Open research questions in Philosophical Ethics and Theory
70 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 6,553 Philosophical Ethics and Theory papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
Drawing on the contributions of George Akerlof, Harry Markowitz, Herbert Simon, and Daniel Kahneman, it is argued that the tragedy dramatizes not only decision-making failures resulting from insufficient information, but also situations in which the belated emergence of the truth no longer produces an effective capacity for rational reorganization.
Between Information Asymmetry and Systemic Irrationality: Risk Management, Information Economics, and Decision-Making Paradoxes in King Lear · 2026 · DOI44 - The Coherence Test evaluates whether a system's actions align with its own declared purposes—a test that requires no agreement on which purposes are correct, only honesty about whether a system achieves what it claims to achieve.
Ethics, Morality, and Justice as Relational Phenomena: An Operational and Falsifiable Framework · 2026 · DOIIf we are correct, then not only have we demonstrated a notable and hitherto unforeseen upshot of the position that we can morally wrong others by the beliefs that we form about them – namely, that NU beliefs risk doxastic wronging – but we have also demonstrated why, as a result, it remains to be seen whether NU beliefs or belief in a morally perfect God are epistemically justifiable.
This paper argues for a claim that has not been explored at length elsewhere: that AR is an analytic truth, so it does not imply phenomenalism and can be affirmed by a moderate realist reader.
By connecting Brown’s project with group respect, I aim to illuminate the latter while lending further support to Brown’s project in three ways: further demonstrating its unifying power; revealing how it enables a new account of an underexplored group phenomenon; and extending it to important societal issues via social and political upshots of a non-summativist approach to group respect.
More precisely, I argue that collective amnesia arises as an interplay of negative hermeneutical injustices , whereby conceptual tools are lacking (Fricker, 2007), and “positive” hermeneutical injustices , whereby the positive presence of distorting and oppressive concepts defeats or prevents the application of more adequate concepts or narratives (Falbo, 2022).
In this response I address criticisms raised by Ashton, Battaly, McGlynn and Simion that my account of intellectual humility (hereafter, IH), and of the vices opposed to it, is too internalistic, is insufficiently social and structural, and finally that my proposal for ameliorating vice might be not efficacious.
This essay is meta-methodological in character: given that comparative philosophy sets out to explore how to adequately look at contraries (especially those from different philosophical traditions, but not limited to them, methodologically speaking), and given the self-reflective philosophical nature of comparative philosophy, exploring adequacy conditions for how to look at contraries is meta-methodological in character but also a significant part of comparative philosophy per se.
§§3–5 consider whether Hume's Law, properly interpreted, can be established by Moore's Open Question Argument, and concludes that it cannot: while Moore's argument – appropriately modified – is effective against the idea that moral judgments are either (i) reductively analyzable or (ii) Constitutive-analytic, a different argument is needed to show that they are not (iii) Basis-analytic.
The lack of clear hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice, moreover, obscures both the extent to which Fricker's proposed remedy Hermeneutical Justice – roughly, virtuous communicative practices – adequately addresses the injustice, and the accuracy of criticisms suggesting that Hermeneutical Justice is insufficient to the task.
What manner of protection does Hume’s humanity truly offer? Despite the conclusion that this manner of protection of the vulnerable is insufficient, Hume’s humanity contains valuable characteristics worthy of re-evaluation in modern debate — both on the limits of humanity and on the conditions and models of protecting the vulnerable.
What ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche together [is] the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard or rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous…
James, Nietzsche and Foucault on Ethics and the Self: <b>Sergio Franzese</b>, <i>The Ethics of Energy. William James’s Moral Philosophy in Focus </i> (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2008), ISBN: 978-3868380118 · 2011 · DOIRuddick responded to these critiques in the 1995 edition of her book, but her response has not yet been addressed in the feminist philosophical literature.
The main idea I wish to bring out and defend is that Moore was insufficiently attentive to how distinctive his conception of intrinsic value was, as compared with those of the writers he discussed, and that such inattentiveness skewed his understanding of the positions of others that he discussed and dismissed.
Clifford’s principle, “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” and an objection to it based on William James’s contention that “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.
The question almost raises itself: should the victim's point of view be authoritative in this regard, when different victim groups make incommensurable, indeed competing, claims? If we are to move beyond this unproductive intellectual and moral stalemate, rehearsing the now familiar arguments is insufficient.
Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the 'racial century': genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust · 2002 · DOIIf people who are not in their right mind are regularly punished in a given jurisdiction, or if sane people who are prosecuted do not start out as equal citizens of a republic whose legislation maximizes the free and harmless pursuit of happiness, or if false confessions are not investigated, then all bets are off and the death penalty, as well as other sorts of punishment, are tainted by the injustice of the relevant civil state.
The author believes that various circumstances need to be examined: the social habitus, the real situation and the prospects of law and the state as Kant saw it, the unity and integrity of Kant's philosophical system, the structure of the essay, the complex statement of reasons, the influence of the researcher's views, the validity of the interpretations given on the whole essay, individual segments and, of course, the examined and interpreted statements by Kant in this and other essays.
Kant's view on the connection of law with the state · 1997But essential to any retributivist account is the claim that an adequate justification of punishment must cite not, or not only, its consequential benefits, but its relationship to a past offence: it is a non-consequentialist requirement of justice that punishment must be of an offender, for an offence; that only the guilty may be punished, and that the severity of their punishments should be limited, if not completely determined, by the seriousness of the offences for which they are punished.
THAT THE CAREER of Augustine constitutes a major turning point in the history of Christian political and social thought is scarcely open to doubt, although the reasons given are quite varied.
As has been suggested earlier in this report, the imagined valua- tions expressed by these show certain features of real valuations, especially a tendency of educated persons to order their preferences in terms of money price limited by the conviction that certain states of affairs are so undesirable that no amount of money can compensate for them.
4 By ‘wrongs’ I refer to ‘interpersonal wrongs’ that involve the violation of strict interpersonal juridical duties, to which coercive response is warranted.
Assessing Strawson’s strategy, McK- enna suggests that, once we see that we’re asking about the fittingness of the reactive attitudes, the pos- sibility of a freedom condition becomes salient—and then it is open question whether that condition is in fact satisfied.
Strawson, Libertarianism, and “External Justifications” of Our Responsibility Practices: On Internal, External, and Presuppositional Criticism · 2026 · DOII raise several difficulties for his analysis of loss and argue there is a further aspect of loss, a way in which loss can make us come undone, which Scheffler’s treatment does not account for.
Previous interpretations have mostly focused on epistemological and logical aspects of value interference in science, leaving the relationship between Weber’s categories – and the mechanisms through which values shape scientific problem selection – underexplored.
Most-cited papers in Philosophical Ethics and Theory
- A Theory of the Stability of Punishment · The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-) · 1973 · 160 citations
- Agency, Rationality and Social Policy · Journal of Social Policy · 2001 · 132 citations
- FROM SECRET AGENTS TO INTERAGENCY · History and Theory · 2013 · 104 citations
- Modalities of Conjunctural Analysis: “Seeing the Present Differently” through Global Lenses · Antipode · 2023 · 85 citations
- The Limits of Well-Being · Social Philosophy and Policy · 1992 · 85 citations
- Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the 'racial century': genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust · Patterns of Prejudice · 2002 · 84 citations
- Twenty-five Years with The Logic of Collective Action · Acta Sociologica · 1993 · 70 citations
- Affective injustice and fundamental affective goods · Journal of Social Philosophy · 2021 · 69 citations
- An Alternative Model of Politics? Prospects and Problems of Jane Bennett’s <i>Vital Materialism</i> · Theory Culture & Society · 2018 · 56 citations
- Affect and critique: A politics of boredom* · Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2021 · 55 citations
Most recent work
- Rethinking critical pedagogy in times of polycrisis: towards a generative praxis of entanglement, complicity and hope · Pedagogy Culture and Society · 2026
- John Rawls and Liberal Guilt · Polity · 2026
- Commensuration as moral image: liberal modernity’s equivalence machine · Distinktion Journal of Social Theory · 2026
- High Standards · Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2026
- Hume’s Conception of the Mind as an Instance of a Cognitive Architecture? · Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness · 2026
- Appearances as Representations: An ‘Analytic’ Reading · Kantian Review · 2026
- Living With Loss: On Samuel Scheffler’s “Aging and the Threat of Normative Poverty” · The Journal of Value Inquiry · 2026
- Objective list theories · 2026
- A Probabilistic Case for an Afterlife — by reason alone · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- love · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
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