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2
Rayner, Alice. Comic persuasion: Moral structure in British comedy from Shakespeare to Stoppard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
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5
Andersen, Jens Kr. Handling og moral: En strukturel studie i elleve Holberg-komedier. [Copenhagen]: Akademisk forlag, 1992.
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6
Paracelsus. Los caracteres morales. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1985.
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Montero, Reinaldo. Los equívocos morales: Comedia del cerco de Santiago : con tres ensayos críticos ... La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1998.
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8
Pierre, Nicole. Traité de la comédie: Et autres pièces d'un procès du théâtre. Paris: H. Champion, 1998.
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9
The bourgeois virtues: Ethics for an age of commerce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
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10
Mancuso, Aldo, ed. Mobbing e modernità: la violenza morale sul lavoro osservata da diverse angolature per coglierne il senso, definirne i confini. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2004. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/88-8453-243-4.
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Mobbing, perché se ne parla tanto? Le manifestazioni di violenza del lavoro non misurano soltanto manutenzione e cura del rischio lavorativo. Indicano lo stato dei rapporti tra modo di produrre, senso del lavoro, legami sociali, diritti? Il lavoro della globalizzazione, segnato da insopprimibile violenza, sembra denotare l'inconciliabilità tra le forme che assume nel mercato universale e le regole politiche della modernità: infortuni e malattie da lavoro (come le catastrofi ambientali, le guerre) opacizzano il rapporto tra economia e politica nelle democrazie e nei regimi totalitari? Basta l'omaggio di un'antropologia semplificata per lenire il dubbio che si insinua sulla qualità sociale dei luoghi del nostro mondo?
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Conscience on stage: The Comedia as casuistry in early modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
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12
Glasgow, Ellen. They Stooped to Folly: A Comedy of Morals. Kessinger Publishing, 2005.
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14
Hui, Isaac. Introduction: Jonson and Comedy. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423472.003.0001.
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The introductory chapter gives a preliminary reading of Act 1 scene 2 of Volpone, suggesting how it was often neglected by many early modern scholars. The phenomenon reflects the traditional tendency of reading the dramatist from a moral perspective. It discusses the concept of bastardy through plays such as The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing. This chapter suggests that modern literary and cultural theories can help us understand Jonson in a different light.
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Jeske, Diane. Moral Evasion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190685379.003.0006.
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The case studies of Albert Speer, Charles Colcock Jones, and Franz Stangl illustrate ways in which people can engage in moral evasion. Moral evasion comes in many forms, such as self-deception, wishful thinking, and rationalization. Stangl refused to engage with the full horror of what he was doing by refusing to use his imagination in thinking about hypothetical scenarios, using a highly rule-bound conception of duty, and compartmentalizing his thought. All of Stangl’s strategies are mirrored in those we often use in thinking about our treatment of nonhuman animals. Speer engaged in belief avoidance: by focusing on the demands of his job, he was able to avoid knowing what he could easily have come to know. Jones engaged in wishful compromise: he convinced himself that by becoming a missionary to the slaves he was taking the best route that he could within the confines of an evil institution.
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Radcliffe, Elizabeth S. Morality and Motivation. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199573295.003.0006.
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Hume’s argument against moral rationalism says that because morals produce or prevent actions, and reason alone does not, morals cannot be derived from reason alone. The premise concerning morality is perplexing. This premise is best understood as claiming that the moral sentiments by which we judge virtue and vice produce motives when we find ourselves deficient of a morally-approved trait, or when we anticipate the pleasure of self-approval for exhibiting virtues. These motives are produced by self-approbation and self-disapprobation in the same way that motives are typically generated in Hume’s theory: a person retains an idea of a source of pleasure or displeasure and reacts to it with an impression of reflection. Hume’s sentimentalism is a way of explaining how normative concepts originate in impressions rather than in ideas; although internalist, it is consistent with cognitivism, since motives come from the discernment of morality, not from the ideas themselves.
