On Moral Obligation

May 20, 2014 - May 21, 2014
University of Aarhus

Aarhus
Denmark

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Conference: On Moral Obligation

Aarhus University, 20-21 May, 2014
Aud. 3, Building 1441, Tåsingegade


Attendance is free.

Please e-mail Raffaele Rodogno at [email protected] if you wish to attend.




Conference Programme

Tuesday 20 May

13.15-13.30 Opening of the conference

13.30-14.40 Hans Fink (Aarhus)
Løgstrup on Moral Obligation and Personal Responsibility

14.45-15.50     Robert Stern (Sheffield)
Løgstrup's Ethical Demand: Religious or Secular?

16.05-17.15     Anne-Marie S. Christensen (Syddansk)
‘Relate Actively’. Moral Obligation According to Løgstrup & Wittgenstein


Wednesday 21 May

09.00-10.10     Carsten Fogh Nielsen (Aarhus)
Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation

10.15-11.25     John Skorupski (St Andrews)
Moral Obligation and the Hermeneutics of Blame

11.40-12.50     Raffaele Rodogno (Aarhus)
Moral Obligation and Emotion

12.50-14.00     LUNCH

14.00-15.10     David Owen (Reading)
Wrong by Convention

15.15-16.25     Sten Schaumburg-Müller (Aarhus)
Legal and moral obligations in international relations. Humanitarian
intervention and Kosovo 1999

16:40-17:50     Morten Dige (Aarhus)
Moral obligations at war
Abstracts


Løgstrup on Moral Obligation and Personal Responsibility
Hans Fink (Aarhus)

In his recent book: Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard
(CUP 2012) Robert Stern raises the question of moral obligation: What gives
moral obligations their binding and constraining character? He discusses
this both at the level of the history of ideas and at the level of current
philosophical debate. I shall try to work out what would or could have been
Løgstrup’s answer to the question of moral obligation based on the account
of personal responsibility given in his book The Ethical Demand. I shall
discuss this answer and compare it with the answers given by Kant, Hegel and
Kierkegaard as interpreted by Stern. I shall try to show that Løgstrup
offers a way out of the dialectical circle that his three predecessors can
seem to remain caught up in.


Løgstrup's Ethical Demand: Religious or Secular?
Robert Stern (Sheffield)

The focus of this paper is whether Løgstrup's account of the relation
between ethical demand and the idea of 'life as a gift' is best understood
in theological terms, or whether it is better to think of it in a secular
way. This issue will be approached not so much as an interpretative question
(though this will be mentioned), but through a kind of 'internal critique'
of the theological option on two grounds (1) It would seem to make God into
a 'third thing' in the ethical relation in a way that  rejects Løgstrup in
Kierkegaard (2) It makes the demand a matter of morality, as based on what
we owe to God as our creator, and so something God has the right to demand,
even if we can't demand it of each other, where this then puts pressure on
Løgstrup's distinction between ethics and morality. It would therefore seem
that the theological approach should be rejected. But then, if we read the
idea of 'life as a gift' in a more secular way, the question arises whether
it do the work required of explaining ethical obligation - where I will
argue that it might, if we understand the obligation as a kind of
'exclusionary reason' in Raz's sense.


‘Relate Actively’. Moral Obligation According to Løgstrup & Wittgenstein
Anne-Marie S. Christensen (Syddansk)

It is possible to distinguish between two views of the origin of moral
obligation. According to the first view, moral obligation is founded in the
individual; a view exemplified in Kant’s idea of practical reason and in the
contractualist view of moral obligation as voluntary consent of the
individual. According to the second view, moral obligation arises from our
relationship to the world or to other humans; a view prominent in ethical
theories in the phenomenological tradition. The aim of this talk is to
argue, first, that we should add the views of Ludwig Wittgenstein and K.E.
Løgstrup to this second group and, in doing so, to show some striking
parallels between their views of moral obligation. The second aim is to show
how these two thinkers may help us address an objection often raised against
relational views of moral obligation, namely that they waiver uncomfortably
between two unattractive extremes. One the one hand, relational views often
picture moral obligation as extremely demanding, as arising from the
indeterminate and unlimited need of the other. On the other hand, it is also
often emphasised that any content of such obligations arise solely through
the responsiveness of the individual. This seems to leave the subject
between the possibilities of either being overwhelmed by an indeterminate
responsibility or proceeding from a basically subjective understanding of
how this responsibility obligates her. However, the thinking of Wittgenstein
and especially Løgstrup can help us steer free of this threatening, but only
apparent paradox.


