[opening paragraph}: The latest book by moral philosopher Mary Midgley prompted Anthony Freeman to consider some of the cultural and ethical aspects of consciousness and to discuss them with the author. What have ethics to do with consciousness? First, it is consciousness that makes morality possible. Second, neither subject fits comfortably into currently popular reductive schemes. As a consequence both have tended to be isolated in a ghetto, shut off from the rest of the intellectual scene. So believes Mary (...) Midgley, and in The Ethical Primate she seeks to open up the ghetto for the good of those on both sides of its walls. (shrink)

Andrew Bailey's highly regarded introductory anthology has been revised and updated in this new edition. The comprehensive introductory material for each chapter and selection remains, and new sections on philosophical puzzles and paradoxes and philosophical terminology have been added. New articles include A.J. Ayer on freedom and necessity, Susan Moller Okin on justice and gender, as well as new introductory material for Lorraine Code’s work on feminist epistemology and Mary Midgley's paper on the moral status of non-human animals.

Whether considering vegetarianism, women's rights, or the "humanity" of pets, this book goes to the heart of the question of why all animals matter.

InWisdom, Information and Wonder, Mary Midgley tackles the question at the root of our civilization: What is knowledge for?

"Charming, interesting, thought-provoking and a great read." Rosalind Hursthouse The daughter of a pacifist rector who answered "No!" when his congregation asked him "Is everything in the bible true?", perhaps Mary Midgley was destined to become a philosopher. Yet few would have thought this inquisitive, untidy, nature-loving child would become "one of the sharpest critical pens in the west." This is her remarkable story. Probably the only philosopher to have been in Vienna on the eve of its invasion by (...) Nazi Germany in 1938 and dance in Trafalgar Square on VE day seven year later, she studied philosophy at Oxford in the same year as Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, all of whom became close friends. Midgley tells us in vivid and humorous fashion how they cut a swathe through the arid landscape of 1950s British philosophy, writing and arguing - often with each other - about the grand themes of character, beauty and the meaning of rudeness while the spectral figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein hovered in the background. She also charts the highs and lows of philosophy and academia in Britain. On joining the Reading philosophy department on £400 a year in 1949, she doubled its staff complement. But her many years at Newcastle University - where Mike Brearley, who later captained England at cricket, also used to teach - were rewarded with the closure of the philosophy department in the 1980s. The mother of three children, her journey is also one of a woman who in the 1950s and 1960s was fighting to combine a professional career with raising a family. In startling contrast to many of the academic stars of her generation, we learn that Midgley nearly became a novelist and started writing philosophy only when in her fifties, suggesting that Minerva's owl really does fly at dusk. Plainly told like her philosophy, this is an elegiac and moving account of friendships found and lost, bitter philosophical battles and of a profound love of teaching all too rarely acknowledged today. (shrink)

Science as Salvation discusses the high spiritual ambitions which tend to gather round the notion of science. Officially, science claims only the modest function of establishing facts. Yet people still hope for something much grander from it--namely, the myths by which to shape and support life in an increasingly confusing age. Our faith in science is abused by some scientists whose adolescent fantasies have spilled over into their professional lives. Salvation, immortality, mastery of the universe, humans without bodies, and intelligent (...) self-reproducing computers are just some of the notions and speculations that are now found--not on the pages of science fiction--but on the pages of science itself. The danger is that these concepts are given to a myth-hungry public who turn to science now that religion has lost its ability to create myth. Science as Salvation discusses the function and meaning of such fantasies. Midgley examines the need for and the use of myth in science, and how science and religion are related. She argues that we need to develop a realistic understanding of scientific imagination and its importance. Taking them seriously as symptoms of a genuine myth-hunger, it suggests that the proper function of science may need to include wider perspectives, which would make it plain that such desperate, compensatory dramas are unnecessary. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

In this book, Mary Midgely turns a spotlight on the fashionable view that we no longer need or use moral judgements. She shows how the question of whether or not we can make moral judgements must inevitably affect our attitudes to the law and its institutions, but also to events that occur in our daily lives.

