Browsing by Author "Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter"

Prudential hedonism is a school of thought in the philosophy of welfare that says that only pleasure is good for us in itself and only pain is bad for us in itself. This dissertation concerns an especially austere form of prudential hedonism: basic prudential hedonism (BPH). BPH claims that all pleasure is good for us in itself, and all pain is bad for us in itself, without exception; that all pleasures feel fundamentally alike, as do all pains; and that the amount of welfare in a person’s life can (in principle) be calculated just by adding up the amount of pleasure it contains and subtracting the amount of pain. The dissertation presents a positive argument for the claim that pleasures and pains are defined by common phenomenal properties, defends BPH against a battery of objections, and outlines an argument for accepting BPH on the grounds that it is simpler than competing views.

Since Peter Singer’s (1975) Animal Liberation, sentience has been the dominant justification for increasing non-human animal (hereafter ‘animal’) welfare. This dissertation is an attempt to discover a different reason to treat animals better: their moral agency. If animals are moral agents, then they deserve additional moral rights, rights that arise independently from their sentience.

To find out whether animals are moral agents, I focus on whether animals are ever morally responsible for their actions. More specifically, I examine whether animals punish each other. I focus on a special type of punishment: third-party retributive punishment. This is punishment issued by an unaffected bystander for a moral wrongdoing.

Humans do not treat animals as moral agents, but this does not mean that animals are never morally responsible. I evaluate animal behavior from the contexts of their own communities. Rather than focus on the ways in which humans treat animals, I focus on the ways in which animals treat one another.

This dissertation is highly interdisciplinary, utilizing principles of philosophy alongside empirical evidence from psychology, evolutionary anthropology, animal behavior, and ecology. Both the theoretical and empirical evidence support my main conclusion: animals are moral agents.

Disgust features prominently in many facets of human life, from dining etiquette to spider phobia to genocide. For some applications, such as public health campaigns, it might be desirable to know how to increase disgust, whereas for things like legal and political decision-making it might be desirable to know how to suppress disgust. However, interventions in neither direction can take place until the basic structure of disgust is better understood. Disgust is notoriously difficult to model, largely due to the fact that it is a highly individually variable, multifactorial construct, with a great breadth of eliciting stimuli and contexts. As such, many of the theories which attempt to comprehensively describe disgust come into conflict with each other, impeding progress towards more efficient and effective ways of predicting disgust-related outcomes. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the possible contribution of data-driven methods to resolving theoretical questions, evaluating extant theories, and the generation of novel conceptual structures from bottom-up insights. Data were collected to sample subjective experience as well as psychophysiological reactivity. Through the use of techniques such as factor analysis and support vector machine classification, several insights about the approaching the study of disgust emerged. In one study, results indicated that the level of abstraction across subdivisions of disgust is not necessarily constant, in spite of a priori theoretical expectations: in other words, some domains of disgust are more general than others, and recognizing as much will improve the predictive validity of a model. Another study highlighted the importance of recognizing one particular category of disgust elicitors (mutilation) as a separate entity from the superordinate domains into which extant theories placed it. Finally, another study investigated the influence of concurrent emotions on variability in disgust physiology, and demonstrated the difference in the representations of the structure of disgust between the level of subjective experience and the level of autonomic activity. In total, the studies conducted as part of this dissertation suggest that for constructs as complex as disgust, data-driven approaches investigations can be a boon to scientists looking to evaluate the quality of the theoretical tools at their disposal.

Heightened awareness of the evolutionary, socio-cultural, and psychological origins of our moral judgments pushes many of us in the direction of moral skepticism, in the direction of doubting the objective truth of our moral judgments. But should awareness of the origins of our moral judgments shake our confidence in them? Are there good moral debunking challenges or debunking arguments from premises concerning the accessible origins of our moral judgments to skeptical conclusions regarding them? In vigorous pursuit of these questions, this dissertation sifts three promising moral debunking challenges to moral realism, namely Richard Joyce's (2001) evolutionary debunking argument from epistemic insensitivity, Sharon Street's (2006) "Darwinian Dilemma," and David Enoch's (2010) "Epistemological Challenge." It is argued that each challenge faces cogent objections that not only demonstrate the inadequacy of the best debunking challenges available but also instructively guide us to the development of new and more forceful debunking challenges to moral realism. This dissertation develops two new and forceful debunking challenges, both of which target the epistemic reliability and justification of our moral judgments on realist views of the moral facts. The first new debunking challenge starts from the premise that the best explanation of our moral judgments does not appeal to their truth and invokes a new species of epistemic insensitivity to secure the conclusion that our moral belief-forming processes are epistemically unreliable. The second new debunking challenge reasons that the best explanation of the fact that moral realists have no good explanation of the reliability of our moral belief-forming processes is that there is no such reliability.

This dissertation investigates the role of empathy in mitigating the harms that fraught moral and political conflicts can cause. While critics of empathy have argued that it is unnecessary for morality at best and morally harmful at worst, I maintain that empathy is often needed to promote positive relationships between moral and political opponents. It is especially well suited to this task by virtue of the role it can play in helping such opponents find common ground. As I show, doing so is morally important in its own right and is also a crucial first step to avoiding a host of additional moral, epistemic, and practical pitfalls, including the tendency to dismiss the testimony of outgroup members and the inability to cooperate toward shared goals. While philosophers and social scientists have paid a great deal of attention to questions regarding the moral importance of empathy for those in need, relatively little attention has been paid to the potential moral benefits of empathy for opponents. This dissertation fills this gap while addressing the pressing problem of increased polarization, hostility, and aggression between those who are sharply opposed on issues of moral and political importance.

