Moral psychology has developed increasingly sophisticated tools for measuring moral judges: their values, ideological styles, and responses to sacrificial dilemmas. It has also developed substantial resources for constructing and validating moral stimuli. What remains underdeveloped is a framework for describing the moral structure of the scenarios being judged. This matters because case-level moral judgment is best understood as a person × situation phenomenon: to study that interaction, judge-side measures must be paired with scenario-side descriptions. I propose a provisional scenario-side framework that organises moral scenarios around three higher-order dimensions — Orientation, Cost, and Moral Authorship — which can later be decomposed into more specific coding questions. These dimensions ask, respectively, who or what the act is for, what is harmed, risked, sacrificed, or imposed, and whether, and how, the morally salient outcome is attributable to an agent. I defend these axes through a contrast-case argument: if a framework cannot distinguish cases that differ only in Orientation, Cost, or Moral Authorship, then it describes moral scenarios too coarsely. The proposed framework does not determine which acts are right or wrong; its task is prior, preserving the structural distinctions on which such verdicts depend.
I present findings from a 4-month Martin Seligman-inspired wellbeing intervention of keeping a diary of 1) at least one positive emotion experienced, 2) personally enacting and 3) socially modelled at least one of Christopher Peterson and Seligman’s 24 character strengths daily as a New Zealend intermediate school teacher aide. Strengths enacted were mainly my greater ones as measured by Seligman’s Values In Action test and my judgement. Strengths modelled were informed mainly by the VIA test, professional education resources, counselling theory, and Michelle Borba’s moral education research. I engage with Carol Ryff’s critiques of Seligman’s positive psychology, but Seligman’s character strength research resonates with my main previous wellbeing practice, spirituality especially meditation, and Aristotle’s eudaimonian ethics. Interpreting Aristotle, the good life comprises a contemplative and an active element, the contemplative leading to eudaimonia, and the active centrally involving cultivation of virtue. Some philosophers argue Aristotle’s social praxis surpasses his contemplative Theoria in goodness. My meditation maintains “high-quality wellbeing,” “flourishing,” according to Edward Diener and Katherine Ryan’s subjective wellbeing criteria: positive affect, limiting negative affect, increasing mental engagement and meaning in life. I observe whether TA work as social contribution, less contemplative, equals meditation in sustaining eudaimonic wellbeing.
The environment is immoral and needs to be engineered to accord with our measures of the good, claim animal ethics and effective altruist philosophers. We should engage in “paradise engineering”: the deliberate deployment of advanced biotechnology to engineer nature according to a welfare or utility-based metric. This movement has taken transhumanist thought, amplified and funded by the EA-rationalist movement, and then applied it to nature. This requires a denial of non-welfare-based forms of non-instrumental value. While I agree with critics that radical transformationalism is unwarranted due to feasibility and deference-based reasons, I will raise a more fundamental ethical objection. I argue that the subjugation of nature to accord with human moral metrics diminishes nature's ability to be a robust producer of non-instrumental values. I develop what I call a meta-option-value argument: nature is a robust and open-ended generator of non-instrumental value relations, and people reliably create novel forms of such valuation over time. The intentional transformation of ecological systems cuts this generative capacity in ways that no instrumentalist accounting can recover. The transformationist, therefore, needs to not only show that their displacement of existing value is legitimate but that they are justified in diminishing a source of future value.
This paper proposes a novel account of the conditions for moral virtue centered on an important but overlooked notion: appreciation. I begin by challenging an intellectualist tradition in the literature, which I call the Cognitive Requirement Thesis (CRT): that moral virtue requires the cognitive ability to explain why one’s action is right (Hursthouse 1999; Annas 2011; Hills 2009, 2015). Targeting Hills’s version in particular, I argue that CRT sets the cognitive bar too high, and propose instead the Moral Appreciation View: one is morally virtuous when and because one is able to appreciate the relevant moral features of a situation. By appreciation, I mean a distinctive kind of sensitivity manifested in three dimensions: (i) perceptual sensitivity: recognizing the presence of a morally relevant feature in a situation, (ii) normative sensitivity: capturing that feature’s normative significance, and (iii) affective sensitivity: being affectively moved and motivated in a way that is responsive to that feature. I further distinguish appreciation from knowledge and understanding, suggesting that it entails neither, and argue that it is necessary for virtue: an agent who appreciates the right-making features of situations is thereby disposed to perform right action in a reliable, non-lucky manner across a range of cases.
In this presentation I demonstrate how many of the problems with utilitarianism and rights-based theories of morality can be solved by a kind of consequentialism based on freedom. I show how this avoids happy torturers, resolves conflicts between rights, and applies better to all possible persons. I also demonstrate how freedom can be weighed sufficiently for consequentialist calculus to take place.
A number of philosophers analyse value in terms of fitting attitudes. On such views, very roughly, something is valuable just when it is a fitting object of certain favourable responses. However, these views face a problem about partiality. Suppose that either my friend or a stranger can be rescued from drowning, but not both, and that the two rescue outcomes are equal in intrinsic value. It still seems fitting for me to prefer my friend’s rescue. This creates a difficulty for fitting-attitude analyses: if the two outcomes are equal in value, why is it fitting for me to prefer one to the other?
The main aim of this paper is to offer a Brentanian solution to this problem. I argue that the difficulty arises because we fail to distinguish two different roles that preference can play. In one role, preference is a way of assessing which object is better. In another, it is a practical response involved in deciding what to do. Once this distinction is made, we can say that my friend’s rescue and the stranger’s rescue are equal in value, while also allowing that it is fitting for me to choose my friend’s rescue. This preserves the intuition that partiality can be fitting without implying that my friend’s rescue is intrinsically better.
Let ‘gossip’ be the practice of discussing a person’s character, conduct, or relationships in that person’s absence. Commonplaces about gossip include that it is an ordinary and ubiquitous part of human life, that it plays important social and even evolutionary roles, and that the mores of various times and places nonetheless view it with suspicion. What major ethical theories should say about gossip remains ambivalent. On the one hand, ethicists have called it a pleasant and often harmless pastime, praised its ability to promote self-knowledge and social cohesion, and recommended it as a tool for combatting pernicious power imbalances. On the other hand, ethicists have also wondered why gossip sometimes inspires feelings of guilt in its practitioners, cautioned that it runs a risk of disrespecting the personhood of those involved, and worried that it might foster undeserved isolation. In this talk, I focus on a distinctly epistemic cost of gossip. I argue that gossip eliminates opportunities to garner ‘acquaintance’—understood in the technical sense as a relationship of direct awareness—between those whose story the gossip narrates and those who listen. This matters because, according to influential views in epistemology, acquaintance so understood possesses a special kind of value.
