https://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/atomJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Chico Parkjespmanagingeditor@gmail.comOpen Journal Systems<p>The <em>Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy</em> is a peer-reviewed online journal in moral, social, political, and legal philosophy. The journal welcomes submissions of articles in any of these and related fields of research. The journal is interested in work in the history of ethics that bears directly on topics of contemporary interest, but does not consider articles of purely historical interest.</p> <p>The <em>Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy</em> aspires to be the leading venue for the best new work in the fields that it covers, and applies a correspondingly high editorial standard. But it is the view of the associate editors that this standard does not preclude publishing work that is critical in nature, provided that it is constructive, well-argued, current, and of sufficiently general interest.</p> <p>While the <em>Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy</em> will consider longer articles, in general the journal would prefer articles that do not exceed 15,000 words, and articles of all lengths will be evaluated in terms of what they accomplish in proportion to their length. Articles under 3k words should be submitted as discussion notes, which are reviewed and published separately from main articles. </p>https://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/3086Privileged Citizens and the Right to Riot2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Thomas Carnes
<p>Avia Pasternak’s account of permissible political rioting includes a constraint that insists only oppressed citizens, and not privileged citizens, are permitted to riot when rioting is justified. This discussion note argues that Pasternak’s account, with which I largely agree, should be expanded to admit the permissibility of privileged citizens rioting alongside and in solidarity with oppressed citizens. The permissibility of privileged citizens participating in riots when rioting is justified is grounded in the notions that it is sometimes necessary, in accordance with Pasternak’s necessity condition, and that it will oftentimes substantially improve the chances of successfully achieving the just aims the rioting seeks to achieve, in accordance with Pasternak’s success condition. Allowing for this improves Pasternak’s already strong account of permissible political rioting on its own terms.</p>
2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Thomas Carneshttps://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/3233Gaslighting and Peer Disagreement2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Scott Hill
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I present a counterexample to Kirk-Giannini’s Dilemmatic Theory of gaslighting. </span></p>
2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Scott Hillhttps://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/2316How to Read a Riot2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Ricky Mouser
<p>How should we think about public rioting for political ends? Might it ever be more than morally excusable behavior? In this essay, I show how political rioting can sometimes be positively morally <em>justified</em> as an intermediate defensive harm in between civilly disobedient protest and political revolution. I do so by reading political rioters as, at the same time, uncivil and ultimately conciliatory with their state. Unlike civilly disobedient protestors, political rioters express a lack of faith in the value or applicability of civility in interacting with the state under the political status quo. But unlike political revolutionaries who aim at separation from the state, political rioters paradigmatically seek fuller inclusion within it. By rejecting even the appearance of compliance with the political status quo’s systems of justice, political rioters can create a unique venue for systemically marginalized citizens to express warranted disrespect for the state that maintains them in ongoing subjection, as well as their inviolable respect for themselves as persons with dignity <em>beyond</em> the boundaries of civility.</p>
2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Ricky Mouserhttps://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/2844Dismissing Blame2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Justin Snedegar
<p>When someone blames you, you might accept the blame or you might reject it, challenging the blamer’s interpretation of the facts or providing a justification or excuse. Either way, there are opportunities for edifying moral discussion and moral repair. But another common, and less constructive, response is to simply dismiss the blame, refusing to engage with the blamer. Even if you agree that you are blameworthy, you may refuse to engage with the blame—and, specifically, with blame coming from this particular person. This is a common response if the blamer is being hypocritical or meddlesome in blaming the wrongdoer. This paper aims to make sense of this kind of response: What are we doing when we dismiss blame? A common thought is that we dismiss demands issued by blame, but we still must identify the content of the relevant demands. My proposal is that when we dismiss blame, we dismiss a demand to respond to the blame with a second-personal expression of remorse to the blamer.</p>
2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Justin Snedegarhttps://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/2370The Problem of Basic Equality2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Nikolas Kirby
