Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants

2. A large part of modern normative ethics, taking its inspiration from John Rawls, rests upon a coherentist or antifoundationalist epistemology. See Norman Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); see also the entry “reflective equilibrium” in the glossary. And the irreducible heterogeneity of moral doctrines is defended in, among others, Charles Larmore, “L’hétérogénéité de la morale,” in Modernité et morale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), chap. 4; and Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 53–74.

3. Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009), 4–5.

5. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

6. John M. Doris and Jesse J. Prinz, review of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, October 3, 2009. Like every research program involving more than two researchers, experimental moral philosophy is divided into several different currents. My way of presenting this program is by no means orthodox, and I would not advise a student to use it in an exam (though there is little risk of there being one—in France, at any rate).

7. This, according to Appiah, was the method of Hobbes, Descartes, Locke and Hume: Appiah, Experiments in Ethics, 7–11.

8. Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

1. Tom Regan, “The Dog in the Lifeboat: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, April 25, 1985.

2. Claudia Wallis, “Baby Fae Stuns the World,” Time, November 12, 1984; Claudia Wallis, “Baby Fae Loses the Battle,” Time, November 26, 1984.

3. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 46–47.

4. Kathleen V. Wilkes, Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

5. It is in these terms that Martha Nussbaum characterizes the moral value of literature: “As James says, ‘The picture of the exposed and entangled state is what is required.’” Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 46.

6. Jeremy Waldron, “Right and Wrong: Psychologists vs. Philosophers,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2009; Wilkes, Real People.

7. Jacques Bouveresse, “Les expériences de pensée en littérature et en philosophie morale: Mach-Wittgenstein-Platon-Cora Diamond,” in La connaissance de l’écrivain, sur la littérature, la vérité et la vie, ed. J. Bouveresse (Marseilles: Agone, 2008), 115–22; Cora Diamond, “What If X Isn’t the Number of Sheep? Wittgenstein and Thought-Experiments in Ethics,” Philosophical Papers 31, no. 3 (November 2002): 227–50.

8. This does not prevent us from being prepared, or so it would seem, to enter through the imagination into every kind of physical world very far removed from our own (worlds in which one can become invisible or shrink at will), whereas we are less ready to enter through the imagination into moral worlds very far removed from our own (worlds in which it is good to hang children for pleasure or to kill one’s baby if it is a girl): Tamar Szabo Gendler, “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” Journal of Philosophy 97, no. 2 (February 2000): 55–81.

9. Plato, The Republic, bk. II, 359c-362c.

10. Diamond, “What If X Isn’t the Number of Sheep?”

11. Wilkes, Real People.

12. Samuel Scheffler, ed., Consequentialism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

13. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974); Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

14. Scheffler, Consequentialism and Its Critics.

15. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, eds., Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Marcia W. Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote, Three Methods of Ethics (London: Blackwell, 1997).

16. The descriptions of the three great moral theories I have given are designed to allow the reader to grasp what essentially differentiates them. But there exist almost as many ramifications of these theories as there are philosophers defending or contesting them. There are forms of deontologism that do not acknowledge absolute constraints upon actions and that incline to consequentialism. There are forms of consequentialism that attempt to give ground to certain firm constraints upon our actions, and thus approach deontologism. As for virtue ethics, it now exists in several different forms, some of which are hard to distinguish from consequentialism and from deontologism. All the same, this book is not devoted to an in-depth examination of the three great moral theories and of their resources, but to an analysis of the place of intuitions in the justification of any moral theory. I therefore do not propose to enter into too much detail about such theories. I have attempted, with Christine Tappolet, to present as complete a picture as possible of the different versions of consequentialism and of deontologism, and to analyze the resources of each, in Les concepts de l’éthique: Faut-il être conséquentialiste? (Paris: Hermann, 2009). See also, for a detailed account of the present state of these moral theories, the essays contained in Scheffler, Consequentialism and Its Critics.

17. Immanuel Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives,” in Critique of Practical Reason, and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, ed. Lewis Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 346–50.

18. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 78–82.

19. T. M. Scanlon, “Rawls on Justification,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 140.

20. It extends from the philosopher-king of Plato to the rational and reasonable judge of John Rawls: David Copp, “Experiments, Intuitions, and Methodology in Moral and Political Theory,” text presented to the Molyneux Spring Seminar on Intuitions, University of California, Davis, 2010, 1–49, and to the ANCO-CERSES seminar at Paris 5-René Descartes in June 2010. One can also view this elitist tradition as a long history of exclusion of persons judged to be unsuited to sustaining a well-formed moral judgment: women, the poor, the young, non-Westerners, non-Whites, and so on.

