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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The problem of this dissertation is the formulation of a method for determining the ethical responsibility of the natural scientist for participation in the development of modern military weapons. This question of responsibility is presented to the scientist by the extreme destructiveness of many modern weapons and by the requests of governments for scientists to participate in the development of new weapons. The role of advanced scientific work has become basic and therefore crucial to the success of weapons development programs. The question of responsibility has been debated among scientists and others, particularly since the development of the atomic bomb. In general, this debate has been inconclusive, and no extended studies of the ethical issues involved or of the method needed for resolution of the issue have appeared. This dissertation is an approach to filling this need. [TRUNCATED]

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of faultless disagreement: situations in which it seems that neither of two opposing sides has made a mistake in upholding their respective positions. I explore the way in which we ought to conceive of the nature of the kinds of claims that give rise to faultless disagreement and what the possibility of such disagreement reveals with a view to the rationality of tolerance. My starting point is a rather simple observation: persistent disagreements about ordinary empirical claims, say, that it's now raining outside or that Columbia's Philosophy Department is located at 1150 Amsterdam Avenue, are significantly more puzzling than persistent disagreements about matters of taste and value. Suppose you and I are standing at 1150 Amsterdam Avenue and you deny that this is where Columbia's Philosophy Department is located. My immediate--and I believe justifiable--reaction is to suspect that you suffer from some sort of cognitive shortcoming: bad eyesight, the influence of drugs, or what have you. As opposed to that, I am not particularly shocked to see that our disagreement about the tastiness of snails persists. More importantly, I would not want to say that you are mistaken in any real way if you call snails tasty. The problem is of course that if we are prepared to allow for the possibility of faultless disagreement, it seems inevitable to conclude that for certain subject matters the law of non-contradiction does not hold. The tension between this rather uncomfortable consequence and what seems to be a datum of our linguistic practices motivates the guiding question of my dissertation--namely, if there is a way to make sense of the phenomenon of faultless disagreement. In trying to do so, I make three central claims. First, I argue that the possibility of faultless disagreement is characteristic of what I call "basic evaluations." Evaluations are basic, on my account, not by being fundamental or universal, but by being rooted in the agent's sensibilities. Such evaluations are basic insofar as the agent cannot step outside of her inner frame of personal tastes and preferences. Second, I argue that what characterizes faultless disagreements is that there are no established methods of determining who has gotten things right. This is why we tend to think that the opponents may rationally stick to their respective positions--or, as I put in my dissertation, why we do not epistemically downgrade each other whenever we encounter such disagreements. The absence of established methods of resolution entails various epistemological challenges for realist accounts of the kinds of claims that give rise to faultless disagreement. The realist insists that despite the appearance that these disagreements are rationally irresolvable, at least one of the opposing sides must have made a mistake. But then she is forced to maintain either that we might lack epistemic access to the realm of evaluative facts and properties, or that we have access to this realm due to special evaluative capacities. Neither option is particularly attractive from the point of view of an agent. In response to such challenges I therefore propose a non-cognitivist, robustly anti-realist account of the subset of the evaluative domain of discourse that allows for faultless disagreement. I argue that we can make sense of the dimension of faultlessness, if we construe the relevant claims as expressions of our individual evaluative attitudes. More precisely, I suggest that we can construe them as dispositional intentions or plans to bring the world into line with what one deems worthy of pursuit. I also show how we can make sense of the dimension of disagreement by proposing a pragmatic account of the way in which evaluative attitudes can stand in relations of inconsistency. Third, I argue that whenever there is no way of demonstrating that one side has gotten things wrong, it is unjustified--at least from the point of view of a cognizer who abides by the norms of rationality--to reject a given conflicting evaluation as mistaken. When it comes to the kinds of claims that give rise to faultless disagreement it is thus a rational requirement to be tolerant of our opponents' positions. Contrary to a long-standing tradition that goes back to Locke and Mill I therefore take toleration to be not a moral, but an epistemic value. Moreover, I show that what is sometimes taken to be paradoxical about the kinds of situations that call for toleration is the result of a switch of perspectives: from the perspective of a valuer I genuinely disagree, say, with your claim that it's permissible to lie if this prevents hurting someone's feelings. But from the perspective of a cognizer I realize that I would be unjustified in rejecting your conflicting evaluation as mistaken.

