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What Makes Gentrification Wrong? A Place-based Account Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Meena Krishnamurthy, Margaret Moore
Through an analysis of the moral relationship between people and place, this paper offers a new view of the wrongful character of gentrification, which is pluralistic, locating the wrong in the non-fulfillment of three place-related rights: rights to a home, rights of residency, and place-based rights to a community. By focusing on the multiple ways that people are connected to place, we offer a more
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No Outcome Is Good, Bad, or Evaluatively Neutral for Anyone Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Michael Rabenberg
I argue that no outcome is good, bad, or evaluatively neutral for anyone. My argument concerns non-comparative personal evaluative properties alone; it does not support (say) the conclusion that no outcome is better for anyone than any other outcome. First I argue that there is a sequence of outcomes with the following properties, and that the existence of such a sequence supports the conclusion that
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Rights, Conflicts, and the Mechanics of Claims Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Thomas Sinclair
There is a distinction between two different ways in which people’s interests might figure as inputs into the reasoning that determines verdicts of moral permissibility and impermissibility. Their interests may receive a certain priority in that reasoning, as for example the interests of the people whose lives are at stake in the famous Bystander example should. Or they may not, as for example the
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The Case for Animal-Inclusive Longtermism Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Gary David O’Brien
Longtermism is the view that positively influencing the long-term future is one of the key moral priorities of our time. Longtermists generally focus on humans, and neglect animals. This is a mistake. In this paper I will show that the basic argument for longtermism applies to animals at least as well as it does to humans, and that the reasons longtermists have given for ignoring animals do not withstand
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The Moral Duty Not to Confirm Negative Stereotypes Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Saul Smilansky
Social interaction is laden with stereotypes. Throughout history negative stereotypes have been immensely harmful, leading to hatred, vilification, and direct harm such as discrimination, and they continue to be so in almost all societies. It is widely accepted that we ought not to view members of other groups negatively in stereotypical ways, and also ought not to apply negative stereotypes to members
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Robust Normativity and the Argument from Weirdness: Revisiting Mackie’s Critique Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Victor Moberger
J. L. Mackie argued that moral thought and discourse involve commitment to an especially robust kind of normativity, which is too weird to exist. Thus, he concluded that moral thought and discourse involve systematic error. Much has been said about this argument in the last four decades or so. Nevertheless, at least one version of Mackie’s argument, specifically the one focusing on the intrinsic weirdness
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Threatening Quality of Will Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-12-20 David Shoemaker
Quality of Will (qw) theories of responsibility claim the target of someone’s blameworthiness for an action is their poor quality of will. There have been many “threats” to such a theory over the years, coming out of a literature interested in the metaphysical conditions of free will, threats having to do with moral luck, manipulation, and negligence. In this paper, I am more interested in surveying
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A Bargaining-Theoretic Approach to Moral Uncertainty Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Hilary Greaves, Owen Cotton-Barratt
Nick Bostrom and others have suggested treating decision-making under moral uncertainty as analogous to parliamentary decision-making. The core suggestion of this “parliamentary approach” is that the competing moral theories function like delegates to the parliament, and that these delegates then make decisions by some combination of bargaining and voting. There seems some reason to hope that such
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Are Algorithms Value-Free?: Feminist Theoretical Virtues in Machine Learning Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-11-22 Gabbrielle M. Johnson
As inductive decision-making procedures, the inferences made by machine learning programs are subject to underdetermination by evidence and bear inductive risk. One strategy for overcoming these challenges is guided by a presumption in philosophy of science that inductive inferences can and should be value-free. Applied to machine learning programs, the strategy assumes that the influence of values
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Moral Twin Earth Strikes Back: Against a Neo-Aristotelian Hope Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-10-30 Michael Rubin
A key objection to naturalistic versions of moral realism is that the (meta)semantics to which they are committed yields incorrect semantic verdicts about so-called Moral Twin Earth cases. Recently, it has been proposed that the Moral Twin Earth challenge can be answered by adopting a neo-Aristotelian semantics for moral expressions. In this paper, I argue that this proposal fails. First, however attractive
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Is It Fitting to Divide Value? A Review of The Value Gap Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-10-24 Timothy Perrine
Rønnow-Rasmussen’s The Value Gap is an extended argument for Value Dualism, the view that both goodness and goodness for are coherent value concepts that are not fully understandable in terms of each other. In the first part of the book, he criticizes attempts to fully understand one type of value in terms of the other. In the second part of the book, he argues that both concepts are value concepts
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The Dark Knowledge Problem: Why Public Justifications are Not Arguments Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Sean Donahue
According to the Public Justification Principle, legitimate laws must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Proponents of this principle assume that its satisfaction requires speakers to offer justifications that are representable as arguments that feature premises which reasonable listeners would accept. I develop the concept of dark knowledge to show that this assumption is false. Laws are often
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Paternalism Is Not Less Wrong in Intimate Relationships Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Andreas Bengtson, Søren Flinch Midtgaard
Many believe that paternalism is less wrong in intimate relationships. In this paper, we argue that this view cannot be justified by appeal to (i) beneficence, (ii) shared projects, (iii) vulnerability, (iv) epistemic access, (v) expressivism, or (vi) autonomy as nonalienation. We finally provide an error theory for why many may have believed that paternalism is less wrong in intimate relations.
