Perhaps the central categories of the practical area are 'intention' and 'intentional action.' As Hampshire says, "The notion of the will, of action, the relation of thought and action, the relation of a person's mind and body, the difference between observing a convention or rule and merely having a habit--all these problems find their meeting place in the notion of intention". Certainly if 'intention' and 'intentional action' are clarified the whole practical field will be illuminated. Miss Anscombe thinks that (...) 'intention' itself can best be got at by concentrating on 'intentional action.'. (shrink)

How far can we apply the same moral principles to both public and private behaviour. In the interests of effective political action, are we right to accept acts of deceit, exploitation or force which we would regard as unacceptable in private relations with individuals? What means can be properly adopted in the promotion of great public causes? The problem of 'dirty hands' in politics was posed most strikingly by Machiavelli. It has re-emerged this century in a pressing and, to some (...) extent, a new form, in connection with the two World Wars and more recently the Vietnam War, where the political decisions and the destruction, and risks of destruction, have been of a scale and character not previously experienced. The contributors, including Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, T. M. Scanlon, and Ronald Dworkin, examine the background to this problem in moral and political theory. (shrink)

"Adam Wiegner's work belongs to Polish analytical philosophy, but it falls outside of its main current, the Lvov-Warsaw School, which was influenced by Hume's ideas. Wiegner, influenced by neo-Kantianism, developed a non-Humean conception of "holistic empiricism," which anticipates some of the ideas of K. R. Popper and W. V. O. Quine. Some of his ideas remain original to this day. His main research interests included epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science especially philosophy of psychology, analytical history of philosophy, (...) and interpretation of traditional logic in terms of mathematical logic."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

In this book, Stuart Hampshire argues that no individual and no modern society can avoid conflicts between incompatible moral interests.

In this book of essays, he argues that morality cannot be defined solely by rational and universal principles; instead, a major place must be found for changing and conflicting ideals, values peculiar to specific times and cultures.

From folk tales to movies, stories possess features which naturally suit them to contribute to the growth of virtue. In this article I show that the fictional exemplars help the learner to grasp the moral importance of internal states and resolves a tension between existing kinds of exemplars discussed by virtue ethicists. Stories also increase the information conveyed by virtue terms and aid the growth of prudence. Stories can provide virtuous exemplars, inform learners as to the nature of the virtues (...) and offer practice in developing situational judgement. As such they are a significant resource for virtue ethics and moral education. (shrink)

W. Matthews Grant's "Dual Sources Account" aims at explaining how God causes all creaturely actions while leaving them free in a robust libertarian sense. It includes an account of predestination that is supposed to allow for the possibility that some created persons ultimately spend eternity in hell. I argue here that the resources Grant provides for understanding why God might permit created persons to end up in hell are, for two different reasons, insufficient. I then provide possible solutions to these (...) two problems, compatible with Grant's account overall, that help show why God might allow hell. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

Are animals moral agents? In this article, a theologian and an anthropologist unite to bring the resources of each field to bear on this question. Alas, not all interdisciplinary conversations end harmoniously, and after much discussion the two authors find themselves in substantial disagreement over the answer. The article is therefore presented in two halves, one for each side of the argument. As well as presenting two different positions, our hope is that this article clarifies the different understandings of morality (...) in our respective fields and will help to offset confusion in interdisciplinary dialogue. In what follows, we each present our case. In the first section, Adam Willows argues that moral activity necessarily involves the use of reason, symbolic thought, and language and is on that basis an exclusively human affair. In the second, Marcus Baynes-Rock discusses his experience of relationality with other creatures; a relationality which, he argues, creates a shared understanding of obligations which are characteristically moral. (shrink)

Freedom of mind.--Subjunctive conditionals.--Multiply general sentences.--Dispositions.--Fallacies in moral philosophy.--Ethics: A defense of Aristotle.--Ryle's the Concept of mind.--The analogy of feeling.--On referring and intending.--Feeling and expression.--Disposition and memory.--Spinoza and the idea of freedom.--A kind of materialism.--Sincerity and single-mindedness.

