Rachel Cohon specializes in ethics and its history, particularly the moral philosophy of David Hume, but also ethical theory, applied ethics, and the philosophy of action. She is Professor of Philosophy at the University at Albany, S.U.N.Y. She earned her PhD at U.C.L.A., and taught previously at the University of California, Irvine, and Stanford University. She edited an anthology on Hume’s ethics, Hume: Moral and Political Philosophy (Ashgate, 2001), and wrote the entry on Hume’s moral and political philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Her book, Hume’s Morality: Feeling and Fabrication (Oxford U.P., 2008), reinterprets Hume’s meta-ethics and virtue ethics. Her published articles mainly address topics in Hume’s philosophy and on the nature of reasons for action. She is currently reflecting about character and promises.

Promises and Willing to Be Obligated, with (and without) David Hume

Rachel Cohon

Thanks, Meena, for inviting me to contribute to this blog. I’ve enjoyed reading it and learning about the work of some really interesting philosophers. It’s an honor to be in such accomplished company!

I have longstanding interests in normative ethical theory, metaethics, moral psychology, and the history of philosophy, and I have particularly focused on the moral and political thought of David Hume. I care both about doing accurate textual exegesis in historical context and about grappling with the systematic issues that Hume and others were confronting in the eighteenth century, issues that still puzzle and fascinate us today. My book Hume’s Morality: Feeling and Fabrication focused on two areas: Hume’s metaethics and his important distinction between what he calls the natural and the artificial virtues.[1]

I didn’t begin my career doing history of philosophy but rather writing about reasons for action and reasons to be moral, and I was drawn to Hume at first because I thought I disagreed with his position that cognitions alone cannot move us to action, with his rejection of reason as a foundation of ethics, and with his defense of moral sentimentalism. In the end I do disagree with several of Hume’s positions, but I mainly discovered that Hume was not saying what he was largely believed to have said. For example, he does not deny that beliefs can move us to action – or so I argue in my book. His view is weirder and more interesting than it is usually made out to be. According to Hume reasoning, the process of making inferences, is not by itself a motive to action and doesn’t cause desires or aversions on its own; but causal beliefs about how to obtain pleasure or avoid pain for the agent are perfectly able to generate new desires and aversions that move us to act. (Hume does, however, deny that reason is the foundation of morality and he does defend sentimentalism. But not in quite the ways that many suppose.) There is a good deal we can learn from Hume about how one might develop a normative ethical theory, and specifically an account of the virtues, on a sentimentalist foundation, and how difficult it is to do so. Contemporary sentimentalists and expressivists have to take account of the intersubjective character of moral evaluation: they need to explain why we don’t live in isolated bubbles of individual moral judgment but rather tend to share our judgments and persuade others of them with arguments. And they have to explain what is involved when we distinguish between biased and impartial moral judgments, and when we criticize our own (erstwhile) moral perspective or that of our society. Hume is in fact concerned about avoiding bias in our moral judgments, and about avoiding both individual and (to a lesser extent) cultural relativism; and I argue that he has some successes and also some failures that show both the powerful resources and the limitations of sentimentalism. On the other hand, Hume’s conception of an artificial virtue, a virtue that depends for its existence on human conventions, is, I think, a response to enduring concerns about how to explain the foundations of the virtues of honesty with regard to property and fidelity to promises, on any metaethical theory whatever. Hume’s idea of a social convention is ingenious and he uses it to skirt certain paradoxes that he thought must arise if we try to understand these virtues on the model of a virtue like benevolence.

More recently I have looked at some systematic questions in ethics on their own and also from Hume’s perspective. One of these questions is the nature of the obligation to keep a promise, its ground, and the prerequisites for promising sincerely.

I co-wrote an article called “Promises and Consistency” with my colleague Jason D’Cruz about the challenge posed to the possibility of sincere promising by a conviction that some philosophers have reached from a study of empirical psychology: that human behavior in general lacks cross-situational consistency. [2] This thesis is a crucial component of John Doris’s situationism and some related positions.[3] (Doris and others use it to challenge the existence of character, but Jason and I don’t discuss that role of the thesis at all.) Jason and I argue that someone who is persuaded that consistency across varying (even only slightly varying) situations is quite rare and not to be expected in human beings is consequently incapable of promising sincerely. Jason wrote a lovely follow-on piece working out some further dire consequences of such a belief for the possibility of trust, and it actually beat our original article into print.[4]

Contemporary writers on the nature of promissory obligation disagree about whether a social practice is necessary to explain why promises are morally binding. The practice view has been developed in various current forms (see, for example, Rawls and Hooker), and both roundly criticized and challenged by alternative accounts (Scanlon and Shiffrin are examples).[5] I am working on two papers in which I try to figure out where Hume’s own position would fall in this debate and how Hume’s thought might illuminate it for us today.

One objection to a practice-based account of promissory obligation turns on the insight that this obligation is what we may call directed: its fulfillment is owed to a specific individual (the promisee), who has a claim on the promisor and is wronged if the promisor reneges. (There are other directed obligations, such as the obligation to care for one’s child and some of the duties that arise from property rights.) According to some recent authors, both the views of present-day practice theorists and Hume’s practice-based account imply that the duty to keep a promise is owed not to the promisee but to someone else entirely – it is directed to the wrong party.[6] I argue in a paper I am now revising that leveling this “wrong party” objection at Hume shows a deep misunderstanding of the structure of Hume’s argument about promises and practices. This argument requires me to uncover Hume’s conception of obligation or duty, which is hard to find in his virtue-oriented ethical system. I argue that Hume’s version of ethical sentimentalism (his reliance on sentiments of approval and disapproval to determine what is ethically good and bad) plays a role in his account of promissory obligation, and while his view does not imply that the duty to keep a promise is owed to the wrong party, it is difficult for him to account for the directedness of obligations at all. Difficult, but not impossible. We would have to move beyond the details Hume gives us to account for it, but not necessarily beyond moral sentimentalism.

My other paper in progress is about Hume’s idea that in order to make a morally binding promise, we must perform an act of choosing to obligate ourselves. Hume argues that such an act (he describes it as willing to be obligated) could not possibly be efficacious if performed entirely within the mind, and all talk of that is nonsense. (I can’t actually incur obligation simply by thinking “I hereby choose to place myself under an obligation,” no matter how hard I concentrate.) Some contemporary authors do invoke an act of willing or choosing to be obligated as necessary for promissory obligation,[7] and do not seem worried about Hume’s arguments to the contrary. Carefully investigating the details of Hume’s arguments, I find that while he thinks a private act of self-obligation is impossible, he nonetheless still assumes that some kind of voluntary act of self-obligation is necessary (and with only minimal additional conditions, also sufficient) for incurring the obligation of a promise. Since a private mental act could not have this effect, Hume proposes that a voluntary social act is what creates binding promises. This is one of his strong reasons for adopting a social convention theory. By contrast, it follows from Scanlon’s contemporary account of promissory obligation (according to which we incur the obligation of a promise by intentionally inducing someone to expect us to act as she wants us to) that a choice to obligate ourselves is neither necessary nor sufficient to create a promissory duty. The question is: who is right? While I don’t know yet whether I think a practice is necessary and/or sufficient for promises, my hunch is that some sort of choice to obligate ourselves in fact may be necessary, and at least is, with the addition of just a few very simple background conditions, sufficient. The question I am stuck on is what, exactly, this act of will or choice can come to. How can an agent create a moral duty for herself just by deciding to create a moral duty for herself? Hume and Anscombe[8] offer arguments why this seems impossible. Shiffrin argues that of course it is possible since we do it all the time, just as we create moral permissions by giving consent.[9] Maybe Shiffrin is right that we do it all the time. But what is it that we do?

[1] Oxford University Press, 2008. The book draws on many of Hume’s writings, but most centrally on David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford University Press 1739-40/2000.

[2] Forthcoming in Questions of Character, ed. Iskra Filevå, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2016.

[3] Best known for advocating this view is John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, Cambridge University Press, 2002. See also Gilbert Harman, “Moral philosophy meets social psychology: virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99, 1999.

[4] Jason D’Cruz, “Trust, Trustworthiness, and the Moral Consequence of Consistency,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1;3, Sept. 2015.

[5] John Rawls’s often-cited practice view is in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, revised edition 1999), pp. 301-308. An example of a rule-consequentialist, practice-based view is that of Brad Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-consequentialist Theory of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) and “Promises and Rule-Consequentialism“ (chapter 10 of Hanoch Sheinman, Promises and Agreements (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011)). Alternative approaches and objections to practice views are offered by T. M. Scanlon (most famously) in T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), chapter 7; and Seanna Shiffrin, “Promising, Intimate Relationships, and Conventionalism” (Philosophical Review 16:39, 2008).

[6] Scanlon (ibid.) is just one of many who level this criticism.

[7] See Shiffrin, “Promising, Intimate Relationships, and Conventionalism,” op. cit., and David Owens, “A Simple Theory of Promises,” Philosophical Review 115;1, 2006.

[8] G.E.M. Anscombe, “Rules, Rights, and Promises,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, V. III, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

[9] Shiffrin, ibid.

Miranda Fricker is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, and will move this September to take up a position at CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her research is mainly in Moral Philosophy, and Social Epistemology with a special interest in virtue and feminist perspectives. Currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow she is working on a book on blame and forgiveness. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007); and co-editor of a number of edited collections. She was Director of the Mind Association 2010-2015; and now serves as Moral Philosopher on the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government body of expert advisers that considers claims concerning loss of cultural property during the Nazi era. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association.

