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.
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.
Using Trevor Hedberg’s consequentialist argument for population control, I consider some historical and modern arguments against such control, and suggest responses that address those concerns. In particular, I will argue that economic concerns and anti-colonialist anxieties are misguided. Despite this and even with the best adaptive policies, the world’s environment and climate cannot survive the number of human beings currently on the planet, much less more. While acknowledging legitimate restrictions on coercion and acknowledging the problems of effectiveness, I will suggest that there is value in recognizing a problem even where we have limited solutions. Contrary to Hedberg, I will also argue that modern industrialized societies have special obligations to restrict their procreation rates.
Started out interesting in Bioethics and the Ethics of War. Now I'm interested in Environmental Ethics. (I'm interested in AI only if to the degree that I can't tolerate spruikers)
This paper outlines and assesses current arguments for and against the ethical hedonist claim that pleasure is the only good, and that pain is the only bad. It outlines and appraises some recent moves in ‘heterogeneity’ arguments against hedonism, and some moves in recent arguments for hedonism that appeal to an experience requirement or a resonance requirement. It also analyses contest between attitudinal and phenomenal accounts of pleasure and pain, and some differences among such accounts that matter in experience/resonance arguments for hedonism, and in heterogeneity arguments against hedonism.
According to procreative asymmetry, there is a reason not to create a miserable life not worth living, whereas there is no reason to create a life worth living for its own sake. Although this idea is plausible, it is difficult to account for within a standard consequentialist framework based on population axiology. This paper proposes a new formal framework that extends consequentialism and argues that this intuition can be given a welfarist explanation in terms of dynamic consistency. More specifically, the framework evaluates actions not only in terms of the outcomes they bring about, but also in terms of the outcomes before those actions are performed. As a result, it becomes possible to distinguish between improving the well-being of existing individuals and creating new happy individuals. Within this framework, the axiom of dynamic consistency yields a result corresponding to the asymmetry. Creating a miserable life not worth living is impermissible because it is inconsistent with the ex post perspective, whereas refraining from creating a life worth living is permissible. Moreover, from the same mechanism of consistency, the intuitive judgments in the non-identity problem can also be explained in a unified way.
In virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, someone’s exercise of “intellectual” virtues such as open-mindedness, curiosity, and intellectual humility is understood as key to responsible and knowledge-conducive belief formation. “Moral” virtues such as generosity, courage, and kindness are largely treated as distinct and separate from their intellectual counterparts.
However, recognition of our ubiquitous dependence on others for not only information but also norms for finding and interpreting such undermines individualist approaches and implies a more complex relationship between so-called intellectual and moral virtue. This paper argues that given our beliefs are often formed by knowledge from others and are mediated through social practices of knowing, our regard and treatment of others is necessarily implicated in belief-formation and the pursuit of knowledge.
Drawing primarily on work on social epistemic dependence and Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice (2003), I propose that social epistemic dependence suggests efficacious epistemic practices rely to some extent on ethical regard for and treatment of others. This claim motivates a reconsideration of the traditional distinction between moral and intellectual virtues and provokes a need for a virtue ethic of belief which unifies moral and intellectual concerns and practices.
Transhumanism advances the view that enhancing human cognitive and physical capacities through technological means constitutes the primary route to the greatest good. On this view, the current human condition is deficient and inefficient, and should be optimised, re-engineered, or even transcended into a “posthuman” status to achieve flourishing. I critically analyse Nick Bostrom’s transhumanist framework, focusing in particular on three key ideas: his characterisation of the human as a rational, isolated, and disembodied agent; of limits as constraints to be overcome; and of flourishing as the maximisation of capacities and subjective wellbeing alongside the minimisation of effort and suffering. I argue that this individualistic and reductionist account of the human, limits, and flourishing is inconsistent with ecological and scientific understandings of human nature. Drawing on ecological, system, and relational approaches – including embodied cognition, complex systems theory, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s relational ontology – I present an alternative view of humans as embodied, situated, and relational beings, constituted through dynamic interactions with ecological and evolutionary processes. From this perspective, limits are not merely constraints, but constitutive conditions of flourishing.
I am an early career researcher with a PhD in Health and a Master's in Clinical and Community Psychology. I am currently undertaking a Master of Research in Philosophy at Macquarie University with a project on Transhumanism and human enhancement, particularly the work of Nick Bostrom... Read More →
Will my AI partner really give me the pleasure I expect? Or am I just deceiving myself? While Kaczmarek (2024) looks at human-AI relationships through the lens of self-deception, I offer an alternative, but possibly complementary view. This draws on Plato's idea of false pleasure. This talk re-visits Plato's Philebus an often overlooked, and somewhat peculiar text, which categorises varieties of false pleasure. While there have been debates in the literature in the past about whether pleasure can be false, this seems to have fallen out of favour these days. This talk intends to revive the discussion of false pleasure in light of AI relationships and self-deception (Kaczmarek, 2024). We don’t need to commit ourselves to the idea of whether it is indeed a false pleasure, but the idea of false pleasure provides on way of explicating the concerns or unease people have. I conclude by offering a modest extension to the varieties of false pleasure.
