W J Fitzpatrick
Biographic Data
| ID | 5129101 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W J Fitzpatrick |
| GIVEN NAMES | W J |
| FAMILY NAME | Fitzpatrick |
| SIGNATURE | FITZPATRICK W J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Rochester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6922-1181 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Ardent Moral Realism and the Value-Laden World
This chapter aims to shed light on what is ultimately at stake in debates over moral realism by examining a particularly ambitious form of it, which we’ll call “ardent moral realism.” On this view, the world is robustly value-laden such that it objectively favors certain ways of valuing and acting over others, where this favoring involves categorical moral normativity. An interesting recent challenge seeks to cast doubt on the very coherence of s…
Ethical Realism
This Element examines the many facets of ethical realism and the issues at stake in metaethical debates about it—both between realism and non-realist alternatives, and between different versions of realism itself. Starting with a minimal core characterization of ethical realism focused on claims about meaning and truth, we go on to develop a narrower and more theoretically useful conception by adding further claims about objectivity and ontologic…
Moral Phenomenology and the Value-Laden World
The Origins of Unfairness
Human groups across cultures and times have divided labor by gender. What explains this fact, along with related inequities in the division of resources? It may be tempting to assume that such divisions are to be explained by appeal to evolutionary biology—evolved differences in suitability or preferences for various tasks, innate sexist biases, and so on. But substantial cross-cultural diversity in the details of labor divisions points to a more…
Moral Progress for Evolved Rational Creatures
Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell have developed a rich ‘biocultural theory’ of the nature and causes of moral progress (and regress) for human beings conceived as evolved rational creatures with a nature characterized by ‘adaptive plasticity’. They characterize their theory as a thoroughly naturalistic account of moral progress, while bracketing various questions in moral theory and metaethics in favor of focusing on a certain range of more scie…
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics
Evolutionary ethics - the application of evolutionary ideas to moral thinking and justification - began in the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but was subsequently criticized as an example of the naturalistic fallacy. In recent decades, however, evolutionary ethics has found new support among both the Darwinian and the Spencerian traditions. This accessible volume looks at the history of thought about evolu…
How not to be an ethical constructivist
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Constructivism in Ethics
Are there such things as moral truths? How do we know what we should do? And does it matter? Constructivism states that moral truths are neither invented nor discovered, but rather are constructed by rational agents in order to solve practical problems. While constructivism has become the focus of many philosophical debates in normative ethics, meta-ethics and action theory, its importance is still to be fully appreciated. These new essays writte…
The Doctrine of Double Effect
The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is an influential non-consequentialist principle positing a role for intention in affecting the moral permissibility of some actions. In particular, the DDE focuses on the intend/foresee distinction, the core claim being that it is sometimes permissible to bring about as a foreseen but unintended side-effect of one's action some harm it would have been impermissible to aim at as a means or as an end, all else b…
Climate Change and the Rights of Future Generations
Valuing Nature Non-Instrumentally
Surplus Embryos, Nonreproductive Cloning, and the Intend/Foresee Distinction
There is, as some public figures have asserted, a real moral difference between creating embryos expressly for medical research and conducting research on embryos that are left over from infertility treatments. To create an embryo intending all along to destroy it is worse. But in the end, it isn't so much worse that we should ban all nonreproductive cloning
O'Neill and Korsgaard on the Construction of Normativity
The Doctrine of Double Effect
The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is an influential non-consequentialist principle positing a role for intention in affecting the moral permissibility of some actions. In particular, the DDE focuses on the intend/foresee distinction, the core claim being that it is sometimes permissible to bring about as a foreseen but unintended side-effect of one's action some harm it would have been impermissible to aim at as a means or as an end, all else b…
Moral Progress for Evolved Rational Creatures
Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell have developed a rich ‘biocultural theory’ of the nature and causes of moral progress (and regress) for human beings conceived as evolved rational creatures with a nature characterized by ‘adaptive plasticity’. They characterize their theory as a thoroughly naturalistic account of moral progress, while bracketing various questions in moral theory and metaethics in favor of focusing on a certain range of more scie…
O'Neill and Korsgaard on the Construction of Normativity
Surplus Embryos, Nonreproductive Cloning, and the Intend/Foresee Distinction
There is, as some public figures have asserted, a real moral difference between creating embryos expressly for medical research and conducting research on embryos that are left over from infertility treatments. To create an embryo intending all along to destroy it is worse. But in the end, it isn't so much worse that we should ban all nonreproductive cloning
Valuing Nature Non-Instrumentally
Climate Change and the Rights of Future Generations
The Doctrine of Double Effect
The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is an influential non-consequentialist principle positing a role for intention in affecting the moral permissibility of some actions. In particular, the DDE focuses on the intend/foresee distinction, the core claim being that it is sometimes permissible to bring about as a foreseen but unintended side-effect of one's action some harm it would have been impermissible to aim at as a means or as an end, all else b…
How not to be an ethical constructivist
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Constructivism in Ethics
Are there such things as moral truths? How do we know what we should do? And does it matter? Constructivism states that moral truths are neither invented nor discovered, but rather are constructed by rational agents in order to solve practical problems. While constructivism has become the focus of many philosophical debates in normative ethics, meta-ethics and action theory, its importance is still to be fully appreciated. These new essays writte…
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics
Evolutionary ethics - the application of evolutionary ideas to moral thinking and justification - began in the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but was subsequently criticized as an example of the naturalistic fallacy. In recent decades, however, evolutionary ethics has found new support among both the Darwinian and the Spencerian traditions. This accessible volume looks at the history of thought about evolu…
Moral Progress for Evolved Rational Creatures
Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell have developed a rich ‘biocultural theory’ of the nature and causes of moral progress (and regress) for human beings conceived as evolved rational creatures with a nature characterized by ‘adaptive plasticity’. They characterize their theory as a thoroughly naturalistic account of moral progress, while bracketing various questions in moral theory and metaethics in favor of focusing on a certain range of more scie…
Ethical Realism
This Element examines the many facets of ethical realism and the issues at stake in metaethical debates about it—both between realism and non-realist alternatives, and between different versions of realism itself. Starting with a minimal core characterization of ethical realism focused on claims about meaning and truth, we go on to develop a narrower and more theoretically useful conception by adding further claims about objectivity and ontologic…
Moral Phenomenology and the Value-Laden World
The Origins of Unfairness
Human groups across cultures and times have divided labor by gender. What explains this fact, along with related inequities in the division of resources? It may be tempting to assume that such divisions are to be explained by appeal to evolutionary biology—evolved differences in suitability or preferences for various tasks, innate sexist biases, and so on. But substantial cross-cultural diversity in the details of labor divisions points to a more…
Ardent Moral Realism and the Value-Laden World
This chapter aims to shed light on what is ultimately at stake in debates over moral realism by examining a particularly ambitious form of it, which we’ll call “ardent moral realism.” On this view, the world is robustly value-laden such that it objectively favors certain ways of valuing and acting over others, where this favoring involves categorical moral normativity. An interesting recent challenge seeks to cast doubt on the very coherence of s…
Epistemology (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Free Will and Agency (4 works) · Moral psychology (4 works) · Normative (4 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (4 works) · Realism (4 works)