Blaming and Forgiving

Miranda Fricker

Thanks for inviting me to contribute—I’ve really enjoyed reading other entries too.

I’m working on blame and forgiveness at the moment, trying to give them a unified treatment, as I believe that together they do the lion’s share of constructing shared moral understandings, and hence a shared moral world. (Moral realists can reserve the right to conceive of such shared moral understandings as matching up to moral reality, or not; others may think that the question of morality’s reality or otherwise becomes otiose once we have achieved a sufficiently vivid picture of the mechanisms through which a shared moral outlook is socially constructed and, shall we say, made real on the basis of what people are capable of experiencing as wrongful.)

How does blame work to generate shared moral understandings? Through communicating blame to a wrongdoer, a hurt party can ‘remind’ the culprit of reasons she recognises but which she failed to act on. In such a situation the relevant shared moral understanding pre-exists the communication of the blame, but it is re-affirmed and underlined. Alternatively, and more intriguingly, however, blame can do more than affirm a pre-existing shared understanding, for if the wrongdoer does not currently recognise the reason that the wronged party is insisting on, then still she may be brought to recognise it through the communication of the blame. Bernard Williams has identified this ‘proleptic’ mechanism of blaming (Williams 1995), and I have tried to develop it a bit (Fricker 2014). But what I want to emphasise is that when blame is communicated to someone who does not yet recognise the relevant reasons, but is caused in some measure to come to recognise the reason by being on the receiving end of the blame, then shared moral understanding is actively generated—the proleptic mechanism is a mechanism of causal social construction. Treating someone as if she recognised a given moral reason can bring it about that she really does.

What about forgiveness? How does forgiveness work to generate shared moral understandings? I will confine myself to the kind of forgiveness that is sometimes called ‘unconditional’, or ‘elective’. I shall label it Gifted Forgiveness. Like blame, it can only serve to generate shared moral understanding if it is actually communicated to the relevant party; though unlike blame the creation of shared moral understanding is not its most basic aim or purpose (I won’t trouble readers here with my view of what its most basic purpose is). Instead Gifted Forgiveness brings shared moral understanding through a special sort of presupposition. Let me explain. In Gifted Forgiveness, the hurt party eschews any stance of moral demand (‘you must say you’re truly sorry first!’) and instead simply forgives even the completely remorseless culprit regardless. But what’s intriguing about this kind of forgiveness is that its very lack of demandingness (its unconditionality) can itself inspire remorse in the culprit, sometimes more effectively than the demand for it—explicit demands do have a tendency to inspire a hardening of hearts and further entrenchment, whereas conversational presuppositions tend to inspire accommodation (see Langton 2015). The moral genius of Gifted Forgiveness is that it tends to cause remorse in the culprit, precisely by not demanding it. And remorse for a wrong done is (or at least tends towards) shared moral understanding with the wronged party. That’s how forgiving generates shared moral understandings. Another process of causal social construction—you treat the culprit as if she’s remorseful, and this causes her to really become remorseful.

All this is very telescoped, but I hope it’s enough to give the general idea of how both Communicative Blaming and Gifted Forgiving can be plausibly represented as basic interpersonal moral mechanisms that literally socially construct shared moral understanding. In taking this general approach of looking to identify the basic moral role of these practices I am effectively going in for what Edward Craig called ‘practical explication’ (Craig 1990)—I ask what do blaming and forgiving do for us? What role do they play in our moral life? I like this perspective for many different reasons, but one of them is that I think it helps keep philosophy on the ground, involved in real, contingent human practices. It thereby helps bring into view certain possibilities of what we might call the social geography and history of blaming and forgiving. It does this because there can be social contexts—those of inequality—where the interpersonal mechanisms of communicated blaming and forgiving are socially stratified, in that they can only achieve their proper purpose between some groups, while others are excluded. For example, if a wrong you suffer is not collectively understood or conceptualised partly because people like you are hermeneutically marginalised (you don’t get to participate equally in the generation of shared social meanings) then not only do you suffer what in other work I’ve called a hermeneutical injustice, but the basic practice of Communicative Blame in which you are trying to take part cannot serve its proper point: no shared moral understandings can be generated in this instance owing to the hermeneutical injustice that is unfairly keeping the wrong obscured from shared understanding. This is just one way in which inequality can cause extended distortions in a shared moral outlook, and it is why the equal participation in the communicative aspects of shared moral production are so important.

So moral engagement is important—we need to communicate our experiences of being wronged, and we all need to facilitate others in their efforts to do so. But it is a matter of balance too. Moral engagement need not be our full-time job, for it must compete with other interests and values for our time, effort, and attention. Morality is always there whether we attend to it or not. The moral meanings of our actions may or may not elude us, or bother us, but they are what they are. Ignoring them certainly cannot make them go away. However the business of interpersonal communicative moral engagement is not quite like that. It permits a certain optionality. Moral engagement—the communication of moral demand either immediately in Communicative Blame or as merely presupposed in Gifted Forgiveness—takes energy and time. It often has interpersonal and emotional costs, so that sometimes it just isn’t worth it. Sometimes there are more important things to put our time and energies into. This is, I believe, a profoundly important fact of life, and one that philosophy often forgets. I hope that taking the approach of practical explication to our practices of blaming and forgiving can help us reserve a philosophical space for that optionality, and indeed a real-life space for it too, so that moral engagement can find a sensible weighting in our lives. Most of the time we engage each other morally in the face of wrongdoing (and sometimes we absolutely must, no matter how costly and difficult that may be); but there are occasions when it’s better, all things considered, to just let it go. I believe that bearing in mind this element of optionality in how we relate to the demands of moral engagement in the face of wrongdoing is an important aspect of our freedom.

Craig, Edward (1990) Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

Fricker, Miranda (2014) ‘What’s the Point of Blame? A Paradigm Based Explanation’, NOÛS, 50 (1) 165-183; 2014

Langton, Rae (2015) Accommodating Injustice, John Locke Lectures ms

Williams, Bernard (1995) ‘Internal Reasons and The Obscurity of Blame’, in Making Sense of Humanity and other philosophical papers 1982-1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Julia Nefsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at The University of Toronto. Before that, she was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. She works in ethics. Her main current research project – which is the subject of this post – attempts to understand individual morality in contexts of collective impact. She is also working on some related questions about individual rational agency over time.

The Problem of Collective Impact

Julia Nefsky

Thank you so much to Meena for this terrific series, and for inviting me to contribute.

Much of my current research aims at understanding our individual moral reasons and responsibilities in contexts of “collective impact.” These are contexts in which if enough people act in certain ways rather than others, certain harms or injustices will be avoided or reduced, and yet no individual such act seems to make a difference. Climate change, for instance, is caused by millions of people driving, flying, using air-conditioning, and so on, but give or take any one such act and things will surely be just as bad. Or, consider that while a large-scale shift in demand away from factory-farmed meat would result in many fewer animals being tortured on factory-farms, it is doubtful that any one purchase makes a difference: the factory-farm is not going to be making different production decisions give or take any one purchase. The core problem in such cases is that if it’s true that acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear how we can say that anyone ought, or even has reason, to do so. Each person can ask, “my doing this won’t make a difference, so what is the point?” Call this, “the problem of collective impact.”[1]

I argue that the key to solving this problem is to reject a basic assumption that underlies it. The assumption is that to make instrumental progress toward an outcome – or, as I often put it, to help to bring about an outcome – one must be able to make a difference with respect to that outcome. If acting in a certain way won’t make a difference, this means that things will be the same with respect to the outcome of concern whether or not you do so. And what we take this to mean is that acting in this way would be instrumentally useless – that it would not actually do anything significant toward bringing about that outcome. While this assumption is quite entrenched, I think it is false, and I argue that seeing this is a crucial and central component of solving the problem.

On why I think it is a crucial component of solving the problem: In Fairness, Participation and the Real Problem of Collective Harm, I argue that it is doubtful that we can solve the problem unless we can refute the impression that an individual act is instrumentally superfluous in these cases. Views that might seem to bypass having to worry about such a thing, cannot actually do so if they are to address what is at issue. (This includes various non-consequentialist theories, like Kantianism). (I give further support for this in Individual Consumption and Collective Impact.) However, at the same time, I don’t think we can in general deny that an individual act won’t make a difference in these cases. First, in Consequentialism and the Problem of Collective Harm, I argue that there are cases in which one’s act simply has no chance of making a difference. Second, even when there is a chance of making a difference, this chance can be miniscule – to the point where we can say that such an act, for all practical purposes, won’t make a difference. For this second point, see Mark Budolfson’s excellent paper, The Inefficacy Objection to Consequentialism and the Problem with the Expected Consequences Response. If these conclusions are correct, they together show that to solve the problem we need to reject that basic assumption: we need to show that an act can make significant instrumental progress even if it won’t make a difference.

While we do typically equate not making a difference with being instrumentally useless, I think that the idea that these two notions can come apart is also implicitly present in commonsense thought. To illustrate, take a classic collective impact case: voting in a large election. Suppose the upcoming US election ends up being between Trump and Clinton. In this case, many people will vote for Clinton because they want Clinton to be elected rather than Trump, and because they think that casting their ballot for Clinton does something toward that goal. That is, for many Clinton voters, they are not thinking of their vote as instrumentally superfluous. Rather, it is precisely the opposite thought that moves them to vote: the thought that their vote could make some (small but real) progress toward getting Clinton into the White House. Now, when a person is thinking in this way, I don’t think that what is going on is that she is under the mistaken impression that her vote is likely to make a difference to whether Clinton gets elected. Thoughts about the winner being different depending on her vote are not – I conjecture – coming into it. If this is right, she must have another notion of instrumental progress implicitly in mind. This is not to say she has any clear, consistent understanding of this notion. Indeed, when someone presses her on the fact that her vote most certainly won’t make a difference, she is likely to respond by calling up other sorts of justifications for voting (e.g. that voting expresses support for Clinton, or that it is her duty as a democratic citizen.) The point is just that people sometimes do think of their vote as making real instrumental progress toward an outcome, without having any impression of it as making a difference with respect to that outcome. My project aims to show that they are getting something importantly right when they think in that way.

