Drilling Down

At this stage in the argument it is necessary to begin to develop and refine the theoretical framework I have only sketched thus far. In order to do this we must, as philosophers like to say, "drill down" into certain issues and ideas that I have used to construct the preceding narrative about the relationship among vulnerability, responsibility, rights, and a global ethics.

Drilling down requires that we sharpen our conceptual and linguistic tools and provide more precise analyses of key theoretical concepts such as "moral agents", "moral patients", "responsibilities", "rights", and other notions that will play important theoretical roles as I refine and extend the Vulnerability-Care framework further.

It will also be necessary to make some forays into the realm of metaethics in order to better understand how the kind of account I am developing relates to other approaches to ethical theory, and also how it relates to various topics and issues in applied or practical ethics.

So in the next set of posts I am going to be doing some philosophical sharpening and drilling. I want to begin with a discussion of the key concept of "responsibility" as this is central to the entire philosophical project I am engaged with here in attempting to describe an ethics of global responsibility.