The Principle of Beneficence in Applied Ethics (SEP)

Beneficent actions and motives have traditionally occupied a central place in morality. Common examples today are found in social welfare programs, scholarships for needy and meritorious students, communal support of health-related research, policies to improve the welfare of animals, philanthropy, disaster relief, programs to benefit children and the incompetent, and preferential hiring and admission policies. What makes these diverse acts beneficent? Are such beneficent acts and policies obligatory or merely the pursuit of optional moral ideals?

These questions have generated a substantial literature on beneficence in both theoretical ethics and applied ethics. In theoretical ethics, the dominant issue in recent years has been how to place limits on the scope of beneficence. In applied and professional ethics, a number of issues have been treated in the fields of biomedical ethics and business ethics.

1. The Concepts of Beneficence and Benevolence

The term beneficence connotes acts or personal qualities of mercy, kindness, generosity, and charity. It is suggestive of altruism, love, humanity, and promoting the good of others. In ordinary language, the notion is broad, but it is understood even more broadly in ethical theory to include effectively all norms, dispositions, and actions with the goal of benefiting or promoting the good of other persons. The language of a principle or rule of beneficence refers to a normative statement of a moral obligation to act for the others’ benefit, helping them to further their important and legitimate interests, often by preventing or removing possible harms. Many dimensions of applied ethics appear to incorporate such appeals to obligatory beneficence, even if only implicitly. For example, when apparel manufacturers are criticized for not having good labor practices in factories, the ultimate goal of the criticisms is usually to obtain better working conditions, wages, and other benefits for workers.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/principle-beneficence/

Belief (SEP)

Bayes’ Theorem (SEP)

Bayes’ Theorem is a simple mathematical formula used for calculating conditional probabilities. It figures prominently in subjectivist or Bayesian approaches to epistemology, statistics, and inductive logic. Subjectivists, who maintain that rational belief is governed by the laws of probability, lean heavily on conditional probabilities in their theories of evidence and their models of empirical learning. Bayes’ Theorem is central to these enterprises both because it simplifies the calculation of conditional probabilities and because it clarifies significant features of subjectivist position. Indeed, the Theorem’s central insight — that a hypothesis is confirmed by any body of data that its truth renders probable — is the cornerstone of all subjectivist methodology.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem/

The Epistemic Basing Relation

The epistemic basing relation is the relation which holds between a reason and a belief if and only if the reason is a reason for which the belief is held. It is generally thought to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a belief’s being justified that the belief be based on a reason. The basing relation is what distinguishes good reasons which a person possesses that contribute to the personal justification of a given belief from good reasons which the person possesses but that do not contribute to the personal justification of the belief.

Basing relations may be involved in both inferential and non-inferential justification. For example, one may hold that sensory states count as reasons, and thus require that a sensory belief be based on a reason if it is to be justified by that reason. In addition, one might understand at least some self-evident beliefs to be based on the meanings of the various terms of the sentence expressing the proposition believed. For example, one’s belief that all bachelors are unmarried men may be understood to be based on the meanings of ‘all’, ‘bachelors’, ‘are’, etc.

The basing relation is most frequently analyzed in terms of a reason’s causing a belief.^[1] In such analyses, the reason and the belief are understood to be mental states of a person. The cause may be a contributing cause or a sufficient cause. However, the basing relation has also been analyzed as an appropriate counterfactual cause of a belief and also as depending on an appropriate meta-belief to the effect that a reason is a good reason to hold the belief.

Analysis of the basing relation is relevant to a variety of fundamental epistemological issues. It is relevant to the nature of epistemic rationalization and to questions regarding the internalism/externalism debate. In addition, it has been argued that reliabilist theories of justification are incompatible with the correct analysis of the basing relation.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/basing-epistemic/

Bodily Awareness (SEP)

At the sensory level we continuously receive a flow of information about our own body through external and internal perceptions. Not only can we see our body and touch it, but we also have several inner receptors that convey information about the position of our limbs, the balance of our body, and its physiological condition. Unlike external perception, the inner sensory flow never stops and cannot be voluntarily controlled. Thus, an important amount of information is constantly available whether we want it or not, whether we pay attention to it or not. In that respect, our body qualifies as the object that we know best. Yet, despite numerous sources of information, the phenomenology of bodily awareness is limited. In painful and learning situations, our body appears at the core of our interest, but when we walk in the street, we are rarely aware of the precise position of our legs and of the contact of the floor on our feet. Schwitzgebel (2007), for instance, asked how frequently participants wearing a device beeping at random intervals had tactile experiences in their left foot just before the beeping sound. He found a high variability in the answers, but one participant reported tactile sensations only 16% of the time. Our conscious field is primarily occupied by our environment, instead of the bodily medium that allows us to perceive it and to move through it. Hence, the most permanent and preponderant object in life may also be the most elusive one (Leder 1990; Merleau-Ponty 1945; O’Shaughnessy 1980).

One may then question whether we are completely unaware of it. Except in rare illusory or pathological cases, we never feel fully disembodied. James (1890: 242), for instance, claims that we are constantly conscious of the presence of our body, although at the margin of the stream of our consciousness:

Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know.

What is the content of this marginal body consciousness? James (1890: 242) alludes to a “feeling of the same old body always there” or a mere “feeling of warmth and intimacy” but can we go beyond this rough and metaphorical description?

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bodily-awareness/

Personal Autonomy

Autonomous agents are self-governing agents. But what is a self-governing agent? Governing oneself is no guarantee that one will have a greater range of options in the future, or the sort of opportunities one most wants to have. Since, moreover, a person can govern herself without being able to appreciate the difference between right and wrong, it seems that an autonomous agent can do something wrong without being to blame for her action. What, then, are the necessary and sufficient features of this self-relation? Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy/

Authority (SEP)

Large social groups face many grave problems, such as violence, injustice, disorder, public bads, and war, that require a coordinated collective response. Because disagreement about the nature of and solutions to these problems is pervasive, mounting any such response is difficult in the absence of an authority empowered to issue and enforce coordinating directives. The basic question of political authority asks whether anyone has the right to impose such directives, and if so, under what conditions.

Some anarchist philosophers have thought that political authority is neither necessary nor sufficient for solving the social problems above. Indeed, some think that political authority is counterproductive because it debars better strategies for solving them (e.g. Marx and Engels 1846 [1972: 146–202] and Huemer 2012). This entry surveys the main frameworks that philosophers have developed in defense of a positive, non-anarchistic answer to the basic question of political authority. To this end, we discuss different concepts of the political authority’s right to impose directives on others (part 1) as well as different conceptions of who has the right and how it is grounded (part 2). In a supplement on legitimate political authority in international institutions, we highlight distinctive issues that arise when the basic question of political authority is posed at levels beyond the nation-state.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authority/