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Roux, Alphonse A. Louise Necker ... Or, The Authoress Of Corinne: An Historical And Moral Comedy. Nabu Press, 2011.
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Montero, Reinaldo. Los Equivocos Morales: Comedia Del Cerco De Santiago. Letras Cubanos Editorial, 1998.
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19
James, Henry. Daisy Miller and An International Episode. Edited by Adrian Poole. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/owc/9780199639885.001.0001.
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An inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence’ ... Young Daisy Miller perplexes, amuses, and charms her stiff but susceptible fellow-American, Frederick Winterbourne. Is she innocent or corrupt? Has he lived too long in Europe to judge her properly? Amid the romantic scenery of Lake Geneva and Rome, their lively, precarious relationship develops to a climax in the Colosseum at midnight. The tale gave James his first popular success, yet some compatriots detected treachery in its portrayal of young American womanhood. James responded with ‘An International Episode’, which exposes a couple of English gentlemen to the charm and wit of American sisters in Newport, RI and then in London. Independently read, these short masterpieces probe the manners and morals of a newly emergent transatlantic world. Together they shed light on each other, demonstrating the range of James's own manners, from sharp satire and buoyant comedy to complex, perhaps even tragic, pathos.
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Churchill, Robert Paul. Moral Transformation. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190468569.003.0008.
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This chapter and the next are about ending honor killing through moral transformations occurring within communities. The emphasis is on facilitating and curating reforms that community members come to willingly adopt as their own. Sociocultural norms, expectations, and conditions must be revised such that no one can conceive of honor killing as an honorable deed. Here the practicality of such an outcome is emphasized by examining four subjects. First, the formation by Badshah Khan of the Khudai Kidhmatgar into a nonviolent and service-based army among the Pathans demonstrates the possibility of transformation even among the fiercest of honor-bound peoples. Second, the chapter demonstrates the effectiveness of reframing honor and inducing cognitive dissonance, thereby separating killing from honorable behavior. Next, three existing honor–shame cultures in which honor killing is not practiced are examined as real alternatives. Finally, possibilities for nonviolent conflict resolution and peaceable costly signaling techniques are considered.
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Baggett, David, and Jerry Walls. The Moral Argument. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190246365.001.0001.
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The history of the moral argument is a fascinating tale to tell. Like any good story, it is full of twists and unexpected turns, compelling conflicts, rich and idiosyncratic characters, both central and ancillary players. The narrative is as labyrinthine and circuitous as it is linear, its point remains to be fully seen, and its ending has yet to be written. What remains certain is the importance of telling it. The resources of history offer a refresher course, a teachable moment, a cautionary tale about the need to avoid making sacrosanct the trends of the times, and an often sobering lesson in why reigning assumptions may need to be rejected. If insights from luminaries of moral apologetics prove penetrating and their challenges formidable, then an intentional effort to recapture the richness of the history of the moral argument will likely prove to be illuminating. This book lets the argument’s advocates, many long dead, come alive again and speak for themselves. An historical study of the moral argument is a reminder of how classical philosophers were unafraid to ask and explore the big questions of faith, hope, and love; of truth, goodness, and beauty; of God, freedom, and immortality. It gives students and scholars alike the chance to drill down into their ideas, contexts, and arguments, inviting us all to learn to live with the moral argument. Only by a careful study of its history can we come to see its richness and the fertile range of resources it offers.
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Wallace, R. Jay. The Moral Nexus. Princeton University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691172170.001.0001.