<p>This paper offers a targeted five-point critique of the current debate about the problem of basic equality. First, it argues that the debate should be refocussed away from any particular concept(ion) of basic equality to a more agnostic proposition about the possibility of establishing equality in any basic moral property. Second, it re-articulates the problem in terms of grounding relations rather than supervenience. Third, it argues that proponents of predominant approach to solving this problem have failed to properly distinguish between two different non-scalar properties defined in terms of scalar properties: ‘range properties’ and ‘bare properties’. Once disambiguated it is clear as to why such an approach must fail. However, this critique does direct our attention to a possible alternative strategy, that is, grounding our equality upon a ‘relative property’.</p>
2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Nikolas Nikolas Kirbyhttps://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/1770What Time Travel Teaches Us about Moral Responsibility2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Taylor CyrNeal Tognazzini
<p>This paper explores what the metaphysics of time travel might teach us about moral responsibility. We take our cue from a recent paper by Yishai Cohen, who argues that if time travel is metaphysically possible, then one of the most influential theories of moral responsibility (i.e., Fischer and Ravizza’s) is false. We argue that Cohen’s argument is unsound but that Cohen’s argument can serve as a lens to bring reasons-responsive theories of moral responsibility into sharper focus, helping us to better understand <em>actual-sequence</em> theories of moral responsibility more generally and showing how actual-sequence theorists should respond to a recent criticism.</p>
2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 https://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/2741Paternalism and Exclusion2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Kyle van Oosterum
<p>What makes paternalism wrong? I give an indirect answer to that question by challenging a recent trend in the literature that I call the exclusionary strategy. The exclusionary strategy aims to show how some feature of the paternalizee’s normative situation morally excludes acting for the paternalizee’s well-being. This moral exclusion consists either in ruling out the reasons for which a paternalizer may act or in changes to the right-making status of the reasons that (would) justify paternalistic intervention. I argue that both versions of the exclusionary strategy fail to explain the wrongness of paternalism and that they struggle to accommodate the mainstream view that paternalism is only <em>pro tanto</em> wrong. Their failure consists either in being implausibly strong expressions of antipaternalism or in struggling to spell out the scope of exclusion in an uncomplicated way. After discouraging this exclusionary strategy, I suggest we can capture what is appealing about it—as well as avoiding its pitfalls—by sketching a philosophical model in which we compare the weights of reasons for and against paternalistically interfering. To precisify this sketch, I introduce some conceptual tools from the literature on practical reasoning—in particular, the concept of modifiers—and suggest that these tools offer a better starting point for figuring out what makes paternalism (<em>pro tanto</em>) wrong.</p>
2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Kyle van Oosterumhttps://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/2719Maxim and Principle Contractualism2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Aaron Salomon
<p>I argue that, in order to address the ideal world problem while remaining faithful to our concept of morality, Contractualists should no longer determine which actions I must perform by seeing whether they accord with certain principles for the general regulation of behavior. Instead, I argue, Contractualists should determine whether it is right or wrong for me to perform an action by evaluating any maxim that might be reflected by my action. I call the resulting view “Maxim Contractualism.” It states that an agent’s action is morally required just in case any maxim that he might adopt that involves not performing that action is one that someone could reasonably reject. Finally, I argue that, although Act Contractualism also provides us with the materials to solve the Ideal World Problem, it is a worse solution because it cannot account for the fact that, sometimes, what would happen if I performed an action over time is relevant to whether I am permitted to perform that action right here, right now.</p>
2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Aaron Salomonhttps://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/2103Nonnaturalism, the Supervenience Challenge, Higher-Order Properties, and Trope Theory2024-02-14T05:05:09+00:00Jussi Suikkanen
<p>Nonnaturalist realism is the view that normative properties are unique kind of stance-independent properties. It has been argued that such views fail to explain why two actions that are exactly alike otherwise must also have the same normative properties. Mark Schroeder and Knut Olav Skarsaune have recently suggested that nonnaturalist realists can respond to this supervenience challenge by taking the primary bearers of normative properties to be action kinds. This paper develops their response in two ways. First, it provides additional motivation for the previous claim about the bearers of normative properties by drawing from the work of H. A. Prichard. Second, and more importantly, it formulates a plausible metaphysical framework based on the contemporary trope theory to explain why action kinds would have their second-order properties, including their normative properties, necessarily.</p>
2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Jussi Suikkanen