In How You Can Help, Without Making a Difference I advance the idea that an act can help in collective impact cases, even if it won’t make a difference. If I’m right about this, this vindicates an appealing, commonsense answer to why there is reason for action in these cases, namely: doing so could help. Importantly, while I argue it is a mistake to think that helping requires making a difference, I also argue that it would be a mistake to think that just any causal contribution helps. There is a distinction between causal contributions that make progress and those that don’t – between superfluous and non-superfluous causal involvement. This distinction is at the heart of what is difficult about the cases: what is difficult is that even if I am in the causal fray, my involvement seems entirely superfluous. I don’t think we can adequately understand collective impact cases if we collapse this distinction. This paper, thus, aims to show how we can draw this distinction along something other than difference-making lines.

In my work I draw attention to the fact that the “it won’t make a difference” claim challenges not only the thought that one is obligated to act in the relevant ways, but also – and more basically – the thought that there is any moral reason to do so. But this doesn’t mean that we should be satisfied once we have an answer to that more basic challenge. Plausibly, morality should yield moral obligations to act in the relevant ways, not just some consideration in favour of doing so. The next stage of my project, thus, aims to address the question of what our moral obligations look like in these cases.

In an in-progress paper, I am arguing that we are indeed obligated to act in the relevant ways, but not in the sense that most philosophers who have written about the topic seem to be looking for. I argue that our moral obligations in collective impact cases are – to borrow a term from Kant – imperfect. If, for instance, you are in a position to make choices that will help to mitigate climate change, this does yield an obligation to do so, but – I argue – given the way in which your individual choices can help (namely, without making a difference), this obligation is best understood as imperfect. What it amounts to is an obligation to refrain from flying, driving, and so on enough of the time, rather than an obligation (even a pro tanto one) to do these things at every moment that one can.

Thus, the view I am defending has an important point of agreement with philosophers who have ‘bitten the bullet’ on the obligations question. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, for instance, argues that if you look at a particular act, like driving a gas-guzzling SUV on “this particular sunny Sunday afternoon”, it is not wrong. I agree with that. But what I argue is that this doesn’t mean that you don’t have an obligation to refrain from driving in light of climate change: the obligation is just an imperfect one. Whether you satisfy it can only be determined by looking at the choices you make over time. Isolating a particular action in a collective impact case, and trying to show that it is obligatory is usually a mistake.

[1] In past work I have called it “the problem of collective harm”. I now think “the problem of collective impact” is a better term for it.

Carlotta Pavese is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. In 2013-2014, she was a Bersoff Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Philosophy at NYU. Before that, she was a graduate student at Rutgers. Her main areas of research are epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic. Her main project is on the nature of practical abilities and skills and she is working on book project on these topics — The Practical Mind — some of which is summarized below. She is also working on several other papers in epistemology, philosophical logic, and semantics. Since at Duke, she has been thinking seriously about the philosophy of cognitive sciences.

The Practical Mind

Carlotta Pavese

People differ in their abilities to do things — in their practical abilities, or skills. That is true both of basic skills and of complex skills. I can move my right ear back and forth, whereas Ale cannot. On the other hand, Ale is a talented chef, who can make the best risotto in North Carolina. By contrast, I am a terrible cook. What makes me different from Ale? In other words, how do people differ mentally and/or cognitively when they differ in their skills?

According to dispositionalism, skills are simply dispositions to behavior (Ryle 1949) and/or dispositions to be in certain mental states (for a defense of a view of this sort, see Stanley and Williamson (forthcoming)). For a dispositionalist, there is no further story to be told, from a mental and/or cognitive perspective, over and above the presence of those dispositions. There may be, of course, a lot more to say at the physical level. But at the mental/cognitive level, the only difference that there is between people differing in their skills has to do with the presence or absence of certain dispositions.

Contra dispositionalism, I argue that there are at least two facts about skills that call for an explanation at a cognitive/mental level. First, complex skills are composed out of basic skills in a distinct way; second, skills characteristically manifest in intentional action. In order to explain those two aspects of skills, the practical mind must be both very conceptual and very knowing.

Complex skills seem to be composed out of simpler skills. In full generality, for a complex task of φ-ing, the skill to φ requires the skill to perform all the parts of φ-ing. For example, one’s ability to make a dish requires one’s ability to execute parts of that dish. And one’s ability to play a difficult song requires one’s ability to play certain accords, in a certain succession — i.e., in accordance with a certain structure.

Any view of skills has to explain how complex skills arise from basic ones in this fashion. But this explanatory goal puts constraints on what skills can be and on how they can arise from simpler skills.

To see how, consider an analogy with a very common kind of explanation provided in the philosophy of language. Suppose we want to understand our ability to understand an arbitrary English sentence. It is natural to explain it in terms of simpler abilities — e.g. our ability to understand its parts, together with our ability to put them together according to the sentence’s structure. But it is commonly thought that, for that sort of explanation to be feasible, the meaning of a sentence must obey the so-called principle of compositionality: the meaning of a sentence must be compositional on the meaning of its parts, in accordance to its syntactic structure. Only in this case, can we explain our ability to understand an arbitrary English sentence in terms of our ability to understand its parts, together with our ability to put them together according to the sentence’s structure.

This kind of explanation puts constraints on what meanings can be. In particular, meanings of a sentence’s parts have to be the sort of things that compose with other meanings to give rise to the meaning of a whole sentence, if we are to explain our ability to understand any new arbitrary sentence. If the relevant candidates cannot compose in the relevant way, they do not count as the sort of things the grasp of which can explain our ability to understand an arbitrary English sentence.

As Fodor 1998 taught us, dispositions do not seem to compose. Moreover, it is totally mysterious what their ways of compositions would be. Because of this, dispositionalism (of all brands) is at loss when explaining the compositionality of meanings. By the exact same reasoning, dispositionalism is at loss when explaining how complex skills arise from more basic skills.

This sort of argument motivated me to look for an explanation of skills in terms of the compositionality of certain sorts of concepts (practical concepts) and in terms of our possessing those concepts. Concepts are combinatorial — they are supposed to be exactly the sorts of things that can combine with other concepts to make up propositions. Moreover, concepts possession plausibly explains our cognitive and perceptual abilities. For example, the concept of red enables one to discriminate red from other colors. And the concept of table enables one to tell table apart from chair. Why then not appeal to special kinds of concepts — practical concepts — to explain our distinctively practical abilities — our skills?

In the literature on know how, others have appealed to such things as practical modes of presentation (Stanley & Williamson (2001), Stanley (2011)). But many have complained that such practical modes of presentation are mysterious and in need of explanation. In “Practical Senses” (Philosophers’ Imprint, 2015), I respond to these concerns by elaborating a theory of practical modes of presentation, that I understand as sorts of concepts, within an explicitly Fregean framework. For a Fregean, concepts are ways of determining their referents — they are senses.

To those worried that anything like a practical sense actually exists, I respond that we actually find examples of practical senses in the semantic values that a certain sort of semantics, known as operational semantics, assigns to program texts. Operational semantic values are rules for mappings configurations of instructions to other configurations of instructions. I show that such operational semantic values satisfy the main requirements on Fregean senses — they are abstract, mind-independent, they determine algorithms as their referents and, finally, they have a distinctive kind of cognitive significance in that they are rules which enable those who grasp them with the ability to follow them.

So, operational semantic values are sorts of Fregean senses. In addition, because they can enter into composition with other things of the same kind, according to certain structural rules, they are the sorts of things that can explain the arising of complex skills from other simpler skills. Finally, they qualify as practical senses because their distinctive kind of cognitive significance guarantees that, if one understands them, then one is enabled with a practical ability — the ability to follow a rule. That is so because operational semantic values are themselves primitive recursive: they are definable in terms of other rules (their parts) that one can already follow, and those in turn are defined in terms of operations that are basic for one.

The sort of practical abilities operational semantic values endow one with are themselves rule-following abilities. That has led me to topic of rule-following and to a reflection on Lewis Carroll (1895)’s regress. Carroll asks us to imagine somebody (the Tortoise) who, given two premises, of the form A, and if A then B, cannot understand that B follows from them. The Tortoise seems unable to follow the rule of modus ponens. Now, here thinking of modus ponens as a logical principle — such as the principle that if A, and If A then B, then B — does not help. For if modus ponens were a logical truth, then using it in the course of an argument would amount to instantiating it as further premise. But that will not help the Tortoise see that B follows. Rather, it will embark her on the so-called regress of the premises.

Often philosophers suggest that this regress can be overcome by acknowledging that following a rule cannot be a matter of instantiating a logical truth as a further premise. But while this conclusion is certainly correct, note that it is only negative. It does not tell us what following a rule actually consists in.

A further question to ask is: if following a rule is not a matter of instantiating a logical truth as a further premise, what does it consist in? As before, just saying that following a rule is a disposition does not explain it. For, if we are to be guided by a rule, we must somehow represent it. But what kind of thing is an inferential rule, such that representing it can explain our ability to follow it?