In The Ethical Primate , Mary Midgley, 'one of the sharpest critical pens in the West' according to the Times Literary Supplement , addresses the fundamental question of human freedom. Scientists and philosophers have found it difficult to understand how each human-being can be a living part of the natural world and still be free. Midgley explores their responses to this seeming paradox and argues that our evolutionary origin explains both why and how human freedom and morality have (...) come about. (shrink)

In Utopias, Dolphins and Computers Mary Midgley brings philosophy into the real world by using it to consider environmental, educational and gender issues. From "Freedom, Feminism and War" to "Artificial Intelligence and Creativity," this book searches for what is distorting our judgement and helps us to see more clearly the dramas which are unfolding in the world around us. Utopias, Dolphins and Computers aims to counter today's anti-intellectualism, not to mention philosophy's twentieth-century view of itself as futile. Mary (...) class='Hi'>Midgley explains the point of philosophy: how to do it, why it is needed, what difficulties confront it and what topics need its attention. (shrink)

J.M. Coetzee’s book, 'Elizabeth Costello' is one of the stranger works to appear in recent years. Yet if we focus our attention on the book’s two chapters dealing with animals, two preoccupations emerge. The first sees Coetzee use animals to evoke a particular conception of ethics, one similar to that of the philosopher Mary Midgley. Coetzee’s second theme connects animals to the phenomena of scapegoating, as it has been characterized by the philosophical anthropologist René Girard. While both themes involve (...) human interactions with animals, each transcends application to that particular issue and raises deeper questions, respectively concerning the foundations of morality and the therapeutic allure of political violence. Making explicit these two preoccupations enhances our understanding of Coetzee’s fiction, particularly Disgrace. However, when Coetzee’s two philosophical strands are analyzed in their own terms, the ethics of sympathy is shown to be a more coherent notion than the understanding of politics he takes over from Girard. (shrink)

Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need mentioning, but Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene has succeeded in confusing a number of people about it, including Mr J. L. Mackie. What Mackie welcomes in Dawkins is a new, biological-looking kind of support for philosophic egoism. If this support came from Dawkins's producing important new facts, or good new interpretations of old facts, about animal life, this (...) could be very interesting. Dawkins, however, simply has a weakness for the old game of Brocken-spectre moralizing—the one where the player strikes attitudes on a peak at sunrise, gazes awe-struck at his gigantic shadow on the clouds, and reports his observations as cosmic truths. He is an uncritical philosophic egoist in the first place, and merely feeds the egoist assumption into his a priori biological speculations, only rarely glancing at the relevant facts of animal behaviour and genetics, and ignoring their failure to support him. There is nothing empirical about Dawkins. Critics have repeatedly pointed out that his notions of genetics are unworkable. I shall come to this point later, but I shall not begin with it, because, damning though it is, it may seem to some people irrelevant to his main contention. It is natural for a reader to suppose that his over-simplified drama about genes is just a convenient stylistic device, because it seems obvious that the personification of them must be just a metaphor. Indeed he himself sometimes says that it is so. But in fact this personification, in its literal sense, is essential for his whole contention; without it he is bankrupt. His central point is that the emotional nature of man is exclusively self-interested, and he argues this by claiming that all emotional nature is so. Since the emotional nature of animals clearly is not exclusively selfinterested, nor based on any long-term calculation at all, he resorts to arguing from speculations about the emotional nature of genes, which he treats as the source and archetype of all emotional nature. This strange convoluted drama must be untwisted before the full force of the objections from genetics can be understood. (shrink)

This paper is an update of the documents we have concerning the Acts of the Christian martyrs, focused on three main aspects: 1) the kind of acts we know of and their classification from the point of view of their historic value; 2) the versions or editions of the texts that are most accepted by scholars; 3) the relevance of the different parts that make up these documents in order to discern the original text from passages that were rewritten or (...) underwent later variations. In this way, the article offers an exhaustive list of the documents for use in researching Christian martyrs in the Roman period. (shrink)

Some time ago, an Innocent Bystander, after glancing through a copy of Mind , asked me, ‘Why do philosophers talk so much about Games? Do they play them a lot or something?’.