21. Scanlon, “Rawls on Justification.”

22. Appiah, Experiments in Ethics, 80.

23. Some of these experiments have been conducted upon thousands of persons through the Internet: Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” New York Times, January 13, 2008.

24. Appiah, Experiments in Ethics; Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, eds., Experimental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

25. According to Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

26. He is reputed to have actually tested it on his sisters, which today might perhaps have led to him being charged with mental cruelty: Louis Ernest Borowski, Reinhold Berhnard Jachmann, and Ehrgott André Wasianski, Kant intime, ed. and trans. Jean Mistler (Paris: Grasset, 1985).

27. Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Vanessa Nurock, Sommes-nous naturellement moraux? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).

28. John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behaviour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

1. C. Haney, W. Banks, and P. Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics of a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973): 69–97.

2. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 89–101.

1. After a case devised in Philippa Foot, “Killing and Letting Die,” in Abortion: Moral and Legal Perspectives, eds. J. Garfield and P. Hennessy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 177–85.

2. The analysis that follows is taken from Ruwen Ogien, La vie, la mort, l’État: Le débat bioéthique (Paris: Grasset, 2009). For other approaches to the same problem, see Martin Provencher, Petit cours d’éthique et politique (Montréal: Chenelière Education, 2008), 59–63, which features an extract from the classic essay by James Rachels, “Killing and Letting Die,” in Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd ed., eds. Lawrence Becker and Charlotte Becker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 2: 947–50.

3. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Physician-Assisted Suicide: Two Moral Arguments,” Ethics, special issue, “Symposium on Physician-Assisted Suicide,” 109 (April 3, 1999): 497–518.

4. What follows is a variant of an example given in James Rachels, “Active and Passive Euthanasia,” New England Journal of Medicine 292 (1975): 78–80.

5. Tim Mulgan, The Demands of Consequentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

6. Thomson, “Physician-Assisted Suicide.”

1. The case was devised in Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009), 4–12, discussed in James Rachels, “Killing and Letting Die,” in Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd ed., eds. Lawrence Becker and Charlotte Becker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 2: 947–50. See also Peter K. Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

2. Singer, The Life You Can Save; Rachels, “Killing and Letting Die.”

3. Immanuel Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives,” in Critique of Practical Reason, and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 346–50.

1. The scenario was devised in Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” Yale Law Journal 94, no. 6 (May 1985): 1395–415.

1. This scenario was devised in Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” Oxford Review 5 (1967): 5–15. See also Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 28–29.

2. Foot, “The Problem of Abortion.”

3. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 28–51.

5. Jean-Cassien Billier, Introduction à l’éthique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010); Ruwen Ogien and Christine Tappolet, Les concepts de l’éthique: Faut-il être conséquentialiste? (Paris: Hermann, 2008).

6. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 28–29.

7. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 26–42. Anscombe wholly rejects this way of seeing the human world through the calculating glasses of consequentialism. But that does not mean that, so far as she is concerned, one should never take the consequences of our actions into account. One could say, I believe, that she distinguishes consequentialism as a general theory fixing in advance what is morally relevant (a conception she rejects) and as attention to consequences in particular cases (an attitude she allows). She grants that a prudent estimating of consequences can perfectly well be associated with a strong awareness of absolute prohibitions (she cites the Christian prohibitions on murder, adultery, and apostasy). It is, in her opinion, this association that is at the root of the doctrine of the so-called double effect (see the thought experiment of The Killer Trolley and the glossary). It is a doctrine that she upholds, while at the same time denouncing its abuse: Anscombe, “War and Murder,” in Ethics, Religion and Politics, 58–59. I would like to thank Cora Diamond and Bernard Baertschi for having enabled me to arrive at a clearer understanding of Anscombe’s approach to consequences.

8. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 40.

9. Cora Diamond, “What If X Isn’t the Number of Sheep? Wittgenstein and Thought-Experiments in Ethics,” Philosophical Papers 31 (2002): 227–50.

10. Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 208.

11. Anscombe, “War and Murder,” esp. note 19.

12. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 40.

13. Diamond, “What If X Isn’t the Number of Sheep?,” 247.

14. Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives, 208.

15. Diamond, “What If X Isn’t the Number of Sheep?,” 245.

17. Kaiping Peng, John Doris, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Sich, unpublished typescript, described by John Doris and Alexandra Plakias, “How to Argue About Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism,” in Moral Psychology, vol. 2, The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2008), 303–31, 322–27.

1. After a scenario devised in Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” Oxford Review 5 (1967): 160.

4. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” Yale Law Journal 94, no. 6 (May 1985): 1395–415. An earlier version: Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” in Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory, ed. William Parent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 78–93. A later version: Thomson, “Turning the Trolley,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (2008): 359–74.