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This book develops and defends a new interpretation of morality—namely, as a set of requirements that connect agents normatively to other persons in a nexus of moral relations. According to this relational interpretation, moral demands are directed to other individuals, who have claims that the agent comply with these demands. Interpersonal morality, so conceived, is the domain of what we owe to each other, insofar as we are each persons with equal moral standing. The book offers an interpretative argument for the relational approach. Specifically, it highlights neglected advantages of this way of understanding the moral domain; explores important theoretical and practical presuppositions of relational moral duties; and considers the normative implications of understanding morality in relational terms. The book features a novel defense of the relational approach to morality, which emphasizes the special significance that moral requirements have, both for agents who are deliberating about what to do and for those who stand to be affected by their actions. It argues that relational moral requirements can be understood to link us to all individuals whose interests render them vulnerable to our agency, regardless of whether they stand in any prior relationship to us. It also offers fresh accounts of some of the moral phenomena that have seemed to resist treatment in relational terms, showing that the relational interpretation is a viable framework for understanding our specific moral obligations to other people.
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Buchanan, Allen. Naturalizing Moral Regression. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190868413.003.0008.
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This chapter proposes a theory of moral regression, arguing that inclusivist gains can be eroded not only if certain harsh biological and social conditions indicative of out-group threat actually reappear but also if significant numbers of people come to believe that such harsh conditions exist even when they do not. It argues that normal cognitive biases in conjunction with defective social-epistemic practices can cause people wrongly to believe that such harsh conditions exist, thus triggering the development and evolution of exclusivist moralities and the dismantling of inclusivist ones. Armed with detailed knowledge of the biological and social environments in which progressive moralities emerge and are sustained, as well as the conditions under which they are likely to be dismantled, human beings can take significant steps toward transforming the classic liberal faith in moral progress into a practical, empirically grounded hope.
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Buchanan, Allen. De-Moralization and the Evolution of Invalid Moral Norms. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190868413.003.0009.
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The focus of this chapter shifts from moral progress in the form of inclusion to moral progress in the dimension of “de-moralization,” which occurs when behavior once thought to be morally impermissible comes to be seen as morally neutral or even laudable. The chapter shows that evolutionary processes act as both constraints and enablers in this important dimension of moral progress and then draws upon this analysis to rebut a different set of evoconservative arguments that view de-moralization as a hubristic endeavor that is bound to have unintended bad consequences. These evoconservative arguments are premised on overly simplified conceptions of evolutionary theory, and as a result they underestimate the extent to which cultural evolution permits the origin, proliferation, and preservation of invalid moral norms. Although the conservative worry that de-moralization (or other forms of moral reform, for that matter) could result in unintended bad consequences is valid, contained and limited experiments in de-moralization can manage this risk without forgoing the benefits of emancipation from invalid moral constraints.
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Bringhurst, Piper L., and Gerald Gaus. Positive Freedom and the General Will. Edited by David Schmidtz and Carmen E. Pavel. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199989423.013.1.
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This chapter shows how one understanding of positive liberty—freedom as reasoned control—is presupposed by relations of moral responsibility. Rousseau’s “quixotic quest”—insuring that all subjects of the moral law remain morally free—is necessary to maintain responsibility relations within a moral community. Unless all are free to exercise reasoned control in accepting moral demands, they cannot be held responsible for failure to comply. We then inquire whether the concept of the general will can reconcile positive freedom and moral responsibility with regulation by a common moral law. Rousseau’s account seems inappropriate for a deeply diverse society because it holds that the general will arises from an essential identity of citizens’ interests. Instead, Bosanquet’s work suggests two contemporary proposals for ways in which a diverse society might share a general will, explaining in turn how its members are all fit to be held responsible for violating its moral rules.
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Guerrero, Alexander A., ed. Intellectual Difficulty and Moral Responsibility. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779667.003.0011.
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This chapter considers the relationship between intellectual difficulty and moral responsibility. It focuses on this question: if it is difficult for us to come to believe the truth about some matter, and we do not in fact come to believe it, so that we are ignorant of that matter, does that affect our responsibility if we then act from our ignorance? Answering this question requires getting clearer on both intellectual difficulty and moral responsibility for actions done from ignorance. This chapter takes up both tasks, distinguishing three different kinds of intellectual difficulty—skill-related difficulty in performing, effort-related difficulty in performing, and difficulty in trying—and two different families of views regarding moral responsibility: agential control views and agential revelation views. The chapter then considers the interaction between these different kinds of intellectual difficulty and these different views of moral responsibility, focusing particularly on the familiar case of the Ancient Slaveholder.
