Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Moral Significance Of Empathy: A Scottish Sentimentalist Perspective, Xiaolong Wang

The Hilltop Review

Which feature of human nature accounts for moral motivation? From a Scottish Sentimentalist perspective, the answer lies in our fellow feelings: empathy, the capacity for sharing what other people feel; and sympathy, the capacity for feeling concern for other people’s well-being. Recently, disagreement has emerged within Scottish Sentimentalism on which of the two fellow feelings does the real work in motivating moral acts. Paul Bloom famously argues that sympathy is sufficient for moral motivation with the help of theory of mind (or often called mind reading), and thus concludes that empathy is not necessary from a Scottish Sentimentalist perspective. I …

Justifying Advocacy Of Patients’ Belief Diversity W/ Support From William James’ Lectures On Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways Of Thinking, The Variety Of Religious Experiences & The Will To Believe, Sterling Courtney

The Hilltop Review

Abstract:

Predating monastic healthcare in the Middle Ages (Siraisi, 2019), spirituality and/or religion have been unified with healing, caring for the sick and consoling the dying, as documented by historical writings as early as c.3000 BCE-c.500 BCE in Mesopotamia and followed by coinciding accounts from c.750 BCE-c.280 BCE Greece and Rome (Mann, 2014). Via philosophy and science, a movement towards secularization has been perceived (as the Renaissance faded and the scientific revolution led into the Age of Enlightenment), therefore creating a dichotomy between treating the physical body separate from the metaphysical soul. In the early 1900’s, Abraham Flexner discredited any …

Freedom Or Responsibility? On The Unreason Of Public Reason, Mitchell L. Winget

The Hilltop Review

Abstract: This article argues that the public reason tradition of political normativity is flawed. As a result, I argue for a politically normative approach that rationally justifies morally legitimate political power for democratic political societies from outside the paradigm of public reason. To this end, I propose that neo-Aristotelian virtue theory lends us such a framework. Furthermore, I’ll defend this framework against the objections that such a theory of political normativity is unreasonable and anti-democratic.

Wildlife Emotions: Animal Rights As Examined Through A Cognitivist Lens, Kristy Schultz

The Hilltop Review

The aim of this article is to revisit and redefine the scope of a Kantian rights-based theory to include non-human animals. Generally, rights-based theories are predicated on a Kantian deontology that excludes all but rational subjects from possessing of basic rights. Historically, non-human animals—once thought to act on impulse and desire alone—have been excluded from rights-based considerations. However, more recent literature from emotions theorist Martha Nussbaum suggests an alternative picture for non-human animals. Cognitivist theories like Nussbaum’s, alongside intensive scientific research, support the notion that non-human animals show signs of intentionality and possess the capacity to emote. If Nussbaum’s theory …

Pleasure In Virtue: The Possibility Of Willful Virtuous Behavior, Kaleb Terbush

The Hilltop Review

Virtuous behavior has often been construed as having three requisite elements: right action, done for the right reason, and also carried out with the “right feeling,” i.e. without the contrary inclination of Aristotle’s merely continent individual. Some have argued that even if the right motivating reason(s) for action might not be directly within our power to act on at will, there are a number of steps we can take in order to make ourselves more responsive to the appropriate reasons – thus giving us indirect control over which reasons we take to be compelling. However, I believe that such accounts …

A Defense Of The Unrestricted Kantian Moral Saint, Richard Szabo

The Hilltop Review

In this article I provide a defense for the worthiness of the moral paradigm of unrestricted Kantian Moral Sainthood from criticisms raised by Susan Wolf. She claims that actually achieving the ideal would result in undesirable moral fanatics with underdeveloped nonmoral characters that none of us would want to be like and so we should not aspire to this ideal of Moral Sainthood. My defense’s main thrust appeals to the impossibility of human beings achieving the demands of the ideal in the actual world in order to avoid Wolf’s objections. Because we can never become unrestricted Kantian Moral Saints (i.e. …

Human-Nonhuman Chimeras, Ontology, And Dignity: A Constructivist Approach To The Ethics Of Conducting Research On Cross-Species Hybrids, Jonathan M. Vajda

The Hilltop Review

Developments in biological technology in the last few decades highlight the surprising and ever-expanding practical benefits of stem cells. With this progress, the possibility of combining human and nonhuman organisms is a reality, with ethical boundaries that are not readily obvious. These inter-species hybrids are of a larger class of biological entities called “chimeras.” As the concept of a human-nonhuman creature is conjured in our minds, either incredulous wonder or grotesque horror is likely to follow. This paper seeks to mitigate those worries and demotivate reasonable concerns raised against chimera research, all the while pressing current ethical positions toward their …

Moral Disagreement And Audi's Account Of Moral Intuitionism, Dustin Michael Sigsbee

The Hilltop Review

In Moral Perception Robert Audi advocates for an intuitionist account of moral perception in which a moral agent of the proper disposition can use emotion and intuition as a means of supporting or justifying knowledge claims concerning certain moral truths or propositions. Since emotion and intuition can vary from agent to agent and neither agent would be better disposed to claim priority for their emotion or intuition over that of the other agent this opens Audi’s account up to possible instances of problematic disagreement. For this reason, I argue that agents in this intuitionist picture ought to remain epistemically agnostic …