Because of COVID-19, the experience of disorientation has become very familiar. Many actions, self-evident and seemingly banal before the pandemic, are now significant due to the uncertainty of how the virus spreads and how it impacts our own health and the health of those around us. For example going to the supermarket or to work and also small interactions such as greeting each other have become a challenge to navigate and have caused many of us to be at a loss for how to proceed in such situations. Moreover, political measures to confine the spread of the virus, such as social distancing guidelines and the more severe stay-at-home orders, have, for many of us, deeply disrupted our ordinary ways of life. Because bars, restaurants, and other recreational places were closed, it became impossible to meet up with friends and family in our habitual ways, just as that many hobbies and pastimes couldn't be pursued anymore. As all these possibilities were cut off at once, many may have had the disorienting experience of losing that which normally gives life meaning. Work is also a profound example. As our habitual patterns of going to work, interacting with colleagues, etc. were disrupted, many of us will have experienced disorientation in finding and organizing alternative ways to still be able to teach, do research, and have meetings in ways that felt meaningful. And certainly those who lost a friend or family member and who were deprived of the normal rituals that give meaning to mourning and that are meant to help us cope with death, will have felt lost in a strange, bewildering world. The pandemic has impacted our lives in these and many more ways, disorienting us by disrupting routines and projects that give meaning and purpose to our lives. We call such experiences in which we do not know how to go on, experiences of disorientation. In doing so, we follow Ami Harbin who has devoted a monograph on the contribution of disorientation to moral life (2016), which led to the organization of a workshop on 'the value of disorientation' at the University of Antwerp in May 2018, and subsequently to this special issue. The examples given above show that the experience of disorientation is a pressing, potentially dramatic issue in the life of agents. Harbin's book, and by extension our workshop, was motivated by the thought that experiences such as these merit a closer look. Whenever philosophers have thought about practical deliberation and moral judgement, they assume a unified and resolved agent (f.e.
Harry G. Frankfurt has put the problem of volitional conflict at the center of philosophical attention. If you care fundamentally about your career and your family, but these cares conflict, this conflict undermines the coherency of your decision standard and thereby your ability to choose and act autonomously. The standard response to this problem is to argue that you can overcome volitional conflict by unifying your foundational motivational states. As Frankfurt puts it, the ‘totality of things that an agent cares about’ plus his ‘ordering of how important to him they are effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live’ (The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 23). In this paper, I critically assess the three main reasons given for such a coherency requirement: 1) we can do only one action at a time; 2) our motivational states come with normative pressure towards coherency; and 3) conflicting motivational states provide us with an incoherent decision-making framework. I conclude that these reasons do not ground a coherency requirement for practical deliberation and argue that we can autonomously express ourselves as volitionally conflicted by acting on our conflicting motivational states over the course of multiple actions.
Physicians frequently encounter situations in which their professional practice is intermingled with moral affordances stemming from other domains of the physician’s lifeworld, such as family and friends, or from general morality pertaining to all humans. This article offers a typology of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ as well as a new theoretical framework for dealing with them. We start out by arguing that established theories of professional ethics do not offer sufficient guidance in situations where professional ethics overlaps with moral duties of other origins. Therefore, we introduce the moral theory developed by Christine M. Korsgaard, that centres around the concept of practical identity. We show how Korsgaard’s account offers a framework for interpreting different types of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ to provide either orientation for solving the conflict or an explanation for the emotional and moral burden involved in moral dilemmas.
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