced in support of this claim. First, I argue that acts of prison violence are a sort of state-mediated harm which can thus be appropriately described as punishment-constituting. Second, and more straightforwardly, I argue that the compensation owed to prisoners who are victims of prison violence may naturally take the form of a reduced sentence.

Why do relationships of friendship and love support partiality, but not relationships of hatred or commitments of racism? Where does partiality end and why? I take the intuitive starting point that important cases of partiality are meaningful. I develop a view whereby meaning is understood in terms of transcending self-limitations in order to connect with things of external value. I then show how this view can be used to distinguish central cases of legitimate partiality from cases of illegitimate partiality and how it puts pressure on the traditional way of thinking about partiality.

Retirement is often viewed as a reward for a working life. While many have reason to want a work-free retirement, not everyone does. Should working retirees have to give up their retirement pension and, consequently, their status as retirees? The answer, I argue, boils down to whether we conceive of retirement as free time (need-free) or as leisure (work-free). In this article, I put forward a liberal case in favour of free time, despite whether our liberalism leans towards perfectionism or neutralism, with social primary goods being a case in point. Applying this case for free time to retirement yields two significant policy implications. First, it demands “free synchronic combination” – that retirees may use their retirement pensions however they see fit, including to work. Second, it also yields “free diachronic combination” – that, within limits, individuals have discretionary control over how to combine retirement and work across time – thus challenging the idea that retirement should be available only in old age and not earlier in life. So far, the literature on free time focused only on narrow temporal units, such as hours and days, but there is much to gain by extending the concept into retirement.

Thaddeus Metz, in his book “A Relational Moral Theory” compares the relational African view to Western theories of right action with a focus on Kant (respective contemporary Kantianism) and Utilitarianism. In focussing on the opposition between a relational and an individualistic view, Metz questions the interpretation of basic normative assumptions that are guiding central Western moral and political institutions. He particularly focusses on Kantian and Utilitarian approaches to which he ascribes substantive moral assumptions in terms of utility respective autonomy. In this paper, we reconstruct Metz’s position on the opposition between a relational and an individualistic view on ethics. We then investigate whether his relational conceptualisation is a convincing reconstruction of African views and question his take on Western positions, focussing in particular on views around individual rights and communality as presented in the Kantian tradition. We highlight the value of ubuntu in intercultural discourse to foster ethical and moral reasoning in a holistic way and conclude that any reflection on ethics necessarily involves an understanding of our common human nature, which is at the core of philosophical anthropology.

Abstract

This paper argues that democratic collectives have reason to increase the voting power of their younger members. It first presents an intuitive case for weighted voting in general, before drawing support from a prominent principle of democratic inclusion – the all-affected principle. On a plausible understanding of that principle, a decision may affect people to varying degrees, and this variation should be reflected in the strength of their say. The paper then argues that exposure time to a decision’s effects is typically a good proxy for tracking such variation, such that collectives have reason to gradually reduce their members’ voting power as they grow older. This holds, for example, in the ordinary parliamentary elections in representative democracies. It is then argued that we may build a similar case for age-weighting on a plausible version of the all-affected principle’s main rival, the all-subjected principle. The paper ends by addressing various objections. It argues that none of them undermine the case for age-weighting, and that some might even support age-weighting over its non-weighted (‘one person, one vote’) alternative.

Abstract

The debate around epistemic partiality in friendship presents us with several tough philosophical puzzles. One of these has been articulated in two objections to the view that friendship can require epistemic partiality on the grounds it is incompatible with the nature of friendship. The first, owed to Crawford, argues that you should not treat your friends with epistemic partiality because your beliefs about your friends should be responsive to the facts about them, and epistemic partiality is incompatible with this demand. The second, owed to Mason, draws on a Murdochian account of love to argue that loving relationships—such as friendship—are ‘epistemically rich states’, which means that they are constituted by a drive towards ever greater and more intimate knowledge of our loved ones. In this paper, I shall argue that epistemic partiality may indeed limit what we know about our friends, but not in ways that diminish the quality of our love for them, and certainly not in ways that block us from being friends with them.