Every age has its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago, we used to accept Marx and Freud together, and then wonder, like the chameleon on the tartan, why life was so confusing. Today there is similar trouble over the question whether there is, or is not, something called Human Nature. On the one hand, there has been an explosion of animal behaviour studies, and comparisons between animals and men have become immensely popular. People use evidence from animals to decide whether man (...) is naturally aggressive, or naturally territorial; even whether he has an Aggressive or Territorial Instinct. On the other hand, many sociologists and psychologists still seem to hold the Behaviourist view that man is a creature entirely without instincts, and so do existentialist philosophers. If so, all comparison with animals must be irrelevant.. On that view, man is entirely the product of his culture. He starts off infinitely plastic, and is formed completely by the society in which he grows up. (shrink)

The notion that concern for the feelings of animals is as such sentimental is rather a common one. I shall suggest that, in general, the charge of sentimentality can never be made to stick in this way merely because concern is directed towards one class of sentient beings rather than another. It rests on the motives and reasons for being concerned, not on the objects to which concern is directed. About animals, however, a special point arises which I must deal (...) with first. Objectors may say that it is sentimental to attribute feelings to them at all, or at least to attribute specific feelings, to suppose ourselves well enough informed about their states of consciousness for concern to be appropriate. The charge of sentimentality here is close to that of anthropomorphism. (shrink)

Exchanging views in Philosophy with a two-year time-lag is getting rather like conversation with the Andromeda Nebula. I am distressed that my reply to Messrs Mackie and Dawkins, explaining what made me write so crossly about The Selfish Gene , has been so long delayed. Mr Mackie's sudden death in December 1981 adds a further dimension to this distress.

In recent literature, panpsychism has been defended by appeal to two main arguments: first, an argument from philosophy of mind, according to which panpsychism is the only view which successfully integrates consciousness into the physical world (Strawson 2006; Chalmers 2013); second, an argument from categorical properties, according to which panpsychism offers the only positive account of the categorical or intrinsic nature of physical reality (Seager 2006; Adams 2007; Alter and Nagasawa 2012). Historically, however, panpsychism has also been defended by appeal (...) to a third argument based on considerations about the nature and observability of causation. This argument has not been much discussed in recent times. Here is a concise version from William James: "… the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency … If we took these experiences as the type of what actual causation is, we should have to ascribe to cases of causation outside of our life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experiential nature. In other words, we should have to espouse a so-called “pan-psychic” philosophy" (James 1911: 218). James here suggests that we have direct experience of causation in our own agency. He thereby directly contradicts David Hume, who famously denied that we have any experience of causation. James goes on to claim that if this experience is representative of causation in general, it follows that all causation is mental, and that panpsychism is true. This kind of argument for panpsychism can be called the argument from (experience of) causation. This chapter offers, first, a history of this argument and arguments closely related to it, and second, an analysis of the argument – is it valid, are its premises in any way defensible, and how does it relate to the other, more popular arguments for panpsychism from philosophy of mind and categorical properties? (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Can't We Make Moral Judgements? By Mary Midgley.

Ibn al-ʻArabī, 1165-1240; views on freedom; Sufism; Islamic philosophy.

