Michael Cholbi | California State Polytechnic University at Pomona - Academia.edu

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Michael Cholbi

California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, Philosophy, Faculty Member

California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, Philosophy, Faculty Member |

I'm a philosopher working primarily in theoretical and practical ethics and in moral psychology. You can see my full list of publications at http://michael.cholbi.com.

I also blog at Psychology Today (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ethics-in-question), In Socrates' Wake (http://insocrateswake.blogspot.com) and at PEA Soup (http://peasoup.typepad.com). I also contribute to AskPhilosophers.org (http://askphilosophers.org/users/mcholbi).

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Papers

The Anti-Paternalist Case For Unconditional Basic Income Provision

One popular argument in libertarian and liberal circles for unconditional basic income (UBI) is t... more One popular argument in libertarian and liberal circles for unconditional basic income (UBI) is that UBI is less paternalistic than typical programs designed to provide citizens a social minimum. Many of the conditions governments sometimes attach to the receipt of a social minimum indeed appear to be paternalistic: To require that recipients submit to drug testing or forego procreation is to make the provision of the social minimum contingent upon incursions into recipients’ liberty, autonomy, or agency so as to ensure that recipients live in ways that the state (or other citizens) believe they ought to. Making the provision of a social minimum unconditional thus removes one avenue for state-provided benefits to be paternalistic. This article argues that while policies that make the provision of a social minimum unconditional are less paternalistic, this is not reason to favor an unconditional basic income rather than the unconditional provision of a ‘basket’ of non-income goods such as food vouchers, medical care, etc. On what I regard as the best account of the nature of paternalism and its moral objectionability, which I term the rational will account, there are anti-paternalist reasons to favor a basket of basic goods over a basic income. Some goods (for example, housing) turn out to be critical to creating the kind of non-oppressive or non-dominating social relations that the rational will account, as well as republican or relational theories of equality, endorse. Thus, an in-kind basket of goods is more effective than a basic income in ensuring that the rational wills of some citizens are not subordinate to the wills of other citizens.

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Paternalism and Duties to Self

J. Hanna and K. Grill, eds., Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Paternalism

Two main aims: (1) to articulate and defend a Kantian conception of duties to self, and (2) to ex... more Two main aims: (1) to articulate and defend a Kantian conception of duties to self, and (2) to explore the ramifications of such duties for the moral justification of paternalism. Concludes that there is a distinctive reason to resent paternalistic intercessions aimed at assisting others in fulfilling their duties to self (or the self-regarding virtues necessary thereunto), based on the fact that the goods realized via their fulfillment are historical, i.e., their value depends on an individual's casual contribution to their fulfillment,

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Black Lives Matter and the Call for Death Penalty Abolition

by Alex Madva and Michael Cholbi

Ethics, 2018

The abolition of capital punishment is among the reforms the Black Lives Matter movement has call... more The abolition of capital punishment is among the reforms the Black Lives Matter movement has called for in response to what it calls "the war against Black people" and "Black communities" in the United States. Drawing on the large body of studies indicating discrimination against Blacks both as capital defendants and as murder victims, the movement asserts that the death penalty in the U.S. is a "racist practice" that "devalues Black lives." This article defends the two central contentions embedded in the movement's abolitionist stance: first, that U.S. capital punishment practices represent a wrong to Black communities rather than simply a wrong to particular Black capital defendants or particular Black victims of murder, and second, that the most defensible remedy for this wrong is the abolition of the death penalty. We argue that while Black Americans suffer retributive injustices in the U.S. capital punishment regime, Black Americans as a class also suffer a distributive injustice under that regime inasmuch as Black Americans do not receive either the equal protection of, or equal status under, the law. Moreover, these patterns of discrimination cannot be explained without reference to implicit racial biases likely to influence capital punishment decisions reached by prosecutors, judges, and juries. The failure to remedy such discrimination thus represents a form of institutional recklessness with respect to Black lives and legal status. Among plausible remedies, only abolition, either de facto or de jure, succeeds in both eliminating the discriminatory effects of this bias-based recklessness and in not being itself unjust.

