If a journal can be compared to a building, reviewers are its cornerstones. The difficulties our editors sometimes encounter in finding reviewers, testify that they are scarce, at least relatively. This makes that those who have completed one, or even more reviews, for our journal in the last year, deserve extra gratitude for their work. You find their names in the list, included in this issue.

The first contribution to this issue, by Travis Rodgers and Brandon Warmke, was already mentioned in the previous editorial of volume 17:5, but regrettably not included in that issue. We repeat here what was already said: They go into the unrecognized tension between two theses in John Doris’ situationism: the descriptive thesis that our folk usage of global personality and character traits in describing and predicting human behaviour is empirically unsupported and the prescriptive thesis that we can more successfully act in line with our moral values if, in our deliberation about what to do, we focus on our situation instead of on our moral character.

In his article, Wim Dubbink discusses the duties and responsibilities of economic agents, including corporations. He argues that they have the duty to further justice by assisting in the establishment of just arrangements in society. This duty – a Kantian duty of virtue – is not enforceable but violating it is wrong and not merely non-virtuous. Dubbink argues that the duty cannot be exempted from market morality, even if it is agreed that this must be leaner than the morality outside commercial life.

In the next contribution, Sandrine Berges states that motherhood, as it is practiced, constitutes an obstacle to gender equality in political participation. She discusses several options that are available as a potential solution to this problem, such as rejecting motherhood or denying that political participation is an important or necessary part of human flourishing, The solution that she herself proposes, inspired by the writings of Sophie de Grouchy, is that we look for a form of republicanism that regards caring activities as a form of political participation.

Demetris Tillyris intends to cast a doubt in his article as to whether the standard conception of the problem of dirty hands (DH)—the recognition that, in certain inescapable and tragic circumstances an innocent course of action is unfeasible—fully captures Machiavelli’s message. In particular, he argues that the standard DH thesis is inadequately ‘static’: it conceives the conflict between ordinary morality and political morality as a stark, momentary and rare paradox of action—an anomaly disrupting the normality of harmony. As such it misconceives both the extent and the nature of the rupture between morality and politics.

Marcel van Ackeren and Martin Sticker’s article discusses the demandingness of Kant’s ethics. Their first aim is to show that Kantian demandingness is especially salient in the class of perfect duties. The second aim is to introduce a fine-grained picture of demandingness by distinguishing between different possible components of a moral theory which can lead to demandingness: (i) a required process of decision making, (ii) overridingness and (iii) the stringent content of demands, due to a standpoint of moral purity. Their third aim is to discuss whether Kant has the resources to reply to those who criticize his ethics based on its demandingness.

Caj Strandberg provides a systematic examination of different versions of hybrid expressivism with particular regard to how they are assumed to evade the Frege-Geach problem. The major conclusion is that none of these views succeeds to provide both a fully satisfying interpretation of moral sentences and a convincing response to the Frege-Geach problem. Strandberg ends by briefly considering alternative hybrid views that employ the notion of conventional or conversational implicature.

Michael Popejoy argues that a distinction made in recent literature in the philosophy of mind between self-organizing and self-governing systems can serve as the basis of a principled distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ determination on the part of the compatibilist with respect to freedom or control. After considering arguments for the claim that causal determinism undermines control, he elucidates the difference between a self-organizing and self-governing system, and argues that the capacity for self-representation that is constitutive of the latter allows for agential control. This difference, Popejoy argues, can provide the basis of a principled distinction between good and bad determination.

Particularists contend that guidance by principles leads us to engage in worse decision making because principled guidance is too rigid and it leads individuals to neglect or distort relevant details. However, says Jennifer L. Zamzow in her contribution, when we examine empirical literature on the use of rules and principles in other domains, we find that people can learn to use rules discriminately and that rule-based models tend to outperform even expert judgment. She argues that this evidence poses a problem for the moral particularist.

Erik Anderson argued in this journal (volume 16:4) that the contemporary Natural Law position that only heterosexual couples are capable of marriage rests upon an “arbitrary and irrational distinction between same-sex couples and sterile heterosexual couples?” According to Patrick A. Tully, many agree with him. In his article, Tully examines Anderson’s argument and concludes that, whether or not one ultimately agrees with the New Natural Law account of marriage, the distinction found there between same sex couples and sterile heterosexual couples is neither arbitrary nor irrational.

Cheryl E. Abbate discusses whether there is a connection between the moral discussions regarding animal rights and abortion. While some ethicists and theologians have come to agree that a pro-life ethic demands an animal liberation ethic, others encourage animal liberationists to acknowledge that the principles which govern the animal rights movement have implications for the moral issue of abortion and that it is inconsistent for animal liberationists to promote an ethic for animals while failing to recognize the inherent value of fetuses. In response to the claim that a liberal abortion policy is at odds with a theory of animal rights, Gary Francione argues that the principles used in the animal rights discourse do not have implications for the abortion debate. Abbate shows in her article that he is wrong.

In her article, Julia Peters joins the current debate among virtue ethicists on the role played by phronesis in virtuous action. The paradigmatic case of an action expressing phronesis is, says Peters, one where an agent explicitly reflects and deliberates on all practical options and eventually makes a wise choice. Habitual actions, by contrast, are typically performed automatically. Thus they would seem to fall outside of the primary focus of the current virtue ethical debate. By contrast, Bill Pollard has recently suggested in an article in this journal (vol 6: 4) that all properly virtuous actions must be performed habitually and therefore automatically. In her article, Peters interprets Pollard’s suggestion as the thesis that habitual automaticity is constitutive of virtue or moral excellence and seeks to defend a qualified version of this thesis.

Does the decision to relax by taking a drive rather than by taking a walk cause harm? In particular, do the additional carbon emissions caused by such a decision make anyone worse off? According to Christopher Morgan-Knapp and Charles Goodman, several philosophers have argued recently that the answer is no, and on this basis have gone on to claim that act-consequentialism cannot provide a moral reason for individuals to voluntarily reduce their emissions. In their article, Morgan-Knapp and Goodman show why both steps are mistaken, and hence why act-consequentialism implies that each of us has an individual obligation to do what we can to stop damaging the climate, including by refraining from, or perhaps by purchasing offsets against, our own individual luxury carbon emissions.

In the last article of this issue, James Boettcher discusses the asymmetric convergence model of public justification of laws and policies which, compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, allows for the public justification based on a convergence of quite different and even publicly inaccessible reasons. The model is asymmetrical in the sense of identifying a broader range of reasons that may function as decisive defeaters of proposed laws and policies. Boettcher raises several critical questions about the asymmetric convergence model and its central but ambiguous presumption against coercion, and also develops an alternative, Rawlsian-inspired account of public justification that includes elements of both convergence and consensus but not asymmetry.