Shopping cartJournal of Moral Philosophy
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Notes on Contributors
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Editorial
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Secession as a Human Right
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If people are to have rights to themselves, then they must have the right to affiliate in sovereign entities composed of people who mutually agree to affiliate with one another. This requires that any individual or group has a right to secede from any sovereign entity. The article develops the idea that a right of secession is natural when rights to territory and other gifts of nature are regarded as belonging equally to all persons, and all persons have rights to themselves. The article also argues that a world that recognizes a right of secession is feasible.
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Robust Alternatives and Responsibility
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The Principle of Robust Alternatives (PRA) states that an agent is responsible for doing something only if he/she could have performed a ‘robust’ alternative: another action having a different moral or practical value. Defenders of PRA maintain that it is not refuted by a ‘Frankfurt case’, given that its agent can be seen as having had such an alternativeprovided that we properly qualify that for which she is responsible. I argue here against two versions of this defense. First, I show that those who maintain that a ‘Frankfurt agent’ is responsible forvoluntarily performing his/her action must attach moral significance to his/her luck. I proceed to discuss Carl Ginet's strategy of temporally qualifying ascriptions of responsibility, arguing that his counterexample to the principle that ‘If an agent is responsible for doing A @ t, then he/she is responsible for doing Asimpliciter’ is disanalogous to a Frankfurt case.
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A Change of Heart: Moral Emotions, Transformation, and Moral Virtue
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Inspired in part by a renewed attention to Aristotle's moral philosophy, philosophers have acknowledged the important role of the emotions in morality. Nonetheless, precisely how emotions matter to morality has remained contentious. Aristotelians claim that moral virtue is constituted by correct action and correct emotion. But Kantians seem to require solely that agents do morally correct actions out of respect for the moral law. There is a crucial philosophical disagreement between the Aristotelian and Kantian moral outlooks: namely, is feeling the correct emotions necessary to virtue or is it an optional extra, which is permitted but not required. I argue that there are good reasons for siding with the Aristotelians: virtuous agents must experience the emotions appropriate to their situations. Moral virtue requires a change of heart.
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‘Animals Do It Too!’: The Franklin Defence of Meat-Eating
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The Franklin defence of meat-eating is the claim that meat-eating is morally permissible because animals eat other animals. I examine five versions of this defence. I argue that two versions, claiming respectively that might is right and that animals deserve to be eaten, can easily be dismissed, and that the version based on a claim that God intends us to eat animals is theologically controversial. I go on to show that the two other versions—one claiming that meat-eating is natural, the other that it is inconsistent to condemn human meat-eating without also trying to prevent animals eating other animals—present some difficulties for the moral vegetarian.
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Rorty, the First Amendment and Antirealism: Is Reliance upon Truth Viewpoint-Based Speech Regulation?
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In this article I investigate the implications of antirealism, as characterized by Richard Rorty, for First Amendment jurisprudence under the United States Constitution. It is hoped that the implications, while played out in the context of a specific tradition, will have more universal application. In Section 1, Rorty’s ‘pragmatic antirealism’ is briefly outlined. In Section 2, some effects of the elimination of the concept of truth for First Amendment jurisprudence are investigated. Section 3 argues for the conclusion that given the antirealist stance, the Supreme Court’s usage of the true/ false fact distinction is actually an uncritical allowance of viewpoint-based discrimination into speech protection that has potentially far-reaching and restrictive results for important speech. Finally, in Section 4 Rorty’s antirealism is combined with various traditional models of First Amendment analysis to see how it would function. The conclusions aimed at are twofold. First, that Rortian antirealism is compatible with the traditional models underlying First Amendment theory. Second, that a realization that truth is the result of, in Rorty’s words, ‘intra-mundane’ discourse leads to an argument for different and potentially stronger and more farreaching protections to speech.
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Review Article: Forgiveness and the Claims of Retribution
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Book Review: The Philosopher’s Dog
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Book Review: Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology
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Book Review: Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities
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Book Review: Deontic Morality and Control
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Book Review: What Makes Us Think?: A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain
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Book Review: Ethical Formation: Practical Reason and the Socially Constituted Subject
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Books Received
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