The doctrine (or principle) of double effect is often invoked to explain the permissibility of an action that causes a serious harm, such as the death of a human being, as a side effect of promoting some good end. According to the principle of double effect, sometimes it is permissible to cause a harm as a side effect (or “double effect”) of bringing about a good result even though it would not be permissible to cause such a harm as a (...) means to bringing about the same good end. Does the principle of double effect play the important explanatory role that has been claimed for it? To consider this question, one must be careful to clarify just what the principle is supposed to explain. Three misinterpretations of the principle’s force or range of application are common. 1. To ensure that Double Effect is not misunderstood as principle issuing a blanket permission on causing any unintended harm that yields a benefit, applications must require that the agent seek to minimize the harm involved. 2. Since it is widely accepted that it is wrong to aim to produce harm to someone as an end, to rule this out is not part of double effect’s distinctive content. 3. Harms that were produced regretfully and only for the sake of producing a good end may be prohibited by double effect because they were brought about as part of the agent’s means to realizing the good end. (shrink)

I will introduce six constraints that should guide the formulation and use of DE. One goal in listing them is to engage in dialectical fair play by ruling out criticisms of the doctrine that are directed at misformulations of DE or that result from misapplications of it. Each of these constraints should be acceptable to any proponent of DE. Yet when these constraints on the application of DE are respected, it becomes clear that many of the examples provided as illustrations (...) of DE actually illustrate other, more interesting uses of the contrast between intention and foresight. (shrink)

John Fischer and Mark Ravizza defend in this book a painstakingly constructed analysis of what they take to be a core condition of moral responsibility: the notion of guidance control. The volume usefully collects in one place ideas and arguments the authors have previously published in singly or jointly authored works on this and related topics, as well as various refinements to those views and some suggestive discussions that aim to show how their account of guidance control might fit into (...) a more comprehensive account of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Many would say that unlike other failures of practical rationality, which can be difficult to recognize, weakness of will wears its rational defect on its sleeve. Whenever we judge that it would be best not to do x, while intentionally doing x without relinquishing this judgment, we condemn quite explicitly the intention on which we act. This observation gives rise to the attractive idea that weak-willed agents indict themselves of irrationality as they fail to comply with their own practical judgments. (...) Weakness of will is often treated as the paradigm of practical irrationality just because of the explicit and quasi-logical form of incoherence in the weak-willed or akratic agent’s attitudes. Underpinning this idea is the assumption that practical rationality can be characterized as a kind of executive capacity that produces congruence between judgment and action by ensuring that practical judgments are faithfully enacted. Some are happy to call this capacity the will, so that the label “weakness of will” is literally true. I will argue against both of these assumptions. (shrink)

Hume’s discussion of pride and sympathy in the _Treatise_ shows direct engagement with Malebranche’s discussion of ‘imitation’ in the _Search_. For Malebranche, imitation—both of passions and belief—and our tendency to judge ourselves by comparison, generate the passion of pride or grandeur, which plays a useful social role. However, as both cause and effect of the admiration of others, grandeur is ungrounded and thus imaginary. Hume disagrees. He invokes the principle of sympathy to explain how the evaluations of others can support (...) pride by indicating, without constituting, grounds for pride. Hume’s argument depends on his underappreciated claim that sympathy can communicate the evaluative opinions as well as the passions of others. Working with the Malebranchean inventory of principles—sympathy and comparison—Hume refines their characterization, thereby redeeming the human tendency to feel pride and humility by characterizing it as corrigible and subject to social regulation. (shrink)

Familiarity with the doctrines presented in Richard Allestree’s devotional work The Whole Duty of Man (1658), which Hume reported having read as a boy, can illuminate the strategy of argument Hume employs in Treatise 2.1.6–2.1.8 to undermine views he attributes to “the vulgar systems of ethicks.” Hume’s explicit critique of the view that pride is a sin and humility a virtue in Treatise 2.1.7 relies on assumptions that are already present in Allestree’s account of pride and humility and are described (...) using similar language. Sections 6–8 of Treatise 2.1 also provide an implicit critique of Allestree’s attempts to induce a general stance of humility based on mortifying considerations about human nature and to inspire episodes of penitential humility for the sins of the day. I argue that the “limitations to this account” gathered together in 2.1.6 are placed there to set up this critique. Together, the limitations imply that defects in our personal character are sufficiently close to us, peculiar to us, discernible to others, of appropriate duration, and supported by general rules to generate the passion of humility when we reflect on them, while reflection on human nature in general and particular episodes of sin are not. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion of the topic of intentional agency has often focused on questions about the nature of the events which are intentional actions. This event-oriented approach cannot yield an adequate account of human agency because it cannot accommodate negative acts, or acts of omission. Agents may act intentionally by omitting to act, but many such acts of omission cannot be identified with any event consisting of a bodily movement. This dissertation is an attempt to develop an account of agency which (...) can accommodate acts of omission. In the course of this, generally accepted views about the causal powers of agents, the ontology of action, the relation between an intention and the act which realizes it and the abilities exercised in acting are challenged. In Chapter One it is argued that causation by acts of omission cannot be explicated in terms of event causation and that the abilities which an agent exercises in intentionally omitting must be analyzed as second order abilities. Views according to which acts of omission are in some way constituted by positive actions are surveyed and criticized in Chapter Two. It is claimed that an agent omits to act by forming a negative intention, but this mental act is not identical to the act of omission. Acts of omission are states of affairs which obtain or facts and are not events. In Chapter Three it is shown that certain positive non-basic acts like killings also cannot be identified with any event because no event could have the requisite temporal and causal properties. Two important differences between positive and negative acts are identified in Chapter Four. The relation between a positive intention and behavior which realizes it is a causal one, but negative intentions do not cause the behavior which realizes them. A person may perform a positive action and may be responsible for this even though he lacks the ability to refrain from doing so, but to omit to perform some action and to be responsible for this, a person must have the ability to perform it. (shrink)

Book 1 of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature was reshaped into the first Enquiry, while the second Enquiry further develops some themes from Book 3. What became of Book 2, “Of the Passions”? Did Hume never extend his thinking in that area? Amyas Merivale notes that the standard answer to that question is that Hume did not do much in the way of rethinking T2 beyond selecting a few passages to excerpt, almost verbatim, in his “Dissertation on the Passions.” (...) In this fine, wide-ranging, scrupulously researched and carefully argued book, Merivale offers a more intriguing and satisfying answer: the essays collected in the Four Dissertations, “The Natural History of Religion”, “Of the Passions”... (shrink)