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Finding the Good in Grief: What Augustine Knew that Meursault Couldn't

Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2017

Meursault, the protagonist of Camus' The Stranger, is unable to grieve, a fact that ultimately le... more Meursault, the protagonist of Camus' The Stranger, is unable to grieve, a fact that ultimately leads to his condemnation and execution. Given the emotional distresses involved in grief, should we envy Camus or pity him? I defend the latter conclusion. As St. Augustine seemed to dimly recognize, the pains of grief are integral to the process of bereavement, a process that both motivates and provides a distinctive opportunity to attain the good of self-knowledge.

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The Euthanasia of Companion Animals

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The terminal, the futile, and the psychiatrically disordered

The various jurisdictions worldwide that now legally permit assisted suicide (or voluntary euthan... more The various jurisdictions worldwide that now legally permit assisted suicide (or voluntary euthanasia) vary concerning the medical conditions needed to be legally eligible for assisted suicide. Some jurisdictions require that an individual be suffering from an unbearable and futile medical condition that cannot be alleviated. Others require that individuals must be suffering from a terminal illness that will result in death within a specified timeframe, such as six months. Popular and academic discourse about assisted suicide paradigmatically focuses on individuals with 'physical,' i.e., non-psychiatric medical conditions, such as cancer or AIDS. Here I defend analyses of the notions of unbearable suffering, futility, and terminality that imply that, regardless of which of these medical conditions is invoked, at least some individuals with severe and persistent psychiatric illnesses satisfy these conditions and ought to be classified as legally eligible for assisted suicide. The legal and moral case for a right to assisted suicide is therefore not in principle weaker for the severely psychiatrically disordered than for those with 'typical' terminal or futile medical conditions.

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Grief and end-of-life surrogate decision making

Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments, 2016

Because an increasing number of patients have medical conditions that renders hem incompetent at ... more Because an increasing number of patients have medical conditions that renders hem incompetent at making their own medical choices, more and more medical choices are now made by surrogates, often patient family members. However, many studies indicate that surrogates often do not discharge their responsibilities adequately, and in particular, do not choose in accordance with what those patients would have chosen for themselves, especially when it comes to end-of-life medical choices. This chapter argues that a significant part of the explanation of such surrogate failure is that family surrogates are likely to undergo anticipatory grief when making end-of-life decisions. After clarifying both the emotional structure and object of grief, I propose that the pending death of a loved one induces an emotional conflict in surrogates between the care demanded by their responsibilities as surrogates and the attachment surrogates feel toward their dying loved one, a conflict surrogates “resolve” in the direction of attachment rather than care. This hypothesis helps to explain both surrogates’ general inability to exercise “substituted judgment” on behalf of their loved ones and a wide swath of the particular data regarding this inability (e.g., that surrogates more often err by choosing overtreatment). I conclude by considering possible clinical and philosophical responses to this hypothesis.

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The Compensatory Basis of Procreative Parental Rights

Procreation, Parenthood, and Educational Rights Ethical and Philosophical Issues, Dec 2016

Philosophical defenses of parents’ rights typically appeal to the interests of parents, the inter... more Philosophical defenses of parents’ rights typically appeal to the interests of parents, the interests of children, or some combination of these. Here I propose that at least in the case of biological, non-adoptive parents, these rights have a different normative basis: namely, these rights should be accorded to biological parents because of the compensatory duties such parents owe their children by virtue of having brought them into existence. Inspried by Seana Shiffrin, I argue that procreation inevitably encumbers the wills of children in otherwise morally objectionable ways. Such subjection generates duties to compensate children, even if the child’s life is on balance a benefit to her. The right to procreate is thus conditioned on prospective parent’s willingness to compensate for the harms of procreation. And because parents bear such compensatory duties, they must be accorded permissions (i.e., rights) to fulfill these duties. These rights include familiar exclusionary rights to promote children’s welfare, etc. Moreover, because subjecting children to harms or the risks thereof violates their autonomy, parental duties (and rights) include the provision of education and other goods that enable their subsequent autonomy as adults. Grounding parental rights in compensatory procreative duties avoids problems associated with appeals to the interests of children (e.g., that these interests do not seem to generate exclusive parental rights) or to the interests of parents (e.g., that these interests do not appear strong enough to permit the creation of a new, vulnerable human individual).

