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Eric Campbell has argued that we should abolish moral discourse on the grounds that making moral judgments leads to “potentially severe practical pathologies,” including hypocrisy and self-delusion...

Bespreking van: A. Koler,A Moral Theory of Solidarity Oxford:Oxford University Press ,2016 9780198769781

This article draws on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany in critically assessing the efficacy of reasonableness in advancing the aims of em...

According to Christine Sypnowich, theorising about equality is in a bad way. The ideal of equality has come under sustained attack from theorists of ‘difference’, who focus on claims arising from the particularities of identity and culture, and view equality as a homogenising doctrine based upon a false universalism. Defenders of equality, meanwhile, have become “mired in odd debates and concerns” (221) about welfare for surfers, expensive tastes, and the precise distinction between choice and luck. To make matters worse, liberal political theory is dominated by neutralism, an “aberrant” view that is “at odds with the tradition of conceiving social justice with reference to ideas of wellbeing, the public good, and community that are so central to the ideal of equality and the hope of its realisation” (212). These various developments all conspire to leave equality beleaguered. The key to its renewal, Sypnowich argues, is a return to a focus on human flourishing or wellbeing, recasting egalitarianism in an unapologetically perfectionist vein. “It is the task of the egalitarian state to enable citizens to live worthwhile lives” (7). Sypnowich thus endeavours to defend flourishing as the proper metric of equality, responding to various objections to perfectionism along the way, and to show that this conception of equality both enables a persuasive response to theorists of difference and illuminates contemporary debates about topics such as responsibility, multiculturalism, the public good, and global justice.

Human Rights are a complex phenomenon, comprising an array of different aspects. They have a moral life, expressing urgent human concerns and claims that must not be violated or ignored; they also have a legal life, being enshrined in national constitutions and in international declarations; and they have a political life, expressing standards of basic political legitimacy. For a comprehensive philosophical account of human rights, all of these aspects are essential and need to be integrated. Yet when doing so one must not overlook the central social-political aspect of human rights, namely that when and where they have been claimed, it has been because the individuals concerned suffered from and protested against forms of oppression and/or exploitation that they believed disregarded their dignity as human beings. Human rights are first and foremost weapons in combating certain evils that human beings inflict upon one another; they emphasize standards of treatment that no human being could justifiably deny to others. My thesis in what follows is that if this is correct, it implies – reflexively speaking – that one claim underlies all human rights, namely human beings’ claim to be respected as agents who have the right not to be subjected to certain actions or institutional norms that cannot be adequately justified to them. In other words, human rights have a common ground in one basic moral right, the right to justification.

Imagine that a couple passes up an opportunity to conceive and bear a child who would, they have every reason to think, be happy and healthy. Imagine that they have solid personal and financial reasons for doing so. If all other things are equal, many of us are inclined to think that they have done nothing wrong and would be comfortable glossing this thought in the following kind of way: “Their decision was good for them, good for the overburdened local school system . . . and bad for whom? Show me an actual person who has been made worse off.” Now look back at your parents’ decision to bring you into the world. Unless you have had a very unpleasant life, you will probably feel rather good about that decision and will probably think poorly of anyone who wishes that it hadn’t been made. “After all,” you might reasonably say, “that decision was good for an actual person—me.” For those who are committed to a broadly consequentialist way of thinking about ethical questions, such considerations may lend some intuitive weight to moral actualism. Moral actualism says that the moral status of a token action is determined by its effects on the interests of all and only actual past, present, and future people. The interests of merely possible people (those people who could have existed but didn’t and those who might exist but won’t) are morally irrelevant. A story may make the structure of moral actualism vivid. After the last of us has died, God prepares one list of all the people there have ever been and another of all the things they ever did. When he casts his mighty eye down the first list, he thinks “I loved all these creatures

A being has moral standing if it or its interests matter intrinsically, to at least some degree, in the moral assessment of actions and events. For instance, animals can be said to have moral standing if, other things being equal, it is morally bad to intentionally cause their suffering. This essay focuses on a special kind of moral standing, what I will call “full moral standing” (FMS), associated with persons. In contrast to the various accounts of what ultimately grounds FMS in use in the philosophical literature, I will propose that the emotional capacity to care is a sufficient condition of an individual’s FMS as a person. In developing this account, I will appeal to a set of intuitions not previously mined for this purpose: those generated by conflicts of interests between different life phases of a single individual. It is commonplace in ethical theory and standard moral practice to hold that ordinary adult human beings have an exalted moral standing—that we owe them special concern and respect. A core constituent of FMS is a kind of inviolability: roughly put, we are prohibited from destroying and from interfering in various other ways with a being with FMS for the sake of another being and its interests, or for any other value. For instance, we are prohibited from killing an innocent human being for the sake of saving one or several others, or even, perhaps, for the sake of justice and world peace; but we are allowed

One important strand in moral particularism concerns moral practice. Moral reasoning, it maintains, ought not to rely on moral principles because such reliance distorts moral judgment and so provides poor moral guidance. Another important strand concerns the structure of the moral domain. The traditional generalist conception of moral theory goes wrong, particularists maintain, in seeing moral theorizing as a project of articulating and defending substantive principles concerning the rightness and wrongness of actions, the value of states of affairs, the fairness of social arrangements, and so on. Depending on which particularist you talk to, this is either because there are no true moral principles, or because there is no good reason to think there are any, or because, even if there are true moral principles, actions and other objects of moral assessment don’t depend for their moral status on there being any. In this article I challenge the second strand in particularism

Feminists have had an uneasy relationship to communitarianism. On the one hand, many feminists have shared some of the communitarians’ critiques of liberalism. With communitarians, many feminists have criticized liberalism for its individualism, voluntarism, and reliance on rights. Both communitarians and feminists have stressed traditional social and familial arrangements, whether or not they are voluntarily entered into, that confer on us (or lock us into) duties and obligations. In different ways, both sets of critics pointed to the shortcomings of rights discourse in resolving familial disputes and promoting community. That is, it often fails in major settings in which people develop and thrive.1 Yet feminists have also balked at the invocations of community on which many communitarian arguments depend. Traditional societies, often valorized by communitarians, notoriously restrict women’s opportunities to adopt roles other than wife and mother. Marilyn Friedman, in her criticism of communitarianism, recounts the need women have had to escape from what she calls their ‘‘communities of place.’’ She acknowledges, however, how frequently women, in making this escape, have sought new communities, what she calls ‘‘communities of choice.’’ 2 Friedman, even as she warns feminists against an all too uncritical embrace of communitarianism, still sees community as a useful ideal for feminists along with liberal concepts such as equality, freedom, and rights. The notion of community offers a way of situating notions of re