Suppose a religious community regards a site – with, say, a stone circle – as sacred. It has for centuries been used as a place of prayer and contemplation. The land is owned by the state and they want to sell it off to build apartment blocks. You might think that the deep attachment the… Read More »Cross Post: Sacred Places and Traditions with Lea Ypi
Simon Keller, Victoria University of Wellington
Read more in the current issue of the Journal of Practical Ethics
There is good reason to believe that people living comfortable lives in affluent countries should do more to help impoverished people in other parts of the world. Billions of people lack the nutrition, medicines, shelter, and safety that the better-off take for granted, and there exist organizations that do a pretty good job of taking money donated by the relatively rich and directing it towards those who need it most. If I can address myself to others who count among the global rich: we could do more to help the global poor, but we don’t.
It is not just that we do not do much to help the global poor; it is also that our patterns of helping do not respond to the most morally significant aspects of global poverty. We will give more in response to a disaster, like a hurricane or a tsunami, than to ongoing systemic poverty. We are more likely to give when confronted with a photograph of a starving family, or when we take ourselves to be sponsoring a particular child, than when faced with truths about how many people are suffering and how much they need our help.
In a recent article in Journal of Practical Ethics, I try to say something about what explains our patterns of helping behavior, as directed towards the global poor. Part of the explanation, of course, is our selfishness, laziness, and willful ignorance; and part of it is the power of personal stories and photographs to engage our emotions while statistics and geopolitical truths leave us numb. But a further part of the explanation, I think, is that while we know we have good reasons to help the global poor, we do not know what those reasons are.
Read More »Guest Post: Why Don’t We Do More to Help the Global Poor?
Journal of Practical Ethics. Volume 3, Issue 1. June 2015 Cost Effectiveness Analysis and Fairness F. M. Kamm Journal of Practical Ethics, 3(1): 1-14 Read Online | Download PDF The Elements of Well-Being Brad Hooker Journal of Practical Ethics, 3(1): 15-35 Read Online | Download PDF | Podcast Motives to Assist and Reasons to Assist: the… Read More »Announcement: Journal of Practical Ethics Volume 3, Issue 1
Guest Post by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
Professor Lippert-Rasmussen’s paper on indirect discrimination is part of the latest issue of the JPE
December 3, 2014, the US Supreme Court held its first hearing on the case of a former UPS driver, Peggy Young (Young v UPS, 12-1226): “In 2006, UPS forced Young to take an unpaid leave after refusing to accommodate her doctor’s order that she not lift heavy packages during her pregnancy… Young lost not just her income, but her health insurance as well” (http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-ra-supreme-court-pregnancy-discrimination-20141203-column.html#page=1). While UPS requires delivery drivers “to be able to lift packages as heavy as 70 pounds. Young said she rarely handled anything over 20 pounds and dealt almost exclusively with letters that sat on the passenger seat of her van”. Interestingly, however, at the time UPS also had a policy of providing temporary light-duty work to, but also only to, ”employees who had on-the-job injuries, were disabled under federal law or lost their federal driver certification” (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/01/ups-employee-pregnancy-discrimination-supreme-court). Before taking her case to the Supreme Court, lower courts had dismissed Young’s lawsuit twice.Read More »Pregnancy discrimination: Indirect discrimination against women? (JPE 2(2))
by Dominic Wilkinson, Managing editor JPE, @Neonatalethics The latest issue of the journal is out this week: Valerie Tiberius examines the relevance of different theories of wellbeing for the important practical task of providing life-advice to friends. She has posted a short blog on the topic. You can also listen to a great podcast interview… Read More »Discriminating happiness. Journal of Practical Ethics 2(2) is out!
Guest post: Valerie Tiberius, University of Minnesota. Read the related paper: How Theories of Well-being Can Help Us Help in the latest issue of the Journal of Practical Ethics.
I have a friend I’ll call Liam who is ruining his life. Liam is marrying the wrong man: someone controlling and unappreciative who seems to all the world to be making Liam unhappy and stressed. What should I do for Liam? I think it’s very unclear. If you have ever wanted to help a friend or a family member who is in trouble, you know that helping isn’t as easy as it sounds. There are lots of ways to go wrong – your “help” may be perceived as insulting, condescending, paternalistic, insensitive, or just plain unhelpful.
Can philosophy help? You might think that theories of well-being would be useful here. Such theories aim to tell us what makes something good for a person. So, if we’re aiming to help someone – to do something for their sake, something that’s good for them – a theory of what makes something good for a person is a good place to start. Unfortunately, theories of well-being aren’t that helpful when it comes to helping. There are two main types of wellbeing theory. Theories that emphasize the psychological dimensions of well-being would tell us to promote desire satisfaction, life satisfaction, or pleasure. But sometimes the reason that a person’s life isn’t going well is that she wants (or is satisfied by or gets pleasure from) the wrong things. The other type of theory emphasizes the importance of achieving objective goods (e.g., friendship, love, knowledge), things that make a like go well whether or not they are desired. However, if we are guided in our attempts to help by objective values that are not connected to a person’s desires, then we risk giving advice that is thought of as condescending, insensitive or the like.
So claims renowned Oxford philosopher and feminist Janet Radcliffe Richards. Professor Radcliffe Richards is the author of The Sceptical Feminist, Human Nature After Darwin and Careless Thought Costs Lives: the ethics of transplants. She was also listed recently as one of the world’s 50 most important thinkers by Prospect magazine. Writing in the Journal of… Read More »JPE 2(1) – The pursuit of sex equality keeps going off the rails
Allegations that Nigella Lawson, professional domestic goddess, was an inveterate drug taker caused a media, twitter, blog and water-cooler storm. Even after the initial shock subsided, column inches have been devoted to her relationship with her ex-husband, her future career prospects, the running of her household and the other fall out of a criminal trial… Read More »Is Two -Thirds of What We Say Immoral?
