Can moral judgments be objectively justified?

Can Animals Be Moral?

1. Grace of the Virtues Eleanor, the matriarch of her family, is dying and unable to stand. Grace manages to lift her to her feet. She tries to get Eleanor to walk, pushing her gently along. But Eleanor falls again. Grace appears very distressed, and shrieks loudly. She persists in trying to get Eleanor to stand, unsuccessfully. Grace stays by the fallen figure of Eleanor for another hour, whil...

Can claims for 'wrongful life' be justified?

The authors reject Joseph Fletcher's arguments that the choice to procreate is a privilege and that parents may be responsible in certain circumstances for producing genetically defective children. They argue instead that procreation is a conditional right, but nonetheless conclude that parents may be held responsible for the "wrongful life" of genetically damaged offspring based on the legal ...

Can Knowledge Be Justified True Belief?

Knowledge was traditionally held to be justified true belief. This paper examines the implications of maintaining this view if justication is interpreted algorithmically. It is argued that if we move sufficiently far from the small worlds to which Bayesian decision theory properly applies, we can steer between the rock of fallibilism and the whirlpool of skepticism only by explicitly building i...

Active euthanasia: can it be justified?

Can Animals be Moral Agents?

This experiment confi rms and extends an earlier finding that a hungry rhesus monkey (0) will avoid securing food if this subjects another mon key (SA) to electric shock. In the present series this "sacrificial" behavior was manifested in 6 of 10 animals independently of the relative position of the two animals in a dominance hierarchy. It was also found that while prior shock of the 0 resulted...