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Does Practicality Support Noncognitivism? Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Sarah Zoe Raskoff
Normative judgments are practical: they bear a close connection to motivation. Noncognitivists often claim that they have a distinctive explanatory advantage accounting for this connection. After all, if normative judgments just are noncognitive, desire-like states, then it is no mystery why they bear an intimate connection to motivation: desire-like states motivate. In this paper, however, I argue
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Big Data and Compounding Injustice Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Deborah Hellman
This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The Anti-Compounding Injustice principle or aci. Compounding injustice and the aci principle are likely to be relevant when analyzing the moral issues raised by “big data” and its combination with the computational power of machine learning and artificial
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The Right Kind of Reason for the Wrong Kind of Thing Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Laura Tomlinson Makin
This paper offers a novel solution to the Wrong Kind of Reason problem that afflicts Fitting-Attitude analyses of value. I argue that we can distinguish reasons of the right kind from reasons of the wrong kind by being clear about what our reasons are for. In Wrong Kind of Reason cases, our reason to have a certain affective attitude is a reason for an action, and it is this category-mistake that is
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The Myth of Zero-Sum Responsibility: Towards Scaffolded Responsibility for Health Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Neil Levy, Julian Savulescu
Some people argue that the distribution of medical resources should be sensitive to agents’ responsibility for their ill-health. In contrast, others point to the social determinants of health to argue that the collective agents that control the conditions in which agents act should bear responsibility. To a large degree, this is a debate in which those who hold individuals responsible currently have
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Absolutism and its Limits Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 John Hawthorne, Yoaav Isaacs, Clayton Littlejohn
Many philosophers think that given the choice between saving the life of an innocent person and averting any number of minor ailments or inconveniences, it would be better to save the life. How, then, should one compare the risk of an innocent person’s life to such minor ailments and inconveniences? If lives are infinitely more important than insignificant factors then any risk cannot be outweighed
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What is “Race” in Algorithmic Discrimination on the Basis of Race? Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Lily Hu
Machine learning algorithms bring out an under-appreciated puzzle of discrimination, namely figuring out when a decision made on the basis of a factor correlated with race is a decision made on the basis of race. I argue that prevailing approaches, which are based on identifying and then distinguishing among causal effects of race, in their metaphysical timidity, fail to get off the ground. I suggest
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Privacy and the Standing to Hold Responsible Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-08-11 Linda Radzik
In order to be held responsible, it is not enough that you have done something blameworthy; someone else must also have the standing to hold you responsible. But a number of critics have claimed that this concept of ‘standing’ does not hold up to scrutiny and that we should excise it from our analyses of accountability practices. In this paper, I examine James Edwards’ (2019) attempt to define standing
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Can We Turn People Into Pain Pumps? On the Rationality of Future Bias and Strong Risk Aversion Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 David Braddon-Mitchell, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller
Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for negatively valenced events to be located in the past rather than the future, and positively valenced ones to be located in the future rather than the past. Strong risk aversion is the preference to pay some cost to mitigate the badness of the worst outcome. People who are both strongly risk averse and future-biased can face a series of choices
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Hypocrisy, Knowledge, and the Rule of Blaming Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Yuval Eylon
It is commonly accepted that non-hypocrisy is a condition of blaming, and that it is a moral condition. This paper proposes an alternative, epistemic, view of blaming: knowledge is necessary for blaming, and with the added condition that knowledge provides a (motivating) reason for action – sufficient. First it is argued that knowing that the action of a blamee is wrong is necessary for blaming. Second
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The Morality of Defensive Force: Replies to Christie, Hecht, and Parry Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Jonathan Quong
This article offers a brief synopsis of some of the main claims from The Morality of Defensive Force, and replies to the symposium contributions of Lars Christie, Lisa Hecht, and Jonathan Parry.