For many, honesty is a key tenant of friendship. We trust our friends to ‘give it to us straight’, to ‘keep it real’. We often like to believe that we can be our truest selves around our friends. But how reasonable is it to expect total candor from our friends? Might it sometimes be more acceptable to lie to preserve our friends’ feelings or interests? Are lies told to our friends, in a way, worse than lies told to non-friends? I explore various categories of lies - lies by omission, lies by commission, and lies by misrepresentation. I present two categories of potential justification for lying to a friend - internalist justification, reasons motivated by the friend’s interest, and externalist justification, reasons extraneous to the friend’s interest. Ultimately, I argue that all lies, regardless of content or justification, should be broadly considered unacceptable, but that our decisions about whether to lie to a friend or, alternately, our response to being lied to by a friend can and should be motivated by the features of the lie.
Some of your choices are primarily guided by the interests of others: for example, which charities to give to or which political policies to vote for. How should you evaluate the options when they involve risk—when you don’t know how the world will turn out? I argue for a tight connection between the problem of making a risky choice for another person and the problem of distributing benefits and burdens across people. This yields a schema for a principle governing risk-taking for others, both when you know a person’s attitude toward risk and when you do not. I detail several ways to fill in this schema, including my preferred view. The result is a unified framework for thinking about what we owe to others in cases of risk.
In his 2019 paper Two Visions of Welfare,Fred Feldman defends Attitudinal Hedonism about welfare by positing a conceptually pluralist account of welfare. Feldman argues that there are two concepts of welfare: Pure Welfare Narrowly Conceived and Enhanced Welfare Broadly Conceived. In this talk I appraise Feldman’s move to pluralism and his subsequent account of welfare. I proceed in four parts. First, I introduce the idea of moves (such as ‘going pluralist’), how moves might come about, and the benefits that we can get by employing them. Next, I introduce Feldman’s use of a move to conceptual pluralism. Then, I argue that Feldman’s attempt merely collapses into a case of conceptual gerrymandering, a case of artificially shifting the bounds of a concept to rule out one’s less-preferred theories of that concept on conceptual grounds. Finally, I argue that we can learn at least two things from Feldman’s unsuccessful move to pluralism. First, there is a problem that all conceptual pluralist accounts will face: the umbrella problem. Second, there is a plausible solve for the umbrella problem in the case of the concept of welfare: a move to functionalism.
Victims of wrongdoing are frequently encouraged to forgive in order to move forward in peace. Victims who keep reminding the perpetrators of the past wrongdoing might be accused of not having forgiven at all. Arguably, real healing will be achieved by victims who let bygones be bygones, who forgive and forget. However, victims of extreme wrongdoing are also regularly encouraged to participate in memorials and collective acts of remembrance which repeatedly pull them back to condemn the past wrongdoing. We are told that remembrance is part of the vigilance required in order to protect against wrongs of this kind being perpetrated again. These victims are told that they should forgive but never forget. In this talk I will ask whether we can resolve the tension between these two claims by thinking more carefully about the conceptual relationship between forgiving and forgetting, and about the moral function of remembrance.
A widely accepted view about the badness of death is the Deprivation Account (DA), according to which death is bad for the person who dies because it deprives them of future goods. A natural idea for DA proponents is that we should lament our death if and only if, and to the extent that, it is bad for us—a view called the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption (NBNL). However, Travis Timmerman has recently argued that DA proponents should reject NBNL. This paper has two aims. First, I argue, pace Timmerman, that DA is compatible with NBNL. Second, I explore what follows if both DA and NBNL are true. I shall tentatively defend the claim that, given both claims, we should not lament our death in most actual cases. My defense relies on the observation that we normally lack sufficiently good reasons to believe that our death is bad for us. In most actual cases, we have only a very limited amount of information about what our own circumstances would be like in the remote future had we not died.
Product boycotts are a common feature of our political lives. Vegans avoid animal products, and many Americans boycott Tesla for political reasons. Boycotts are a central mechanism through which consumers attempt to hold firms morally accountable within market systems. Consequentialists defend consumer boycotts on the basis of their expected effects. Non-consequentialists, by contrast, defend boycotts on grounds such as non-complacency, the expression of disapproval and public solidarity, or their role as instruments of democratic values. I reject these defences and provide a novel non-consequentialist framework to evaluate the moral goodness of consumer boycotts. I argue that the moral significance of product boycotts does not depend on their causal efficacy but on their expressive role in reflecting consumers’ moral concerns. Consumer boycotts are actions through which agents manifest what they care about and what they take to be morally important. When such actions express morally admirable concerns — for instance, concern for animal welfare or justice — they reflect well on the consumer’s moral concerns; when they express morally objectionable concerns, they reflect poorly. Consequently, even causally inefficacious boycotts can be morally meaningful, not as instruments of change, but as expressions of moral commitments that contribute to making us morally better persons.
People should be honest, but we know, or ought to know, that being honest is more demanding for some people, in some circumstances, than it is for others. Do we have a duty to avoid putting those people in those circumstances if we can? I argue that we do have that duty and that it is evident (even if not explicitly recognised) in some institutional arrangements (e.g., the legal privilege against self-incrimination), but that it is ignored in others (e.g., when we incentivise dishonesty about relationship status in welfare systems). At least occasionally, failure to recognise the obligation imposes heavy burdens on people and amounts to a significant wrong.
