Jack, Jill, and Jane in a Perfect Moral Storm

Political Theory and Global Climate Change, 2008

Jack, Jill, and Jane in a Perfect Moral Storm Dale Jamieson tephen Gardiner's A Perfect Moral Storm is a wonderful 9 book. It goes a long way towards explaining why we have 10 failed to act on climate change. I agree almost entirely with 11 its broad conclusions and with most of its specific claims. The author and I are comrades in the struggle, and like-minded in the ways that matter most. Still, there is an important difference between us. I do not want to overstate this difference nor exaggerate its significance. However, I believe that articulating this difference can help clarify why moral arguments have largely failed to move us to respond to climate change. Gardiner and I agree that our response to climate change constitutes a "profound ethical failure" but we disagree about the nature of this failure. 1 Gardiner thinks that we have moral norms and concepts that apply that we are not living up to. Thus we are the proper subjects of moral condemnation. He charges us with "willful self-deception and moral corruption"(11). I do not deny that with respect to some of our climate change contributing behavior there are applicable moral norms which we fail to live

Cognition & Emotion, 2013

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

In this paper, I defend the view that we can literally perceive the morally right and wrong, or something near enough. In defending this claim, I will try to meet three primary objectives: 1) to clarify how an investigation into moral phenomenology should proceed, 2) to respond to a number of misconceptions and objections that are most frequently raised against the very idea of moral perception, and 3) to provide a model for how some moral perception can be seen as literal perception. Because I take ‘moral perception’ to pick out a family of different experiences, I will limit myself (for the most part) to a discussion of the moral relevance of the emotions.

2002

impartiality as we separate ourselves from our own personalities and interests to follow the dictates of universalizable moral principles— a vision of moral maturity that is rather psychologically barren and suspect. The philosophical constraints and psychological emphases inherent in Kohlberg’s model have the inevitable consequence of restriction of perspective, a conceptual skew that results in a narrow view of moral functioning. Kohlberg was not entirely blind to the constraints placed on his model by the emphasis on moral rationality and justice, and he attempted to flesh out his theory in several ways, at least as much as his theoretical allegiances would allow; but the model could only be tweaked so far and its core emphasis on cognition and justice remained. Other influential theorists in moral psychology2 have also implicitly assumed the objectives of modernity and so can be similarly tarred and feathered for their emphasis on moral rationality and minimal attention 2. N. Ei...

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2012

In this paper I explore the question of whether or not we ought to defer to our moral intuitions across a range of situations by critically comparing two of the major views on this debate. The views I compare are those of Gerd Gigerenzer and Joshua Greene. Despite both having influential and opposing views they have never engaged with each other in print and are not often directly compared. Gigerenzer is of the view that our moral intuitions are, broadly speaking, adaptive whilst Greene takes the opposite view. The main contention that I focus on is Greene's supposition that our moral intuitions are maladaptive in what he calls ‘unfamiliar’ moral situations i.e. problems that have arisen in our recent history such as global poverty, terrorism, trolly problems etc. My conclusion is that Gigerenzer’s thesis is either trivial or false because the areas that Greene identifies as being unsuited to our intuitions are precisely the areas that we should care about and the conceptual tool that Gigerenzer employs to avoid this (ecological rationality) cannot plausibly solve these problems. The normative framework I employ to judge an intuition as ‘better’ or ‘worse’ is one which both parties can agree to.

Environmental Ethics, 2017

The harms that will result from climate change are so spatiotemporally distant from and complexly related to the acts that cause them that the commonsense concept of moral responsibility can seem inadequate. For this reason, Dale Jamieson has raised the possibility that climate change might represent not simply a moral failure but a failure of morality itself. The result could be a climate disaster for which no one is morally responsible. Debates about the adequacy of commonsense morality, however, often rely on an overly simplistic picture of it. This essay proposes a more adequate picture of commonsense morality, which allows for both a more nuanced account of its role in the problem of climate change and a more satisfying account of individual moral responsibility for contributions to climate change.

Nursing Outlook, 2020