Agape-justice conflicts are epistemological in nature because they arise from limitations in human knowledge. However, they may in fact be also ontological in nature as occasions to give vent to love’s diffusiveness, to develop the moral faculties of reason and freedom, to acquire personal and collective virtue, and to grow in Christified agape (caritas). Even epistemological limitations may, by divine design, also be meant to serve these purposes. Agape-justice conflicts are instrumental for humans’ eventual union with God, their telos. They are occasions for grace to build on our human frailties and brokenness, grace building on nature.

This book explores the idea that there is a gray area in ethics. My central claim is that some acts are somewhat right and somewhat wrong, meaning that deontic concepts such as RIGHT and WRONG (capitalized to indicate that we are discussing the concepts and not the entities they refer to) are gradable. Philosophical theories of indeterminacy and vagueness can shed light on some aspects of the gradualist hypothesis, but they leave important questions open. It is, for instance, not clear what a morally conscientious agent should do if she must choose among options that are somewhat right and somewhat wrong.

Ordinary language users do in fact use RIGHT and WRONG in ways that permit of degrees, as pointed out in Chapter 1, but advocates of the binary theory may question the philosophical relevance of this. Meaning tracks use, but it is not certain that the current meanings (and uses) of RIGHT and WRONG are optimal. Gradualists need to show that the gradable notions of RIGHT and WRONG used by laypeople are better than their binary rivals and ought to be adopted by moral philosophers. The focus of this chapter is on what I call the argument from conflicting reasons. This argument seeks to show that gradable notions of RIGHT and WRONG enable moral theorists to articulate nuanced verdicts about moral conflicts, which cannot be expressed in binary theories. The gist of the argument is as follows: Some moral conflicts are irresolvable, and in those cases the deontic properties of acts favored and disfavored by conflicting reasons cannot be accurately captured by binary deontic verdicts.

This chapter draws conclusions and considers ways of extending the gradualist hypothesis to topics not discussed here. An example of the latter is human rights. For gradualists, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that human rights may come in degrees. Perhaps an unborn fetus has a right to life that must be balanced against that of the pregnant mother, who has a right to full control of her body. If rights are binary it is hard to see how both these rights could coexist, but gradualist could argue that both rights hold to some limited degree. Another possible extension is duty ethics. Although Kant himself rejected the gradualist hypothesis, it seems possible to argue that a slightly modified version of duty ethics could include gradualist duties. This and a couple of other extensions are briefly considered.

This chapter explores the insights that ethnography offers into understanding the interface between commerce and ethics. The first section argues that the anthropology of exchange, in which commerce is seen as a distinctive sphere of transaction, risks truncating our understanding of the relationship between commerce and ethics. The second section explores the relationships between trade, violence, and state power, noting that merchants often articulate ethical ideals as they negotiate these relationships. The third section discusses scholarship on long-distance trading networks and trust, and suggests that the category of ethics is most helpful when it is used to describe not the basis of trust but the ways in which merchants manage and confront mistrust: for example, how they conceive of tensions between sentiment and self-interest. The final section identifies four areas stimulated by attention to the ethical dimensions of commerce: the diverse notions of reputation and personhood that animate the conduct of trade; the ways in which merchants conceive of the relationship between commerce and systems of morality and negotiate moral dilemmas; the way that commerce is informed by vernacular notions of value, abundance, and prosperity; and the forms of self-making that traders pursue through commerce.

Military service members may perform an action – such as killing – that they realize is the best thing to do in some situation, but that nevertheless strikes them as being morally wrong or even unthinkable. Such unavoidable moral failure may involve feelings of extreme distress and self-destructive behavior, together constituting a ‘moral injury.’ Service members (or veterans) often feel an anguished sense of responsibility in these cases, while other people do not tend to think it is right to hold them responsible. I defend this mismatch of reactions against the claim that servicemembers cannot be responsible for actions that were unavoidable, arguing that this denies something important that their distress reveals. Their tendency to hold themselves responsible may be a fitting response that correctly represents how it matters subjectively to them that their own action was unthinkable. However, others cannot hold them responsible because they have not violated fair, shared, normative expectations.

In Chapter 7, we find that the characters in J. M. Coetzee’s novels are afflicted by second thoughts in a manner that brings to mind the structure of sceptical interlocution and the abolition of philia that we saw in Fanon. With the particular case of the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, this thought-affliction produces an edginess that is directly related to the character’s unerring perception of the force of the Empire’s ideology and to his sense of having been compromised for being their unwitting agent. As the novel progresses, the Magistrate’s edginess moves from being a feature of his internal interlocution to being defined by his material conditions: he is thrown into jail and tortured. It also impacts on the moral contradictions of his position – having to choose between allegiance to the Empire and care for the barbarian girl. The question of moral residue and ethical choice are carefully examined with respect to the Magistrate.

We spend large portions of our inner lives imagining social events and situations that fall under the umbrella of moral cognition. For example, we may simulate in our mind a future scenario in which we have to decide whether to withhold the truth to protect a colleague or a friend and wonder if it is the right thing to do or not. Or we may do the same for a past event or situation. This chapter briefly introduces the field of moral cognition with a focus on dual processing approaches, and then provides a critical review of recent empirical studies about the effect of various forms of mental simulations on a subset of moral cognitive processes. A number of behavioral studies show that imagination can affect moral cognitive processes in multiple ways, from enhancing our emotional responses to personal moral dilemmas and guiding our moral judgments, to facilitating theory of mind simulations and perspective-taking in prosocial scenarios. Ideas for future directions in the field are discussed in the final section.