It could not be simply a syntactic mapping, for we may be able to follow a syntactic mapping without being able to understand that a conclusion follows from the premises. Imagine a version of Searle (1980)’s Chinese Room — the Inferential Chinese Room — where a subject is asked to map premises to conclusions according to certain syntactic mappings. The subject may do it quite well and reliably, without necessarily understanding that the conclusion follows from the premises.

If syntactic mappings cannot explain our inferential abilities, what will? In some recent work (“Inferential Rules as Dynamic Semantic Values”), I propose that inferential rules can be thought as special sorts of dynamic semantic values — the sort of semantic values suggested by proponents of dynamic semantics.

Dynamic semantics is an approach to semantics more and more prominent in the philosophy of language. According to it, meanings are to be understood dynamically, as functions from context to context. Availing myself of the technical tools provided by dynamic semanticists, I show in detail that inferential rules can themselves be thought of as composite functions from context to context, made out of an update part — telling us how to update a context with the premises, and a test part — telling us how to check that the conclusion follows from the context so augmented.

Because, in contrast with logical truths, such dynamic semantic values are not propositions, following them is not a matter of instantiating them as further premises. Hence, so conceived, following a rule does not trigger the regress of the premises. And since being competent with such semantic values requires one to be able to check whether a conclusion follows from a certain set of assumptions, a view that appeals to dynamic semantic values in a theory of inferential competence does not face the problem of understanding that instead afflicts a syntactic conception of inferential rules.

So, if we think of following an inferential rule in this fashion — as a matter of being guided by the dynamic semantic values of the logical vocabulary — we make a lot of progress in understanding how to halt Carroll’s regress and what makes us different from the Tortoise. But we also make progress in understanding skills in general. For recall that practical senses and operational semantic values are themselves inferential rules of a certain sort — they are rules to move from configurations to configurations. If such rules were to be understood as syntactic mappings, we would be presented again with a version of the problem of understanding. In “Operational Semantics, Dynamic Semantics and Competences” (forthcoming in Philosophical Topics), I explain that operational semantic values and practical senses themselves are best thought of not as syntactic mappings, but rather themselves as special sorts of dynamic semantic values. That, I argue, completes my argument in “Practical Senses.”

Are practical senses all there is to a theory of skills and know how? In “Knowing a rule” (Philosophical Issues, A Supplement to Nous, 2015), I argue that they could not be. For our skills and know how characteristically manifest in intentional actions. However, the ability to follow a rule that one acquires by grasping a practical sense is blind and adrift without a propositional attitude that brings it to bear relevantly and intelligently. That is so because one may have the ability to follow a rule without knowing what task the rule is for, and so without being able to intentionally and relevantly deploy that ability. For example, one may have the ability to follow a method that is in fact a method to escape avalanches in virtue of being able to swim, for escaping avalanches requires making swimming movements. In this circumstance, one may nonetheless fail to be able to intentionally escape avalanches, if one does not know that one escapes avalanches by making swimming movements (this particular example is from Hawley (2003). For other examples, see “Knowing a rule”).

Some prominent theories do take the intentionality of an action to require a propositional attitude about the means to employ to perform that action (for example, see Goldman (1970)). Such a propositional attitude is usually taken to be a belief about how to perform that action. Gibbons (2001) argues, upon considerations of lottery cases, that it must be knowledge. According to these views of intentional action, in order for one to intentionally perform a task, one must have certain true beliefs, or even knowledge, about how to perform a task. In “Knowing a rule” (Philosophical Issues. A Supplement to Nous, 2015) and “Skill in Epistemology” (Philosophy Compass, forthcoming), I argue on similar grounds that, because skills and know how characteristically manifest in intentional actions, they must involve a propositional attitude about how to perform those actions.

Practical senses, just like ordinary senses, can then be thought of as components of the content of such propositional attitudes. By thinking of skills and know how in these terms, we are in position to explain not just one’s ability to follow a rule, but also our ability to intentionally perform task by deploying that rule.

The practical mind turns out to be, perhaps surprisingly, both very conceptual and very knowing.

References
Carroll, Lewis (1895) “What The Tortoise Said to Achilles.” Mind, 4(14): 278-80.
Fodor, Jerry (1998) Concepts: where Cognitive Science went wrong. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Gibbons, John (2001) “Knowledge in Action.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62.3: 579-600.
Goldman, Alvin (1970) A Theory of Human Action, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Hawley, Katherine (2003) “Success and Knowledge-How.” American Philosophical Quarterly 40.1:19-31.
Pavese, Carlotta (2015) “Knowing a Rule,” Philosophical Issues, A Supplement to Nous, 25 (1): 165-188.
Pavese, Carlotta (2015) “Practical Senses,” Philosophers’ Imprint, 29(15): 1-25.
Pavese, Carlotta (forthcoming)“Operational Semantics, Dynamic Semantics, and Competences,” Philosophical Topics.
Pavese, Carlotta (forthcoming) “Skill in Epistemology,” Philosophy Compass,
Pavese, Carlotta (manuscript) “Inferential Rules as Dynamic Semantic Values,”
https://www.academia.edu/23462009/Inference_Rules_as_Dynamic_Semantic_Values
Ryle, Gilbert (1949) The Concept of Mind, Routledge.
Searle, J. R. (1980) “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and brain sciences, 3(03):417-424.
Stanley, Jason and Timothy Williamson (2001) “Knowing how.” The Journal of Philosophy 98.8: 411-444.
Stanley, Jason (2011) Know how. Oxford University Press.

Lara Buchak is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley.  She works in decision theory, and the subject of this blog post is her book, Risk and Rationality (Oxford, 2013).  She has also written on applications of the book material to topics in distributive ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of religion.

Risk and Rationality

Lara Buchak

One perennial human problem is what to do when you have to make an important choice but you don’t know all the relevant facts.  Should you try for the career you love, not knowing whether it will work out, and knowing that if it doesn’t, you will struggle financially?  Should you marry the person you are now dating, or move on?  Should you start a family, or instead devote yourself to work or other pursuits?  Should you commit to a religious community, and if so, which one?

Decision theorists study how to make a choice when you are uncertain about some relevant aspect of the world—whether your career will succeed, whether this person will make a good match, whether God exists—but you know what you value—how good succeeding at the dream career is relative to having an ordinary career relative to failing at the dream career.  According to decision theory, you can assign probabilities to the possible ways the world could turn out: for example, you might think the likelihood of succeeding as a musician is 10%.  You can assign utilities that measure the relative values of the possibilities: for example, succeeding as a musician might be twenty times as good as failure is bad, relative to the ordinary job, so that success as a musician is worth 21 utils, failure is worth 0, and the ordinary career is worth 1.

Furthermore, according to the orthodox theory, these numbers are enough to determine a unique decision: the value of an act is a weighted average (“expectation”) of its utility values, each utility value weighted by the probability of obtaining it.  If the expected utility of trying for the dream career is higher than that of having an ordinary job, then you should go for it.  In our example, the expected utility of the dream career is (0.90)(0) + (0.10)(21) = 2.1, whereas the expected utility (in this case, certain utility) of the ordinary job is 1.  Thus, you should go for the dream career.  To do otherwise would be irrational.  In brief: rational individuals maximize expected utility.

In practice, people don’t in fact maximize expected utility.  Often, the conclusion drawn from this is that people are hopelessly irrational—failing to maximize expected utility goes in the dustbin with a host of other fallacies and biases.

In my work, however, I champion ordinary behavior and show that it is, in fact, rational.  Contra the orthodox theory, some individuals might not weight possible outcomes by their probability values; instead, they might be more concerned about what goes on in relatively worse or relatively better states.  Some individuals—risk-avoidant individuals—might be more concerned with what happens in worse states than better states, and thus might hold that the value of a gamble is closer to its minimum value than the expected utility maximizer holds.  Other individuals—risk-inclined individuals—might be more concerned with what happens in better states than worse states, and thus might hold that the value of a gamble is closer to its maximum value.  Finally, some individuals—globally-neutral individuals—might be equally concerned with what happens in all (equiprobable) states, regardless of their relative rank, and thus will simply be expected utility maximizers.  The way to take account of these differences is to hold that each individual has, in addition to a utility and probability function, a risk-function that measures the weight of the top p-portion of consequences in her practical decision-making.  For example, for some individual, the top 50% of the consequences may garner 40% of the weight, and the top 10% of the consequences may garner only 1% of the weight.  By contrast, the bottom 90% of consequences garner 99% of the weight.  For this individual, the value of going after the dream career is (0.99)(0) + (0.01)(21) = 0.21.  So sticking with the ordinary job (utility 1) looks better.

Thus, I argue that orthodox decision theory leaves out an important factor that, like beliefs and values, is up to the individual: how the agent trades off securing good worst-case scenarios against allowing for good best-case scenarios.  In ordinary folk psychology, this attitude corresponds to how she trades of the virtue of prudence—securing a guarantee that things won’t turn out too badly—against the virtue of venturesomeness— allowing for the possibility of something great.  Individuals who care more about prudence are risk-averse: of two gambles with the same average utility value, they would rather have the less-spread-out gamble.  Individuals who care more about venturesomeness are risk-seeking: they would rather have gambles that are more spread out.

Importantly, it is up to the individual exactly which risk-attitude to adopt.  She must take risk into account in whichever way she thinks is appropriate for a life well-lived.  She can be cautious, ensuring that her life will not be filled with many disasters.  She can be a romantic, willing to sacrifice everything for a small chance of realizing her highest goals.  Or she can strike any number of balances between these two outlooks, including the one expected utility theory recommends.  And so with this recognition that decision-makers have more freedom than we previously thought, comes a realization that decision makers have more responsibility than we previously thought.  Since there is no unique answer to the question of how a decision-maker should treat risk, an individual not only may, but must, decide for herself how she will take risk into account when making decisions.

