Examines an ethic of sexuality rooted in black queerness, including ethnographic interviews that help to trace the development of black queer ethics and sexual ethics.

The question “Are you what you eat?” is ultimately a question about change. When we eat, are the nutrients from the food simply added to the biological complex we call the body or are the nutrients a product of substantial change? The scientific literature on digestion often describes the process in the former manner, which, if it were the only way to describe the data, would prove problematic to an Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy. However, the interpretation of the scientific data (...) is not so simple and can be understood within the framework of a broad range of philosophical perspectives. This paper is an attempt to show how it is possible to reconcile the scientific data of digestion with an Aristotelian-Thomistic natural philosophy. (shrink)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret Macdonald, (...) from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

This paper is about how best to understand the notion of ‘public wrongs’ in the longstanding idea that crimes are public wrongs. By contrasting criminal law with the civil laws of torts and contracts, it argues that ‘public wrongs’ should not be understood merely as wrongs that properly concern the public, but more specifically as those which the state, as the public, ought to punish. It then briefly considers the implications that this has on criminalization.

This paper critically appraises the arguments that have been offered for what can be called ‘the expressive function of punishment’. According to this view, what distinguishes punishment from other kinds of non-punitive hard treatment is that punishment conveys a censorial/reprobative message about what the punished has done, and that this expressive function should therefore be accepted as part of the nature and definition of punishment. Against this view, this papers argues that the standard account of punishment, according to which punishment (...) is a kind of hard treatment that is imposed on an alleged offender in response to her alleged wrongdoing, can already properly account for punishment and distinguish it from other kinds of hard treatment when it is properly clarified and understood. Thus there is no need to accept the expressive function of punishment in addition to the standard account when it comes to the nature and definition of punishment. (shrink)

I did something yesterday, so it was true a thousand years ago that I was going to do it. Could I help it, then? Professor Ryle shows that I could; he also shows that a dilemma like this starts with a slender base - the question whether statements in the future can be true - and opens out before one notices it into questions like 'is it worthwhile learning to swim?' In his second demonstration Professor Ryle proves that Achilles will (...) after all overtake his tortoise and will not have to pursue it through all eternity. These two puzzles were classic if academic examples of the dilemmas Professor Ryle is concerned with. Common sense tells me that I can to some extent control my life; should I then, faced with an apparently logical argument for fatalism, reject common sense? Again, because I enjoy or dislike things, are all my actions due to the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain? Because my eyes and ears tell me one set of things about the world and science tels me another, am I to think my senses less reliable or accurate than science? Professor Ryle's aim is to arbitrate between these pairs of theories which compete for our allegiance, and to show that the either/or which they seem to insist on is a false dilemma. It may lead to mere muddle, or to a more subtle confusion; either way these tugs-of-war between conflicting theories may bring the ordinary man either to confused or wrong action or to intellectual apathy. (shrink)

The author reviews the contents of the ten articles by j l austin which appear in the volume "philosophical papers". She tries to "single out what is unique about his contribution, In particular what features of his procedure, Falling as it does under the general classification 'linguistic analysis', Were so distinctive as to win for it the attention accorded to a new departure." (staff).

In sub-Saharan Africa, a nurse gives iron pills as placebos to terminally ill patients. She tells them, acting in what she believes is in their best interests, “these will make you feel better”. The patients believe it will help their AIDS and their well-being improves. Do the motive and the patient’s positive outcome in well-being make the deceit justifiable when other issues such as consent, autonomy and potential consequences regarding the patient and the wider community are considered? Is there a (...) difference between lying and non-lying deception when the end result is the same? The patients feel better, but at what cost if the deceit was found out? It will be argued that although the actions of the nurse are understandable and to some extent defensible, they are unethical. It is not ethically acceptable to take away the patient’s autonomy and risk the health of the community even though the risk of deceit being discovered is a small one. (shrink)