5. Marc Hauser, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, R. Kang-Sing Jin, and John Mikhail, “A Dissociation Between Moral Judgements and Justifications,” Mind and Language 22 (February 2007): 1–21.

6. There were also control scenarios to check that the respondents had a minimal grasp of the problem posed. Those respondents who judged that it was not permissible to divert the train onto a secondary track, even if no one was there, were eliminated from the investigation.

7. Foot, “The Problem of Abortion,” 156–59; Anscombe, “War and Murder,” in Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981); Jean-Yves Goffi, “Le principe des actions à double effet,” in Hare et la philosophie morale, ed. Jean-Yves Goffi, Recherches sur la philosophie et le langage 23 (2004): 237; Bernard Baertschi, La valeur de la vie humaine et l’intégrité de la personne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 97–101.

8. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 96.

9. Hauser et al., “A Dissociation Between Moral Judgements and Justifications,” 5. In the appendix, and for reasons that escape me, it is 85 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

10. Marc Hauser has been suspected of having taken some liberties with his data, so that they support his arguments. This said, the presumption of innocence should of course be respected.

11. Joshua D. Greene, R. Brian Somerville, Leigh E. Nystrom, John M. Darley, and Jonathan D. Cohen, “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgement,” Science 293, no. 5537 (September 2001): 2105108. Greene also exploits this hypothesis in order to account for the contrast between our indifference to the fate of children dying of hunger far away from us, with whom we have no physical contact, and our sensitivity to the wretchedness displayed before our very eyes: Joshua D. Greene, “From Neural ‘Is’ to Moral ‘Ought’: What Are the Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 4 (October 2003) : 847–50. Florian Cova (personal communication) tells me that Greene has not always distinguished between personal and impersonal actions in terms of the criterion of direct physical contact. He has at times regarded personal action as action in which we treat someone as a means. But I prefer to retain this definition of the personal-impersonal opposition in terms of direct and violent physical contact, in order not to render the debate too confused. If all consequentialists are, have been, or could be deontologists, and vice versa, how are we ever to find our way?

12. Greene et al., “An fMRI Investigation.”

14. Perhaps by neutralizing the emotional reactions, as Luc Faucher suggests (personal communication). Bernard Baertschi, “Le dilemme du wagon fou nous apprend-il quelque chose de notre vie morale?” (unpublished manuscript).

15. I prefer to refer the reader to a very lucid text: Bernard Baertschi, La neuroéthique: Ce que les neurosciences font à nos conceptions morales (Paris: La Découverte, 2009).

16. Yet more arguments in support of this position are now to be found in the philosophy of the emotions: see Christine Tappolet, Émotions et valeurs (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000).

17. As I pointed out at the outset, the variants were presented at the same time to the respondents. It seemed to me preferable to describe these two variants after a first round of discussion of the first two, so that the part they played in the debate is more in evidence (and also because they are so complicated that it is better to be somewhat prepared in order to understand them).

18. These conclusions may, however, leave us perplexed. Whereas 11 percent only reckon that it is permissible to push the fat man, there are nonetheless 56 percent who think that it is permissible to use him as a means when there is no direct physical contact. It seems to me difficult to conclude on the basis of these results that physical contact is a factor that is not involved! There is perhaps here a tendency to force the data, to get them to speak in favor of the hypothesis one has privileged, which is not peculiar, of course, to this research. Hauser has moreover been reproached for this before.

19. Hauser et al., “A Dissociation Between Moral Judgements and Justifications,” 5, 7.

20. Nicolas Baumard, Comment nous sommes devenus moraux: Une histoire naturelle du bien et du mal (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 122–25.

21. If we are philosophers (and have read too much Kant), we will be readily convinced that the worst thing that can happen to someone is their being treated simply as a means. But what the thought experiment of the trapdoor will serve to show (I extrapolate a little) is that it is not obvious that it is the worst thing. If we are used without violence, it is perhaps not so important. But the best thing, of course, is to be left in peace.

22. I owe thanks to Stéphane Lemaire for suggesting that I spell out the reasons why the consequentialists are still in the running.

23. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 73–120; Edouard Machery, “The Bleak Implications of Moral Psychology,” Neuroethics 3, no. 3 (2010): 223–31.

24. Thomson, “The Trolley Problem.”

25. Machery, “The Bleak Implications of Moral Psychology”; Jennifer Zamzow and Shaun Nichols, “Variations in Ethical Intuitions,” Philosophical Issues 19 (2009): 368–88.

26. Peter K. Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

28. Appiah, Experiments in Ethics.

29. Baertschi, “Le dilemme du wagon fou nous apprend-il quelque chose de notre vie morale.”

30. Ibid.; Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Framing Moral Intuitions,” in Moral Psychology, vol. 2, The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 47–76.