Carolyn McLeod is Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Member of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. She researches mainly in applied ethics (especially reproductive ethics), feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. Her current work includes a monograph on conscientious refusals in reproductive health care (under contract with OUP), an interdisciplinary project called “Paying for Parenthood” about government funding for assisted reproduction and adoption, and research on parental licensing. She has recently published Family-Making: Contemporary Ethical Challenges (OUP 2014) with Françoise Baylis, and a series of papers about parental licensing and adoption with Andrew Botterell. An adoptive parent (with Botterell) of two beautiful boys, Carolyn also does advocacy work on adoption and chairs the Board of Ontario’s Adoptive Parents Association.

Discriminatory Biases in Parental Licensing

Carolyn McLeod

Philosophers who write about parental licensing ask whether we should license parents, the way we license drivers and professionals such as physicians. But this question is the wrong one to ask. At the very least, it’s misleading. For we already license some parents, namely adoptive and foster parents. So philosophers should be asking instead whether our current practice of parental licensing is justified. My work on parental licensing with Andrew Botterell centres on this question. Right now, we are consumed with how to construct a system of licensing that is an improvement on our current system in that it minimizes the effects of discriminatory biases on who is subject to parental licensing and who succeeds in getting a license.

Some background is in order before explaining what Andrew and I are up to and also how discriminatory biases are a problem with parental licensing. Such licensing is similar in many respects to other types of licensing. Like them, it involves restrictions imposed by the state on people’s ability to perform an activity—in this case, parenting—even though they may never have performed it badly. The state requires them to show they are competent before being permitted to engage, or continue engaging, in the activity. Moreover, the purpose is to decrease potential future harm (i.e., to children). Thus, the licensing focuses on whether applicants will continue to meet a certain standard of performance, not simply whether they currently do so (i.e., whether they will treat their children well or will at least not mistreat them; LaFollette 1981, 181).

But parental licensing is also different from other types of licensing. For example, since it often occurs before one has had the opportunity to parent a child, it often predicts future performance in parenting based not on present performance, but rather on whether one possesses certain capabilities, such as emotional or financial capabilities, that show (or are meant to show) that one will parent at the desired level in the future. With many other forms of licensing, by contrast, applicants must actually perform the relevant activity at the desired level before getting a license. For example, one has to drive a car well for an assessor before obtaining a driver’s license, or have given competent patient care during a residency before being licensed to practice a particular form of medicine. The fact that parental licensing typically involves only an assessment of capabilities deemed to be relevant to the performance of the licensed activity (parenting) may not make it unique compared to all forms of licensing. All the same, this aspect is important and explains some of the controversy surrounding parental licensing.

As I’ve indicated, in many jurisdictions, adoptive and foster parents are now licensed. Though they tend not to receive an actual license to parent, similar to a driver’s license, what they undergo is still properly called ‘parental licensing.’ They are prevented from parenting a child unless or until they complete (among other things) a home study, which involves criminal background checks together with assessments of one’s financial situation, physical and mental health, home, neighbourhood, family history, and so on. If prospective adoptive or foster parents have parented a child before, then an evaluation of their success at doing so will be part of the home study, although of course many of them, particularly adoption applicants, have never had this experience.

The status quo on parenting licensing is that licensing is required for foster care and adoption—more specifically, for family-member adoptions (e.g., stepparent adoptions)—but not for (assisted or unassisted) reproduction. It is safe to assume that the status quo privileges biological connections to the child who will be parented. If one is biologically related to the child or is the spouse of someone who is biologically related to her (unless one is a same-sex spouse and lives in a jurisdiction where same-sex spouses do not count as family members for the purposes of adoption), then one will be spared the intrusion of a home study. One will be able to become a parent without anyone trying to ensure that one is competent to do so.

In previous work I have done with Andrew (referenced below), we aim to show that the status quo is morally unjustified. We focus on adoptive parents and canvass all of the possible reasons for licensing them but not people who become parents through assisted or unassisted reproduction. Our conclusion is that none of these reasons are good ones. In our view, the status quo discriminates against adoptive families as well as foster families. It reinforces what some call the “biological bias” or “biologism,” that is, the privileging of families formed through biological reproduction compared to families formed in other ways. We contend therefore that the status quo needs to change.

But we have yet to say how the status quo should change. In future work together, we will try to figure this out. Although our personal experience with adoption licensing has left us skeptical about the value of parental licensing, we doubt that just anyone should be able to adopt a child (or, for that matter, access fertility treatments, especially government funded ones) without having to undergo some kind of background check. All the same, we hesitate to recommend a particular system of licensing, largely for fear that it would be implemented in ways that are biased against minority groups, including (among others) the poor, LGBT people, and people with disabilities. This practical concern is a live one in adoption practice. Any adequate proposal in favour of parental licensing needs to take it seriously.

Proposals in philosophy generally fail to do so, however. For example, in his classic paper, “Licensing Parents,” where he argues that all parents should be licensed, Hugh Lafollette responds to objections about what he calls the “unintentional misuse” or “intentional abuse” by administrators of tests used to determine who would be an acceptable parent (1980, 192). He says “there is no reason to believe” that unconscious and conscious biases will be more of a problem in the administration of parental licensing than in other forms of licensing that we already accept (192). Yet I doubt that is true. For consider how many stereotypical images of minority groups target, directly or indirectly, their ability to be a good or decent parent (and how relatively few concern their ability to be, e.g., a decent driver). Examples include images of Black women as matriarchs or welfare moms (Hill Collins 2000), of gay men as pedophiles, of indigenous people as lazy or violent, and of people with disabilities as helpless and vulnerable. The result is that discriminatory bias is more of a worry with parental licensing.

Consider as well that the testing for a parental license is arguably more subjective than the testing is, say, for a driver’s license. Often, there is no test of present performance and so the evaluators do not get to see whether the person can parent at the desired level; rather, they have to make a judgment based on whether this person possesses capabilities that are thought to be relevant to good or decent parenting. Biases can enter at various stages: deciding which capabilities are relevant, at what level the applicant needs to possess them, and whether the applicant does indeed possess them at this level. Although testing for other types of licenses can certainly be biased too, we strongly suspect that there is less opportunity for bias with them than with parental licensing.

Overall, philosophers need to pay more attention to how discriminatory biases will affect who receives a parental license and who does not. In all likelihood, parental licensing carries the risk of promoting such biases. And while this risk may be worth the cost of not being proactive when it comes to child abuse and neglect, an argument needs to be made for this view. But so far no such argument exists in the philosophical literature. We hope to contribute one in the future. 

References

Botterell, A. and C. McLeod. Forthcoming. “Licensing Parents in International Contract Pregnancies,” Journal of Applied Philosophy. Published online August 2015, DOI: 10.1111/japp.12143.

—. 2015. “Can a Right to Reproduce Justify the Status Quo on Parental Licensing?” In Permissible Progeny. Ed. R. Vernon, S. Hannan, and S. Brennan. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 184-207.

Hill Collins, P. 2000. “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images.” In her Black Feminist Thought. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 69-96.

LaFollette, H. 1981. “A Reply to Frisch,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 11(2), 181-183.

—. 1980. “Licensing Parents,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 9(2): 183-97.

McLeod, C. and A. Botterell. 2014. “’Not for the Faint of Heart’: Accessing the Status Quo on Adoption and Parental Licensing.” In Family-Making: Contemporary Ethical Challenges. Ed. F. Baylis and C. McLeod. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 151-167.

Anke Graness is Elise Richter Fellow at the chair Philosophy in a Global World / Intercultural Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna (Austria), and member of the editorial board of Polylog: Journal on Intercultural Philosophy. She has published books – both in German and English  (e.g. Das menschliche Minimum: Globale Gerechtigkeit aus afrikanischer Sicht: Henry Odera Oruka—The Human Minimum: Global Justice in an African Perspective; with Kai Kresse, Sagacious Reasoning. H. Odera Oruka in memoriam) and articles in peer reviewed journals in the area of African philosophy, ethics, intercultural philosophy, global justice, and feminist theory. Currently she is a project leader of a research project on the History of Philosophy in Africa from Ancient Egypt until the beginning of the 21st Century. 

Philosophy in Africa – A Case of Epistemic Injustice in the Academy

Anke Graness

I – as a German/Austrian philosop-her – was surprised and delighted to be invited by Meena to contribute to this important network of women in philosophy and I am very grateful for the opportunity to share parts of my work here with you.

The exclusion of woman philosophers and feminist theory from the History of Philosophy has been widely criticised and a number of ground-breaking research projects and publications contributed to the reconstruction of contributions of women to philosophy during the last decades. However, exclusion from the philosophical canon is not only a gender issue but is also an issue that concerns whole regions of the world.

In Africa’s case, exclusionary tendencies have played a particularly destructive role in the perception of philosophical concepts, schools, and traditions. For centuries Africans’ ability to philosophise was entirely denied (in the mainstream), and African thinkers, traditions, and schools were not seen as a part of world philosophy. The characterisation of Africa’s pre-colonial cultures and societies as ‘a-historical’ and ‘primitive’ (Hegel 2001, 117; 110-111) was one of the main obstacles to unprejudiced, solid research in the History of Philosophy regarding that region of the world. Since black Africans were regarded as incapable of intellectual reflection, it was generally assumed that there was and is no philosophical thinking in Africa South of the Sahara. From the end of the eighteenth century until recently (see Graness 2015a), such prejudices have been partly responsible for the low opinion of Africa as a source of original philosophical ideas and concepts and the exclusion of African schools, traditions, and authors from the philosophical canon. Thus, the dominant occidental version of the History of Philosophy as well as contemporary trends and debates in philosophy are examples of epistemic injustice, which consists according to Miranda Fricker “most fundamentally, in a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower” (Fricker 2007:1). The exclusion of a whole continent from the History of Philosophy is certainly a profound epistemic injustice.