1. It is a commonplace that contemporary empiricism, or antimetaphysical philosophy, at least in this country, is a re-statement of the essentials of Hume's position with the aid of the more complete analysis of a priori reasoning provided by logicians within the last fifty years; what logical empiricism has most substantially added to Hume's sceptical method is the means of stating and applying his distinction between purely analytic sentences and sentences conveying information about matters of fact more precisely than he (...) was able to state or apply it. It was Hume's governing purpose in every part of his writing to defend what is now generally called the language of common-sense, which is essentially what he called natural belief, against every kind of philosophical theory, whether rationalist or professedly sceptical. By “philosophical theory” is meant in this context any attempt by the use of logical or a priori arguments either to justify or to amend our common-sense beliefs or assertions; Hume tries to show that all such attempts are mistaken in logic and ineffective in fact. The work of the genuine sceptic, who is the true philosopher, is repeatedly to draw attention to the limits of human reason; to draw attention to the limits of human reason is to point to the logical impossibility of answering philosophical demands for some general, and therefore non-empirical, justification of our natural beliefs; such demands involve the substituting of some single, imposed criterion of justification in the place of the various and shifting criteria which we in fact habitually use. (shrink)

How should you take into account the opinions of an advisor? When you completely defer to the advisor's judgment, then you should treat the advisor as a guru. Roughly, that means you should believe what you expect she would believe, if supplied with your extra evidence. When the advisor is your own future self, the resulting principle amounts to a version of the Reflection Principle---a version amended to handle cases of information loss. When you count an advisor as an epistemic (...) peer, you should give her conclusions the same weight as your own. Denying that view---call it the ``equal weight view''---leads to absurdity: the absurdity that you could reasonably come to believe yourself to be an epistemic superior to an advisor simply by noting cases of disagreement with her, and taking it that she made most of the mistakes. Accepting the view seems to lead to another absurdity: that one should suspend judgment about everything that one's smart and well-informed friends disagree on, which means suspending judgment about almost everything interesting. But despite appearances, the equal weight view does not have this absurd consequence. Furthermore, the view can be generalized to handle cases involving not just epistemic peers, but also epistemic superiors and inferiors. (shrink)

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

The resemblance is plain to see between Kripke’s Wittgenstein introducing bizarre rules such as quaddition (in illustrating the sceptical paradox against theories of meaning) and Goodman’s introducing the equally bizarre grue (in generating the new riddle of induction). But the two sorts of bizarre cases also differ in interesting respects. For those familiar with Goodman’s case, this similarity sparks a strong temptation to enlist to the meaning sceptic’s cause key elements of Goodman’s new riddle, which are missing from Kripke’s case. (...) In this essay, I characterize a natural way of doing just this, which targets dispositionalist solutions to the sceptical paradox. I also show that, despite initial appearances, this new objection to dispositionalism (the symmetry problem) is not nearly as worrisome as originally thought. The solution offered on behalf of semantic dispositionalists does require a trade-off, though, from the severe form of indeterminacy advanced by the meaning sceptic to a much milder thesis. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Theorists have had less success in analyzing the truth conditions of generics. Philosophers of language have offered a number of theories. This chapter surveys several semantic accounts of generics. However, the focus is on generics and experimental philosophy. It briefly reviews empirical work that bears on these semantic accounts. While generics constitute an interesting linguistic phenomenon worthy of study in their own right, the study of generics also has wide‐ranging implications for questions beyond the philosophy of language, including questions in (...) social psychology and cognitive science more generally. The chapter also reviews empirical work on the relationship between generics and cognition. Existing empirical work strongly supports the generics‐as‐defaults hypothesis: the hypothesis that generics reflect a cognitively default, fundamental mode of generalizing in humans. Finally, the chapter elucidates evidence that generic language and generic modes of generalizing play an important role in stereotyping and prejudice. (shrink)