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Clarke, Steve, Hazem Zohny, and Julian Savulescu, eds. Rethinking Moral Status. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894076.001.0001.
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Common-sense morality implicitly assumes that reasonably clear distinctions can be drawn between the ‘full’ moral status usually attributed to ordinary adult humans, the partial moral status attributed to non-human animals, and the absence of moral status, usually ascribed to machines and other artefacts. These assumptions were always subject to challenge; but they now come under renewed pressure because there are beings we are now able to create, and beings we may soon be able to create, which blur traditional distinctions between humans, non-human animals, and non-biological beings. Examples are human non-human chimeras, cyborgs, human brain organoids, post-humans, human minds that have been uploaded into computers and onto the internet, and artificial intelligence. It is far from clear what moral status we should attribute to any of these beings. While commonsensical views of moral status have always been questioned, the latest technological developments recast many of the questions and raise additional objections. There are a number of ways we could respond, such as revising our ordinary suppositions about the prerequisites for full moral status. We might also reject the assumption that there is a sharp distinction between full and partial moral status. The present volume provides a forum for philosophical reflection about the usual presuppositions and intuitions about moral status, especially in light of the aforementioned recent and emerging technological advances.
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Sher, George. What Is Moral Standing? Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190660413.003.0004.
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People employ the concept of moral standing when they try to explain why (or, less frequently, deny that) all humans are of equal moral importance. They also do so when they ask whether animals, fetuses, or seriously and permanently impaired humans are of lesser status than normal humans. But what do claims about moral standing come to, and how are they related to other moral categories such as obligation, value, and rights? This chapter develops a conception of moral standing that is neutral among the competing moral theories and their competing vocabularies and concepts. The main thesis defended is that a being’s moral standing relative to a given theory depends not on how the theory’s principles say it should be treated but rather on whether claims about its interests are among the inputs to the arguments by which the theory defends its principles.
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Sins of the Fathers: Moral Economies in Early Modern Spain. University of Toronto Press, 2013.
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31
Smith, Michael. Three Kinds of Moral Rationalism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198797074.003.0003.
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Moral rationalism can be formulated in three very different ways depending on which of three features the moral rationalist thinks is more fundamental when it comes to explaining what we are obliged to do, permitted to do, and forbidden from doing. The first of these is the relation that holds between certain considerations and intentions or desires when those considerations provide reasons for having those intentions or desires. The second is the choiceworthiness or desirability of the objects of an agent’s intentions or desires. The third is the set of structural relations that an agents’ intentions or desires stand in to each other, and to other psychological states, insofar as that agent is rational. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate that the last of these is explanatorily fundamental. A subsidiary aim is to spell out the epistemological consequences of this fact.
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LiVecche, Marc, and Timothy S. Mallard. The Good Kill. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197515808.001.0001.
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The Good Kill examines killing in war in its moral and normative dimension. It argues against the commonplace belief, often tacitly held if not consciously asserted, among academics, the general public, and even military professionals, that killing, including in a justified war, is always morally wrong even when necessary. In light of an increasingly sophisticated understanding of combat trauma, this belief is a crisis. Moral injury, a proposed subset of posttraumatic stress disorder, occurs when one does something that goes against deeply held normative convictions. In a military context, the primary predictor of moral injury is having killed in combat. In turn, the primary predictor for suicide among combat veterans is moral injury. In this way, the assertion that killing is wrong but in war it is necessary becomes deadly, rendering the very business of the profession of arms morally injurious. It does not need to be this way. Beginning with the simple observation—recognized by both common sense and law—that killing comes in different kinds, this book equips warfighters and those charged with their care and formation with confidence in the rectitude of certain kinds of killing. Engaging with Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, Nigel Biggar, and other leading Christian realists, crucial normative principles within the just war tradition are brought to bear on questions regarding just conduct in war, moral and nonmoral evil, and enemy love. The Good Kill helps equip the just warrior to navigate the morally bruising field of battle without becoming irreparably morally injured.