In The Neverending Story (1984), “the nothing” was spreading throughout Fantasia. This is terrifying not just because of the nature of the west-German fantasy film but also because nothing—non-being—was represented as something that existed. Nothing can’t be—or so it seems. In this dissertation, I ask: what do ordinary statements about omissions and absences mean if they are not about things that exist? And then I ask: how can an answer to this question help us understand omissive causation? I present various normative accounts of omissive language and omissive causal models. I end by considering some reasons to doubt such models.

Why is political disagreement such a persistent and pervasive feature of contemporary societies? Many political philosophers answer by pointing to moral pluralism and the complexity of relevant non-moral facts. In Chapter 1, I argue that this answer is seriously inadequate. Drawing on work from psychology, political science, and evolutionary anthropology, I argue that an adequate explanation of political disagreement must emphasize two features of human psychology: tribalism and motivated reasoning.

It is often assumed that disagreements rooted in bias and irrationality can be ignored or idealized away by philosophers developing ideal theories, that is, theories that aim to sketch the normative outlines of an ideal society. In Chapters 2 and 3, I argue that this assumption is mistaken because even ideal theories are subject to constraints, and idealizing away disagreements rooted in certain kinds of bias and irrationality violates these constraints.

In Chapter 4, I turn to the ethics of political compromise, focusing specifically on compromises that involve making serious concessions to injustice. I consider and attempt to reconcile two seemingly inconsistent approaches to evaluating such compromises: one that emphasizes fundamental moral principles versus one that emphasizes pragmatic considerations.

This dissertation provides an answer to what I call the central question of moral philosophy: what, if anything, is moral value? The answer, I argue, is that moral value is the relational property of eliciting a suitable response from a properly informed, rational, benevolent and otherwise minimal spectator. I call this theory the response-dependent benevolent ideal observer theory or BIORD.

Although the way in which I express and argue for BIORD is original and unique, the core of the theory is old. In chapter 1, I explore these historical roots. The notion that moral value depends, in some sense, upon the reactions of an idealised spectator stretches back at least to Adam Smith and, I argue, to his tutor Francis Hutcheson. I explore how a natural connection between ideal observers, benevolence and utilitarianism has often been assumed without being explicitly argued for.

In chapter 2, I lay out certain crucial meta-theoretical assumptions that help to motivate BIORD. I argue against the methodology of conceptual analysis and in favour of a revisionary approach sometimes called ‘conceptual ethics’. I explore the theoretical aims that ought to guide the conceptual ethicists’ project before arguing in favour of a response-dependent metaethics, in contrast to other sentimentalist theories such as fitting-attitude accounts. The response-dependent schema states that an object is morally valuable if and only if a particular agent would have a particular reaction to it (in certain circumstances).

In chapter 3, I argue that the agent that ought to fill the response-dependent schema is a properly informed, rational, benevolent and otherwise minimal spectator. I define benevolence as a final care directed towards the welfare of conscious creatures and thus argue in favour of welfarism: the view that welfare is the only essential moral value.

In chapter 4, I discuss which of the benevolent observer’s reactions are best thought of as relevant, and which objects are best thought of as the bearers of both essential and non-essential moral value. I suggest that any attitude which lacks the property of being ‘truth-oriented’ is relevant. Arguments concerning the objects of value leads to a discussion of Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, which BIORD entails. I argue that we ought to embrace it. Lastly, I discuss the objects of non-essential value, showing how BIORD can capture some intuitions that value pluralists might otherwise use against it.

Finally, in chapter 5, I discuss how accepting BIORD would impact our moral discourse, arguing in favour of a radical eliminativist proposal in which deontic language is abandoned in favour of comparative value-talk. I then discuss how BIORD can provide us with a theory of reasons.

This Dissertation critiques the prevailing law and dominant scholarly treatment of the right to emigrate, which I understand to mean the conjunction of the rights (i) to physically leave one’s nation of membership and (ii) to renounce one’s citizenship therein. Contrary to this status quo, which holds that this legal right is and ought to be near-unconditional, it defends the revisionary view that legitimate nations, which are in good standing with the international community and respect human rights, should be permitted to recover great losses unjustly sustained as a result of unrestricted emigration by taxing their emigrants on their worldwide income on an ongoing basis where necessary, or iff such attempts at taxation prove infeasible, inadequate, or otherwise inappropriate, by employing as a backup measure the least severe restrictions on emigration required to forestall such injustices. In general, tax and economically motivated emigrants, as well as more well-off emigrants, should be taxed and regulated prior to doing so for emigrants who relocate for other reasons, such as for political or cultural reasons. In practice, however, one would expect that nations would seldom have to rely upon actual physical restrictions. This is because a home nation’s mere threat to restrict the relocation of its desirable emigrants would often provide potential destination nations with an incentive to cooperate with the home nation in the administration of a tax on its emigrants—which, under the regime I defend, the home nation would be required to avail itself of before resorting to physical restrictions.

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