Philosophy Colloquium Lecture Series

In her 2006 review of Virginia Held’s The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global, Carla Bagnoli asks: “Is the ethics of care an autonomous ‘moral theory’?” Nearly twenty years later, the answer to Bagnoli’s pivotal question remains unclear. While Bagnoli originally concluded that “[a]s an independent theoretical approach, the ethics of care is not yet justified,” in this paper, I argue that not only does care ethics serve as a meaningful alternative to moral theories, as many feminist philosophers have observed, but it also contains the seeds of an autonomous moral theory. To this end, I offer one aspect of what it would take to justify the ethics of care as a unified, independent moral theoretical approach: a constructivist grounding for the ethics of care.

Recent developments in the ethics of care have made strides toward advancing care ethics as a moral theory. For example, after observing a lack of a “precise analysis of care ethics’ central normative commitment,” Stephanie Collins engages the care ethics literature to generate the normative core of care ethics, captured by what she calls the “slogan” of care ethics: “dependency relationships generate responsibilities” (2015, 2), which she later articulates as a principle. In another important intervention, Steven Steyl provides a theory of right action for care ethics. He holds that “[a]n action is right if and only if it is caring” (2021, 512), with caring further being stipulated in terms of promoting the flourishing of those being cared for (2021, 516; cf. Steyl 2020). Both contributions are substantial. Neither, however, addresses the more fundamental question of why one is morally required to adhere to the dependency principle or what it is that makes caring action a morally required action.

In response, I develop a restricted constructivist justification (Street 2010) of care ethics. I argue that the truth of normative claims of the sort that Collins, Steyl, and other care ethicists wish to make rests on the recognition that the situation of humans as inextricably related, inevitably dependent, and vulnerable beings necessarily entails the acceptance of a set of substantive normative claims required to maintain their abilities as reasoning moral agents. That is, it implies acceptance of a responsibility to care for one another, in which others’ needs or interests (and perhaps sometimes even desires) warrant consideration in moral deliberation.

Hume's problem of induction, in its modern formulations, asserts that no universal rule of inductive inference can be justified since all such attempts are circular or trigger an infinite regress. The material theory of induction has no universal rules of inductive inference. The warrants for inductive inferences are supplied by background facts. Hume's problem is thereby dissolved since there are no universal rules of inductive inference to be justified. I will argue that attempts to revive the problem within the material theory fail.

See Chapter 6 "The Problem of Induction" in The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference, BSPSopen. (Open access)

https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/homepage/cv.html#material_large

Many of us believe that human extinction would be catastrophically bad. Some of us believe that, among the events that are realistically possible, it would be the worst. But why? Part of the explanation is that it would frustrate many or most of the interests of the people who would be alive while it was occurring and perhaps, retroactively, the interests of people in the past. But if human extinction would really be as bad as many of us think it would be, the main part of the explanation must be that there would be no more lives with high levels of well-being when there could have been a vast number of such lives. This, however, suggests that there must be a moral reason to cause people to exist just because their lives would be worth living, and this is in tension not only with common-sense morality but also with widely accepted views in “population ethics.” The main aim of my talk is to present a variety of arguments against the common view that there is no moral reason to cause well-off people to exist just because they would have lives that would be good for them. If these arguments are sound, they should provide firm grounding for common beliefs about the badness of extinction.

We find in numerous philosophical traditions the idea that human activity plays a key role in construction of the world, whether through conceptualization of an originally undifferentiated “world-stuff”, constructive idealist views such as those of Yogacara Buddhists, or other forms of the view. Here I look at two versions of this idea that share a similar position concerning the relationship of communal to individual activity, in order to better understand the relationship between these two forms of activity in theories of human construction of the world, as well as the ways the stress changes dependent on the social concerns associated with these theories. In particular, I discuss the Classic Maya account of the constructive element of ritual performance, and the view of the Five Percent Nation/Nation of Gods and Earths, a black nationalist movement in the U.S. that began in the mid 1960s, of the self as the “sole controller” and creator, grounding this view in communal discourse that develops the individual. In each of these systems, we find a picture of the necessary interplay between individual and communal activity, even while communal action is centered in the Maya view and individual action is centered in the NGE view. This difference, I argue, is primarily explained by key differences in the social meanings and implications of these theories in their respective societal contexts.

In “A Method for Metaethics,” Velleman considers the question “What turns a fact into a reason for acting?” but he doesn’t answer the question; rather, he proposes a method for finding the answer. He arrives at that method by considering the views of historical figures such as Aristotle and David Hume as well as the 20th-century philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, and Bernard Williams. The method he proposes cannot be derived from the mere concept of a reason for acting, but he suggests that we cannot derive a theory of reasons for acting by simply analyzing that concept.

Philosophers used to take it that developing an account of the highest good was crucial to work in ethics and political philosophy, and, on some views, even to work in speculative or theoretical philosophy. An account of the highest good was supposed to ground accounts of how one should live (given one's situation) and what one should do (under one's circumstances). In this talk, Vogler will explore the topic of the highest good with special emphasis on the accounts of it provided by Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Vogler will urge that we ought to revive interest in this lost topic.