by Roger Crisp
This may be an odd thing for a moral philosopher to say, but I think that morality is not fundamentally important. In fact, I think it would be helpful if we stopped using, or at least drastically cut the use of, moral language in philosophical ethics, unless we are engaged in some non-normative enterprise, such as describing a particular morality, that of common sense, for example, or of some particular group or individual. Read More »Demoralizing Ethics
Alberto Giubilini, University of Oxford
Udo Schuklenk, Queen’s University
Francesca Minerva, University of Milan
Julian Savulescu, National University of Singapore and University of Oxford
(reposted from the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog )
The reversal of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling by the US Supreme Court in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed the Constitutional protection of women’s right to access abortion services in the US. This decision has resulted in renewed interest in the morality of conscientious commitment by health care professionals to provide abortion care.
Typically, ethical debates on conscience in health care revolve around the morality of doctors refusing to provide professional services on idiosyncratic personal conscience claims. Here the issue is different in that conscientious doctors, motivated by a commitment to professional values, might want to provide services that are arguably in their patients’ best interest, but that are illegal.
By Neil Levy
Authenticity is a widely espoused ideal; often under that name but also under other labels. People take pride in being individuals, set apart from the crowd, in not following the herd, in thinking for themselves. To be accused of conformism stings. Read More »Is Authenticity Coherent?
Written by Muriel Leuenberger
A modified version of this post is forthcoming in Think edited by Stephen Law.
Authenticity is a popular ideal. Particularly in the western world, authenticity has developed into a prevailing ideal since its rise in Modernity.[1] The search for authenticity is a common trope in film and literature, countless self-help books advise us how to become more authentic, and marketing and politics have long discovered authenticity as a useful label to sell goods and candidates.
Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are recent examples of politicians who presented themselves and were perceived by many as particularly authentic. At the same time, both are known for not taking the truth too seriously, if not for being notorious liars. This seems like a contradiction. Can you be an authentic liar? Figures like Johnson and Trump can prompt us to reconsider and clarify what we mean by a concept like authenticity as well as how we should relate to ourselves and express ourselves to others.
Written by Tony Coady , Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University, Honorary Fellow in the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in Oxford.
There are a plethora of terms in widespread political and social use that often obfuscate more than they elucidate. One of those is “terrorism” and its derivatives such as “terrorist”, but I have had my say about this elsewhere, most recently in my 2021 book The Meaning of Terrorism and will simply commend it to readers. Here I want to address instead the cluster of expressions around “extremist/extremism”, “radical/radicalism” and best of all “the sensible centre”.
Typical quotes about extremism show the standardly condemnatory nature of its widespread current usage. Examples are almost endless, but here are two examples from very different well-known people: “A people inspired by democracy, human rights and economic opportunity will turn their back decisively against extremism.” – Benazir Bhutto;[1] “Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.” – Milan Kundera [2] Read More »Guest Cross Post: Extremism And The Sensible Centre
By Charles Foster
Image: The Great Sphinx and Pyramids of Gizeh (Giza), 17 July 1839, by David Roberts: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Words are powerful. When a word is outlawed, the prohibition tends to chill or shut down debate in a wide area surrounding that word. That tendency is much discussed, but it’s not my concern here. It’s one thing declaring a no-go area: it’s another when the mere use or non-use of a word is so potent that it makes it impossible to see something that’s utterly obvious.
There has recently been an excellent and troubling example. Some museums have started to change their labels. They consider that the use of the word ‘mummy’ demeans the dead, and are using instead the adjective ‘mummified’: thus, for instance ‘mummified person’ or ‘mummified remains’. Fair enough. I approve. Too little consideration is given to the enormous constituency of the dead. But using an adjective instead of a noun doesn’t do much moral work.