Legal coercion seems morally problematic because it is susceptible to the Hegelian objection that it fails to respect individuals in a way that is ‘due to them as men’. But in what sense does legal coercion fail to do so? And what are the grounds for this requirement to respect? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions. It argues that legal coercion fails to respect individuals as reason-responsive agents; and individuals ought to be respected as such in virtue (...) of the fact that they are human beings. Thus it is in this sense that legal coercion fails to treat individuals with the kind of respect ‘due to them as men’. (shrink)

There are at least two ways to argue for the view that the outcome of one’s actions does not affect one’s blameworthiness. The first way appeals to the ‘Control Principle’ while the second way relies on what it means to be blameworthy. The focus of this paper is on a recent attempt at pursuing this second way that relies on an account of blameworthiness dubbed the ‘Engagement View’. This paper argues, however, that the Engagement View alone is insufficient to show (...) why the outcomes of one’s actions does not affect one’s blameworthiness. It argues that if blame is understood more robustly as involving reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation, then it turns out the Engagement View can also give us reasons for the contrary view. This paper ends by drawing out some general implications that this has on our understanding of blameworthiness. (shrink)

This thesis is the first step in a research project which aims to develop an accurate and robust theory of global justice. The thesis concerns the content of our duties of global justice, under strict compliance theory. It begins by discussing the basic framework of my theory of global justice, which consists in two aspects: duties of minimal wellbeing, which are universal, and duties of fairness and equality, which are associative and not universal. With that in place, it briefly discusses (...) the nature of duties of fairness and equality. I shall argue that they are associative, because they are derived from the form of cooperation at hand; and that there are three kinds of them in our contemporary world: states, local cooperation and trans-state cooperation. It is from their forms of cooperation that these duties are derived. After that, the thesis focuses exclusively on duties of minimal wellbeing. Against the usual account of these duties - the human-flourishing account - I argue for my human-life account. This account argues that the function of these duties is to secure a human life for individuals; and it begins with a Razian conception of wellbeing, which states that the wellbeing of an individual is fundamentally constituted by: (a) the satisfaction of his biological needs, and (b) his success in whole-heartedly pursuing socially defined and determined goals and activities which are in fact valuable. An account of what constitutes a human life is then derived from this conception of wellbeing – it is a life that consists in having a level of wellbeing that is higher than the satisfaction of biological needs, where this is constituted by the pursuit of goals and activities with a sense of what is worth doing; and this in turn consists in: (a) being able to forms ideas of what is worth doing, (b) being able to revise them in light of further reasons, and (c) being able to coordinate one's actions according to them. I then determine the specific objects of duties of minimal wellbeing (means for the satisfaction of biological needs, education, physical security, freedom of belief, association and expression, freedom of non-harmful conduct, and minimal resources), by determining what is involved in securing such a human life for individuals. (shrink)

The question I wish to raise, which in my opinion is fundamental, concerns the conception Mr. Blanshard has of what, in his words, he is "trying to do in his philosophizing." Wittgenstein declared, in emphatic disagreement with many philosophers, that philosophical problems "are, of course, not empirical problems," which implies that philosophical views are not factual, not accounts of the existence or nature of things and occurrences. And this conception, which is so evidently in collision with Mr. Blanshard's, seems to (...) me correct. There are various ways of supporting it, as regards the doctrine that all relations are internal, but I call attention to one consideration which seems to me to carry great weight: that the metaphysician who holds this view cannot cite any conceivable case of things being externally related. The relations with which everyone is familiar are all alike counted as internal: no relation which we can bring forward would be accepted as constituting a counter instance. Nor can anyone who holds the view that all relations are internal describe a relation which he could count as being external. For in addition to such relations as north of and a mile from, what could be cited? A philosopher who declares that north of penetrates the being of its terms, and thus is as much an internal relation as entails, debars himself from saying what it would be like for things to be externally related. This shows that his view has, in principle, no falsification. For this reason I shall suppose that the proposition, "All things are internally related," is put forward as a priori, since it has what is the most characteristic feature of an a priori proposition, namely, that one cannot say what a confuting instance would be like. The following comments will be in part directed toward showing that the view that things are internally related is not about how things are related, but primarily the comments will be directed toward bringing out the linguistic character of the view. (shrink)