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Immortality and the Exhaustibility Of Value

Much of the literature on the desirability of immortality (inspired by B. Williams) has considere... more Much of the literature on the desirability of immortality (inspired by B. Williams) has considered whether the goods of mortal life would be exhausted in an immortal life (whether, i.e., immortality would necessarily end in tedium). However, there has been very little discussion of whether the bads of mortal life would also be exhausted in an immortal life, and more generally, how good immortal life would be on balance, particularly in comparison to a mortal life. Here I argue that there are compelling reasons to favor a mortal over an immortal life because a mortal life offers a higher ceiling for well-being and assigns our agency a greater role in how our lives turn out.

Views

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Suicide

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The Anti-Paternalist Case For Unconditional Basic Income Provision

One popular argument in libertarian and liberal circles for unconditional basic income (UBI) is t... more One popular argument in libertarian and liberal circles for unconditional basic income (UBI) is that UBI is less paternalistic than typical programs designed to provide citizens a social minimum. Many of the conditions governments sometimes attach to the receipt of a social minimum indeed appear to be paternalistic: To require that recipients submit to drug testing or forego procreation is to make the provision of the social minimum contingent upon incursions into recipients’ liberty, autonomy, or agency so as to ensure that recipients live in ways that the state (or other citizens) believe they ought to. Making the provision of a social minimum unconditional thus removes one avenue for state-provided benefits to be paternalistic. This article argues that while policies that make the provision of a social minimum unconditional are less paternalistic, this is not reason to favor an unconditional basic income rather than the unconditional provision of a ‘basket’ of non-income goods such as food vouchers, medical care, etc. On what I regard as the best account of the nature of paternalism and its moral objectionability, which I term the rational will account, there are anti-paternalist reasons to favor a basket of basic goods over a basic income. Some goods (for example, housing) turn out to be critical to creating the kind of non-oppressive or non-dominating social relations that the rational will account, as well as republican or relational theories of equality, endorse. Thus, an in-kind basket of goods is more effective than a basic income in ensuring that the rational wills of some citizens are not subordinate to the wills of other citizens.

Views

Paternalism and Duties to Self

J. Hanna and K. Grill, eds., Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Paternalism

Two main aims: (1) to articulate and defend a Kantian conception of duties to self, and (2) to ex... more Two main aims: (1) to articulate and defend a Kantian conception of duties to self, and (2) to explore the ramifications of such duties for the moral justification of paternalism. Concludes that there is a distinctive reason to resent paternalistic intercessions aimed at assisting others in fulfilling their duties to self (or the self-regarding virtues necessary thereunto), based on the fact that the goods realized via their fulfillment are historical, i.e., their value depends on an individual's casual contribution to their fulfillment,

