Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Mihailis Diamantis, ‘The Moral Irrelevance of Constitutive Luck’
ABSTRACT One’s constitution – whether one is generous or miserly, temperate or intemperate, kind or mean, etc – is beyond one’s control in significant respects. Yet one’s constitution affects how one acts. And how one acts affects one’s moral standing. The counterintuitive inference – the so-called problem of constitutive moral luck – is that one’s […]
Cass Sunstein, ‘Manipulation As Theft’
ABSTRACT Should there be a right not to be manipulated? What kind of right? On Kantian grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion are moral wrongs, and for similar reasons; they deprive people of agency, insult their dignity, and fail to respect personal autonomy. On welfarist grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion share a different characteristic; […]
‘Doing vs Allowing Harm’
“Is there a moral difference between doing harm and merely allowing harm? If not, there should be no moral objection to active euthanasia in circumstances where passive euthanasia is permissible; and there should be no objection to bombing innocent civilians where doing so will minimize the overall number of deaths in war. There should, however, […]
Dari‐Mattiacci and Fabbri, ‘How Institutions Shape Morality’
ABSTRACT We present the results of a randomized control trial on the effect of the introduction of formalized property rights on individuals’ moral judgments and, in particular, on utilitarian morality. We show that institutions shape morality: being exposed to private property institutions makes individuals more utilitarian when confronted with moral dilemmas. Our results shed light […]
Duus-Otterström and Page, ‘Why victims of unjust harm should take priority over victims of bad luck’
ABSTRACT It is sometimes suggested that victims of unjust harm should take priority over victims of other forms of harm. We explore four arguments for this view: that victims of unjust harm experience greater suffering; that prioritizing victims of unjust harm would help prevent unjust harm in the future; that it is good for perpetrators […]
Floridi and Sanders, ‘On the Morality of Artificial Agents’
ABSTRACT Artificial agents (AAs), particularly but not only those in Cyberspace, extend the class of entities that can be involved in moral situations. For they can be conceived of as moral patients (as entities that can be acted upon for good or evil) and also as moral agents (as entities that can perform actions, again […]
Sigurd Lindstad, ‘Benefiting from Wrongdoing and Moral Protest’
ABSTRACT Some normative theorists believe that there is a principled moral reason not to retain benefits realized by injustice or wrongdoing. However, critics have argued that this idea is implausible. One purported problem is that the idea lacks an obvious rationale and that attempts to provide one have been unconvincing. This paper articulates and defends […]
Luciano Floridi, ‘Distributed Morality in an Information Society’
ABSTRACT The phenomenon of distributed knowledge is well-known in epistemic logic. In this paper, a similar phenomenon in ethics, somewhat neglected so far, is investigated, namely distributed morality. The article explains the nature of distributed morality, as a feature of moral agency, and explores the implications of its occurrence in advanced information societies. In the […]
Luciano Floridi, ‘Faultless Responsibility: On the Nature and Allocation of Moral Responsibility for Distributed Moral Actions’
ABSTRACT The concept of distributed moral responsibility (DMR) has a long history. When it is understood as being entirely reducible to the sum of (some) human, individual and already morally loaded actions, then the allocation of DMR, and hence of praise and reward or blame and punishment, may be pragmatically difficult, but not conceptually problematic. […]
‘Legal Theory Lexicon: Virtue Ethics’
“The Legal Theory Lexicon already includes posts on Deontology and Utilitarianism – representing two important families of ethical theory. This week, the Lexicon provides an introduction to virtue ethics. As always, the Lexicon provides a quick and dirty summary with an eye to law students (especially first-year law students) with an interest in legal theory. […]