Duty! Kant on the phenomenology and normativity of moral obligation
Carsten Fogh Nielsen (Aarhus)

“Duty” plays a twofold role in Kant’s explication and explanation of moral
obligation. One the one hand Kant believes that human beings, because of our
dual nature as both rational and sensuous creatures, experience the
requirements of practical reason as constraints, as duty. On the other hand
Kant also uses the term “duty” to describe the underlying normative
structure of (pure) practical reason, which makes possible, explains and
justifies the cogency of this experience. In my talk I will discuss how
these two aspects of Kant’s conception of duty are related and highlight
(some of) the tensions, which his dual view of moral obligation gives rise to.


Moral Obligation and the Hermeneutics of Blame
John Skorupski (St Andrews)

I argued in my book, The Domain of Reasons, that the categoricity of the
moral - the principle that if an action is morally wrong there is sufficient
reason not to do it - arises from the hermeneutics of blame. In this talk I
shall discuss further what is involved in hermeneutic understanding of
feelings, in particular, of blame, and how blame relates to reasons for action.


Moral Obligation and Emotion
Raffaele Rodogno (Aarhus)

In this paper I argue that blame is not a distinct emotion but an integral
part of other, distinct emotions. I examine in particular the connection
between blaming attitudes, on the one hand, and guilt, shame, and anger on
the other. I then explore the extent to which the emotional underpinnings of
blame can explain three allegedly standard features of moral obligation,
namely, inescapabilty, authority, and overridingness.  Finally, I compare
the sentimentalist approach discussed here to what are arguably more
substantive (less structural) sentimental approaches such as the CAD triad
hypothesis (Shweder at al. 1997; Rozin et al. 1999), i.e., the hypothesis
that contempt, anger, and disgust respectively map three moral codes,
namely, community, autonomy, and divinity.


Wrong by Convention
David Owen (Reading)

Lawyers distinguish acts wrong in themselves (*mala in se*) from acts wrong
because prohibited (*mala prohibita*). This distinction can be applied to
non-legal wrongs, for example to those wrongs corresponding to the
obligations that exist between family members. I argue that, on standard
views, many familial wrongs are neither *mala in se* nor *mala prohibita*.
To understand the normative force of these familial obligations, we must
adopt a non-standard view of how wrongs are created by social convention.




Legal and moral obligations in international relations. Humanitarian
intervention and Kosovo 1999
Sten Schaumburg-Müller (Aarhus)

In March 1999 NATO launched an airborne attack on Serbia in order to prevent
ethnic cleansing and further suppression of the Kosovars. From the outset it
was highly debated and contested how to understand this military attack.
Some authors (such as Cassese and Simma) held the position that the action
was unlawful, but morally defensible or even imperative. Others claimed that
the action had – or at least could have – legal backing (Mertus, Knudsen). I
tend to side with the latter group, arguing that the ‘moralists’ ignore the
importance of the human rights provisions in the UN Charter. Setting the
legal considerations aside, the situation and the debates highlight and add
to the discussion on the relationship between law and morality: It makes
sense to engage with a non-legal ought in relation to law – the law does not
allow for a specific action such as humanitarian intervention but it ought
to – and this ought may or may not be moral. Also, the connection between
law and morality is obvious; including human rights into international law
may be conceived of as a, perhaps feeble, attempt to introduce morals into
international law, which had hitherto been much of a codification of great
powers’ interests. In my presentation I shall bring in international law in
sketching out my position, which may be labelled ‘border relativity’, a term
first coined (to my knowledge that is) by Hans Fink in 1990. Yes, we can
distinguish between morals and law also in international relations, however,
the borders are not absolute, and perhaps most interesting, there is an
element of choice, of interests and of actor positions involved.


Moral obligations at war
Morten Dige (Aarhus)

Two positions and the conflict between them have dominated contemporary
ethics of war. A traditionalist position represented by Michael Walzer and
others argue that "war changes everything", in the sense that the concepts
and distinctions from "common" or "domestic" morality needs to be
supplemented and to some degree revised in normative analyses of war. A
"revisionist" position represented by Jeff McMahan and others resists such
revisions(!) claiming that "war changes nothing", morally speaking. The
disagreement seems to me to reflect a tension between certain metanorms in
ethics, namely consistency and pragmatics. I see no obvious solution to that
paradox but I find it important to understand the challenges it poses not
only for combatants and politicians but also for ordinary citizens who find
themselves at war.

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