A Fair Shake For the Fair Weather Fan
By Kyle Fruh, Marcus Hedahl, Luke Maring, Nate Olson
Journal of The Philosophy of Sport, 2021, Vol 48 (2): 262-274
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After initially pitting partisans against purists, the literature on the ethics of fandom has coalesced around a pluralist position: purists and partisans each have their own merits, and there is no ideal form of fandom. In this literature, however, the fair-weather fan continues to be viewed with dismissal and (sometimes) derision. While some fair-weather fans may earn this contempt, many fair-weather fans, we argue, are not only acceptable, they have important advantages over partisans and purists, and as such are in a better position to navigate some of the moral complexities inherent in modern sports. We develop this argument first by clarifying the nature of the fair-weather fan. We then examine challenges that fans face in many modern sports, first owing to their economic nature and, second, due to the morally tainted status of many of them. We argue that the fair-weather fan meets these challenges in ways that the partisan and purist cannot replicate.
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Duties and Demandingness, Individual and Collective
By Marcus Hedahl and Kyle Fruh
Journal of Value Inquiry, 2021
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Some theorists have attempted to reply to the demandingness objection by analyzing the moral requirements to respond to large-scale moral issues as collective duties rather than individual ones. On this view, the relationship between potentially overly demanding individual duties and large-scale moral issues is mediated by the fact that the duties are, first and foremost, ours together rather than each of ours on our own. In response to this strategy, this paper advances two reasons to believe that the interplay between collective duties and demandingness concerns is more complicated than has typically been appreciated. First, we argue that in cases in which risks and burdens are indivisible, the move to collectivize duties fails to fulfill its promise to alleviate demandingness concerns. Second, we argue that if concerns over individual demandingness could block a putative obligation from becoming an actual moral duty, then, in some cases at least, concerns over collective demandingness could do so as well.
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Why the Military Needs Confucian Virtues
By Marcus Hedahl
Work in Progress
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The U.S. military often focuses on virtues that are deeply interconnected with the ways individuals interact with one another, highlighting character traits that are on public display that don’t just make more excellent individuals, but that help make us more excellent together. While some might try to reduce ethics to nothing more than the bumper sticker slogan of “doing the right thing when no one else is looking," the U.S. military often stresses that doing the right thing when everyone else is looking is another essential aspect of the ethics, one that requires much, much more of us than we might have initially suspected. It is in many ways surprising, therefore, that the military hardly ever, if ever, appeals to the philosophical foundation most suitable to those aims: Confucian virtue theory. This brief introductory piece attempts to argue why Confucian ethics are an essential element for a proper understanding of military ethics
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Climate Change is Unjust War:
Geo engineering and the Rising Tides of War
by Kyle Fruh and Marcus Hedahl
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 57, No. 3 September 2019.
Climate change is undeniably a global problem, but the situation is especially dire for countries whose territory is comprised entirely or primarily of low-lying land. While geoengineering might offer an opportunity to protect these states, international consensus on the particulars of any geoengineering proposal seems unlikely. To consider the moral complexities created by unilateral deployment of geoengineering technologies, we turn to a moral convention with a rich history of assessing interference in the sovereign affairs of foreign states: the just war tradition. We argue that the just war framework demonstrates that, for these nations, geoengineering offers a justified form of self-defense from an unwarranted, albeit unintentional, aggression. This startling result places our own carbon-emitting activities in a stark new light: in perpetrating climate change, we are, in fact, waging war on the most vulnerable.
Sharing Values
by Marcus Hedahl and Bryce Huebner
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 56, No. 2, June, 2018.
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In this paper, we consider one of the ways in which shared valuing is normatively significant. More specifically, we analyze the processes that can reliably provide normative grounding for the standing to rebuke others for their failures to treat something as valuable. Yet problems with grounding this normative standing quickly arise, as it is not immediately clear why shared valuing binds group members together in ways that can sustain the collective pursuit of shared ends. Responding to this difficulty is no easy task, since doing so requires demonstrating that the standing to call on one's fellow participants because of shared forms of valuing is not merely a side effect of members authority to call on their fellow participants to do their fair share in a collective endeavor. This is, to the best of our knowledge, a problem that the sparse literature on shared valuing has yet to consider. We argue that the best way to address this difficulty is to consider the real‐world complexity of how forms of valuing come to be shared within well‐structured collectives and how members internalize the evaluative tendencies that sustain shared valuing. To accomplish those ends, we examine two different ways that shared valuing is cultivated within well‐structured groups and the corresponding ways that members internalize forms of valuing; specifically, we examine differences between forms of valuing that are passed downward from the top of a group, as they are in the U.S. Military, and forms of valuing that bubble‐up through local patterns of interaction, as they do among the Zapatistas of Chiapas.
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Don’t Feed the Trolls: Bold climate action in a new, golden age of denialism
by Marcus Hedahl and Travis Rieder
Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, “Special Edition on 2016 Election,” July 2017.
