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In Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence , John Tillson argues that initiating children into religion is morally wrong. His argument overlaps and intersects at various points with my own argument against confessional religious education in schools. In this brief reply I consider two notable differences between our arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 2020 article in Analysis , Lippert-Rasmussen argues that the moral equality account of the hypocrite's lack of standing to blame fails. To object to this account, Lippert-Rasmussen considers the contrary of hypocrisy: hypercrisy. In this article, I show that if hypercrisy is a problem for the moral equality account, it is also a problem for Lippert-Rasmussen's own account of why hypocrites lack standing to blame. I then reflect on the hypocrite's and hypercrite's standing to self-blame , which reveals that the challenge hypercrisy poses for accounts of standing is different from the challenge Lippert-Rasmussen articulates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What reasoning processes do consumers use to support public figures who act immorally? Existing research emphasizes moral rationalization, whereby people reconstrue improper behavior in order to maintain support for a transgressor. In contrast, the current research proposes that people also engage in moral decoupling, a previously unstudied moral reasoning process by which judgments of performance are separated from judgments of morality. By separating these judgments, moral decoupling allows consumers to support a transgressor's performance while simultaneously condemning his or her transgressions. Five laboratory studies demonstrate that moral decoupling exists and is psychologically distinct from moral rationalization. Moreover, because moral decoupling does not involve condoning immoral behavior, it is easier to justify than moral rationalization. Finally, a field study suggests that in discussions involving public figures' transgressions, moral decoupling may be more predictive of consumer support (and opposition) than moral rationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the moral wrongness of joke theft. Working through a trove of real‐world cases, and using the sitcom The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as a touchstone, I argue, ultimately, for a pluralist approach, contending that there are several wrongs that may be present in any case of joke theft, but which cannot be reduced to each other and which are collectively irreducible to any sort of "superwrong." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the idea of moral offsetting: the idea that good actions can offset bad actions in a way roughly analogous to carbon offsetting. For example, a meat eater might try to offset their consumption of meat by donating to an animal welfare charity. In this paper, I clarify the idea of moral offsetting, consider whether the leading moral theories and theories of moral worth are consistent with the possibility of moral offsetting, and consider potential benefits of moral offsetting. I also compare moral offsetting to a related practice that I call 'moral triaging'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about poems by Tony Hoagland that reflects the sense of something wrong going in the world, seeking a culprit with wrongness, changing the world for better and the moods of pondering includes teasing, anger and despairing. It talks about metaphor against mortality and testimony, the harm in the system that includes racism, capitalism, gender relations, human sexuality, the America poetry having the abundance of protest against social injustice and protest by Bob Dylan.

