Jul 2026· Ethics, Politics & Society· Vol 9· 0 citations
Abstract
Gosseries argues that we have moral duties to future people, since we should not discriminate against people based on when they live—that all people, at all times, have an equal right to the basic requirements of a good life. I argue that in making this claim Gosseries is committed to the real existence of these future people, and in making this commitment he is also committed to a metaphysical view where the future is fixed and unchanging. This introduces a problem that Gosseries does not address: that a fixed future makes any kind of moral deliberation pointless.
In this article, it is argued that action from duty has special moral worth on Kant's account because (i) it is an instance of good willing, and (ii) the good will is the only unconditional good. This is used to argue, contrary to various commentators, that Kant's doctrine of moral worth is central, not only to Kantian ethics, but to any deontological ethics. It is suggested that, if this is correct, then there are grounds for taking the first line of part I of the Groundwork to a Metaphysics of Morals to be the long‐debated, unenumerated first proposition in the deduction of the Formula of Universal Law.
Samuel Kahn· Philosophical Investigation· 0 citations
In this reply to critics, I begin by addressing concerns about the ability of future rights to justify current duties. I then move to the issue of whether a collectivist approach can help us facing the difficulties that we encounter when we want to hold some people responsible today for what their ancestors did. I then conclude the paper by considerations on the social discount rate, discussing both ideas about discounting for reasons of uncertainty and the implications of a Schefflerian approach for the practice of discounting.
Axel Gosseries· Ethics, Politics & Socie...· 0 citations
There has been a recent surge of interest in normative internalism, according to which what you ought to do depends on your beliefs about morality. This view has potentially wide-reaching implications for practical action, policy choice, and societal norms. The view is motivated by certain compelling examples, but in this paper I argue that such examples may not support normative internalism after all, for the phenomenon of imaginative resistance – well-known to philosophers of fiction – is at work here, muddying our intuitions. Once these examples are set aside, we get a more realistic view of the limited interest and importance of an internalist sense of ‘ought’.
Modernity has ushered in an increasing detachment from life; a divorce of sorts is taking place between the individual and the cultural context. Given certain thoughts and feelings, words fail us. It seems that we fail to communicate, to understand, to carve significance beyond the text. I write this manuscript as a feature of contemporary Zeitgeist, as a response to modern uncertainties about humanity. My belief is that the contract between language and reality is broken; thus, we lost our only hope to make contact with reality.
In the paper I argue that social discounting of the future fails, in more general terms, because by focusing on existence or time distance, neglects the fact that future generations are participants in the same chain of human succession. Making use of Gosseries’ discussion in the book What is Intergenerational Justice? I argue that existence and time distance are morally irrelevant factors, because human succession is mapped on the structure of our practical rationality, and particularly on the notion of valuing per se. By criticizing Gosseries’ insistence on impartiality, I argue first that valuing is a diachronic enterprise that necessitates the fact that human generations should exist, something that creates certain duties of sufficientarian justice. Second, I argue that valuing is also a synchronic enterprise, unveiled in our attachment to fellow people that interact with us in the here and now, something that also creates special duties of justice to them.
Kostas Koukouzelis· Ethics, Politics & Socie...· 0 citations
Recently, Hasok Chang has argued that we should adopt a pragmatic account of truth on which truth is constituted by practical success. Central to his argument is the claim that truth in this sense can be pursued and that other senses of truth can’t be. In this paper, I present a dilemma for Chang’s view. Either practical success constitutes truth in a way that implies infallibility—a conclusion that I’ll argue is untenable—or the argument from pursuit fails. I end by suggesting that scientific realism alone commits us to very little with respect to truth.
Corey Dethier· Philosophia Scientiæ· 0 citations
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