Contemporary accounts of luck, though differing in pretty much everything, all agree that the concept of luck is descriptive as opposed to normative. This widespread agreement forms part of the framework in which debates in ethics and epistemology, where the concept of luck plays a central role, are carried out. The hypothesis put forward in the present paper is that luck attributions are sensitive to normative considerations. I report five experiments suggesting that luck attributions are influenced by the normative features of the case, and not merely by descriptive notions like agential control or modal fragility. I discuss the implications of this effect for theories of luck and debates in ethics and epistemology.
Moral obligation, according to one influential conception, is distinct among other moral concepts in at least two respects. First, obligation is linked with demands. If I am obligated to you to do X, then you can demand that I do X. Second, obligation is linked with blame and the rest of our accountability practices. If I am obligated to you to do X, failure to do so is blameworthy and you may hold me accountable for it. The puzzle is the following: when it comes to our attitudes, in particular to our emotional responses, these two components seem to come apart. We do not appear to demand that others feel a given emotion.And yet, we do blame others (and ourselves) for feeling them. The challenge I take on in this paper is to sort out the moral status of emotions given these facts. |One influential conception of moral obligation is given by John Stuart Mill. In a famous passage, Mill tells us that We do not call anything wrong unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it-if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience … There are other things, on the contrary, which we wish that people should do … but yet admit that they are not bound to do; it is not a moral obligation; we do not blame them. (Mill, 2001, pp. 48-49) The idea is that blame, guilt, and related practices of censure track moral obligation and separate it out from other normative concepts. As Mill puts it, "This seems the real turning point between morality and simple expediency" (p. 49).But there is another crucial bit. Mill writes, It is a part of the notion of duty in every one of its form that a person may rightfully be compelled to fulfill it. Duty is a thing which may be exacted from a person, as one exacts a debt. (p. 49, emphasis in the original)
Pyrrhonian Skepticism, as described by Sextus Empiricus, has proven to be an influential philosophical tradition. However, little attention has been paid to the empirical claims that animate the Pyrrhonian project. This chapter aims to reverse that trend. First, it argues that Sextus’s assertion that belief causes anxiety plays an essential role in Sextus’s philosophy. It then reviews modern research on dogmatism and anxiety, and building on this research, presents three different studies conducted with the purpose of elucidating the relationship between them. The results suggest, contrary to Sextus’s claim, that dogmatism predicts low levels of anxiety, though no evidence about their causal relation was found.
The paper attempts to bridge a gap between two prevalent conceptions of forgiveness that are widely thought to be in opposition. On one side of things, forgiveness is often characterized as a gift. The image is an ever-present one, enduring in popular culture no less than in the sober prose of analytic philosophy. But we also talk of forgiveness as a moral imperative, an important, even vital aspect of our moral life. I argue that, contrary to what may at first appear, the two sides are not in tension, and each gets at something important about the nature of forgiveness. Forgiveness is indeed a gift but, much like actual gifts, it is one we are sometimes required to give.
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