If criminal law blamed in a way that accurately reflected blameworthiness, what would it say about the outcomes of our actions? On one view, criminal law would be outcome-insensitive: all crimes would be defined in the inchoate mode, and outcomes would be irrelevant to the quantum of punishment. On a second view, criminal law would be doubly outcome-sensitive: some crimes would be defined in terms of outcomes, and more punishment would be imposed where those outcomes occurred. Here, we reject both of these views in favour of a third. While the outcomes of our actions affect which wrongs we commit, they do not make us more blameworthy for committing them. A criminal law that accurately reflected blameworthiness would convict those who commit significantly different wrongs of different crimes. It would punish those who are equally blameworthy to the same degree. So the outcomes of our actions would be relevant to criminalisation. But they would be irrelevant to the quantum of punishment imposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a well-known moral quandary concerning how to account for the rightness or wrongness of acts that clearly contribute to some morally significant outcome – but which each seem too small, individually, to make any meaningful difference. One consequentialist-friendly response to this problem is to deny that there could ever be a case of this type (e.g. a case where a collection of individually harmless acts causes a grave harm). This paper pursues this general strategy, but in an unusual way. Existing arguments for the consequentialist-friendly position are sorites-style arguments. Such arguments imagine varying a subject's predicament bit by bit until it is clear that a relevant difference has been achieved. The arguments offered in this paper are structurally different, and do not rely on any sorites series. For this reason, they are not vulnerable to objections that have been leveled against the sorites-style arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many surveys of respondents from multiple countries or subnational regions have now been fielded on multiple occasions. Social scientists are regularly using multilevel models to analyse the data generated by such surveys, investigating variation across both space and time. We show, however, that such models are usually specified erroneously. They typically omit one or more relevant random effects, thereby ignoring important clustering in the data, which leads to downward biases in the standard errors. These biases occur even if the fixed effects are specified correctly; if the fixed effects are incorrect, erroneous specification of the random effects worsens biases in the coefficients. We illustrate these problems using Monte Carlo simulations and two empirical examples. Our recommendation to researchers fitting multilevel models to comparative longitudinal survey data is to include random effects at all potentially relevant levels, thereby avoiding any mismatch between the random and fixed parts of their models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometimes it is wrong to imagine or take pleasure in imagining certain things, and likewise it is sometimes wrong to prompt these things. Some argue that certain fictive imaginings-imaginings of fictional states of affairs-are intrinsically wrong or that taking pleasure in certain fictive imaginings is wrong and so prompting either would also be wrong. These claims sometimes also serve as premises in arguments linking the ethical properties of a fiction to its artistic value. However, even if we grant that it might sometimes be wrong to imagine x or to take pleasure in imagining x, nothing follows about the ethical status of fictively imagining x, with or without pleasure. Prompting some fictive imagining is intrinsically wrong only when the fiction is a means to encourage for export from the fiction to the actual world some belief or attitude that it would be blameworthy to hold. The failure of arguments for the wrongness of certain fictive imaginings and their prompting lies in part in a failure to recognize that imagining x and fictively imagining x are distinct mental acts. This distinction blocks many arguments attempting to forge a link between a work's ethical properties and its artistic properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective disposition theory (ADT), which nicely explains enjoyment of traditional hero narratives, appears somewhat limited in its ability to explain antihero narratives, primarily because of the moral complexity of the protagonists. Recent work proposes that viewers over time develop story schema that permit antihero enjoyment, despite character immorality. This article reports results from three studies that support this claim. Specifically, the findings indicate that moral judgment may be less important to antihero enjoyment than ADT would predict, that previous exposure to an antihero narrative alters responses to similar narratives, and that moral disengagement cues impact the enjoyment process. Ultimately, the studies offer empirical evidence of how antihero narratives are enjoyed differently than their traditional hero counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aggregation of consistent individual judgements on logically interconnected propositions into a collective judgement on the same propositions has recently drawn much attention. Seemingly reasonable aggregation procedures, such as propositionwise majority voting, cannot ensure an equally consistent collective conclusion. The literature on judgement aggregation refers to such a problem as the discursive dilemma. In this article we assume that the decision which the group is trying to reach is factually right or wrong. Hence, we address the question of how good various approaches are at selecting the right conclusion. We focus on two approaches: distance-based procedures and a Bayesian analysis. They correspond to group-internal and group-external decision making, respectively. We compare those methods in a probabilistic model whose assumptions are subsequently relaxed. Our findings have two general implications for judgement aggregation problems: first, in a voting procedure, reasons should carry higher weight than the conclusion, and second, considering members of an advisory board to be highly competent is a better strategy than discounting their advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to distinguish and discuss the importance and limitations of different ways of being wrong. At first it is argued that strictly falsifiable knowledge is concerned with simple (instrumental) mistakes only, and thus is incapable of understanding more complex errors (and truths). In order to gain a deeper understanding of mistakes (and to understand a deeper kind of mistake), it is argued that communicative aspects have to be taken into account. This is done in the theory of communicative action, which adds to our knowledge of errors the notion of communicative mistakes: mistakes as obstacles for sincere communication. However, to overcome this still purely negative judgment of errors, two processes are examined in which mistakes are best regarded as developmental steps, that is, steps not only meaningful in their own right (as containing some truth), but also as necessary preconditions for further progress. This would suggest that truth is born out of errors. But if so, one has to understand the wrongness of such errors; how is it that they are erroneous if they (somehow) contain the truth? At the end of this essay, a tentative answer to this question is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral relativism provides a compelling explanation of linguistic data involving ordinary moral expressions like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. But it is a very radical view. Because relativism relativizes sentence truth to contexts of assessment it forces us to revise standard linguistic theory. If, however, no competing theory explains all of the evidence, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift. However, I argue that a version of moral contextualism can account for the same data as relativism without relativizing sentence truth to contexts of assessment. This version of moral contextualism is thus preferable to relativism on methodological grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to T. M. Scanlon's ‘buck-passing’ analysis of value, x is good means that x has properties that provide reasons to take up positive attitudes vis-à-vis x. Some authors have claimed that this idea can be traced back to Franz Brentano, who said in 1889 that the judgement that x is good is the judgement that a positive attitude to x is correct (‘richtig’). The most discussed problem in the recent literature on buck- passing is known as the `wrong kind of reason' problem (the WKR problem): it seems quite possible that there is sometimes reason to favour an object although that object is not good and possibly very evil. The problem is to delineate exactly what distinguishes reasons of the right kind from reasons of the wrong kind. In this paper we offer a Brentano-style solution. We also note that one version of the WKR problem was put forward by G. E. Moore in his review of the English translation of Brentano's Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis. Before getting to how our Brentano-style approach might offer a way out for Brentano and the buck-passers, we briefly consider and reject an interesting attempt to solve the WKR problem recently proposed by John Skorupski. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses acts and omissions. Before the event, our business when engaging in practical thinking is to decide what to do, to make sure that we do the right thing and avoid doing the wrong thing. Precision is required but the ambiguities still remain. The English language has a repertoire of somewhat more technical expressions to hand for resolving these ambiguities. We may distinguish the different things we might want to say when we speak of someone doing something, by distinguishing between activities, actions, and acts.

In this article the author offers information on philosopher Murali Ramachandran's concept of ristrictedly rigid (RR) designator in order to defend the contingency of identities. He discusses the arugements of Ramachandran where he asserts that the price of defending the contingency of identities ensures the necessity of non-identities. However the author believes that Ramachandran is right to think about the problem as substantial, but wrong to think that it is intractable.

This article discusses the moral issues in science. It discusses that as science has gained ever-increasing power to alter species' relationship to nature and the relationship of human being to another, there has been a growing preoccupation on scientists with what are conceived of as the ethical problems that arise from that power. However, this preoccupation on the part of the scientists has been confined exclusively to individual ethical decisions, related to problems of individual freedom and choice.