Institutional wrongdoing and moral perception

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 96-115

  Pleasants, Nigel ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 78650322228     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00413.x     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Michael Slote, "Is Virtue Possible?" Analysis 42, no. 2 (1982): 72;
2. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 124.
3. Susan Wolf, "Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility," in The Inner Citadel: Essays on Autonomy, ed. J. Christman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 146.
4. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 66-67.
5. Wolf, "Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility," 146.
6. Michele Moody-Adams, "Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance," Ethics 104, no. 2 (1994): 291-309 (hereinafter referred to in main text and notes as "AI");
7. Michele Moody-Adams, Field-work in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) (hereinafter "FF");
8. Michele Moody-Adams, "The Idea of Moral Progress," Metaphilosophy 30, no. 3 (1999): 168-83.
9. A similar stance is taken by Alasdair MacIntyre in "Social Structures and Their Threats to Moral Agency," Philosophy 74, no. 289 (1999): 311-29.
10. Wolf, "Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility," 146 (my emphasis).
11. MacIntyre argues that there are societies "whose structures to some large degree inhibit the exercise of the powers of moral agency." But he also maintains that the diminished responsibility defense fails even for institutional wrongdoers in such societies, because they "are not passive victims," and therefore "share in responsibility for having made themselves into the kind of diminished agent that they are." See MacIntyre, "Social Structures," 327.
12. G. A. Cohen, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 211-12, n. 21 and n. 28.
13. Paul Benson, "Culture and Responsibility: A Reply to Moody-Adams," Journal of Social Philosophy 32, no. 4 (2001): 610.
14. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), sec. 258.
15. Giuseppe Cambiano, "Aristotle and the Anonymous Opponents of Slavery," in Classical Slavery, ed. M. Finley (London: Cass, 1987), 23.
16. See Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (London: Duckworth, 1993).
17. Jürgen Habermas's notion of opening oneself to persuasion by "the unforced force of the better argument" nicely captures the ideal form of autonomous judgment. See Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 163.
18. Thomas Haskell, "Responsibility, Convention, and the Role of Ideas in History," in Objectivity Is Not Neutrality (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 302.
19. Thomas Haskell, "Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Antislavery," The Ameri - can Historical Review 92, no. 4 (1987): 848.
20. According to Ronald Dworkin, the "paradigm liberal position on abortion" holds that abortion "means the extinction of a human life that has already begun, and for that reason alone involves a serious moral cost," but one which is "nevertheless morally justified for a variety of serious reasons" (32-33). Ronald Dworkin, Life's Dominion (New York: Vintage).
21. E.g., Williams, Shame and Necessity.
22. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), makes a similar point against Cartesian doubt: One does not doubt that something is the case merely by avowing, contemplating, or entertaining propositions of the form "I doubt that X," however intensely one concentrates on the proposition.
23. See, for example, Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity (London: Routledge, 2000), 181-83, who chastises Singer not so much for his (tentative) conclusions, but for being prepared even to broach what he (Gaita) regards as "the morally unthinkable."
24. As an antidote to the perceived coldness and emotional detachment of conventional consequentialist and deontological arguments for animal liberation, Josephine Donovan voices the decidedly non-reflective exhortation: "We should not kill, eat, torture, and exploit animals because they do not want to be so treated, and we know that. If we listen, we can hear them." Josephine Donovan, "Animal Rights and Feminist Theory," in Ecofeminism, ed. G. Gaard (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 185.
25. See Wittgenstein's extended discussion of the concepts, Philosophical Investigations, 193-208.
26. Dworkin, Life's Dominion, argues that practically all "liberals" and antiabortionists share the same core values and moral principles (the "sacredness" of human life), but apply them in different ways.
27. Lawrence Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 30.
28. In her article "Virtue Theory and Abortion," Philosophy and Public Affairs 20, no. 3 (1991): 223-46, Rosalind Hursthouse rejects traditional approaches to the morality of abortion that argue over its permissibility as such, advocating instead a contextually sensitive approach that attends to the conditions under which abortion in particular cases manifests vice or virtue.
29. See John Searle, Rationality in Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 68.
30. See Bernard Williams, "Deciding to Believe," in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
31. Searle, Rationality, 15.