Views

Black Lives Matter and the Call for Death Penalty Abolition

by Alex Madva and Michael Cholbi

Ethics, 2018

The abolition of capital punishment is among the reforms the Black Lives Matter movement has call... more The abolition of capital punishment is among the reforms the Black Lives Matter movement has called for in response to what it calls "the war against Black people" and "Black communities" in the United States. Drawing on the large body of studies indicating discrimination against Blacks both as capital defendants and as murder victims, the movement asserts that the death penalty in the U.S. is a "racist practice" that "devalues Black lives." This article defends the two central contentions embedded in the movement's abolitionist stance: first, that U.S. capital punishment practices represent a wrong to Black communities rather than simply a wrong to particular Black capital defendants or particular Black victims of murder, and second, that the most defensible remedy for this wrong is the abolition of the death penalty. We argue that while Black Americans suffer retributive injustices in the U.S. capital punishment regime, Black Americans as a class also suffer a distributive injustice under that regime inasmuch as Black Americans do not receive either the equal protection of, or equal status under, the law. Moreover, these patterns of discrimination cannot be explained without reference to implicit racial biases likely to influence capital punishment decisions reached by prosecutors, judges, and juries. The failure to remedy such discrimination thus represents a form of institutional recklessness with respect to Black lives and legal status. Among plausible remedies, only abolition, either de facto or de jure, succeeds in both eliminating the discriminatory effects of this bias-based recklessness and in not being itself unjust.

Views

Finding the Good in Grief: What Augustine Knew that Meursault Couldn't

Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2017

Meursault, the protagonist of Camus' The Stranger, is unable to grieve, a fact that ultimately le... more Meursault, the protagonist of Camus' The Stranger, is unable to grieve, a fact that ultimately leads to his condemnation and execution. Given the emotional distresses involved in grief, should we envy Camus or pity him? I defend the latter conclusion. As St. Augustine seemed to dimly recognize, the pains of grief are integral to the process of bereavement, a process that both motivates and provides a distinctive opportunity to attain the good of self-knowledge.

Views

The Euthanasia of Companion Animals

Views

The terminal, the futile, and the psychiatrically disordered

The various jurisdictions worldwide that now legally permit assisted suicide (or voluntary euthan... more The various jurisdictions worldwide that now legally permit assisted suicide (or voluntary euthanasia) vary concerning the medical conditions needed to be legally eligible for assisted suicide. Some jurisdictions require that an individual be suffering from an unbearable and futile medical condition that cannot be alleviated. Others require that individuals must be suffering from a terminal illness that will result in death within a specified timeframe, such as six months. Popular and academic discourse about assisted suicide paradigmatically focuses on individuals with 'physical,' i.e., non-psychiatric medical conditions, such as cancer or AIDS. Here I defend analyses of the notions of unbearable suffering, futility, and terminality that imply that, regardless of which of these medical conditions is invoked, at least some individuals with severe and persistent psychiatric illnesses satisfy these conditions and ought to be classified as legally eligible for assisted suicide. The legal and moral case for a right to assisted suicide is therefore not in principle weaker for the severely psychiatrically disordered than for those with 'typical' terminal or futile medical conditions.

Views

Grief and end-of-life surrogate decision making

Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments, 2016

Because an increasing number of patients have medical conditions that renders hem incompetent at ... more Because an increasing number of patients have medical conditions that renders hem incompetent at making their own medical choices, more and more medical choices are now made by surrogates, often patient family members. However, many studies indicate that surrogates often do not discharge their responsibilities adequately, and in particular, do not choose in accordance with what those patients would have chosen for themselves, especially when it comes to end-of-life medical choices. This chapter argues that a significant part of the explanation of such surrogate failure is that family surrogates are likely to undergo anticipatory grief when making end-of-life decisions. After clarifying both the emotional structure and object of grief, I propose that the pending death of a loved one induces an emotional conflict in surrogates between the care demanded by their responsibilities as surrogates and the attachment surrogates feel toward their dying loved one, a conflict surrogates “resolve” in the direction of attachment rather than care. This hypothesis helps to explain both surrogates’ general inability to exercise “substituted judgment” on behalf of their loved ones and a wide swath of the particular data regarding this inability (e.g., that surrogates more often err by choosing overtreatment). I conclude by considering possible clinical and philosophical responses to this hypothesis.