Almost all the original philosophers, from Socrates to the verificationists of the present day, have tried to provide some universally applicable method of eliminating confusion and error from our discourse: this provision of a method of ‘correcting the understanding’ is at least one, and perhaps the principal, of the continuous threads which can be traced in Western philosophy. There was the Socratic method, which requires us to look for real definitions of our fundamental abstract terms: the Cartesian methods of rejecting (...) as possible candidates for knowledge any propositions which do not consist of clear and distinct ideas: the Humean or Empiricist method of dismissing as nonsense any non-tautologous statement which cannot be justified as referring to the order of our sensations: Kant's transcendental method of critical philosophy, whichit would certainly be imprudent to characterize in a phrase, but which was equally intended to be a safe protection against empty metaphysics and meaningless questions: lastly, the verification principle, which provides a general method of determining which of our statements conform to some scientific standard of intelligibility, and which are to classed as tautologies or as playing with words. New movements in philosophy have in general been new methods of correcting the understanding, methods which are further generalized and applied in the interval before another great philosopher appears with another general method of showing that all previous metaphysics is nonsense. (shrink)

It may sometimes be useful in philosophy to state a method of argument in very simple and even over-simplified terms; it may at a certain stage be useful to ignore for the moment the details and difficulties of particular philosophical arguments, and to try to state simply what is commonly assumed in a variety of different and even opposing arguments.

This thoughtful new abridgment is enriched by the brilliant commentary which accompanies it. In it, Laurence Dickey argues that the _Wealth of Nations_ contains--and conceals--a great deal of how Smith actually thought a commercial society works. Guided by his conviction that the so-called Adam Smith Problem--the relationship between ethics and economics in Smith's thinking--is a core element in the argument of the work itself, Dickey's commentary focuses on the devices Smith uses to ground his economics in broadly ethical and (...) social categories. An unparalleled guide to an often difficult and perplexing work. (shrink)

This book, which inaugurates the Princeton Monographs in Philosophy series, starts from Plato's analogy in the Republic between conflict in the soul and conflict in the city. Plato's solution required reason to impose agreement and harmony on the warring passions, and this search for harmony and agreement constitutes the main tradition in political philosophy up to and including contemporary liberal theory. Hampshire undermines this tradition by developing a distinction between justice in procedures, which demands that both sides in a (...) conflict should be heard, and justice in matters of substance, which will always be disputed. Rationality in private thinking consists in adversary reasoning, and so it does in public affairs. Moral conflict is eternal, and institutionalized argument is its only universally acceptable restraint and the only alternative to tyranny.In the chapter "Against Monotheism," Hampshire argues that monotheistic beliefs are only with difficulty made compatible with pluralism in ethics. In "Conflict and Conflict Resolution," he argues that socialism, seen as the proposal of extended political solutions for natural human ills, is still a relevant, yet strongly contested, ideal. (shrink)

In addition to being uncertain about what the world is like, one can also be uncertain about one’s own spatial or temporal location in the world. My aim is to pose a problem arising from the interaction between these two sorts of uncertainty, solve the problem, and draw two lessons from the solution.

Heritable personality traits often predict fundamental philosophical disagreement. This conclusion is based on studies of more than 15,000 people sampled from diverse cultures and educational backgrounds, including verifiable experts. In this chapter, we review some of this research showing links between personality and philosophical bias in free will, intentional action, and ethics. Our discussion focuses on serious challenges that these philosophical biases pose (e.g., limits on the use of philosophical intuitions as evidence). We close with discussion of the Philosophical Personality (...) Argument and brief consideration of emerging projects in applied experimental philosophy. (shrink)

