Jul 2026· Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy· Vol 31, pp. 566-596· 0 citations· 15 references
Abstract
Sometimes oppressed people resist their oppression through actions that are themselves morally fraught, such as theft, deception, or violence. This article considers what might be said in favor of such actions, which I call imperfect resistance, from the point of view of ethics. Against the expectation that oppressed people must remain “perfect victims” for their resistance to be admirable, I argue that oppression often constrains agency in ways that leave people with no wholly unproblematic options. Resisting oppression well under these conditions requires the capacity to navigate moral risks with practical wisdom—to discern which moral risks are worth taking and how best to negotiate the limited and morally fraught options available. Some acts of imperfect resistance can express a virtue I call audacious integrity—a willingness to take moral risks in order to defend one’s values for good reasons. It occupies a middle ground between moral purism, which treats moral considerations as decisive, and moral nihilism, which rejects them altogether. Those exhibiting audacious integrity take moral considerations seriously but are willing to stretch the limits of morality to maintain their agency and pose formidable challenges to their oppression. It is a virtue exercised when agents retain the capacity to resist but cannot do so without moral compromise.
This paper begins from a moral question arising within a carceral context: how one can make good choices when only bad options seem available. Drawing on that lived experience, it argues that the prison industrial complex constricts not only bodies but the moral imagination itself. Contemporary carceral systems, especially as shaped by religious “law and order” frameworks, produce an ethic in which goodness is defined through exclusion, punishment, and moral differentiation. Engaging theological critiques of moral formation, the paper identifies this as a “system of goodness” that depends upon the designation of others as criminal to sustain its coherence. In response, it turns to a Christological account of reconciliation in which God identifies with the condemned rather than standing over against them. This vision exposes carceral logic as a form of moral violence and reorients ethics toward solidarity, participation, and grace. Finally, the paper develops a pneumatological ethic in which moral life is not the achievement of individual goodness but the shared life of reconciliation, formed through participation in divine action.
H. Spaulding· Studies in Christian Ethics· 0 citations
Beginning in childhood, and continuing throughout our lives, we are immersed in a web of attitudes, evaluations, and practices that are evidence of our deep commitment to moral responsibility. At the same time, we encounter puzzles and perplexities that may encourage a misplaced scepticism about moral responsibility. This Very Short Introduction explores our understanding of moral responsibility and what it involves. Among the various difficulties that we must confront are issues of retribution and punishment, moral education and manipulation, and how to identify and respond to those whose moral competence is impaired or in doubt. The account provided defends an understanding of moral responsibility that begins with a realistic moral psychology and that acknowledges the limits to agential control. No adequate interpretation of moral responsibility can require that the trajectory of our ethical lives is entirely immune to fate and luck. To insist on an ‘idealism’ of this kind would be to invite an implausible and unlivable scepticism about the foundations of moral responsibility. The ‘realist’ alternative offers a more truthful, effective, and humane way of addressing these issues. The picture presented is one that falls in the territory that lies between a consoling optimism and a bleak pessimism about our human ethical predicament.
What is morality, and where does it come from? Ethics: Action, Power, and Moral Autonomy answers boldly: Morality cannot be understood solely as a code prescribed by nature or God. but the work of a being who must create meaning, responsibility, and value in a world that offers none ready-made. Tracing the long passage from nomos — the archaic order of fear, custom, and survival — to ethos, the freedom of a self that gives itself its own law, this book retells the birth of conscience as a profound anthropological transformation, where the inherited fog of mystery gives way to reason and obedience gives way to autonomy. Yet autonomy is not the end of the story. Drawing on Aristotle and Hegel, on existential thought and the Islamic ethics of amānah and akhlaq, it builds a vision of ethical life grounded in personality and conscience, sustained by an ontology of Love, and bound to others through justice — the "stone arch" that joins individual conscience to law, institutions, and the common good. Against the modern "invasion of things," which quietly surrenders human judgment to economic and technical machinery, this book makes an urgent case for the human being as a moral creator of the world: ethical life as an unfinished project, a workshop of human becoming in which dignity, justice, and meaning must be reclaimed again and again, toward a shared Planetary Ethos broad enough for all of humanity.
Accounts of normative ethics that are based on the African conception of personhood tend to say that the goal of morality is to develop one's normative personhood (i.e., character), which is accomplished by exercising other-regarding virtues in the context of community. One argument in the African philosophical tradition that defends the permissibility of euthanasia appeals to this understanding of personhood. This argument suggests that developing a sufficient degree of personhood leads to a kind of achievement dignity that can be lost in the process of a bad death. As such, euthanasia is permissible in order to preserve achievement dignity. I argue that there are a number of problems with this argument, including that it cannot apply to those who fail to develop their personhood, that it is impossible to lose achievement dignity for non-moral reasons, and that the argument may prove too much in justifying involuntary euthanasia. An argument for the permissibility of euthanasia that appeals to the achievement dignity associated with African personhood cannot be successful. Furthermore, shifting the argument to an appeal to status dignity, which is grounded in personhood, is unlikely to completely rescue it.
Kirk Lougheed· Journal of Medicine and Phil...· 0 citations
This paper uses disparate examples of AI resistance and theoretical lenses to render explicit an underlying logic which connects varied forms of resistance, grounded in the ethical value(s) that effort can manifest, and reframe one side of the debate between embracers and resisters.
R. Downes, Rebecca Mines· AI and Ethics· 0 citations
In this paper, I define patriarchal bargains as a subset of oppressive double binds. They are situations in which an agent, under conditions of gender oppression, intentionally chooses the prudentially best option—complying with an oppressive norm—over the morally best option—resisting the norm—even though both options are “inextricably bound up” (Hirji 2021, 645). I then explore two frameworks to examine the bargainer’s responsibility for choosing the prudentially best option: forward-looking political responsibility (Young 2011) and backward-looking moral responsibility (Sangiovanni 2018). Forward-looking political responsibility shows some conceptual limitations in justifying why the bargainer is neither blameworthy nor liable for choosing the prudentially best option when she is aware of the implications of her choice and does not face unreasonable costs in forgoing the bargain. However, backward-looking moral responsibility faces two practical concerns: first, it risks diverting attention from the oppressive structures that constrain the bargainer’s moral agency; and second, it may be divisive and isolating by promoting negative emotions such as guilt and shame, which could discourage people from participating in collective struggles for social change.