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Dirty Hands Defended Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-06-28 Linda Eggert
This paper defends the possibility of dirty hands against the longstanding skepticism that an action cannot be simultaneously right and wrong and that dirty hands cases are therefore impossible. While skeptics are right to recognize that prima facie reasons against violating moral duties may be overridden, they are wrong to deny that actions required by necessity may nevertheless remain wrong. Dirty
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The Right to Exclude and the Duty to Include: Self-determination, Equal Opportunity, and Immigration Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Eszter Kollar, Ayelet Banai
The immigration debate in political theory has produced a series of accounts that justify the state’s right to exclude potential immigrants, where the right of self-determination figures prominently. We challenge two prominent accounts of the self-determination-based right to exclude and defend a circumscribed right to exclude and a corollary duty to admit immigrants, based on our ‘people relationship
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Conventionalism about Property and the Outsider Challenge Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Aaron Salomon
Conventionalism about property is the view that all moral duties correlative to property rights depend essentially either on the existence of a convention that assigns conventional ownership of objects, or on the existence of a body of positive law that confers legal property rights. It has been objected that, if Conventionalism about property is true, then it is impossible for someone to have her
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Epistemic Limitations & the Social-Guiding Function of Justice Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Matthew R. Adams
The contemporary methodological debate about justice has centered around a dispute about the value of so-called ideal theory. I argue that justice performs a social-guiding function, which explains how people should respond to their limited and fallible abilities to realize justice institutionally. My argument helps to re-orientate the contemporary methodological debate. The obvious disagreement between
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Explaining Loss of Standing to Blame Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Justin Snedegar
Both in everyday life and in moral philosophy, many think that our own past wrongdoing can undermine our standing to indignantly blame others for similar wrongdoing. In recent literature on the ethics of blame, we find two different kinds of explanation for this. Relative moral status accounts hold that to have standing to blame, you must be better than the person you are blaming, in terms of compliance
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The Duty to Accept Apologies Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-04-07 Cécile Fabre
The literature on reparative justice focuses for the most part on the grounds and limits of wrongdoers’ duties to their victims. An interesting but relatively neglected question is that of what – if anything – victims owe to wrongdoers. In this paper, I argue that victims are under a duty to accept wrongdoers’ apologies. I claim that to accept an apology is to form the belief that the wrongdoer’s apologetic
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Equality, Democracy, and the Nature of Status: A Reply to Motchoulski Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Jake Zuehl
Several contemporary philosophers have argued that democracy earns its moral keep in part by rendering political authority compatible with social or relational equality. In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Motchoulski examines these relational egalitarian defenses of democracy, finds the standard approach wanting, and advances an alternative. The standard approach depends on the claim that
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The Constraint Against Doing Harm and Long-Term Consequences Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Charlotte Franziska Unruh
Many people hold the constraint against doing harm, the view that the reason against doing harm is stronger than the reason against merely allowing harm, everything else being equal. have recently argued that when considering indirect long-term consequences of our everyday behavior, the constraint against doing harm faces a problem: it has the absurd implication that we should do as little as possible
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Fairness, Benefits, and Voluntary Acceptance Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Edward Song
The principle of fairness suggests that it is wrong for free riders to enjoy cooperative benefits without also helping to produce them. Considerations of fairness are a familiar part of moral experience, yet there is a great deal of controversy as to the conditions of their application. The primary debate concerns whether cooperative benefits need to be voluntarily accepted. Many argue that acceptance
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Libertarian Control and Ultimate Responsibility Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-01-09 Martin Montminy
I raise three new objections against Robert Kane’s account of ultimate responsibility based on what he calls self-forming actions (sfa s). First, the ultimate responsibility that we have for our character is very limited, since, according to Kane’s model of character development, our character is shaped by sfa s for which we are only minimally responsible. Second, it is not desirable to rely on sfa s
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(When) Are Authors Culpable for Causing Harm? Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-01-09 Marcus Arvan
To what extent are authors morally culpable for harms caused by their published work? Can authors be culpable even if their ideas are misused, perhaps because they failed to take precautions to prevent harmful misinterpretations? Might authors be culpable even if they do take precautions − if, for example, they publish ideas that others can be reasonably expected to put to harmful uses, precautions
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The Epistemic Responsibilities of Voters: Towards an Assertion-Based Account Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-25 Michele Giavazzi
It is often claimed that democratic voters have epistemic responsibilities. However, it is not often specified why voters have such epistemic responsibilities. In this paper, I contend that voters have epistemic responsibilities because voting is best understood as an act that bears assertoric force. More precisely, voters perform what I call an act of political advocacy whereby, like an asserter who
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Public Servants Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-16 Mario I. Juarez-Garcia, Alexander Schaefer
Several political philosophers have recently pointed out that current electoral democracies fail to facilitate accurate and reliable feedback on the performance of public officials. Rather than rejecting democracy as a hopeless ideal, we defend an institutional reform called Service Responsibility, which introduces a superior incentive structure that better aligns the interests of citizens and public
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Is There a Duty to Read the News? Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Amy Berg