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Bernstein, Sara. Causal Proportions and Moral Responsibility. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198805601.003.0009.
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Both causation and moral responsibility seem to come in degrees, but explaining the metaphysical relationship between them is more complex than theorists have realized. This paper poses an original puzzle about this relationship and uses it to reach three important conclusions. First, certain natural resolutions of the puzzle reveal the existence of a new sort of moral luck called proportionality luck. Second, there is indeterminacy in the type of causal relation deployed in assessments of moral responsibility. Finally—and most importantly—leading theories of causation do not have the ability to capture the sorts of causal differences that matter for moral evaluation of agents’ causal contributions to outcomes.
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Sher, George. Why We Are Moral Equals. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190660413.003.0003.
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It is widely agreed that all persons have equal moral standing, but it is far less clear why this is so. Given the innumerable differences that separate people—they differ in strength, intelligence, and along every other empirical dimension—what could ground the view that they are all equally important? In this chapter, I propose an answer to this question: namely, that each person is a distinct subjectivity or center of consciousness. Because this feature of persons is all or nothing—because you either have it or you don’t—it is unlike the empirical features that come in degrees. In this and other ways, it fits naturally into the slot that an adequate basis of our moral equality must occupy.
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May, Joshua. The Difficulty of Moral Knowledge. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198811572.003.0005.
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While empirical debunking arguments fail to support wide-ranging moral skepticism, there are more modest threats to moral knowledge. First, debunking arguments are more successful if highly selective, targeting specific sets of moral beliefs that experimental research reveals to be distinguished for morally irrelevant reasons (thus flouting consistency reasoning). Second, the science of political disagreement suggests that many ordinary people can’t claim to know what they believe about controversial moral issues. Drawing on moral foundations theory, the best examples come from disagreements between liberals and conservatives within a culture. Controversial moral beliefs at least are disputed by what one should regard as epistemic peers, at least because others are just as likely to be wrong, even if not right, due to cognitive biases that affect proponents of all ideologies, such as motivated reasoning. Still, both of these empirical threats to moral knowledge are limited.
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Buchanan, Allen. Contemporary Accounts of Moral Progress. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190868413.003.0003.
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This chapter lays out several alternative understandings of moral progress found in the contemporary literature of analytical moral and political philosophy. None of these amounts to a theory of moral progress, but each is suggestive of some of the building blocks for constructing such a theory. Among the accounts considered are those offered by Peter Singer, Ruth Macklin, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Railton. A taxonomy of types of views is provided, utilizing the following distinctions: monistic (reductionist) versus pluralistic, static versus dynamic, and better norm compliance versus functionalist, where the latter are grounded in the idea that managing problems of cooperation is constitutive of morality. Each of these understandings is shown to be inadequate because it is unable to accommodate the full range of types of moral progress or, in the case of functionalist views, because it betrays an impoverished conception of what morality has come to encompass.
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Jeske, Diane. The Feeling of Morality. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190685379.003.0005.
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Emotions play a critical role in both moral deliberation and moral action. Understanding the emotions and how they ought to interact with theoretical principles is an important part of fulfilling our duty of due care in moral deliberation. By examining the Nazi police squads and the Nazi virtue of “hardness,” we can come to see how ordinary people can suppress their emotions in order to carry out morally odious tasks. We can then see that the methods we use to live with our treatment of nonhuman animals bear striking similarities to the methods used by those in the police squads. Ted Bundy, a psychopath, suggests that a lack of emotions can hinder our ability to grasp moral concepts, thus showing that even while emotions must be regulated by theory, they also play an important role in any full understanding of the significance of moral demands.
