It is commonly said that ethical disputes either involve disagreements of fact or disagreements of principle and that while disagreements of fact can be overcome by rational means, disagreements of principle cannot. The difficulty is supposed to be this: for an argument to be rationally persuasive it must appeal to premises already accepted by the person to be persuaded, and if the premises include the principle in question then they will not be acceptable to that person; however, if the premises (...) do not include the principle in question the argument cannot succeed because the conclusion can only validly be inferred from premises which do include the principle in question. While this doctrine is appealing to philosophers who find the idea of ultimate disagreement in ethics comforting, it is a visciously skeptical view which can be generalized to cover all systematic areas of human knowledge. As ‘disagreements of principle’ can appear in almost any domain of human inquiry, the hidden cost of this doctrine is terribly high. (shrink)

The way individual actions enter into larger courses of action often has an effect on the utility of those individual actions. This simple fact has motivated recent discussions about the intelligibility of act-utilitarianism. It has become clear that act-utilitarianism is incomplete, if not intelligible, without an account of the utility-making properties of courses of action taken as a whole. In this paper I offer a brief discussion of the difficulties of a simple act-utilitarianism and then offer three complementary principles in (...) which the utility of an action is made to depend upon the courses of action of which it may be a constituent. I hope that the discussion will be of interest not only to committed act-utilitarians but to its sympathetic critics as well. (shrink)

In this paper c i lewis's theory of practical reason is discussed. the purpose is to explicate the role which value experience plays in the thinking of a rational agent who is attempting to determine imperatives of action. lewis, who vehemently opposed noncognitivism in ethics, believed that the objectivity of ethics could be shown to be the result of the logical demands of consistency upon the deliberative consciousness of an active self-determining agent. rightness, for lewis, was not primarily a moral (...) concept but rather a logical concept to be exercised in the critique of any deliberate activity; ethics thus rests on very general features of agent rationality. (shrink)

The text of The Tractatus supports incompatible interpretations of a number of key philosophic positions. For example, the book is neither obviously nominalistic nor obviously realistic. Another difficulty is presented by the apparent. incompatibility of Wittgenstein's theses that propositions are logical pictures of facts, and that propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. There are several places in The Tractatus where these two doctrines meet head on, but the central one is the set of passages 5.54-5.5422. This paper is an exegesis (...) of these passages and a sketch of Wittgenstein's theory of judgement.In Tractatus 5.54 - 5.5422, Wittgenstein argues that statements of belief, judgement, thoughts and the like are not incompatible with the principle of finite extensionality. The passages contain a brief but obscure reductio on the possibility of non-extensional contexts, and several no less obscure corollaries. In this paper I shall explicate the content of the reductio, criticise a common but mistaken view of these passages, and draw out the consequences of some major doctrines in the Tractatus for Wittgenstein's Theory of Judgement. (shrink)