It seems as though we have a duty to read the news – that we’re doing something wrong when we refuse to pay attention to what’s going on in the world. But why? I argue that some plausible justifications for a duty to read the news fail to fully explain this duty: it cannot be justified only by reference to its consequences, or as a duty of democratic citizenship, or as a self-regarding duty. It can
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People in Suitcases Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-09-19 Kacper Kowalczyk
Ex-ante deontology is an attempt to combine deontological constraints on doing or intending harm with the idea that one should act in everyone’s interest if possible. I argue that ex-ante deontology has serious problems in cases where multiple decisions are to be made over time. I then argue that these problems force us to choose between commonsense deontological morality and a more consequentialist
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Activating the Right to Be Rescued Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Lisa Hecht
When a person finds herself in peril her right to be rescued is activated and a rescue duty is imposed on those who are in a position to help. In this article, I argue that the activation of the right to be rescued needs to be suitably constrained so that the rescuee is prevented from arbitrarily controlling the normative situation between herself and potential rescuers. Such control would be in conflict
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Against the Worse Than Nothing Account of Harm: A Reply to Immerman Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Jens Johansson, Olle Risberg
The counterfactual comparative account of harm (cca) faces well-known problems concerning preemption and omission. In a recent article in this journal, Daniel Immerman proposes a novel variant of cca, which he calls the worse than nothing account (wtna). According to Immerman, wtna nicely handles the preemption and omission problems. We seek to show, however, that wtna is not an acceptable account
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Mortal Mistakes Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Lars Christie
What are the justifications and constraints on the use of force in self-defense? In his book The Morality of Defensive Force, Jonathan Quong presents the moral status account to address this and other fundamental questions. According to the moral status account, moral liability to defensive harm is triggered by treating others with less respect than they are due. At the same time, Quong rejects the
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The Scope of the Means Principle Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Jonathan Parry
This paper focuses on Quong’s account of the scope of the means principle (the range of actions over which the special constraint on using a person applies). One the key ideas underpinning Quong’s approach is that the means principle is downstream from an independent and morally prior account of our rights over the world and against one another. I raise three challenges to this ‘rights first’ approach
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The Right to Preserve Culture Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-07-18 Matthias Hoesch
Although a supposed right to preserve culture is frequently invoked in normative debates, philosophical literature has produced scarcely any attempt to treat it as a particular claim that differs from other cultural rights and, for that reason, is in need of a particular justification. Only by clarifying the content and the normative reasons underlying the supposed right, however, is it possible to
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Demystifying the Deep Self View Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-06-06 August Gorman
Deep Self views of moral responsibility have been criticized for positing mysterious concepts, making nearly paradoxical claims about the ownership of one’s mental states, and promoting self-deceptive moral evasion. I defend Deep Self views from these pervasive forms of skepticism by arguing that some criticism is hasty and stems from epistemic injustice regarding testimonies of experiences of alienation
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Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism as Ethical Naturalism Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-05-13 Parisa Moosavi
Neo-Aristotelian naturalism purports to explain morality in terms of human nature, while maintaining that the relevant aspects of human nature cannot be known scientifically. This has led some to conclude that neo-Aristotelian naturalism is not a form of ethical naturalism in the standard, metaphysical sense. In this paper, I argue that neo-Aristotelian naturalism is in fact a standard form of ethical
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How (and How Not) to Defend Lesser-Evil Options Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Kerah Gordon-Solmon
Many philosophers believe in lesser-evil justifications for doing harm: if the only way to stop a trolley from killing five is to divert it away onto one, then we may divert. But recently, Helen Frowe has argued that we do not only have the option to pursue the lesser evil: in most cases, we are so obligated. After critically assessing Frowe’s argument, I develop three mutually compatible accounts
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Richard Kraut, The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Nicholas M. Sparks
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Michael Moehler, Minimal Morality: A Multilevel Social Contract Theory Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Saranga Sudarshan
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Daniel Halliday, The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Marina Uzunova
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Christopher B. Kulp, Knowing Moral Truth. A Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Artur Szutta
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Sven Nyholm, Humans and Robots; Ethics, Agency and Anthropomorphism Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Lydia Farina
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Neil Sinclair (ed.), The Naturalistic Fallacy Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Dan Kemp
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Javier S. Hidalgo, Unjust Borders: Individuals and the Ethics of Immigration Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Daniel Sharp
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Kate Manne, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Joshua B. Grubbs,Brandon Warmke
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Christopher Finlay, Is Just War Possible? Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Camilo Ardila
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Richard Rowland, The Normative and the Evaluative Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Christos Kyriacou
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Laura Papish, Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Irina Schumski
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Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Adam Gjesdal
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Roger S. Gottlieb, Morality and the Environmental Crisis Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Anh-Quân Nguyen
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Benjamin Bennett, Shaping a Modern Ethics: The Humanist Legacy from Nietzsche to Feminism Journal of Moral Philosophy (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Jacob L. Goodson