It would be good to have a Bayesian decision theory that assesses our decisions and thinking according to everyday standards of rationality — standards that do not require logical omniscience (Garber 1983, Hacking 1967). To that end we develop a “fragmented” decision theory in which a single state of mind is represented by a family of credence functions, each associated with a distinct choice condition (Lewis 1982, Stalnaker 1984). The theory imposes a local coherence assumption guaranteeing that as an agent's (...) attention shifts, successive batches of "obvious" logical information become available to her. A rule of expected utility maximization can then be applied to the decision of what to attend to next during a train of thought. On the resulting theory, rationality requires ordinary agents to be logically competent and to often engage in trains of thought that increase the unification of their states of mind. But rationality does not require ordinary agents to be logically omniscient. (shrink)

In order to predict and explain behavior, one cannot specify the mental state of an agent merely by saying what information she possesses. Instead one must specify what information is available to an agent relative to various purposes. Specifying mental states in this way allows us to accommodate cases of imperfect recall, cognitive accomplishments involved in logical deduction, the mental states of confused or fragmented subjects, and the difference between propositional knowledge and know-how .

Many have claimed that unspecific evidence sometimes demands unsharp, indeterminate, imprecise, vague, or interval-valued probabilities. Against this, a variant of the diachronic Dutch Book argument shows that perfectly rational agents always have perfectly sharp probabilities.

Proponents of epistocracy worry that high levels of voter ignorance can harm democracies. To combat such ignorance, they recommend allocating comparatively more political power to more politically knowledgeable citizens. In response, some recent critics of epistocracy contend that epistocratic institutions risk causing even more harm, since much evidence from political psychology indicates that more politically knowledgeable citizens are typically more biased, less open-minded, and more prone to motivated reasoning about political matters than their less knowledgeable counterparts. If so, perhaps epistocratic (...) institutions will perform worse epistemically than corresponding democratic institutions. Call this 'the problem of epistocratic irrationality'. This paper argues that the problem of epistocratic irrationality can be overcome. First, I argue that critics of epistocracy have overlooked several complications regarding the psychological data they claim shows that more knowledgeable citizens are less politically rational. Second, I argue that appropriately designed epistocratic institutions could overcome the problem of epistocratic irrationality even if such critics have interpreted the data correctly. I first explore whether refined selection mechanisms could allow epistocrats to avoid empowering less rational citizens, before assessing the prospects of implementing only those epistocratic institutions with a solid track record of reliable performance. (shrink)

Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock's critical introduction to the philosophy of Gottlob Frege is based on twenty-five years of teaching Frege's philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico. It developed from an earlier publication by Rosado Haddock on Frege's philosophy which was, however, available only in Spanish. This introduction to Frege is meant to steer a path between the two main approaches to Frege studies: on the one hand, we have interpretations of Frege which portray him as a neo-Kantian and thus (...) as some kind of idealist; on the other, we have writings like those of Dummett in which Frege is portrayed as a type of ‘philosophical Adam’, i.e., as completely separated from his philosophical tradition. Rosado Haddock succeeds in placing Frege's thinking into a broader philosophical context — mainly by reference to his contemporary Edmund Husserl — while also avoiding a Kantian reading of Frege's work.The structure of the book follows Frege's writing chronologically. In this way, Rosado Haddock leads the reader through the whole of Frege's philosophy while highlighting important changes and developments in Frege's thought from the Begriffsschrift to his Grundgesetze and other later writings. Chapter 1 introduces us to the core philosophical themes of Frege's Begriffsschrift with a special emphasis on Frege's notions of ‘conceptual content’ and ‘judgeable content’. Here, Rosado Haddock anticipates further discussion and points towards changes and developments of Frege's core notions of ‘identity’, ‘function’, and ‘content’. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Chapter 2 discusses Frege's methodological principles as outlined in Frege's introduction and his criticisms of psychological, naturalistic, and Kantian approaches to the philosophy of mathematics. Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on Frege's own logicist account of arithmetic while emphasizing differences between Frege's views and Kantian …. (shrink)