Views

The Compensatory Basis of Procreative Parental Rights

Procreation, Parenthood, and Educational Rights Ethical and Philosophical Issues, Dec 2016

Philosophical defenses of parents’ rights typically appeal to the interests of parents, the inter... more Philosophical defenses of parents’ rights typically appeal to the interests of parents, the interests of children, or some combination of these. Here I propose that at least in the case of biological, non-adoptive parents, these rights have a different normative basis: namely, these rights should be accorded to biological parents because of the compensatory duties such parents owe their children by virtue of having brought them into existence. Inspried by Seana Shiffrin, I argue that procreation inevitably encumbers the wills of children in otherwise morally objectionable ways. Such subjection generates duties to compensate children, even if the child’s life is on balance a benefit to her. The right to procreate is thus conditioned on prospective parent’s willingness to compensate for the harms of procreation. And because parents bear such compensatory duties, they must be accorded permissions (i.e., rights) to fulfill these duties. These rights include familiar exclusionary rights to promote children’s welfare, etc. Moreover, because subjecting children to harms or the risks thereof violates their autonomy, parental duties (and rights) include the provision of education and other goods that enable their subsequent autonomy as adults. Grounding parental rights in compensatory procreative duties avoids problems associated with appeals to the interests of children (e.g., that these interests do not seem to generate exclusive parental rights) or to the interests of parents (e.g., that these interests do not appear strong enough to permit the creation of a new, vulnerable human individual).

Views

Immortality and the Exhaustibility Of Value

Much of the literature on the desirability of immortality (inspired by B. Williams) has considere... more Much of the literature on the desirability of immortality (inspired by B. Williams) has considered whether the goods of mortal life would be exhausted in an immortal life (whether, i.e., immortality would necessarily end in tedium). However, there has been very little discussion of whether the bads of mortal life would also be exhausted in an immortal life, and more generally, how good immortal life would be on balance, particularly in comparison to a mortal life. Here I argue that there are compelling reasons to favor a mortal over an immortal life because a mortal life offers a higher ceiling for well-being and assigns our agency a greater role in how our lives turn out.

Views

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Suicide

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No Delight But in Tears: A Philosophical Examination of Grief [introduction]

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Understanding Kant's Ethics (preview/intro), Cambridge University Press 2016

Preface -/- Introduction -/- PART I -/- 1 Kant’s pursuit of the Supreme Principle of Morality -/-... more Preface -/- Introduction -/- PART I -/- 1 Kant’s pursuit of the Supreme Principle of Morality -/- 2 The Categorical Imperative and the Kantian theory of value, part I -/- 3 The Categorical Imperative and the Kantian theory of value, part II -/- 4 Dignity -/- 5 Freedom, reason, and the possibility of the Categorical Imperative -/- PART II -/- 6 Objections to the Formula of Universal Law -/- 7 Three problems in Kant’s practical ethics -/- 8 Reason and sentiment: Kantian ethics in a good human life -/- Conclusion -/- Index .

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Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions

Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions is a provocative and comprehensive investigation of the mai... more Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions is a provocative and comprehensive investigation of the main philosophical issues surrounding suicide. Readers will encounter seminal arguments concerning the nature of suicide and its moral permissibility, the duty to die, the rationality of suicide, and the ethics of suicide intervention. Intended both for students and for seasoned scholars, this book sheds much-needed philosophical light on one of the most puzzling and enigmatic human behaviors

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A Duty to Grieve

Robert Solomon's " On grief and gratitude " is perhaps the best known contemporary philosophical ... more Robert Solomon's " On grief and gratitude " is perhaps the best known contemporary philosophical article on grief. There Solomon makes the provocative claim that there is a duty to grieve – that those who do not grieve or do not grieve sufficiently are subject to " the most severe moral censure, " that as a " moral emotion, " grief is not only an " appropriate reaction to the loss of a loved one, but also in a strong sense obligatory. " While Solomon offer reasons why grief speaks positively of a person's relations with others and why grief may contribute to the bereaved's well-being, he does not offer an explicit argument for the obligatoriness of grief. Here I consider a number of routes by which such a claim might be defended. If there is a duty to grieve, its object must be other living people (those with whom one shares grief at a particular person's death), the deceased for whom one grieves, or oneself. The first two, I argue, are likely to be candidates for duties of mourning, i.e., duties to engage in public or ritualistic memorialization or acknowledgements of the deceased's death, etc. Only the last, a duty to grieve owed to oneself, is a credible candidate for a duty to grieve. For insofar as grief is an egocentric activity, it responds to the death of a person with whom one stands in an identity-constituting relationship and hence involves the attempt to re-establish or place on new terms that relationship in light of that individual's death. The source of a self-concerning duty to grieve is that grief thus represents both an opportunity for, and motivator of, self-knowledge, that is, knowledge of one's practical identity and values. The duty to grieve, I conclude, is a non-enforceable duty to oneself whose non-fulfillment should elicit agent-centered regret.