This study investigates the relevance of habits in education. Philosophers, from Aristotle to Montaigne to Rousseau to Dewey, positively and negatively portray habits. Philosophers of education have delineated habits worth developing and habits detrimental to the project of education. In the current era of high-stakes testing and accountability, there has been an increased interest in habits. Yet, the habits of interest in many educational settings today are often regimented and un-reflectively repetitive. Lists of habits that we can widely recommend and repeat across countless contexts are deemed useful because they are easily measurable and facilitate assessment, but they can lead to a practice of education that is inhumane and a profession of teaching that is marked by growing attrition. A philosophically-grounded conception of habit has the potential to humanize learning. This study seeks to identify habits that are dynamic and responsive, those that can become the bases for lifelong learning. An account of dynamic habits and ways of modifying habits through experience and reflection has twofold implications for teachers. First, by reflecting on what they have learned and imagining new possible directions for their practice, teachers initiate the critical process of reconstructing habits, which allows them to improve their practice. Second, by cultivating dynamic habits, teachers are better equipped to model and actively teach thinking and reflection in the classroom with their students.

The concept of luck is important to a wide range of philosophical areas including ethics (moral luck), epistemology (epistemic luck), political philosophy (issues of distributive justice and just deserts), and metaphysics (causation and the notion of coincidence). However, until recently, many of these discussions appealed to the concept of luck (and intuitions surrounding the role of luck) only as an undefined primitive. This dissertation is directed at providing a theory of luck from a different vantage than contemporary philosophical accounts (such as those developed by Duncan Pritchard, Wayne Riggs, and Nicholas Rescher). My first two chapters explore the existing treatments of luck in contemporary philosophy and a selection of psychological research is order to distinguish the philosophically relevant notion of luck from the popular superstitious ideas of luck. I propose that luck can be roughly described as involving a sense of significance (instances of luck matter to the affected parties) and a sense of unreliability (we cannot count on luck). I also identify two important trends in contemporary treatments of luck; 1) contemporary accounts have a much more detailed focus on the unreliability criterion than on the significance criterion, and 2) many discussions of luck treat luck as an intrinsic feature of the world such that instances of luck can be identified as matters of luck apart from any consideration of their significance. In my third chapter, I argue that significance deserves as careful and detailed a treatment as unreliability, and I argue against the idea that the relevant notion of significance can be understood merely in terms of an affected subject's actual or potential beliefs about what is significant to her. In giving a more nuanced account of significance, I propose a distinction between impersonal luck (luck that involves an advantage for any subject in the same situation) and personal luck (luck that involves an advantage for the subject only because of that subject's particular characteristics). In my fourth chapter, I criticize accounts that treat luck as an intrinsic property that can be identified apart from a consideration of the significance for an affected subject (what I have called matter of luck accounts). I propose that luck is a property dependent on a practice of adopting modified attitudes (what I call luck attitudes) and that we can understand the unreliability of luck in terms of this practice; an advantage is ordinarily acquired if it is appropriate to adopt normal attitudes towards someone's possession of it, and an advantage is extraordinarily acquired, and therefore lucky, if it is appropriate to adopt the modified luck attitudes towards it. My final chapter contains my theory of luck. Following the discussions in my third and fourth chapters, I propose an account where significance plays a central role in distinguishing instances of luck. I propose a framework on which advantages are ordinarily or extraordinarily obtained according to their significance to the possessor, and I propose that a lucky state of affairs be understood as a state of affairs that involves an advantage for a subject who has obtained that advantage in an extraordinary way. The conditions under which an advantage is ordinarily obtained are sensitive to the nature and degree of the advantage. In line with the discussion in my fourth chapter, I conclude by proposing some conditions which lead us to adopt normal attitudes (that is, conditions under which having an advantage would be considered ordinary) but leave it open to modification in light of changing social practices of, and standards for, adopting luck attitudes.