31. Machery, “The Bleak Implications of Moral Psychology.”

32. Nagel, “War and Massacre,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 53–74.

33. Philip Kitcher, “Biology and Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

34. Subsequently Thomson appears to have abandoned an interpretation in terms of rights in favor of another, phrased in terms of “hypothetical consent.”

1. After a scenario devised in Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–34.

4. This, broadly speaking, is the argument in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

5. Jesse J. Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Luc Faucher, “Les émotions morales à la lumière de la psychologie évolutionniste: Le dégout et l’évitement de l’inceste,” in Morale et évolution biologique, ed. Christine Clavien (Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques Universitaires Romandes, 2007).

6. Dan Sperber, “Remarques anthropologiques sur le relativisme moral,” in Les fondements naturels de l’éthique, ed. Jean-Pierre Changeux (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), 319–34.

7. See Ruwen Ogien, “Que fait la police morale?,” Terrain 48 (2007): 31–48.

8. I prefer to give a list of what in this debate are called “victimless crimes” rather than a general definition that would risk raising too many questions. Thus, as Florian Cova has pointed out to me, attempted murders that come to nothing should not be morally problematic for those who reckon that there is no victimless crime. In order to reject the objection, one would have to distinguish between criminal thoughts (which are, in fact, victimless crimes) and the initial attempts to perform such an act (which are crimes that have not produced victims because they have been averted and so on).

9. See Ruwen Ogien, L’éthique aujourd’hui: Maximalistes et minimalistes (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).

10. Elliot Turiel, The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Elliot Turiel, “Nature et fondements du raisonnement social dans l’enfance,” in Les fondements naturels de l’éthique, ed. Jean-Pierre Changeux (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), 301–17; Elliot Turiel, The Culture of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 113–14. See also the experimental studies analyzed by Vanessa Nurock, Sommes-nous naturellement moraux? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), and the original theory of “core morality” that she tries to develop on the basis of them.

11. Larry Nucci, Education in the Moral Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

12. Turiel, The Culture of Morality, 114, a case drawn from research by Larry Nucci.

13. Without going into technical details, one can say that it contradicts in certain respects the classic theories of Piaget and Kohlberg, according to which understanding of the distinction between the conventional and the moral arises later. Lawrence Kohlberg, “My Personal Search for Universal Morality,” Moral Education Forum 11, no. 1 (1986): 4–10; Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgement of the Child (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977); Nurock, Sommes-nous naturellement moraux?

14. Jonathan Haidt, S. H. Koller, and M. G. Dias, “Affect, Culture and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 5, no. 4 (1993): 613–28.

15. The Kisses and Chicken vignettes were not presented to the youngest individuals, a fact that no one seems to have regretted, although it would perhaps have been interesting to know their reactions, given that it was a study concerned with “innate” or “natural” moral tendencies (at any rate, let us say, for Kisses, if one considers that the youngest might find it difficult to comprehend the act of masturbating in a chicken prior to putting it in the oven).

16. Jonathan Haidt and F. Bjorklund, “Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions About Moral Psychology,” in Moral Psychology, vol. 2, The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, ed. W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 181–217.

17. R. A. Schweder, “The Psychology of Practice and the Practice of the Three Psychologies,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 3 (2000): 207 22.

18. Haidt and Bjorklund, “Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions.”

19. This is Fodor’s critique of a “modularity gone mad”: Jerry Fodor, “Modules, Frames, Fridgeons, Sleeping Dogs and the Music of the Spheres,” in Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding, ed. Jay Garfield (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).

20. An example scrutinized by Nicolas Baumard, Comment nous sommes devenus moraux: Une histoire naturelle du bien et du mal (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 156.

21. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin, 2010), chap. 4, p. 124.

1. After a scenario devised in Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

2. Plato, The Republic, bk. 2.

3. The most famous of them are the Thrasymachus of Plato, The Republic, bks. 2–4, 8–9, and the Fool of Hobbes, Leviathan, bk. 15, 72. To vary such references, one could add the conman in House of Games, a film by David Mamet.

4. Elliot Turiel, The Culture of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

7. Alan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

8. Nagel, “War and Massacre,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 53–74.

9. An amoralist is not an immoralist who openly defies the moral rules with which he is very well acquainted, but rather a person who is indifferent to such rules, owing to a lack either of interest or of motivation: Joseph Raz, “The Amoralist,” in Ethics and Practical Reason, eds. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 369–98.

10. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).

11. To these inconsistencies in thought, Kant adds contradictions in the will. He says that a rule stating that we must never come to the aid of others could not serve as a universal law. It would be a contradiction in the will. No one, in fact, can will that we never come to the aid of others, since in case of need everyone would be tempted to will that we came to his aid: Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. I merely wish to stress the fact that neither the inconsistencies of thought nor the contradictions of the will can be assimilated to practical consequences akin to those that the statement “and if everyone were to do the same thing?” predicts.

