On March 19–20, 2008, a conference took place at the VU University in Amsterdam, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of our journal. The theme was: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice: How Do They Relate? It was a lively conference, above all attended by young scholars. This issue contains the reviewed and revised versions of a selection of papers, presented at the conference.

Although the assertion from the last sentence is not untrue, it has to be qualified. One of the selected papers, Eric Cave’s paper ‘Unsavory Sexual Seduction,’ was wrongly included in the previous issue. Moreover, the article that opens this issue, was not discussed at the conference. It is the winning article from ETMP’s 2008 Essay Competition for young scholars. Submissions had to relate to the question ‘What kind of ethical theory might be of a help to moral practice (if any)?’ The winner, Johan Brännmark from Lund University, focuses in his article on conditions for the practicality that can be demanded of ethical theories, and discusses one of such conditions: transparency, which, in his view, stands in a dialectical relationship with Bernard Williams’ ‘one thought too may objection’. Brännmark argues that both Kantianism and utilitarianism run into trouble with this dialectic. He prefers Aristotelian theories, although they offer generalisations that only hold for the most part and although they will not remove the fact that, when facing hard cases, we have to not just draw conclusions, but make decisions. Finally, the second article, by Alfred Mele, was also not discussed at the conference. Mele, one of the key-note speakers, has written this piece after the conference, especially for this issue. In previous publications, Mele has argued that compatibilist accounts of moral responsibility for actions should be sensitive in a certain way to historical facts about agents. Several compatibilists have disagreed with him about this. In this article, he responds to the objections of Michael McKenna and Manuel Vargas.

Now the papers, presented at the conference, that actually are included in this issue. The first is Carla Bagnoli’s article on the Mafioso Case. She argues that immoralists do not so much suffer from logical incoherence, as Christine Korsgaard thinks, but have an underdeveloped autonomous agency because they are not capable of engaging in the proper form of practical reflection, which requires relating to others as having equal standing. An adequate diagnosis of the immoralists’ failure of agential authority requires, according to Bagnoli, a relational account of reflexivity and autonomy. The compelling quality of reason should not be represented as the capacity to force them to abide by morality on pain of incoherence. Rather, its authority (and objectivity) is shown when it presents them with the prospect of a transition that makes sense for them to undertake.

Michael Cholbi considers moral equivalents of ‘Moore-paradoxical statements’—assertions of statements such as ‘it’s raining, but I don’t believe it’—statements wherein individuals affirm moral judgments while also expressing motivational indifference to those judgments (such as ‘hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don’t care’). He argues that such statements are genuinely paradoxical, even if not contradictory. This paradoxicality can be traced to a form of epistemic self-defeat that also explains the paradoxicality of ordinary Moore-paradoxical statements. Although a simple form of internalism about moral judgment and motivation can explain the paradoxicality of these moral equivalents, a more plausible explanation can be provided that does not rely on this simple form of internalism. The paradoxicality of such statements suggests a more credible understanding of the thesis that those who are not motivated by their moral judgments are irrational.

Perhaps people think that we are more responsible for our psychological states than we are for our neurological states. If so, the more we get to know about the neural underpinnings, the less likely people will hold individuals responsible for actions that are caused by neurological illnesses. This hypothesis receives some support from a study reported in an article by Eddy Nahmias. Nahmias supposed that if an agent’s conscious choices are bypassed, then we should expect participants to judge that the agent in question is not responsible for his or her actions. In their article, Felipe De Brigard, Eric Mandelbaum and David Ripley present three empirical studies that provide evidence against this hypothesis.

Emer O’Hagan discusses Kant’s duty of self-knowledge. Kant, O’Hagan says, wants us to avoid an investigation of moral motives that might lead us to focus on whether our actions were truly virtuous, whether the moral target was hit, or whether we were in fact humiliated by the moral law, or loved our duty; these are all invitations to self-deception and heteronomy. The duty to know one’s heart is, according to O’Hagan, explicitly a duty to know oneself in terms of one’s moral perfection in relation to duty; the practical project of self-knowledge demands that the theoretical ground of Kant’s ethical theory be kept clearly in focus.

With Nora Hämäläinen’s paper we return to the conference’s central question. She reviews two forms of criticism claiming that at least some types of ethical theory are harmful for moral thought and practice. The first form is directed against a specific kind of ethical theory that strives for completeness and a hierarchical ordering of principles. This form of criticism is most commonly found among neo-Aristotelian and virtue ethical philosophers. The success of these critics is perhaps not only due to the power of their arguments, but also to the fact that the ideas they present have been there all along, slumbering under the surface of other overt pursuits. The second, anti-theoretical form urges, according to Hämäläinen, more emphatically than the neo-Aristotelians to reconsider the role philosophical theories overall should have in moral thought. She thinks that the best way of doing justice to the anti-theoretical challenge is not to grant that philosophy should be merely descriptive, but to remove from our picture of moral theory an assumption concerning the relationship between systematic theoretical articulation and action-guidance that the anti-theorists object to.

The final article, by Nancy Snow, starts with a description and possible explanations of the humiliation in 2004 by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. She uses social psychological studies to identify situational pressures soldiers were under. Identifying problematic situational pressures can then point the way to the kind of character formation that would be helpful in combating them. In her view, the morally conscientious soldier would: (1) obey only legitimate orders, (2) maintain professional discipline, and (3) do the morally right thing for the right reasons. The personal qualities, such as practical wisdom and courage, needed for (3) also underpin (1) and (2). These and other virtues are, according to Snow, found in the character ideal advanced by the Stoics.