Can an error be rational? Hegel traces modern skepticism to the mistaken idea that the object of knowledge is ontologically separate from our rational, subjective minds. Once we subscribe to this idea—which John McDowell has called “the basic misconception of modern philosophy”—we can only represent reality as it appears to us, as subjects, rather than know it in-itself, as it is independently of us. However, and contrary to McDowell and other prominent commentators, I argue that Hegel takes this mistake to be ethically rational; it is grounded in basic and enduring features of the modern socio-political order, features that are necessary for individual freedom and for economic and cultural development. And yet, while it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate modern skepticism, I argue that Hegel’s social theory offers ethical arrangements that are meant to mitigate its potentially nihilistic effects. I reconstruct his account of the modern (nuclear) family as a case of what I call an “ethical remedy” to skepticism.

This dissertation argues that ethics is fundamentally mind-dependent. Ethics is invented by humans, to solve the problems that mutually sympathetic agents find in living together. Ethical discovery is the discovery of solutions to the kinds of problems that humans find themselves to face. Views of this kind are familiar, but I attempt to re-orient the debate. Many philosophers see questions about the foundations of ethics as fundamentally theoretical, arguing for one view or another on metaphysical or linguistic grounds. I argue that the question of which metaethical view we adopt is a substantive, first-order moral question. And, contrary to many, I think that first-order considerations speak in favour of a variety of anti-realism. We should reject the search for non-natural, mind-independent, objective moral truths as morally objectionable: it denigrates interpersonal concern, making the significance of moral and practical life dependent upon abstractions remote from what we care about and ought to care about. By contrast, seeing norms of morality and practical rationality as collectively created by processes of interpersonal sympathy shows why they matter, and explains the goals and methods of moral inquiry.

The primary aim of this thesis is to examine whether and how Kantian ethicists can accommodate the intuitions that motivate moral particularism: the intuition that the moral domain is very complex, that our moral obligations vary with circumstances in ways that are hard to codify, and that there are exceptions to most, if not all, moral principles that we can think of or formulate (Part One). The secondary aim of this thesis is to draw on the insights gained in the course of this investigation in order to contribute to the solution of two other problems that occupy contemporary Kantian ethicists (Part Two). To begin with, I discuss and reject a number of existing attempts to account for the circumstance-dependence of our moral obligations within a Kantian framework. What all these attempts have in common is the assumption that, for Kant, a principle of duty is universally valid only if it is valid in all cases or situations. I call this the “Case-Scope Reading” of Kant’s conception of universal validity. When combined with the requirements that emerge from the challenge mounted by their particularist opponents, this reading throws Kantians on the horns of a trilemma. In response, I suggest that we should rethink this understanding of universal validity in light of the distinctive role and significance assigned to universal rules within Kant’s theory of objective knowledge. If we do, we are led to what I call the “Agent-Scope Reading” of Kant’s conception of universal validity: the view that a principle is universally valid if and only if it can be agreed to hold by all rational agents (qua judging subjects) and for all such agents (qua objects judged) in the same circumstances. This reading has a number of advantages. Not only does it expose the trilemma mentioned above as merely apparent, it also helps Kantians to dissolve the so-called Problem of Relevant Descriptions and to defend Kantian Constructivism against its Humean critics.

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The thesis proposes an ethics centred on the notion of human dignity. In Chapter One I introduce the position the thesis proposes, Agent Particularism, according to which who you are is relevant to determining what you ought to do. I reject the thesis of the universalizability of moral judgements that says that if you judge that X is the right thing for you to do, you are necessarily committed to the view that X is the right thing for everybody to do in relevantly similar circumstances. In Chapter Two I present an Agent-Particularist conception of freedom. I offer an Agent-Particularist conception of the self. I make a distinction between negative freedom, which is being free from external interference, and positive freedom, which is developing into the ideal version of yourself (in accord with your particular nature). In Chapter Three I present Agent Particularism as a kind of virtue ethics. I offer a solution to an epistemological problem that the thesis faces: once I have rejected the existence of exceptionless moral principles, how can there be moral knowledge and what kind of knowledge that would be? I argue that the problem can be solved by understanding moral knowledge as consisting on the deliverances of a perceptual capacity. I position Agent Particularism in relation to traditional virtue ethics. In Chapter Four I present the Agent-Particularist conception of human dignity. I show that the Agent-Particularist position developed in the first three chapters issues in a peculiar conception of human dignity. I present the basic elements of an Agent-Particularist conception of dignity. I present Kant's conception of dignity and contrast it with the Agent-Particularist conception.