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Vallier, Kevin, and Michael Weber. Contempt, Futility, and Exemption. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190666187.003.0005.
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Exemptions from laws of general application are sometimes granted on the basis of an individual’s unwillingness to comply with the law. Most such volitional exemptions involve a conflict between the law and the demands of an individual’s religious or secular moral convictions. I argue here that a limited number of volitional exemptions can be justified on the basis of a futility principle. When otherwise morally permissible penalties for violating the law cannot be expected to induce the compliance of an intransigent minority, the penalties are futile, and the state has some principled reason to exempt the minority from the law’s requirements. Since the futility principle only applies to some cases of conscientious objection, it differs in important ways from justifications grounded in a general entitlement to religious or moral exemptions.
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Buchanan, Allen, and Russell Powell. The Evolution of Moral Progress. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190868413.001.0001.
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The idea of moral progress played a central role in liberal political thought from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century but is rarely encountered in moral and political philosophical discourse today. One reason for this is that traditional liberal theorists of moral progress, like their conservative detractors, tended to rely on underevidenced assumptions about human psychology and society. For the first time in history, we are developing robust scientific knowledge about human nature, especially through empirical psychological theories of morality and culture that are informed by evolutionary theory. In addition, the social sciences now provide better information about which social arrangements are feasible and sustainable and about how social norms arise, change, and come to shape moral thought and behavior. Accordingly, it is time to revisit the question of moral progress. On the surface, evolutionary accounts of morality paint a pessimistic picture, suggesting that certain types of moral progress are unrealistic or inappropriate for beings like us. In brief, humans are said to be “hard-wired” for rather limited moral capacities. However, such a view overlooks the great plasticity of human morality as evidenced by our history of social and political moral achievements. To account for these changes while giving evolved moral psychology its due, we develop a dynamic, biocultural theory of moral progress that highlights the interaction between adaptive components of moral psychology and the cultural construction of moral norms and beliefs; and we explore how this interaction can advance, impede, and reverse moral progress.
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Tsuruda, Sabine. The Moral Burdens of Temporary Farmwork. Edited by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199372263.013.31.
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This chapter discusses how agricultural guest worker programs fail to treat guest workers as moral equals. Such programs are typically justified on the theory that they enable host countries to cheaply meet labor needs while offering nonresidents access to higher wages than in their home countries. The chapter explains how, to participate in the programs, guest workers must rupture personal and political ties to then come to a new country and either not establish new relations or rupture the new ones when their work authorization expires. The chapter argues that adopting such programs to reduce the amount of farmwork host-country residents must perform treats guest workers’ interests in associational life as less valuable than the like interests of host-country residents. It concludes that even if the programs could ensure decent working conditions, the programs’ unjustified effect on associational life recommends ceasing such programs under their current formulation and, instead, extending a path to citizenship to guest workers.
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Grossman, Andrew. Animated Pasts and Unseen Futures: on the Comic Element in Hong Kong Horror. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424592.003.0006.
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Analyses of horror cinema seldom focus on the genre’s intersections with comedy, perhaps because the dominant influence of psychoanalysis on horror has emphasized gender, sexuality, trauma, abandonment, and various aspects of the unconscious. Yet Hong Kong might well boast world cinema’s most successful engagement of the horror-comedy as a sustained genre. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, the ghosts and animated corpses of Taoist folklore became invested with the martial arts comedy advanced by Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, rendering supernatural bodies as clownish cyphers rather than the romantic entities of Enchanting Shadow or AChinese Ghost Story. If spirits represent an intermediary stage between life and death, so too does the stylized clown, whose death-defying feats and transgression of “normal” human limitations render our mortal fears absurd. Presenting superstition as a comedy of stubborn familiarity and reveling in the foolishness of a premodern past, the Hong Kong horror-comedy resists the ideology of the encroaching Mainland, which has often censored “backwards” depictions of Chinese folklore and fantasy. In addition to examining the phenomenology of Hong Kong’s horror-comedies, this chapter also considers how such films fit into overall theories of physical comedy, from Bergson to Koestler.