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The Duty To Work

Whatever work has to recommend it prudentially, there remains the additional (and underinvestigat... more Whatever work has to recommend it prudentially, there remains the additional (and underinvestigated) question of whether there is a moral duty to work. Here I suggest that this duty rests on a fair play argument, according to which individuals who benefit from a cooperative economic scheme are obligated to make a fair contribution to that scheme lest they make wrongful claims on others' contributions to that scheme and treat those others merely as means. On this picture, the duty to work is civic rather than natural, grounded in reciprocity between workers and the other participants in a cooperative scheme. More crucially however, the duty is conditional on workers being able both to make fair contributions to that scheme and to receive their fair share of its benefits. But because few contemporary workers work under circumstances in which they do (or can) plausibly make their fair contributions or in which they receive their fair shares, these workers have no duty to work. Thus, while there exists a duty to work in ideal socioeconomic and labor market circumstances, current circumstances are non-ideal, diverging sufficiently from ideal circumstances to cancel most individuals' duty to work.

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Public Cartels, Private Conscience

A right to refuse goods or services on grounds of conscience is invoked primarily by professional... more A right to refuse goods or services on grounds of conscience is invoked primarily by professionals in industries that function as public cartels, i.e., industries that benefit from government-backed restrictions on competition that reduce the supply of the goods they provide, policies that stimulate demand for their goods, and subsidization of training, technology, etc., that improve the goods’ quality. However, professionals within such public cartels do not have a basic pre-institutional moral right to conscientiously refuse the goods with respect to which such professions have public cartel status. To acknowledge such a right would accord greater respect to the professionals’ conceptions of the good than that of their clients, thus licensing an objectionable form of moral paternalism, as well as violating the profession’s duties of reciprocity and compelling clients to provide disproportionate material support for conceptions of the good they themselves reject. Honoring some instances of conscientious refusal is nevertheless compatible with this denial of a basic pre-institutional individual moral right to conscientious refusal.

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The value of self-knowledge

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No Delight But in Tears: A Philosophical Examination of Grief (chapter outline/precis, Aug 2016)

A chapter outline of the book on the philosophy of grief I have been developing

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Regret, resilience, and the nature of grief

Should we regret the fact that we are often more emotionally resilient in response to the deaths ... more Should we regret the fact that we are often more emotionally resilient in response to the deaths of our loved ones than we might expect -- that the suffering associated with grief often dissipates more quickly and more fully than we anticipate? Dan Moller ("Love and Death") argues that we should, because this resilience epistemically severs us from our loved ones and thereby "deprives us of insight into our own condition." I argue that Moller's conclusion is correct despite resting on a mistaken picture of the nature and significance of grief. Unlike Moller, I contend that grief is a composite emotional process, rather than a single mental state; that grief is a species of emotional attention rather than perception; and that grief is a form of activity directed at placing our relationships with the deceased on new terms. It is precisely because grief has these three features that it facilitates the scrutiny of our practical identities and thus fosters self-knowledge and self-understanding.

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Public Cartels, Private Conscience

Abstract of a paper to be presented at the meeting of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Soc... more

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Review, "Near Death Experiences" (J. Martin Fischer and B. Mitchell-Yellin)

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PHL440 (Winter 2018) The Ethics, Politics, and Future of Work International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union collection, via Flickr creative commons

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