12. Bernard Williams, “The Amoralist,” in An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3–13.

13. It is this kind of situation that the so-called prisoner’s dilemma experiments are designed to formalize: Robert Nadeau, Vocabulaire technique et analytique de l’épistémologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). Suppose the police suspect you of having committed armed robbery with an accomplice. A seasoned police superintendent would like to extract a confession, for he knows that he lacks the proof needed to take you to court. He therefore proposes the following deal: “If you confess and denounce your accomplice, you’ll be free and your accomplice will serve ten years in prison. If you both keep silent, you’ll do two years each. If both of you confess, you’ll do six years each.” You know that the superintendent will make the same offer to your accomplice. At first glance, it seems preferable for you to confess. If you confess and the other does not, you walk free. If you confess and the other does too, you’ll serve six years each. But if you do not confess and the other does, you will do ten years, the maximum sentence. The same reasoning can apply to the accomplice: he too would be tempted to confess. All in all, it would be rational for the two accomplices to confess. However, this outcome is not optimal. It is neither the one that gives the best overall result (indeed, it is the worst: twelve years in prison in total instead of four—if no one confesses—and ten if just one person confesses) nor even the one that guarantees the best personal outcome (six years each instead of two if no one confesses).

14. Williams, “The Amoralist,” 3–13.

15. Harry J. Gensler, Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998), 89–90.

19. Nagel, What Does It All Mean?

20. In moral philosophy we call “externalists” those who grant that we can have reasons for acting without having the corresponding motivation, as opposed to “internalists,” who hold that if we do not have the motivation, it is because we do not really have a reason. The possibility of amoralism is often presented as an argument in favor of externalism: David O. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 46–50, and the glossary, for a fuller account.

21. In his examination of akrasia, or weakness of will, Aristotle presented this argument with his characteristic use of images, by quoting the proverb “when water chokes, what should a man drink then?” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 7, 1146b.

22. The novel, adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, features a young, ultraviolent criminal, incarcerated for a long spell, who accepts a terrible reconditioning therapy designed to curb his drives and thus to earn an earlier release from prison.

1. After a scenario devised in Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 42–45.

2. Felipe de Brigard, “If You Like It, Does It Matter If It’s Real?,” Philosophical Psychology 23, no. 1 (2010): 43–57.

1. After a scenario devised in Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 367.

2. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 184.

1. Case discussed in Bernard Williams, “Resenting One’s Own Existence,” in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 237.

2. Saul Smilansky, Ten Moral Paradoxes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 101.

5. I am indebted to Valérie Gateau for this hypothesis.

6. I am indebted to Patrick Savidan for this hypothesis.

7. I am indebted to Jocelyn Benoist for this hypothesis.

1. Jean-Luc Guichet, “Questions contemporaines d’anthropologie et d’éthique animale: L’argument antispéciste des cas marginaux” (unpublished manuscript).

2. The mere fact of having entertained it led to Peter Singer being banned from speaking in public in Germany, for reasons that may all too readily be understood.

3. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, eds. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1970), chap. 17, p. 283, note b.

4. Luc Ferry, Le nouvel ordre écologique: L’arbre, l’animal et l’homme (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1992), 86.

6. There are many instance of mutual aid between different animal species: shrimps that clean predators’ mouths at the sources of the Nile, birds that protect crocodile eggs, and so on. Such cases are presented in the documentary by Nicolas Gabriel, L’entraide animale (Saint Thomas Productions, 1998).

7. Alberto Bondolfi, L’homme et l’animal: Dimensions éthiques de leurs relations (Freiburg: Éditions universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 1995), 39.

9. Guichet, “Questions contemporaines d’anthropologie et d’éthique animale.”

10. These are the conclusions arrived at in particular by the utilitarian philosopher Richard Hare and the jurist Gary Francione: Hare, “Why I Am Only a Demi-Vegetarian,” in Singer and His Critics, ed. Dale Jamieson (London: Blackwell, 1999), 233–46; Francione, “Taking Sentience Seriously,” in Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 129–47.

11. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles, 283, note b; J. S. Mill, “Whewell on Moral Philosophy” (1853), in Utilitarianism, and Other Essays, by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, ed. Alan Ryan (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 251–52; Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (London: Cape, 1990), 7–8.

12. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles, 283, note b.

13. See Ruwen Ogien, L’éthique aujourd’hui: Maximalistes et minimalistes (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 81–84, referring to Axel Gosseries, Penser la justice entre les générations: De l’affaire Perruche à la réforme des retraites (Paris: Aubier, 2004), 52–53.

