Against moral intuitionism, which holds that moral intuitions can be non-inferentially justified, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that moral intuitions are unreliable and must be confirmed to be justified (i.e. must be justified inferentially) because they are subject to cognitive biases. However, I suggest this is merely a renewed version of the argument from disagreement against intuitionism....

I offer a new approach to teaching ethics that offers a heuristic for moral reasoning and attempts to inculcate a habitual process of moral reasoning. I use a variety of theories from ethics, philosophy of mind, and psychology to create what I call Sympathetic Moral Reasoning. In this paper, I explain my initial motivations for this approach as well as some of my theoretical inspirations in dev...

I offer here a new theory of moral agency –why people are ethical, why they are not, and how to get them to be more ethical. I look broadly at evidence from the new brain sciences, systems theory, and Spinoza’s philosophy to address the question. Spinoza’s vision of the infinitely expansive boundaries of the self as we progressively take in and embrace the world, and also extrude ourselves into...

Moral error theory of the kind defended by J.L. Mackie and Richard Joyce is premised on two claims: (1) that moral judgements essentially presuppose that moral value has absolute authority, and (2) that this presupposition is false, because nothing has absolute authority. This paper accepts (2) but rejects (1). It is argued first that (1) is not the best explanation of the evidence from moral p...

which Ronald Dworkin published three decades ago. Though that earlier volume bore a catchier title, Justice in Robes is otherwise similar in being a collection of very loosely related essays on sundry topics in legal, political, and moral philosophy. Both books display Dworkin’s truculent hostility toward legal positivism and his more polite opposition to value-pluralism (namely, the notion tha...

Mark Lenker is Assistant Librarian for Reference and Instruction and Elizabeth Kocevar-Weidinger is Associate Librarian for Reference and Instruction in Greenwood Library at Longwood University; e-mail: lenkermn@ longwood.edu and [email protected]. © Mark Lenker and Elizabeth Kocevar-Weidinger Though the academic library’s primary mission is to serve the students, faculty, and sta...

Using a unique experimental data set, we investigate how asymmetric legal rights shape bargainers’ aspiration levels through moral entitlements derived from equity norms and number prominence. Aspiration formation is typically hard to observe in real life. Our study involves 15 negotiations from Germany and China. Over the course of the negotiation, bargainers discuss the distribution of an amo...

The Humean theory of motivation remains the default position in much of the contemporary literature in meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. Yet despite its widespread support, the theory is implausible as a view about what motivates agents to act. More specifically, my reasons for dissatisfaction with the Humean theory stem from its incompatibility with what I take to be a compelli...