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In trying to motivate climate action, many of those concerned about altering the status quo focus on trying to convince climate deniers of the error of their ways. In the wake of the 2016 Election, one might believe that now, more than ever, it is tremendously important to convince those who deny the reality of climate science of the well-established facts. We argue, however, that the time has come to revisit this line of reasoning. With a significant majority of voters supporting taxing or regulating greenhouse gases, those who want to spur climate action ought to focus instead on getting a critical mass of climate believers to be appropriately alarmed. Doing so, we contend, may prove more useful in creating the political will necessary to spur bold climate action than would engaging directly with climate deniers.
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The Changing Nature of the Just War Tradition: How our changing environment ought to change the foundations of just war theory
By Marcus Hedahl, Scott Clark, and Michael Biggins
Public Integrity, Vol. 19, No. 5, April 2017.
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Our changing environment must, in turn, change the way we think about Just War Theory. While there is a long rich history within the just war tradition of considering an attack on natural resources to constitute an act of war (e.g. Victoria 1532; Grotius 1625), and while there have been more recent analyses about how environmental impacts can alter which wars and which actions within war can be justified (e.g., Drucker 1989; Reichberg & Syse 2000; Woods 2007), there has not yet been, to the best of our knowledge an analysis of how the environmental impacts of war ought to alter the just war framework itself. In other words, there has not yet been a consideration of how environmental impacts ought to change not only the content of just war principles, but also the way those principles are utilized, and in some cases even the principles themselves. In this paper, we argue that the time has come for such an analysis.
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Collective Directionality: A New Possibility for Collectives as Objects of Normative Consideration
By Marcus Hedahl
Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 51, No. 2, September, 2016.
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People often talk about taxes owed to one’s nation, duties owed to a university, and debts owed to a corporation. Yet despite extensive debates about the possibility of collective moral agency and the possibility of collective correlates to individual natural rights, there has been surprisingly limited analysis about the possibility of collective counterparties to directed duties, i.e., collectives as entities to which directed duties can be owed. The questions of who or what can be wronged, who’s or what’s concerns ought to have more normative import with respect to a given duty, and who or what ought to have “special standing” to demand that duty bearers fulfill their duties will often have practical, rather than merely theoretical, implications. At times at least, it matters if the duties I owe to my nation are normatively distinct from the duties I owe to my fellow citizens, if the duties I owe to my university are distinct from the duties I owe to my colleagues, and even if the duties to I owe to us as a couple could be distinct from the duties I owe to my spouse. In this paper, I argue that holding that collectives can never be counterparties to directed duties requires sacrificing any normative distinction between coordinated behavior guided by individual interests and collective behavior in pursuit of genuinely collective ends. Nonetheless, unlike individuals, collectives do not become entities to which directed duties are owed merely by existing.Ultimately, I attempt to avoid these problematic extremes by arguing that the existence of a constitutive and causal bidirectional counterfactual dependence between individual and collective interests—a state of affairs I refer to as an integration of interests—is sufficient for a collective to be a counterparty to directed duties.
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Climate Mitigation
by Marcus Hedahl, Kyle Fruh, & Lindsay Whitlow
Working Draft for Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics
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Given the current status of the climate crisis, preventing climate change altogether is no longer a possibility. There is simply no way to avoid serious, climate-related harms. We have already seen atmospheric carbon dioxide rise above 400 ppm and a temperature rise greater than 0.7 degrees centigrade since the beginning of the twentieth century. Even with an immediate and radical reduction in our emissions, an even greater temperature rise is almost certain. This current state of affairs has made many recognize the need to adapt, and even to examine limited geoengineering efforts. Yet while mitigation, adaptation, and geoengineering are not mutually exclusive options, regardless of what other measures are pursued, mitigation remains an indispensable part of any morally appropriate response to climate change. Photo Credit: Andrea Zeppilli CC-BY-SA-3.0)
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Shared Values, Interests, and Desires
by Bryce Huebner & Marcus Hedahl
Working Draft for Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality
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Our aim is to examine some of the ways in which values, interests, and desires are shared. We hold that a methodological individualist can account for many forms of sharing without revision to their theory, but we also aim to motivate reflection on the possibility that some kinds of joint-activity complicate this ontological minimalism. Sometimes, joint-activities do more than provide the social scaffolding that makes individual values, interests, and desires possible; sometimes, joint-activities generate new loci for values and interests, and new ways of valuing.
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The Significance of A Duty's Direction: Claiming priority rather than prioritizing claims
by Marcus Hedahl
Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2013, Vol. 7, No. 3
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Agents do not merely have duties – they often have directed duties to others. This paper first reveals problems with traditional attempts to equate these directed duties with claims and claim rights. It then defends a novel account of directionality that locates the unifying element of directed duties in a counterparty’s prioritization of the duties owed to her. If one agent has a directed duty to another, then the degree to which fulfilling the duty matters to the agent to whom it is owed itself matters – in a distinctive, special and inherent sense. This subject-determined normative significance of directed duties can be used to articulate a priority account of directionality, an account that can demonstrate why many have taken control powers, interests or the authority to demand compliance to be so important in analyzing the directed duties we owe to others.
