2010; Holton 2009). 1 Mele, then, offers a disjunctive account: weakness of will involves the violation of either kind of practical commitment. Holton, by contrast, offered a more restrictive account: weakness of will involves the violation of resolutions (a form of intention), and it is only when judgment and resolution are in agreement that judgment violations count as weakwilled.Recent experimental work by Holton and co-author Josh May has moved toward Mele's view that both forms of commitment violation are part of the folk concept. Some differences remain, however. May and Holton argue that the ordinary notion is a cluster concept rather than a disjunctive one. On their view, cases that feature both commitment violations are more central, while cases that feature one but not the other are equally marginal (May and Holton 2012). Even more recently, James Beebe has shown that the violation of either a judgment or a resolution is sufficient to generate folk ascriptions of weakness of will, which offers support for Mele's disjunctive account (2013, under review).The emerging consensus, then, is that weakness of will involves the violation of practical commitments. This view, however, has emerged out of a debate about which commitment violations are more central to the ordinary notion of weakness of will. This means that less attention has been paid to whether such violations are in fact essential to the folk concept. In order to establish that the concept essentially involves practical commitment violation, we need to establish that in cases that lack such violations, people will not make weakness of will attributions. Mele, however, does not consider this question: all of his experiments involve
2010; Holton 2009). 1 Mele, then, offers a disjunctive account: weakness of will involves the violation of either kind of practical commitment. Holton, by contrast, offered a more restrictive account: weakness of will involves the violation of resolutions (a form of intention), and it is only when judgment and resolution are in agreement that judgment violations count as weakwilled.Recent experimental work by Holton and co-author Josh May has moved toward Mele's view that both forms of commitment violation are part of the folk concept. Some differences remain, however. May and Holton argue that the ordinary notion is a cluster concept rather than a disjunctive one. On their view, cases that feature both commitment violations are more central, while cases that feature one but not the other are equally marginal (May and Holton 2012). Even more recently, James Beebe has shown that the violation of either a judgment or a resolution is sufficient to generate folk ascriptions of weakness of will, which offers support for Mele's disjunctive account (2013, under review).The emerging consensus, then, is that weakness of will involves the violation of practical commitments. This view, however, has emerged out of a debate about which commitment violations are more central to the ordinary notion of weakness of will. This means that less attention has been paid to whether such violations are in fact essential to the folk concept. In order to establish that the concept essentially involves practical commitment violation, we need to establish that in cases that lack such violations, people will not make weakness of will attributions. Mele, however, does not consider this question: all of his experiments involve
In this article I criticize the non-consequentialist Weighted Lottery (WL) solution to the choice between saving a smaller or a larger group of people. WL aims to avoid what non-consequentialists see as consequentialism's unfair aggregation by giving equal consideration to each individual's claim to be rescued. In so doing, I argue, WL runs into another common objection to consequentialism: it is excessively demanding. WL links the right action with the outcome of a fairly weighted lottery, which means that an agent can only act rightly if s/he has actually run the lottery. In many actual cases, this involves epistemic demands that can be almost impossible to meet. I argue that plausible moral principles cannot make such extreme epistemic demands.
The war on drugs is widely criticized as unjust. The idea that the laws prohibiting drugs are unjust can easily lead to the conclusion that those laws do not deserve our respect, so that our only moral reason to obey them flows from a general moral obligation to obey the law, rather than from anything morally troubling about drug use itself.In this paper, I argue that this line of thinking is mistaken. I begin by arguing that the drug laws are indeed unjust. However, so long as they remain prohibited, I argue that we have strong moral reasons to avoid drug use. First, drug users are partly responsible for the violent and exploitative conditions in which many drugs are produced and distributed. Second, the unequal ways in which drug laws are enforced make drug use by many an unethical exercise of privilege. These reasons do not depend on the existence of a general moral obligation to obey the law; we ought to refrain from illegal drug use even if prohibition is unjust and even if we have no general obligation to obey the law. In fact, drug laws turn out to represent an interesting exception case within the broader debate about this obligation, and I argue that it is the very injustice of the law that generates the reasons not to violate it.
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