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May, Joshua. Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198811572.001.0001.
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The burgeoning science of ethics has produced a trend toward pessimism. Ordinary moral judgment and motivation, we’re told, are profoundly influenced by arbitrary factors and ultimately driven by unreasoned feelings or emotions—fertile ground for sweeping debunking arguments. This book counters the current orthodoxy on its own terms by carefully engaging with the empirical literature. The resulting view, optimistic rationalism, maintains that reason plays a pervasive role in our moral minds and that ordinary moral reasoning is not particularly flawed or in need of serious repair. The science does suggest that moral knowledge and virtue don’t come easily, as we are susceptible to some unsavory influences that lead to rationalizing bad behavior. Reason can be corrupted in ethics just as in other domains, but the science warrants cautious optimism, not a special skepticism about morality in particular. Rationality in ethics is possible not just despite, but in virtue of, the psychological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape moral cognition.
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Beckford, William. Vathek. Edited by Thomas Keymer. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/owc/9780199576951.001.0001.
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Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant; and to undertake that which surpasseth his power!’ The Caliph Vathek is dissolute and debauched, and hungry for knowledge. When the mysterious Giaour offers him boundless treasure and unrivalled power he is willing to sacrifice his god, the lives of innocent children, and his own soul to satisfy his obsession. Vathek’s extraordinary journey to the subterranean palace of Eblis, and the terrifying fate that there awaits him, is a captivating tale of magic and oriental fantasy, sudden violence and corrupted love, whose mix of moral fable, grotesque comedy, and evocative beauty defies classification. Originally written by Beckford in French at the age of only 21, its dreamlike qualities have influenced writers from Byron to H. P. Lovecraft. This new edition reprints Beckford’s authorized English text of 1816 with its elaborate and entertaining notes. In his new introduction Thomas Keymer examines the novel’s relations to a range of literary genres and cultural contexts.
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Gunkel, David J. Can machines have rights? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199674923.003.0063.
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One of the enduring concerns of ethics is determining who is deserving of moral consideration. Although initially limited to “other men,” ethics has developed in such a way that it challenges its own restrictions and comes to encompass what had been previously excluded entities. Currently, we stand on the verge of another fundamental challenge to moral thinking. This challenge comes from the autonomous and increasingly intelligent machines of our own making, and it puts in question many deep-seated assumptions about who or what can be a moral subject. This chapter examines whether machines can have rights. Because a response to this query primarily depends on how one characterizes “moral status,” it is organized around two established moral principles, considers how these principles apply to artificial intelligence and robots, and concludes by providing suggestions for further study.
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Levitov, Alex, and Stephen Macedo. Human Rights, Membership, and Moral Responsibility in an Unjust World. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198713258.003.0029.
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International human rights instruments establish both a fundamental right to collective self-determination and a right of individuals to free movement. What principles and priorities should guide us when these two sets of claims come into conflict? When and under what conditions are political communities morally entitled to exclude those who wish to enter? And when, on the other side, do the rights of individuals seeking entry take priority? These issues are both philosophically contested and of great practical import, and this chapter seeks to illuminate them.
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Baker, Derek. Skepticism About Ought Simpliciter. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823841.003.0011.
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There are many different oughts. There is a moral ought, a prudential ought, an epistemic ought, the legal ought, the ought of etiquette, and so on. These oughts can prescribe incompatible actions. What I morally ought to do may be different from what I self-interestedly ought to do. Philosophers have claimed that these conflicts are resolved by an authoritative ought, or by facts about what one ought to do simpliciter or all-things-considered. However, this chapter defends the view that the only coherent notion of an ought simpliciter comes with preposterous first-order normative commitments. It is more reasonable to reject the ought simpliciter in favor of the form of normative pluralism advocated in Tiffany (2007).