Today, philosophy is an established discipline at several universities in Africa. African philosophers are engaged in lively and controversial debates (see e.g. the debate on ubuntu in South Africa), and there is a tremendous production of publications regarding philosophy in Africa. In addition, since 1978, philosophy in Africa has become an integral part of the World Congresses of Philosophy. However, despite some progress, it is still a fact that scholars and concepts from Africa are rarely included in debates or in standard works on philosophy, and philosophy in Africa is only in very rare exceptions part of philosophical curricula. But why? Beside academic ignorance and still existing prejudices, I think the following factors notably influence the perception of African philosophers and concepts today[1]:

1. The canon-forming power of the universities

Universities have a very specific canonizing power by means of setting down curricula and the funding of research topics. Establishing a canon requires doing a preliminary selection out of a variety of theories and concepts and drawing attention to certain problems, theories and authors. Given the enormous importance of the canon for the reception of a theory, it is important to ask whether it is the originality of the idea of an author alone that influences his/her inclusion or exclusion from the grand narratives or our curricula’s, or whether the origin of one’s academic degree (Princeton vs. the University of Nairobi) plays a role too, and whether gender, religion, or race make a critical difference in the process of inclusion/exclusion. In case of Africa, we are confronted with a fatal circle: Since scholars and concepts from Africa are rarely included in surveys and debates, there is little knowledge about African contributions to philosophy—what leads to an ignorance in curricula’s (outside Africa, but inside Africa as well!), and, thus, to a perpetuated ignorance in teaching and research.

2. The place of publication

Despite significant improvements resulting from the electronic networking of the world and the thereby easier access to publishers and journals,  African authors’ access to renowned publishing houses is usually limited due to exorbitantly high printing costs. Here it makes a big difference whether an author is situated in Europe or America and has access to the academic fund raising system or not. On the other hand, publications of publishers situated in Africa are hardly accessible in Europe or America. This directly influences the perception (and limited influence) of authors from Africa and other parts of the world. 

3. Financial Resources

The situation of academic philosophers in Africa is to a large extent a precarious one: the salaries of African universities are usually low—not only in comparison to the salaries in Europe and the USA but in respect to the average costs of living in their home countries too (an exception is the Republic of South Africa). This implies that many African academics run small businesses besides holding jobs at the university. Although it may have been common for centuries to practice philosophy alongside another profession (Spinoza did it, Kant did it), today this is hardly the case. In a highly competitive academic world, the fact that many African academics cannot solely concentrate on their academic work is a clear disadvantage, in addition to a basic lack of books, technical equipment, and travel grants at their institutions.

4. The language

Today, the international scientific discourse is run mainly in English. There are, for sure, clear advantages of a world-language, such as having a shared media of communication. However, a lingua franca is (and was in human history, see Latin or Arabic) always the language of a hegemonic power. In the case of English, the colonial heritage is still obvious and its globalising tendencies are rightly criticised as a form of hegemony associated with the spread of market economics (see e.g. the famous critique of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1993). Beside the problem that taking over the language of the colonizer as academic language might perpetuate ‘mental colonization’, there is a lively debate in African philosophy about whether European languages and the concomitant episteme are able to grasp African reality, concepts, and traditions of thought (see e.g. Wiredu 1996, Ngũgĩ 1993).

It will be a long process to change the unequal epistemological and political-economic terms, under which academic work is done today, a process which can be influenced only partially by philosophers. However, equally important, is our will to change the ways academics work and how academic debates are conducted today. As long as the Euro-American dominated philosophical discourses are not even aware of concepts and arguments beyond its narrow discursive boundaries, nothing will change. Thus, it is time to open the debates in philosophy to perspectives from all regions of the world. This might lead to fundamental changes in our debates and research priorities. Presently, our debates are largely dominated by European and American scholars who draw primarily on concepts from the European History of Philosophy and from experiences within the industrialized nations. Experiences and social conflicts embedded in geopolitical power asymmetries as well as in different contexts (determined by historical, cultural, religious, socio-political conditions et al) are totally neglected. Such ignorance reduces the debate to a narrow body of questions and topics—and limits our horizon.

For a true change towards more academic justice the following considerations are of eminent importance:

1. Euro-American philosophers have to be aware of their own context and how it reflects on their thinking.
2. Euro-American concepts cannot be taken per se as concepts of universal validity while concepts from different regions are considered only to be valid for their respective region.
3. It should be a basic principle of academic work to undertake serious efforts to include perspectives from different cultural, religious, and politico-economic contexts (i.e. to actively search for voices and sources from other regions of the world) and to open a true intercultural exchange. For culturally, socioeconomically, politically, and historically different worlds might lead to very different questions and problems—but also to different answers to the same questions. An intercultural dialogue or polylogue will lead not only to an enrichment of our philosophical horizons, but is also an essential precondition for answers to questions with a global reach.

To sum it up briefly: Philosophical concepts arise not only in a specific historical, cultural, linguistic, religious, and political context but also under very specific financial, technical, and institutional conditions that are anything but philosophical. Nevertheless, these material conditions are relevant factors. For the value of a philosophical argument as such it is irrelevant where it was developed—for its perception, acceptance and inclusion in the discourse, however, the place of origin is extremely important, if not crucial.

References

Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Graness, A. 2015a. Questions of Canon Formation in Philosophy: The History of Philosophy in Africa, In: Phronimon. Vol 16, No 2 (2015), pp. 78-96

Graness, A. 2015b. ‘Is the debate on ‘Global Justice’ a global one? Some Considerations in View of Modern Philosophy in Africa’, In: Journal of Global Ethics, Vol. 11:1, pp. 126-140.

DOI: 10.1080/17449626.2015.1010014.

Hegel, GWF. 1939. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Bd. 11 Stuttgart. [Engl.: Hegel, GWF. 2001.The philosophy of history. Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books]

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 1993. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey Publishers.

Wiredu, K. 1996. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[1] The following four paragraphs are an excerpt of Graness 2015b.

Andrea J. Pitts is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Their research interests include social epistemology, philosophy of race and gender, Latin American and U.S. Latina/o philosophy, and philosophy of medicine. Their publications appear in Hypatia (forthcoming), the Radical Philosophy Review, and the Inter-American Journal of Philosophy. Andrea is also currently co-editing two forthcoming volumes: one on the reception of the work of Henri Bergson in decolonial thought, feminism, and critical race studies, and a volume on contemporary scholarship in U.S. Latina and Latin American feminist philosophy.

Mil gracias to Meena for inviting me to contribute to Philosop-her. I am honored by the invitation and delighted to be among such wonderful philosophical company. In what follows, I’ll mention a little about myself and then explain a bit about one of the avenues of research that I’m currently pursuing.

A little about me: I am a U.S.-born genderqueer/non-binary Latina philosopher. My mother is a first-generation immigrant from Panamá with cultural ties to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Miami, FL, and my father is Anglo-American from the U.S. South with cultural ties to rural Virginia. Being raised by divorced parents from different cultural and class backgrounds meant that a lot of my experiences seemed to span separate worlds of meaning, and I considered myself somewhat of an atravesada or border-crosser.^[1] I also recall feeling frustrated and confused by the ways in which these differing worlds would collide almost casually, and bring in their wake a number of disagreements, injuries, and seemingly compulsive patterns of behavior. Through such choques, I became acquainted with poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic and sexual violence, racism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia at various moments throughout my childhood and young adulthood. Yet, due in large measure, I imagine, to my light skin and ethnoracial presentation, and in part to the fierce love and determination of my family and mentors, I was more often than not an indirect observer and faithful witness to these forms of ignorance, hatred, fear, and abuse. As a result, these experiences continue to provide the backdrop for many of the issues that I address in my scholarly, pedagogical, and activist work today; and even now as a university professor, I still find myself traversing variegated worlds of class, racial, and gender difference in which I am often left frustrated and full of questions.

Stemming in part from these motivations, my current research focuses on three areas of analysis: 1) the epistemic and hermeneutical intersections of criminalization, health, and race; 2) twentieth-century Mexican social/political philosophy and aesthetics; and 3) questions regarding the manner in which speech and other forms of linguistic communication impact processes of racialization and structural racism. While I’m currently pursuing research projects in each of these areas, I’ve also been designing my graduate seminars to thematically address veins of my research. In this latter respect, I am immensely grateful to the graduate students that I have been working with on texts related to these issues.

Regarding speech and race, I’m currently developing some work on what I call insurrectionist speech acts. My concerns with insurrectionist speech stem from a long-held interest in the way music, poetry, fiction, and autobiography can provide hermeneutic resources for responding to the gaps and fissures in meaning caused by forms of social oppression. In this sense, I’m currently taking up the work of several contemporary philosophers whose work negotiates one or both of the following difficult questions: a) what constitutes an insurrectionist/resistant act? and b) what constitutes a linguistic/speech act?