14. The majority concede that abortion is permissible in cases of rape or where the mother’s life is at risk, whereas they would probably not allow the wounding or mutilation of a baby in good health, for this kind of reason or indeed for others.

15. Hare, “Why I Am Only a Demi-Vegetarian.”

17. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 387–90.

18. Bentham, quoted in Francione, “Taking Sentience Seriously,” 192.

20. Hare, “Why I Am Only a Demi-Vegetarian,” 240.

21. Parfit, Reasons and Persons.

22. Francione, “Taking Sentience Seriously.”

24. Ibid., 134–35.

26. Quoted by Kari Weil, “Liberté éhontée,” trans. Thierry Hoquet, in Libérer les animaux?, Critique, August-September 2009, 665–66. The passage is from an unpublished lecture by Francione delivered at Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, on December 4, 2008.

1. After a case proposed in Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 41.

1. After a case proposed in Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 47–66.

2. Ibid. Thomson invokes the legitimate defense argument in the case in which the mother’s life is threatened by the state of the fetus. She therefore grants that there can be a legitimate defense even against an innocent threat, which Bernard Baertschi contests (personal communication).

3. David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133–276.

4. This argument is evoked in Nicolas Baumard, Comment nous sommes devenus moraux: Une histoire naturelle du bien et du mal (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 113–14.

5. Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage, 1994), 33–34.

1. Smilansky, Ten Moral Paradoxes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 134–37.

2. IPSOS, Enquête maternité, 2009.

4. John Stuart Mill, “Nature,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J. M. Robson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 375.

1. After a case proposed in Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

2. I presented the following analysis in Ogien, Le corps et l’argent (Paris: La Musardine, 2010), 46–48.

3. Marcela Iacub, “Le législateur et son scalpel: Le corps humain dans les lois bioéthiques,” in Le crime était presque sexuel et autres essais de casuistique juridique (Paris: Champs-Flammarion, 2003).

1. On these logics, see Norbert Campagna, Prostitution et dignité (Paris: La Musardine, 2008).

1. After Joshua Knobe, “The Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology,” in Experimental Philosophy, eds. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 129–47.

2. This point of view has also been defended for conceptual reasons by Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949).

3. To learn more about the contribution of experimental philosophy to the classification of these questions and of many others in general philosophy, the best approach would be to refer to a book that is both brilliant and funny (no harm in that!) by Florian Cova, Qu’en pensez-vous? Introduction à la philosophie expérimentale (Paris: Germina, 2011).

1. After Eddy Nahmias, Stephen G. Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner, “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?,” in Experimental Philosophy, eds. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 81–104.

2. I obviously do not propose to give details of all the other experiments that were supposed to render this result convincing. Interested readers should refer to Nahmias et al., “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?,” 81–104.

3. Ted Honderich, “Compatibilism and Incompatibilism,” in How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95–106.

4. Peter Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974).

5. Nahmias et al., “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?”; Peter Strawson, Freedom and Resentment.

1. John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34.

2. A. M. Isen and P. F. Levin, “Effect of Feeling Good on Helping; Cookies and Kindness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 384–88.

3. R. A. Baron, “The Sweet Smell of … Helping: Effects of Pleasant Ambient Fragrance on Prosocial Behavior in Shopping Malls,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23 (1997): 498–503.

4. Doris, Lack of Character.

6. B. Latané and J. M. Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? (New York: Appleton Century-Crofts, 1970); Doris, Lack of Character, 33.

7. J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson, “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study in Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100–108.

8. Doris, Lack of Character, 37.

10. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

11. Doris, Lack of Character.

12. The experiment best adapted to today’s problems brings face to face a seeker after purely fictitious employment and an unemployment official who has to say humiliating things such as “You’re garbage. You’d do better to look for another job,” following a scenario devised by the experimenter: W. H. J. Meeus and Q. A. W. Raaijmakers, “Obedience in Modern Societies: The Utrecht Studies,” Journal of Social Issues 51 (1995): 155–75.

13. R. Brown, Social Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1986), 4.

14. M. E. Shaub and K. A. Yahia, “A Cross-Cultural Study of Obedience,” Bulletin of Psychonomic Society 11 (1978): 267–69.

15. Doris, Lack of Character, 47.

16. Lawrence Kohlberg, “My Personal Search for Universal Morality,” Moral Education Forum 11, no. 1 (1986).

17. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).

19. Jiri Benovsky, Le puzzle philosophique (Paris: Éditions d’Ithaque, 2010), 31–33.

20. Doris, Lack of Character, 50.

23. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949).

24. See Ruwen Ogien, L’éthique aujourd’hui: Maximalistes et minimalistes (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 63–66.