Consider this: The Great North Museum: Hancock, has on display a mummified Egyptian woman, known as Irtyru. Visitor research showed that many visitors did not recognise her as a real person. The museum was rightly troubled by that. It sought to display her ‘more sensitively’. It’s not clear from the report what that means, but it seems to include a change in the labelling. She will no longer be a ‘mummy’, but will be ‘mummified’. She is a ‘mummified person‘: She’ll still remain in a case, gawped at by mawkish visitors.Read More »Mummification and Moral Blindness
Provided my eyes are not withdrawn from that spectacle, of which they never tire; provided I may look upon the sun and the moon and gaze at the other planets; provided I may trace their risings and settings, their periods and the causes of their travelling faster or slower; provided I may behold all the stars that shine at night – some fixed, others not travelling far afield but circling within the same area; some suddenly shooting forth, and others dazzling the eye with scattered fire, as if they are falling, or gliding past with a long trail of blazing light; provided I can commune with these and, so far as humans may, associate with the divine, and provided I can keep my mind always directed upwards, striving for a vision of kindred things – what does it matter what ground I stand on?
Seneca, Consolation to Helvia, translated by C. D. N. Costa
Read More »Stoicism as a Foundational Component of Ethics and Existentialism
Guest post by Morgan Carpenter, bioethicist; co-founder and executive director, Intersex Human Rights Australia; Magda Rakita co-founder and executive director, Fundacja Interakcja (Poland), and co-chair, OII Europe; and Bo Laurent, founder, Intersex Society of North America
We love Greta Thunberg. But we were hurt and disappointed that she chose “small dick energy” as a pejorative in her recent Twitter exchange with the self-proclaimed “misogynist influencer” Andrew Tate. This particular choice of words was not, in our view, the self-evidently praiseworthy retort that many progressive commentators took it to be.
Don’t get us wrong. Rhetorically taking someone down a notch is undoubtedly sometimes appropriate. Especially if they have an inflated ego, an objectionable moral character, and regularly disrespect others, as appears to be the case with Tate.
We aren’t against mocking misogynists.
But we are against doing so by alluding to, or making disparaging comments about, body parts or mental attributes possessed by marginalized people — people who suffer unjust stigma due to those very traits.Read More »Guest Post: Body Shaming is Unacceptable, Even if Directed at Vile People. An Intersex Critique of “Small Dick Energy”
By Ben Davies
Decisions about how to allocate healthcare resources can be divided, somewhat crudely, into macro– and micro-level choices. Roughly speaking, macro-choices are policy choices, often made outside any clinical setting, e.g., by government. For instance, it is a macro-level choice which treatments to fund to what degree, and how large the health budget should be as a whole. Micro-choices are the choices people make with a particular budget, generally in clinical settings. For instance, it is a micro-level choice which patients to admit to intensive care, and how to prioritise individuals for organ transplants.
Written by Joanna Demaree-Cotton
This last Michaelmas term marked the inaugural series of lab meetings for the Uehiro Centre’s BioXPhi lab (https://moralpsychlab.web.ox.ac.uk). Co-directed by myself and Dr. Brian Earp, the lab brings philosophers together with psychologists to conduct experimental studies in moral psychology and bioethics. Specifically, we investigate the contributing factors and psychological processes that shape:
… with an eye to contributing to substantive normative and philosophical debates in ethics.
(What’s a “lab meeting”, you ask? Our lab meetings are where members of our lab come together with colleagues and collaborators to present and get feedback on ongoing research relevant to the experimental study of ethics.)
Just because people reason in a certain way about morality, that doesn’t mean that this is how we should reason about morality. People get things wrong all the time. Concepts can be incoherent. Reasoning can be flawed. Judgments can be biased and self-serving. Moral motivation can be weak. Moreover, people can often be ignorant or mistaken about many of the morally relevant details and nuances that apply to some particular situation, resulting in moral judgments that are simply ill-informed.
Yet, investigating ordinary moral psychology is invaluable for ethics and moral philosophy for a number of reasons (Earp, Demaree-Cotton et al., 2020; Earp, Lewis et al., 2021).
Read More »Moral Psychology at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