I emphasize these questions to highlight how the notion of insurrectionist speech acts can be explained via two strands of theorizing. The first half of the analysis aims to clarify what is meant by an insurrectionist act by elaborating Kristie Dotson’s augmentation of Leonard Harris’ conception of an insurrectionist ethics. In short, Dotson adds an additional criterion to Harris’ standards for an insurrectionist ethics. Specifically, she adds to his fourth standard “that any moral theory that does not include an epistemic demand to identify the situated oppression to which insurrectionist acts are likely responding will not have an adequate conception of the range of morally relevant insurrectionist acts” (Dotson 2013, 88). Through an examination of the case of Margaret Garner, Dotson argues that an insurrectionist ethics must also have “Standard 5: The ability to provoke when necessary the epistemic demand to situate oppression so as to better approximate the bonds of oppression and the range of oppressors one faces” (Ibid., 89).[2] Following Dotson’s analysis, a remaining question is: under what philosophical interpretation would speech acts provoke epistemic demands to better situate forms of oppression? In the larger project, I turn to the work of María Pía Lara (1998) and María Lugones (2003) to elaborate questions about linguistic agency and speech; however, for this post, I’ll point instead to a brief example of the kind of speech act that I have in mind.

I would like to briefly examine here the recent case in which Jennicet Gutiérrez, an undocumented transgender woman from Mexico, interrupted President Obama during his speech at the LGBT Pride Month Reception in June of 2015. I highlight this public series of speech acts by Gutiérrez to point to the continued need to understand violence against Latinas/os and the multiple axes of oppression faced by transgender women of color in particular. Namely, while Harris’ insurrectionist ethics focuses on racial slavery as a paradigmatic case by which to hold philosophical theories accountable, Dotson’s scope is broader, and appears to understand “insurrectionist ethics” as focusing on various forms of oppression in addition to racial violence. Here, departing from Harris’ original case, we can thereby rephrase his initial articulation of an insurrectionist ethics by stating: ‘A philosophy that offers moral intuitions, reasoning strategies, motivations, and examples of just moral actions but falls short of requiring that we have a moral duty to support or engage in insurrections against the violence against and criminalization of immigrants and transwomen of color is defective.’ This meta-philosophical claim, I propose, offers an opening for the function of insurrection within classic speech act theory.

To elaborate, the context of Gutiérrez’ act was a presidential address that was focused on the accomplishments of the U.S. in terms of LGBTQ rights. During Obama’s opening remarks, Gutiérrez began to call out to the president. After calling his name several times, she then stated “I am a trans woman. I’m tired of the abuse. I’m tired of the violence … President Obama, release all LGBTQ immigrants from detention and stop all deportations … No more deportations!” While Gutiérrez is speaking, other members of the audience are shushing her, booing her, telling her “Enough! Enough. This is not for you. This is for all of us.” and “Shame on you!” (Yu-Hsi Lee 2015). This last statement was repeated by the President: “No, no, no, shame on you. You shouldn’t be doing this.” Gutiérrez is then escorted out by security while the president makes a joke about how people should behave when they are ‘in his house.’ While this example is contextually quite complicated, one important facet of Gutiérrez’s act is the manner in which it provokes the demand to track oppression. Namely, it points to the silencing of trans women of color within LGBTQ communities, and the unacknowledged abuse and incarceration that immigrants face under Obama’s administration. Gutiérrez writes of the event:

“I spoke out because our issues and struggles can no longer be ignored. Immigrant trans women are 12 times more likely to face discrimination because of our gender identity. If we add our immigration status to the equation, the discrimination increases. Transgender immigrants make up one out of every 500 people in detention, but we account for one out of five confirmed sexual abuse cases in ICE custody” (Gutiérrez 2015).

The reason Gutiérrez’s call to the president is significant for my account of insurrectionist speech is because it meets the demands of Harris’ criteria for an insurrectionist act. Namely, following Harris’ account, Gutiérrez’s act appears aimed at the “destruction of her oppressor and the bonds of her oppressor” (Harris 2002, 204). Consider the bonds of her oppressor to include, in this case, the president’s authoritative claims about the achievements of the Obama administration regarding LGBTQ rights. That is, the process of hearing the speech while obtaining discordant knowledge that transgender women of color are routinely harassed, assaulted, and denied medical care while detained under the same administration’s immigration and customs enforcement policy would appear to many advocates for immigration rights as a painful instance of hypocrisy and neglect.

Her call to the president, however, was not just a hail to him and the members of that audience. Gutiérrez’s speech act was also indirectly hailing others to track both the deep tensions within LGBTQ organizing that neglects the criminalization of people of color, and the lack of attention by many immigration rights advocates to the violence faced by trans women of color. Focusing on speech in this sense allows us to further examine the fifth condition proposed by Dotson for an insurrectionist ethics: “The ability to provoke when necessary the epistemic demand to situate oppression so as to better approximate the bonds of oppression and the range of oppressors one faces.” Gutiérrez’s actions at this event thereby demonstrate an example of a position that I would like to describe as insurrectionist, however, the consequences of this approach are vast. Namely, what I defend (and this is where my work returns to Dotson’s and Harris’ meta-philosophical claims) is the claim that theorizing—when understood as action—can be insurrectionist. In this vein, I hope to continue to carve space for resisting patterns of silence, marginalization, harm, and distortion resulting from social oppressions in the very discursive fields of academic knowledge production that many professional philosophers inhabit.

References

Dotson, Kristie. 2013. “Querying Leonard Harris’ Insurrectionist Standards.” ​Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (1):7492.

Gutiérrez, Jennicet. 2015. “I interrupted Obama because we need to be heard.” Washington Blade, June 25, 2015. http://www.washingtonblade.com/2015/06/25/exclusive-i-interrupted-obama-because-we-need-to-be-heard/.

Harris, Leonard. 2002. “Insurrectionist ethics: Advocacy, moral psychology, and pragmatism.” In Ethical Issues for a New Millennium, edited by J. Howie. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Lara, María Pía. 1998. ​Moral textures: Feminist narratives in the public space. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lugones, María. 2003. ​Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Ortega, Mariana. 2016. In-Between: Latina feminist phenomenology, multiplicity, and the self. Albany: SUNY Press.

Yu-His Lee, Esther. 2015. “The Truth about the Heckler at the White House Pride Reception Last Night.” Immigration at ThinkProgress.org. http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2015/06/25/3673860/jennicet-gutierrez-white-house-transgender-detention/.

^[1] Building on the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Martin Heidegger, and María Lugones, Mariana Ortega’s new book In-Between (2016) provides an excellent phenomenological framing for these kinds of experiences.

[2] I should note here that I do not propose the example below of Jennicet Gutiérrez as a point of direct comparison to Dotson’s examination of the brutal conditions of racial slavery or the patterns of violence enacted against Garner and other Black women under conditions of racial slavery. My primary reason for drawing on Dotson’s and Harris’ work on insurrection is to further elaborate forms of resistance against contemporary iterations of state-supported violence. These are, of course, not limited to speech acts against harms experienced by undocumented transgender women of color, and would also include forms of resistance by many other Black and Latina/o persons who are acting against the criminalization, hyperincarceration, sexual violence, and unjust labor conditions that characterize the U.S. carceral system today.

Myisha Cherry is interested in issues at the intersection of moral psychology and social and political philosophy. She has published on manipulation, white privilege, resistance, and state violence and is currently co-editing ‘The Moral Psychology of Anger’, under contract with Rowman and Littlefield. She has taught philosophy at such schools as the City University of New York and St. Johns University. She is a blogger at the Huffington Post and is the host and producer of the UnMute Podcast. Myisha is currently pursing a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

What Does it Mean to Ask Blacks to Forgive and How Should They Respond?

Myisha Cherry

In 2012, I read about a horrific case that would have an impact on my research interests. In 2002, Adam Wright, repeatedly raped a 12-year-old girl in a Brooklyn elevator. He was caught 10 years later. While acting as his own lawyer in court, he looked at the victim and said, “Let go, learn to let go … Don’t hold on to any pain, don’t hold on to it. Give it to the Lord and he’ll take care of it for you.”

His words rocked me to my core as I sat and watched the video clip of the trial. I did not think he had the right to ask the victim to do that. I also felt that the problem with his request was rooted in his definition of forgiveness, in his desire to not be held accountable, and in the belief that girls and women have no right to feel violated or to seek justice. They should just “let it go.” His request was not an oddity. It was quite familiar.

I had heard about women who were instructed by their pastors and church mothers to forgive their abusing husbands. That kind of forgiveness required them not to leave, but to stick in there, love him because ‘this is what Jesus would do’. I had heard “let go” requests throughout my life. African-Americans have always been instructed to forgive injustices and to let go of the pain of oppression. African Americans have always been told that the Lord would take care of it although the State would not. After hearing Adam Wright make his request in court, I got angrier and more tired of hearing such requests. I also got interested in trying to figure out exactly what forgiveness was. I thought, “They must have got it wrong.” At that moment, I became interested in the rhetoric of forgiveness and how it can be used to silence others and prevent justice. I also became interested in the nature of forgiveness and the value of anger.

My current research focuses on how forgiveness rhetoric is used in response to anti-black racism and state violence against blacks. I noticed during the Charleston Nine Shooting, the shooting of Eric Garner, and the shooting of Samuel Dubose, that judges and the press would ask or demand the forgiveness of white perpetrators from black victims. The requests were all made within a few days of the violence. This was quite odd to me. In no press conference or court hearings of the Sandy Hook Shooting, the 911 tragedy, or the recent attack in San Bernardino is it recorded that the press or judges asked victims to forgive the suspects. I call the request for marginalized groups, particularly African-Americans, to hurry up and forgive, the “Hurry and Bury Ritual.”