The word moral and its derivatives are showing signs of strain. Like a small carpet, designed to fit a room which has been enlarged, they are wrenched this way and that to cover the bare spaces. Perhaps in the end we shall be forced to abandon them altogether, as Nietzsche suggested. But this would be wasteful, and it seems a good idea to examine first the various spaces they can cover, and try to fix them to the one where they (...) are needed most. I shall approach this problem by making very full quotations. It is not an isolated verbal puzzle which can be settled by showing that a particular usage exists; we need to know as well just what it is doing. There are real muddles here, within common-sense, about the relation of thought to life. There is no simple plain-man's usage prepared for us to follow. Anyone who uses moral in anything beyond the Daily Mirror sense is no longer a quite plain man anyway, and we had better follow careful writers than casual ones, real ones than imaginary ones. Philosophers, unlike the Erewhonians, do not have to study a hypothetical language. I am sure both that quotations are necessary and that mine are inadequate; I hope other people will supplement them. As for my choice, I can only say that I have tried very hard not to be tendentious. Certainly I have quoted authors who are capable of being silly and perverse, but as far as I can see the remarks I have taken from them are sober and normal. Anyone may disagree with them, but not, I hope, think them oddly worded. My point affects all the derivatives of moral and to some extent those of ethical too, so I have drawn my illustrations from all of them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT When does ‘reduction’ in the harmless sense of relating one science to another involve a sinister devaluing of the valuable? Only when the ‘reductive’ explanation is (1) treated as excluding others, and (2) so chosen as to make a moral point by illicit means. (1) is never legitimate; different kinds of explanation all have their place and do not compete. It is made to look plausible by (2), which can occur in many situations, but is usually called reduction only (...) when it involves the physical sciences. Two different dangers follow—reduction to the unknown entities of physics is chilling, but fortunately seems to have no particular moral consequences. Biological reductions often sound less remote; e.g. when sociobiologists talk of people as ‘survival machines’ for genes. The trouble here is not ‘biological determinism’ but fatalism, with apparent moral consequences, namely, the endorsement of universal competition. This idea is bad biology, compounded by illicit rhetoric. Biology itself cannot be a threat. The biological causes of human behaviour, including those found by sociobiologists in their calmer moments, are perfectly proper material for the social sciences. (shrink)

Is it quite all right to shake hands with murder in your heart? The view that our feelings do not concern morality, that we have no duties about them, that it does not matter what we feel, so long as we act correctly, is often attributed to Kant. I am sure he did not hold it, and shall argue as much presently. Certainly it is not surprising that people have credited Kant with such a view. He did lay himself open (...) to that suspicion, because he was too busy shooting at contrary errors to resist it. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally concentrated on the qualities that make human beings different from other species. In _Beast and Man_ Mary Midgley, one of our foremost intellectuals, stresses continuities. What makes people tick? Largely, she asserts, the same things as animals. She tells us humans are rather more like other animals than we previously allowed ourselves to believe, and reminds us just how primitive we are in comparison to the sophistication of many animals. A veritable classic for our age, _Beast (...) and Man_ has helped change the way we think about ourselves and the world in which we live. (shrink)

First published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

ABSTRACT Argument about Rights can be either purely formal or substantial—meant to affect conduct. These two functions, which need different kinds of support, often become confused. The source of much confusion is the idea that rights‐language is an all‐purpose ‘moral theory’ which is in competition with others such as Utilitarianism. Since these are not really rivals but complementary aspects of moral thinking—parts of it, both of which need to be used along with many others—attempts to establish one of them as (...) sole ruler are doomed to incoherence. The ambition to deploy an all‐purpose thought‐system is distinct from the moral motivation to change the world, and the two aims inevitably interfere with one another. Among these ‘moral theories’, however, the language of rights is specially ill‐suited for all‐purpose use. This becomes plain when philosophers, taking its adequacy for granted, conduct moral argument in terms of it alone, as if it were obviously appropriate, without background discussion. Rights‐language is of particularly limited use because it is simply the most competitive and litigious of such thought‐systems. Its win‐or‐lose formula allows no more scope for doing justice to defeated claims than a lawcourt does. For the serious conflicts of value that underlie large moral problems, this is disastrous. (shrink)