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Rosenthal, Jesse. Good Form. Princeton University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691196640.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
What do we mean when we say that a novel's conclusion “feels right”? How did feeling, form, and the sense of right and wrong get mixed up, during the nineteenth century, in the experience of reading a novel? This book argues that Victorian readers associated the feeling of narrative form—of being pulled forward to a satisfying conclusion—with inner moral experience. Reclaiming the work of a generation of Victorian “intuitionist” philosophers who insisted that true morality consisted in being able to feel or intuit the morally good, this book shows that when Victorians discussed the moral dimensions of reading novels, they were also subtly discussing the genre's formal properties. For most, Victorian moralizing is one of the period's least attractive and interesting qualities. But this book argues that the moral interpretation of novel experience was essential in the development of the novel form—and that this moral approach is still a fundamental, if unrecognized, part of how we understand novels. Bringing together ideas from philosophy, literary history, and narrative theory, the book shows that we cannot understand the formal principles of the novel that we have inherited from the nineteenth century without also understanding the moral principles that have come with them. The book helps us to understand the way Victorians read, but it also helps us to understand the way we read now.
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Mele, Alfred R. Manipulated Agents. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190927967.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Thought experiments featuring manipulated agents and designed agents have played a significant role in the literature on moral responsibility. What can we learn from thought experiments of this kind about the nature of moral responsibility? That is this book’s primary question. An important lesson lies at the core of its answer: Moral responsibility for actions has a historical dimension of a certain kind. A pair of agents whose current nonhistorical properties are very similar and who perform deeds of the same kind may nevertheless be such that one is morally responsible for the deed whereas the other is not, and what makes the difference is a difference in how they came to be as they are at that time—that is, a historical difference. Imagine that each of these agents attempts to assassinate someone. Depending on the details of the cases, it may be that one of these agents is morally responsible for the attempt whereas the other is not, because one of them was manipulated in a certain way into being in the psychological state that issues in the behavior whereas the other agent came to be in that state under his own steam. A variety of thought experiments are considered. They include stories about agents whose value systems are radically altered by manipulators, vignettes featuring agents who are built from scratch, and scenarios in which agents magically come into being with full psychological profiles.
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Erskine, Toni. Moral Agents of Protection and Supplementary Responsibilities to Protect. Edited by Alex J. Bellamy and Tim Dunne. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198753841.013.10.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter takes seriously the prevalent assumption that the responsibility to protect populations from mass atrocity represents a moral imperative. It highlights tensions between how R2P is articulated and arguments for its legitimate implementation. The chapter maintains that identifying a range of ‘moral agents of protection’ and ‘supplementary responsibilities to protect’ is fundamental to any attempt to realize R2P. It offers an account of the loci of moral responsibility implicit in prominent articulations of R2P that both supports and extends this argument. Taken to its logical conclusion, this account demands that hitherto unacknowledged moral agents of protection step in when the host state and the UN are unwilling or unable to act. The chapter examines which bodies can discharge this residual responsibility to protect and proposes that, in certain urgent circumstances, institutional agents have a shared responsibility to come together and act in concert, even without UN Security Council authorization.
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Bonotti, Matteo. The Political Obligations of Partisans. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198739500.003.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter argues that partisans have distinctive political obligations. It examines first the view that these are consent-based obligations grounded in partisans’ voluntary decision to undertake the positional duties of partisanship. This voluntarist account of partisan political obligations, however, presents some limits and needs to be complemented and reinforced by a fair play conception of partisan political obligations. According to the latter, the positional duties of partisanship acquire the status of political obligations, and become morally binding upon all partisans, because all partisans enjoy special privileges and benefits which derive from their participation in party politics. Partisans therefore have a moral duty to restrain their freedom and comply with their positional duties, which involve obeying the laws of their state and the fulfilment of which contributes to producing the benefits they enjoy.