The Hurry and Bury Ritual is a public ritual of asking for and expecting immediate forgiveness from black victims of anti-black racism, white violence, and state violence. As indicated above, an asymmetry exists. This asymmetry forces us to ask what is really going on. I think the ritual reveal several things: 1) A desire to ignore the problem and the solution of racist acts, (2) a lack of empathy for blacks, (3), the myth that black people have superhuman strength, (4) a fear of black rage, and (5) a belief that anger and forgiveness cannot co-exist. The cases above are uniquely useful for seeing these interactions. I claim that the Hurry and Bury ritual has illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects but it is also an example of exercitives. In other words, the requests made has the intention of motivating the victim to take the moral high road with the hope the victim will say “I forgive.” But the ritual also denies black victims the power to choose their own emotional path. By asking for forgiveness, they are commanding it, challenging black victim’s ethical and religious commitments, and controlling the narrative. The Hurry and Bury ritual is informed by both a particular view of blacks and a particular account of forgiveness.

The Standard account of forgiveness views forgiveness as the overcoming of anger. Philosophers Norvin Richards, Jeffrie Murphy, Howard McGary, and Macalester Bell all hold this view or a form of it. The Prudential account of forgiveness encourages the overcoming of negative emotions in order to feel better. Nigel Biggar holds this view of forgiveness. So there is no way for me to address the Ritual and forgiveness without understanding anger. Last year, I gave a TEDx talk entitled “Anger Is Not a Bad Word.” In that talk, I argue how appropriate anger is useful in the pursuit of justice. I think that it is important for marginalized groups to keep their anger. I believe the standard accounts of forgiveness, with its negative view of anger, burdens the marginalized and the oppressed.  It burdens them because it focuses on the character of the victim and not the damage done. It encourages the romanticizing of the forgiver while the damage itself is never addressed and rectified. It also creates a preference for feeling better over fairing better and this may impede social change. The accounts also implicitly require a compromise of self-respect for if proper self-respect is tied to resentment, a person who does not resent an injury is lacking in self-respect. These accounts of forgiveness are also too much work for victims. They de-emphasizes self-care and can place more focus on the care we offer to offenders and not the care we offer to victims.

I offer an alternative to the standard and prudential accounts. I refer to it as ‘Outraged Forgiveness’. British Moralist, Joseph Butler, has greatly influenced my account. I claim that while those who argue for the standard account claim to borrow from Butler, they instead are misreading him. I read Joseph Butler as not only valuing resentment but also giving us a unique account of anger. I argue that this makes room for black victims to maintain their resentment while forgiving. I claim that not only should we not forgive too quickly, but if forgiveness includes the forswearing of resentment, it is best for oppressed blacks not to ‘forgive’ at all.

‘Outraged Forgiveness’ is an individual action and not something that one person does for the whole community. My account of outraged forgiveness is a fittingness account of forgiveness. To forgive, on my view is to offer an appropriate, proportionate, and reasonable response to injustice. Forgiveness that is not appropriate is not an example of Outraged Forgiveness but is rather revenge or mercy, for example. For this reason, my account does conflict with arguments for Restorative Justice. Outraged forgiveness can also look different depending on the social context. Unlike the standard and prudential accounts, Outraged Forgiveness retains anger to affirm self-respect and condemn moral injury, it makes room for compassion and benevolence, in it the concept of virtuous character is broadly construed, it doesn’t burden black victims with saving others but places responsibility on institutions to correct the damage, and it doesn’t impede social change. Outraged forgiveness is a matter of action, inaction, and the heart.

In some ways, my account of forgiveness is a way to respond to the Hurry and Bury Ritual. I do not think my account is something that blacks should adopt; I think it is an account that blacks have adopted throughout the history of this country and should continue to do so. When a reporter asks another black victim of state violence to forgive, I hope the victim will respond, “Black people have been practicing Outraged Forgiveness forever. So there is no need to ask for it! Next Question.”

Lisa Tessman is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University. Her previous publications have been in ethics, feminist philosophy, and related areas. Her more recent work integrates philosophical ethics with empirical moral psychology. She is the author of Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (Oxford University Press, 2005).

The Questions of Plural and Conflicting Demands

Lisa Tessman

The “question of moral demandingness” has been understood primarily as a single, quantitative question: how much am I morally required to do? Some philosophers have answered the question by claiming that morality is extremely demanding, and this has given rise to what is known as the demandingness objection—an objection that morality can’t possibly be that demanding, and instead must be more moderate. In the debate between the extremists and the moderates, the question is usually discussed as if it were not complicated by irreducible differences in kind amongst the moral requirements—and more generally amongst all of the demands—that we face, and the contingent fact of conflict amongst them.

I think of the quantitative question, as it’s typically posed (how much am I morally required to do?), as the reductive question of moral demandingness. I grant that the reductive question of moral demandingness is tremendously useful for calling attention to an important point: that most of us who are relatively advantaged in the world do not do nearly enough of what is morally demanded of us, particularly when those demands are about responding to the needs of distant others, and (relatedly) particularly in situations in which we don’t experience an automatic, intuitive feeling of requirement. Indeed, becoming familiar with the literature surrounding this reductive question of moral demandingness is part of what has led me to now do quantitatively more to respond to the needs of distant others than I used to, and to do it in the way that tends to be recommended in this literature: send cash. Generally speaking, doing this is better than not doing it (depending, of course, on where one sends the cash).

But I think we have more complicated questions to answer, and that answering them may point us in better directions than answering the reductive question does. I’ll call these more complicated questions the questions of plural and conflicting demands:

1.     What are we required to do?

2.     Who determines this, and how?

3.     How much must we do, of what we’re required to do?

4.     When we can’t do all that we’re required to do, what shall we do?

5.     What’s the significance of the requirements that we can’t and don’t fulfill?

In my recent book, Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality, I focused on question 5. By referring in the question to “requirements that we can’t… fulfill”  I mean to indicate that there are at least some (moral) requirements that contravene the principle that “ought implies can.” In brief, I believe the significance of these impossible moral requirements lies in the fact that our failure to fulfill them is inevitable, and thus we should expect our moral lives to be shaped in part by such moral failures.

On the way to answering question 5, I had to also think about questions 1, 2, and 3.

Question 1 is a normative question. Because I believe that values are plural and conflicting, and that many of our values come with associated requirements, I think that we face a plurality of requirements that will often tend to conflict. Many of these requirements are moral requirements, and these may also conflict with some requirements based on non-moral values. So there are many, many answers to question 1.

Question 2 is a metaethical question. I never intended to do metaethics, but I found that I could not explain how we could “really” be required to do the impossible without giving an account of how any moral requirement comes to count as “real” or authoritative. In trying to answer question 2 I join other constructivists in saying that it is we who construct our (moral) requirements, and we do so through a process that involves not just making moral judgments, but also developing the kind of confidence in them that allows us to affirm or endorse them and imbue them with authority. I differ from other constructivists in that I think that moral reasoning need not take center stage in this process, and that through an intuitive process we can be confident even about some impossible moral requirements. The construction of values—and associated requirements—is complicated by the fact that who does the constructing varies (for some non-moral values it might be “I,” for moral values it is always a “we,” but this “we” could be smaller or larger, or could be constituted in different ways). This, too, contributes to the plurality of requirements that are produced.

Question 3 is what the quantitative question of moral demandingness becomes when we don’t assume that we can measure all values according to a common metric. My answer to the question, if the moral requirements under consideration are non-negotiable, is: all of it, even though we can’t. Sometimes morality is not just extremely demanding, it’s impossibly demanding.

Now it’s time for me to work on the question that I’ve avoided: question 4. Question 4 should not be confused with the following question: when moral requirements conflict, what’s the morally right thing to do? In my view, this question is misleading because if the moral requirements that conflict are non-negotiable, then there is no right thing to do, although there may (or may not) be something that’s the best possible thing to do in the circumstances. Answering the misleading question (without noticing that it’s misleading) is very gratifying because if we answer this question then we’ll not only know what to do, we’ll also get to feel great about doing it—because it’s the right thing to do and people who do the right thing (for the right reason) are good people. Answering question 4, on the other hand, is discouraging. If we answer it, we’ll know what to do, but we’ll also know that whatever we do won’t be good enough. Even if there’s something that’s the best possible thing to do, doing it will still not be good enough. To make matters worse, identifying the best possible thing to do when moral requirements (or requirements more generally) conflict isn’t always possible, particularly when the conflicting requirements concern different and incommensurable kinds of values, making comparisons complex.

When we are able to identify the best possible thing to do, we may do so on the basis of the (shared) values that we’ve already imbued with authority, in which case, by choosing to do that best possible thing, we further affirm these values. At other times we might choose against what our already established values point to, and this choice begins to alter those values. But sometimes our already established values don’t enable us to make any action-guiding choice; nevertheless, we must choose, and this choice itself serves as a new expression of value, which is part of the process of constructing value.

Suppose I make an action-guiding decision, when faced with a conflict between the requirement to do X and the requirement to do Y, that I/we should do X.  By making the decision I participate in the construction of value—I prioritize X over Y, even while recognizing that I have failed by not doing Y. My decision is not based on my grasping any independently existing moral fact that doing X takes priority over doing Y. (This is the point that Sartre emphasized to the student who sought his advice about whether to care for his mother or join the Free French Forces.) When moral requirements conflict and I’m asked, “what shall we do?” it is as if, in my response, I’m saying to fellow members of some moral community, “let’s do X” or “let’s establish a norm that doing X takes priority over doing Y,” and I’m saying it as part of the conversation that serves to construct our shared morality.

Conceived in this way, I don’t think that working on question 4 is what moral philosophers usually think of ourselves as doing. Being asked question 4 is essentially being asked for an expression of what you value, or for your contribution to what we value. Answering the question is an evaluative act. So I’d like to be explicit about what we’re doing when we answer the question: we’re participating in the construction of (moral) value.