25. Doris, Lack of Character, 26. But the weak correlation between these personality tests and real behavior affects the credibility of these measures as well, according to Doris.

30. Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Germany (London: Collier MacMillan, 1988).

31. E. Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (New York: Doubleday, 1994); K. R. Monroe, The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

32. N. Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi Occupied Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

33. Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality.

34. F. Rochat and A. Modigliani, “The Ordinary Quality of Resistance: From Milgram’s Laboratory to the Village of Le Chambon,” Journal of Social Issues 51 (1995): 195–210.

35. Machery, “The Bleak Implications of Moral Psychology,” Neuroethics 3, no. 3 (2010): 223–31.

36. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). John M. Doris and Jesse J. Prinz, review of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, October 3, 2009.

1. Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009).

3. David Copp, “Experiments, Intuitions, and Methodology in Moral and Political Theory,” text presented to the Molyneux Spring Seminar on Intuitions, University of California, Davis, 2010, 1–49.

4. Ibid.; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971). On the place of intuitions in the Rawls method, see Jon Mandle, Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice”: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 8–9. On reflective equilibrium, see the glossary.

1. John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–14.

2. Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

3. Doris, Lack of Character, 1–14.

4. Bernard Williams, “Must a Concern for the Environment be Centred on Human Beings?,” in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 233–40.

1. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

2. Saying that it is irrational to retain empirical hypotheses that have been systematically belied by the facts obviously does not mean that the facts can completely refute a scientific theory. We never know what part of the theory they refute in reality and we must sometimes retain a theory in the face of the facts just as we retain a moral theory in the face of the intuitions: W. V. O. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

1. Vanessa Nurock, Sommes-nous naturellement moraux? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).

2. Jesse J. Prinz, “Is Morality Innate?,” in Moral Psychology, vol. 1, The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 367–408.

3. Haidt and Bjorklund, “Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions About Moral Psychology,” in Moral Psychology, vol. 2, The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, ed. W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 181–217.

4. Jesse J. Prinz, “Resisting the Linguistic Analogy: A Commentary on Hauser, Young and Cushman,” Moral Psychology 2:157–79.

5. Nurock, Sommes-nous naturellement moraux?; John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

6. Doris, Lack of Character.

7. Jerry Fodor, Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).

9. Jay Garfield, “Modularity,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 441–48.

10. Dan Sperber, “Défense de la modularité massive,” in Les languages du cerveau, ed. E. Dupoux (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002), 55–64.

11. Jerry Fodor, “Why We Are So Good at Catching Cheaters,” in The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 101.

12. The analysis that follows is drawn from Ruwen Ogien, “Ils voient des modules partout,” in Le rasoir de Kant et autres essais de philosophie pratique (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2003), 161–87.

13. Leda Cosmides, “The Logic of Social Exchange,” Cognition 31 (1989): 187–276; Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Cognitive Adaptation for Social Exchange,” in The Adapted Mind, eds. J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 163–228.

14. George Botterill and Peter Carruthers, The Philosophy of Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 109–11.

16. From 90 percent to 95 percent, according to Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 336–37; from 75 percent to 90 percent according to Botterill and Carruthers, The Philosophy of Psychology, 109.

17. R. A. Griggs and J. R. Cox, “The Elusive Thematic-Materials Effect in Wason’s Selection Task,” British Journal of Psychology 73 (1982): 407–20.

18. Cosmides, “The Logic of Social Exchange.”

19. Ibid.; Cosmides and Tooby, “Cognitive Adaptation for Social Exchange.”

20. Fodor, “Why We Are So Good at Catching Cheaters.”

21. Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, introduction to Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Culture and Cognition, eds. L. A. Hirschfeld and Susan A. Gelman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

22. Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, “The Moral Mind: How Five Sets of Innate Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture-Specific Virtues and Perhaps Even Modules,” in The Innate Mind, vol. 3, eds. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen P. Stich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

1. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, Experimental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8.

2. For Knobe and Nichols, this hypothesis has some famous antecedents, in Marx, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, and so on: ibid., 7–8.

3. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 82–88, referring to the article by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 221 (1981): 453–58.

4. Ibid; F. M. Kamm, “Moral Intuitions, Cognitive Psychology, and the Harming-Versus-Not-Aiding Distinctions,” Ethics 108, no. 3 (April 1998): 463–88, at 476; Warren Quinn, “Actions, Intentions and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing,” in Morality and Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 149–74.

5. Greene et al., “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgement,” Science 293, no. 5537 (September 2001): 2105–108.

6. We owe this thought experiment to Gilbert Harmann, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4.

7. However Gilbert Harmann, the inventor of this thought experiment, uses it to criticize the objectivist conceptions of ethics. For him, cruelty is not a property that could exist independently of our judgments. It is in our own heads. It is “projected” onto actions, which give us the illusion that a real property of the action is involved.

