Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons is a long, difficult and fascinating book, inside which three shorter, clearer and better books are struggling to get out. The third of these shorter but better books deals with the problem of Future Generations, and that is the book I want to discuss. In it Parfit tries, but fails, to find a theory—Theory X, he calls it—which will deal with various problems and issues which he develops, and in particular the issue which I will (...) call the Parfit Population Problem, the problem of how many people there ought to be. In this paper I offer not so much a theory as a suggestion as to what the solution might be. (shrink)

_Postures of the Mind _was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Annette Baier develops, in these essays, a posture in philosophy of mind and in ethics that grows out of her reading of Hume and the later Wittgenstein, and that challenges several Kantian or analytic articles of faith. She questions the assumption that intellect has authority over all (...) human feelings and traditions; that to recognize order we must recognize universal laws—descriptive or prescriptive; that the essential mental activity is representing; and that mental acts can be analyzed into discrete basic elements, combined according to statable rules of synthesis. In the first group of essays—"Varieties of Mental Postures"—Baier evaluates the positions taken by philosophers ranging from Descartes to Dennett and Davidson. Among her topics are remembering, intending, realizing, caring, representing, changing one's mind, justifying one's actions and feelings, and having conflicting reasons for them. The second group of essays—"Varieties of Moral Postures" - explores the sort of morality we get when all of these capacities become reflective and self-corrective. Some deal with particular moral issues—our treatment of animals, our policies regarding risk to human life, our contractual obligations; others, with more general questions on the role of moral philosophers and the place of moral theory. These essays respond to the theories of Hobbes, Kant, Rawls, and MacIntyre, but Baier's most positive reaction is to David Hume; _Postures of the Mind _ affirms and cultivates his version of a moral reflection that employs feeling and tradition as well as reason. (shrink)

Are there circumstances in which we would be justified in taking one person's life for the sake of others? I am not here concerned with cases of self-defence, or what we might call ‘other-defence’, where one person has to be killed to prevent him taking the lives of others. Nor am I concerned with cases of self-sacrifice, or suicide more generally, or euthanasia; nor with capital punishment, or killing in warfare; nor even, for reasons we shall explore, with abortion. I (...) am concerned with those cases where several people have an equal claim or right to life, the same claim or right which we typically accord to all human beings, but where not all can survive. In short we are faced with a choice, as to who shall live and who shall die. (shrink)

The problem of necessity is fundamentally a problem of knowledge: how can we know not just that something is so but that it must be so, not just that a statement is true but that it must be true? The problem arises the moment we make two fairly familiar assumptions: that all knowledge comes, in the end, from experience; and that experience can tell us only that something is so and not that it must be so. From these it follows (...) immediately that there can be no knowledge of necessary truths. Yet obviously we do have such knowledge: we know that bachelors must be unmarried and that the angles of a Euclidean triangle must total 180°. It seems equally obvious that we do not learn such facts from experience, from observing bachelors and triangles, so it seems clear which of the assumptions is mistaken. Whatever may be the success of Locke's attack on innate knowledge, it seems undeniable that we do have knowledge which does not come from experience. We do possess some a priori knowledge, viz. knowledge of necessary truths. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A reply to hyslop and jackson, American philosophical quarterly, April 1972: I argue that the argument form analogy begs the question, Much as does the inductive justification of induction, Of which it is a version.

This ‘philosophical biography’ gives an account of Godwin’s life and thought, and by setting his thoughts in the context of his life, brings the two into juxtaposition. It relates Godwin’s views on politics and morality, education and religion, freedom and society, to the events of his life, notably the revolution in France and its impact on radicalism and reaction in Britain and the parliamentary reforms of 1832.

Don Locke; X*—Natural Powers and Human Abilities, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 171–187, https://doi.org/10.10.

R m hare's discussion, In "freedom and reason," fails to distinguish several senses of universalizability. The universalizability in question is not, As hare thinks, That which applies to any judgement with 'descriptive meaning,' and although moral judgements may presuppose principles, These principles need not be universal, Nor 'u-Type,' nor such that they apply to everyone, Nor such that they could be applied to anyone, Nor such that they do except individuals qua individuals--All of which are different. The most that hare (...) shows is that if we make exceptions we must have reasons for making them, Which places no restriction on what these reasons may be. (shrink)

In this paper I shall be principally concerned with three points arising from Professor Austin's British Academy Lecture on ‘Ifs and Cans’. 1 These points only concern that use of ‘can’ where it is used in the general sense of ‘to be able’ and applied to human beings in respect of actual or possible actions. 2 To some extent, of course, the basic problem is simply what sense of ‘can’ it is which is involved when we talk of possible but (...) not actual human actions, i.e. when we say that a person could do or could have done what he does not or did not do. (shrink)

Dialogues on moral education is directed at persons who wish to encounter many of the major issues confronting moral education in an interesting and highly readable fashion.

Action is to be distinguished from (mere) bodily movement not by reference to an agent's intentions, or his conscious control of his movements (Sect. I), but by reference to the agent as cause of those movements, though this needs to be understood in a way which destroys the alleged distinction between agent-causation and event-causation (Sect. II). It also raises the question of the relation between an agent and his neurophysiology (Sect. III), and eventually the question of the compatibility of purposive (...) and mechanistic accounts of human behaviour (Sect. IV). For the two to be compatible it is necessary that, e.g., intentions and brain states be not merely co-existent but also causal equivalents, in a way which allows for the mechanical explanation of teleological states — or vice versa. (shrink)

Only a fool would attempt to discuss the morality of strikes in twenty-five pages or less, and even he will fail. For one thing he can be sure in advance that whatever conclusions he might come to will be ridiculed as outrageous, prejudiced or self-serving by one party or the other. There is, in particular, the accusation that the attempt to discuss in moral terms what is essentially a political issue, is itself an exercise in bourgeois politics disguised as morals, (...) their morals but not ours. But there is also, and more worrying to my mind, the sheer complexity of the issues. This complexity is, however, simply unmanageable in the space available, and I have gone instead for the simple story, in the hope that the essentials will stand out that much more clearly. Whether I have got the right essentials, whether the elegance of the picture compensates for its lack of realism, is something that will have to emerge. (shrink)

In his recent and suitably provocative book on The Object of Morality G. J. Warnock argues that the fundamental moral concern is with what he sums up as the ‘amelioration of the human predicament’, a predicament which is made even more pressing by the natural limitations of our human sympathies. The distinctively moral virtues, Warnock concludes, will be those dispositions which tend to countervail these natural limitations, especially non-maleficence, fairness, beneficence, and non-deception; and from these fundamental moral virtues we can (...) derive, in turn, four fundamental moral standards or principles. The theory of morality—and it is thank heaven a theory of morality, not of moral language—which I have crudely summarised here seems to me correct as far as it goes, but it also seems to me that Warnock’s concentration on the predicament of the individual human being leads him to ignore what is at least as fundamental, the essentially social and interpersonal aspect of much morality. (shrink)