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Embarrassed by the apparent rigorism Kant expresses so bluntly in ‘On a Supposed Right to Lie,’ numerous contemporary Kantians have attempted to show that Kant’s ethics can justify lying in specific circumstances, in particular, when lying to a murderer is necessary in order to prevent her from killing another innocent person. My aim is to improve upon these efforts and show that lying to prevent the death of another innocent person could be required in Kantian terms. I argue (1) that our perfect Kantian duty of self-preservation can require our lying to save our own lives when threatened with unjust aggression, and (2) that Kant's understanding of moral duty was that duties are symmetrical, such that if one has a duty to perform a given action on one’s own behalf or to protect one’s own rational nature, then one also has a duty to perform similar acts on other’s behalf or to protect their rational nature. Thus, that the individual protected against aggression by means of deception is not oneself should be of no consequence from a Kantian perspective. Lying to the murderer is thus an extension of the Kantian requirement of self-defense.
Philosophers have harbored doubts about the possibility of moral expertise since Plato. I argue that irrespective of whether moral experts exist, identifying who those experts are is insurmountable because of the credentials problem: Moral experts have no need to seek out others' moral expertise, but moral non-experts lack sufficient knowledge to determine whether the advice provided by a putative moral expert in response to complex moral situations is correct and hence whether an individual is a bone fide expert. Traditional accounts of moral expertise require that moral experts give reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification, an account which, I argue, is too lean in allowing for the possibility of a moral expert who is motivationally indifferent to her own moral judgments and advice. Yet even if the proposition that a moral expert is an individual who provides reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification and is necessarily motivated by that advice exhausts the necessary and sufficient conditions for moral expertise, this proposition cannot function as an applicable criterion for non-experts to use in appraise would-be experts' claims to expertise. The credentials problem thus remains unanswered.
Standard philosophical accounts of suicide distinguish accidental deaths from suicide by emphasizing that death is the specific intended aim of suicide. A crucial third class of self-produced deaths, deaths in which agents act neither intentionally nor accidentally to produce their own deaths, is left out by such accounts. Based on findings from psychiatry, many life-threatening behaviors, if and when they lead to an agent’s death, are neither intentional nor accidental, with many apparently suicidal behaviors being of this sort, especially the so-called “cries for help.” This category may be usefully analogized to the existing legal category of manslaughter.
Students come to the study of philosophy with a wide array of beliefs and attitudes concerning the nature and value of learning, how knowledge is acquired, etc. These learning orientations in turn shape students’ academic efforts and habits. A significant body of research indicates that students with intentional learning orientations not only learn more deeply, but retain more of what they learn and are better able to apply and extend their knowledge. This article describes various learning orientations and identifies strategies that exemplify and hence encourage the development of this learning orientation.
Daniel Kelly and Stephen Stich aim to cast doubt on the moral/conventional (M/C) model of the cognitive architecture of morality by offering counterexamples that are compatible with their favored model of said architecture, the Sripada and Stich (S&S) model, but allegedly incompatible with the predictions made by the M/C model. Roughly, the essential difference between the M/C model and the S&S model is that each postulates a psychological mechanism for the acquisition of moral norms, but the M/C model also maintains that there is an additional mechanism for the acquisition of conventional, non-moral norms. These conventional norms are distinct from moral norms not only in terms of the content of the stimuli that cause them, but have distinctive motivational, attitudinal, developmental, and sociocultural features as well.
Both models make strong nativist claims. For the purposes of this discussion, we will set aside the issue of nativism; instead, we intend to focus primarily on the fairly narrow dispute between the proponents of these two models. Hence, we will first argue that the M/C model, or some suitably revised version thereof, can accommodate these counterexamples. In so doing, we will suggest that Kelly and Stich too readily adopt the M/C model’s somewhat impoverished conception of moral judgment and the stimuli that can give rise to such judgments. We will then propose that proponents of the S&S model face a dilemma concerning moral versus non-moral norms, a dilemma resulting from the S&S model characterizing the environmental cues that generate norms functionally rather than in terms of the cues’ content.
The metatethical position known as motive internalism (MI) holds that moral beliefs are necessarily motivating. Adina Roskies (2003) has recently argued against MI by citing patients with injuries to the ventromedial (VM) cortex as counterexamples to MI. Roskies claims that not only do these patients not act in accordance with their professed moral beliefs, they exhibit no physiological or affective evidence of being motivated by these beliefs. I argue that Roskies’ attempt to falsify MI is unpersuasive because the evidence used to attribute the relevant moral beliefs to VM patients is insufficient: Contra Roskies, that VM patients are proficient moral reasoners does not establish the presence of these moral beliefs. In addition, the linguistic evidence Roskies cites (a) is vulnerable to methodological worries about its reliability or authenticity, (b) does not override counterevidence derived from the patients’ nonlinguistic behavior, and (c) is undermined by VM patients’ inability to correctly attribute moral beliefs to others. I conclude with a proposal about how MI should be interpreted, given that it is not falsified by empirical evidence of the sort put forth by Roskies.
Numerous studies indicate that racial minorities are both more likely to be executed for murder and that those who murder them are less likely to be executed than if they murder whites. Death penalty opponents have long attempted to use these studies to argue for a moratorium on capital punishment. Whatever the merits of such arguments, they overlook the fact that such discrimination alters the costs of murder; racial discrimination imposes higher costs on minorities for murdering through tougher sentences, and it imposes lower costs on whites for murdering minorities by dispensing weaker sentences. These cost differentials constitute an injustice not simply to actual minority defendants in capital cases, nor simply to the actual minority victims of murder, but to all members of minority communities. I here offer two arguments for a moratorium on capital punishment: The first draws upon evidence of racial discrimination against minority defendants in capital cases, and claims that such discrimination modifies the costs of murder in such a way that minority individuals do not enjoy equal status under the law. The second draws upon the evidence regarding racial discrimination in relation to the race of victims, and claims that such discrimination modifies the costs of murder in such a way that minority individuals do not enjoy the equal protection of the law. Thus, by not assigning equal costs to murder, the American criminal justice system fails to provide racial minorities the equality under the law and discounts the value of their lives and liberties. A moratorium is the least unjust response to such a social injustice. I also reply to the criticism that a moratorium prevents us from executing deserving murderers.
After establishing that the requirement that those criminals who stand for execution be mentally competent can be given a recognizably retributivist rationale, I suggest that not only it is difficult to show that executing the incompetent is more cruel than executing the competent, but that opposing the execution of the incompetent fits ill with the recent abolitionist emphasis on procedural concerns. I then propose two avenues by which abolitionists could incorporate such opposition into their efforts.