8. I obviously cannot enter here into an extended discussion of the basic epistemological distinctions between “truth” and “justification” or “belief” and “knowledge,” or of the very lively debates between those who think that we must take account of the causal history of beliefs in order to know if knowledges are involved and those who do not think so. Or between those who think that the emotions can play, in moral knowledge, the same role as perception in physical knowledge and those who wholly disagree. On these questions of general epistemology and of moral epistemology, the best work, in moral philosophy, is the study by Christine Tappolet, Émotions et valeurs (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). She says far more, and says it far more eloquently, than I ever could.

1. In what follows I have modified in certain respects and greatly expanded the analysis of the four elementary rules proposed in Ruwen Ogien, La morale a-t-elle un avenir? (Nantes: Pleins Feux, 2006).

2. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 455–70.

3. I am indebted to Vanessa Nurock for this clarification.

4. I have added “without further argument” to the usual presentation of Hume’s formula in order to stay close to what he says in the text. But in what follows I shall employ the shortened formula, given that it has become a philosophical commonplace.

5. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, The Ascendancy of Plato (London: Routledge, 2003), 66.

6. Henri Poincaré, Dernières pensées (Paris: Flammarion, 1913), 33.

7. John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 175–98.

8. I am indebted to Florian Cova for this observation.

9. John Woods and Douglas Walton, Fallacies: Selected Papers, 1972–1982 (1989; London: King’s College, 2007), 212.

10. For an overview of the debate, see Ruwen Ogien, “Le rasoir de Kant,” in Le rasoir de Kant et autres essais de philosophie pratique (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2003), 81–90 and 195–96 for a bibliography.

11. Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009).

12. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 47–66.

13. This is a question that is consistently posed when we ask ourselves whether we can extend to the fetus the attitude we adopt toward unwelcome intruders: David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133–276.

14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 60.

15. Occam was a medieval philosopher and theologian who recommended that we not multiply beings and principles of explanation unnecessarily. See Ogien, Le rasoir de Kant et autres essais de philosophie pratique, 76.

1. K. E. Traney, “‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can’: A Bridge from Fact to Norm: Part 1,” Ratio 14 (1972): 116–30.

2. Vanessa Nurock, Sommes-nous naturellement moraux? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).

3. Harry J. Gensler, Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998), 89–90.

4. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004).

5. Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” Philosophical Review 81, no. 3 (July 1972): 305–16.

6. T. M. Scanlon “Rawls on Justification,” The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See “reflective equilibrium” in the glossary.

7. Norman Daniels, “Reflective Equilibrium,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reflective-equilibrium/.

8. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

9. I have presented the argument in full in Ruwen Ogien, Le rasoir de Kant et autres essais de philosophie pratique (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2003), 81–90.

10. One can try to reject this result by maintaining either that the first premise (“Charlie cannot”) is not genuinely descriptive or that the conclusion (“Charlie ought not to”) is not genuinely normative. But it is not a foregone conclusion. See ibid., 82–85.

11. Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 96.

12. An example inspired by Ruth Barcan Marcus, “Moral Dilemmas and Consistency,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 3 (1980): 121–36.

13. Traney, “‘Ought’ implies ‘Can,’” 122.

14. For a very clear presentation of the argument, see Jean-Yves Goffi, Penser l’euthanasie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 29–42.

15. See Ruwen Ogien, La vie, la mort, l’État: Le débat bioéthique (Paris: Grasset, 2009), chap. 2.

16. Bernard Williams, “Which Slopes Are Slippery?” in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 213–23.

17. The traditional example of a “sorites” is that of the heap of wheat. If one grain of wheat does not make a heap, then two do not either, for two grains of wheat are not sufficiently distinct from one grain of wheat. Likewise, if two grains of wheat do not make a heap, then three do not either, for three grains of wheat are not sufficiently distinct from two grains of wheat, and so on. Finally, heaps of wheat do not exist! Jean-Yves Goffi proposes a new version of the same argument, but with grains being replaced by dwarves. A typical dwarf measures 28 inches. Suppose we have an individual measuring 28 + 5 inches. Should we regard him as a dwarf also? Yes, of course, for he does not differ significantly from an individual of 28 inches. But if an individual measuring 28 + 5 inches is a dwarf, what about another individual who measures just 5 inches more? Should he also be regarded as a dwarf? Yes, of course, for he does not differ significantly from an individual of 28 + 5 inches. If we continue thus, by adding 5 inches a great number of times, we will end up with the conclusion that an individual of 8 feet tall is a dwarf. Goffi, Penser l’euthanasie, 33.