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Collective Values
by Bryce Huebner & Marcus Hedahl
Accepted Manuscript for Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences - for citation purposes, please use published version
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While appeals to our collective values are often politically expedient, the content of such appeals is often ambiguous at best. Collective values must be values, not mere common expectations or shared understandings of joint activities, but in order to be genuinely collective values, they also require treating activities, entities, or practices as worthwhile or essential to what we do together. In this summery, we consider what it is to have values that are not just mine and thine, his and hers, but ours.
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Directional Climate Justice: The normative relationship between claim rights and directed obligations
by Marcus Hedahl
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 5, No. 2.
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A prominent theoretical analysis of moral claim rights holds that a right exists if and only if a corresponding directed obligation exists. Unfortunately, that traditional analysis has significant problems with a large number of apparent rights, including rights related to climate change. Many theorists take this limitation to be sufficient grounds to reject this traditional analysis, but eliminating the link between rights and directed obligations risks losing the essential, directional aspect of such rights. This theoretical impasse can be resolved by recognizing that the link between moral claim rights and directed obligations is normative rather than descriptive: a moral claim right ought to engender directed obligations, but it need not actually do so in order to be properly analysed as a right. Recognizing the normative link between rights and obligations not only solves a theoretical riddle, but also uncovers several practical consequences for our ethical understanding of climate change.
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The Collective Fallacy: Irreducible collective action without corresponding collective responsibility
by Marcus Hedahl
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (3):283-300.
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The common assumption is that if a group comprising moral agents can act intentionally, as a group, then the group itself can also be properly regarded as a moral agent with respect to that action. I argue, however, that this common assumption is the result of a problematic line of reasoning I refer to as “the collective fallacy.” Recognizing the collective fallacy as a fallacy allows us to see that if there are, in fact, irreducibly joint actors, then some of them will lack the full-fledged moral agency of their members. The descriptivist question of whether a group can perform irreducibly joint intentional action need not rise and fall with the normative question of whether a group can be a moral agent.
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Coping with Climate Change: What Justice Demands of Surfers, Mormons, and the Rest of us
by Kyle Fruh & Marcus Hedahl
Accepted manuscript. For citations, please use version of record at Ethics, Policy, and the Environment 16 (3):273-296.
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Henry Shue has led the charge among moral philosophers in arguing that harms stemming from anthropogenic climate change constitute violations of basic rights and are therefore prohibited by duties of justice. Because frameworks such as Shue's argue that duties of justice are at stake, one could object that the special urgency of those duties threatens to overrun the normatively protected space in which an agent makes her life her own. We argue that an alternative conception of how moral reasons combine to produce duties is required to respond to the demandingness objection, providing normatively protected space to pursue one's projects while yielding numerous strict obligations of justice.
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Blood and Blkackwaters: A call to arms for the profession of arms
by Marcus Hedahl
Journal of Military Ethics 8 (1):19-33.
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One out of every five combatants carrying a machine gun in Iraq is not a soldier, but an employee. Many, particular those in military service, may consider the men and women working for private military firms to be performing a radically different function than their military counterparts, but, ‘Iraqi citizens do not distinguish between employees of Blackwater and the U.S. military. All they see is Americans with guns.’ In this article, I defend a normative principle that can help determine if a particular act of outsourcing is morally problematic. I will argue that the continued use of mercenaries harms the professional soldiers fighting along side them by undermining the profession of arms. The continued use of private military contractors will turn all those who fight, even professional soldiers, into mercenaries.
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Unaccountable: The current state of Private Military and Security Companies
by Marcus Hedahl
Criminal Justice Ethics 31 (3):175-192.
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The current accountability system for private military and security contractors (PMSCs) is woefully inadequate, and mere enhancements in oversight cannot hope to remedy that failing. I contend that once we recognize the kind of accountability required of PMSCs, we will realize that radical changes in the foundational relationship between PMSCs and the state are required. More specifically, in order to be appropriately accountable, members of PMSCs must become a part of or, at the very least, directly responsible to the legitimate authoritative military or police structures, and there must be a clear and precise delineation of responsibility among public officials for holding individual members of PMSCs criminally liable.
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Comparisons of Maxwell and CLL Gas-Surface Interaction Models
by Marcus Hedahl & Richard Wilmouth
NASA Trade Manual, N96-16264/9.
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The behavior of two different models of gas-surface interactions is studied using the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. The DSMC calculations examine differences in predictions of aerodynamic forces and heat transfer between the Maxwell and the Cercignani-Lampis-Lord (CLL) models for flat plate configurations at freestream conditions corresponding to a 140 km orbit around Venus. Results are presented for both a single flat plate and a two-plate configuration as a function of angle of attack and gas-surface accommodation coefficients. The Maxwell and CLL models produce qualitatively similar results for the aerodynamic forces and heat transfer on a single flat plate. However, the flowfields produced with the two models are qualitatively different for both the single-plate and two-plate calculations. These differences in the flowfield lead to predictions of the angle of attack for maximum heat transfer in a two-plate configuration that are distinctly different for the two gas-surface interaction models.
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