Biographical sketches show how six writers and public figures prepared for their deaths.

While Superman’s fantastic abilities make him the most powerful being on Earth, his upbringing on the Kents’ farm is what makes him a hero. Unfortunately, moral philosophy often understates the importance of such character. One popular approach to ethics, utilitarianism, asks us to act in ways that maximize the happiness or well‐being of all the people affected. We are not born with virtues (or vices), and this is critical for understanding Superman's heroic personality. The question of how Superman's upbringing would (...) be affected by landing in another nation was explored in Mark Millar's Superman: Red Son (2004). Instead of truth, justice, and the American way, Hitler's Superman would value the totalitarian ideals of propaganda, obedience, and serving the führer. Imagine how some of the major events of World War II may have been different had Superman been involved with Hitler's cause. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Laying Medicine Open: Innovative Interaction Between Medicine and the HumanitiesLaurence B. McCullough and Warren Thomas ReichThe past three decades have witnessed the emergence and remarkable success of the fields of bioethics and medical humanities. The intellectual landscape of medicine and that of the humanities have been remarkably altered in the process. Twenty-five to 30 years ago in the United States there existed but a few courses in what came (...) to be called “bioethics” in departments of philosophy, religious studies, and theology in colleges and universities, a handful of programs of teaching in medical schools such as the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine at Hershey, and but one independent research center (the Hastings Center) and one university-based research center (the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University). Articles on bioethics began to appear in the peer-reviewed medical, nursing, and humanities literature and some books were published. There was only one journal in bioethics, The Hastings Center Report (which consolidated two previously separate journals from the Hastings Center). Graduate programs in bioethics and medical humanities in colleges and universities and fellowship training in bioethics and medical humanities in medical schools did not exist. Very little existed in colleges, universities, and medical schools in other countries. Now, of course, everything is different.Teachers, scholars, and students of bioethics and medical humanities should not take these remarkable changes for granted, for they represent a sustained and innovative interaction between medicine and the humanities. We have chosen the metaphor of “laying medicine open” to characterize the history of bioethics and medical humanities of the past three decades. This surgical metaphor was used in eighteenth-century Britain by a number of writers who wanted to make medical science and practice more accessible to the sick and to the lay public more generally (Lawrence 1975). We use the metaphor to characterize the efforts of teachers and [End Page 1] scholars over the past three decades and more to make the value-laden dimensions of biomedical science and practice and of health care policy more accessible to patients and to the lay public more generally. The result of this laying open of medicine has gone a long way toward bringing closer together the two cultures of science and the humanities that had, as C. P. Snow famously described, become significantly isolated from each otherAlbert Jonsen (1998) has recently contributed the first book-length history of what he calls the “birth” of bioethics, adding to the work of other scholars such as Warren Reich (1994; 1995) and Robert Baker (1993) and, before them, Corrado Viafora (1990) and David Rothman (1991). The articles in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal make additional contributions to the developing understanding of the history of the past thirty years of interaction between medicine and the humanities.Laurence McCullough provides an historical context for the three accounts of the recent laying open of medicine that follow. McCullough examines two times in the history of medicine when it has been laid open to accountability (in addition to its being laid open to and by bioethics and medical humanities). The first laying open occurred in the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish physician and philosopher John Gregory, who set out to create a profession of medicine in a true moral sense of a fiduciary profession by making medicine accountable for its scientific and moral quality. The second occurred in the late twentieth century in which the managed practice of medicine in general, and managed care in particular, have begun to lay medicine open to accountability for its scientific and moral quality, as well as its cost and, at least in the public sector, its accessibility. McCullough argues that, just as Gregory responded to the ethical challenges of medicine laid open more than two centuries ago, bioethics should respond to the ethical challenges in the current laying open of medicine.Warren Reich provides an account of André Hellegers, whose premature death left an enormous gap in the field that will never be filled. Reich claims that Hellegers was engaged substantially in much more than the laying open of medicine: he... (shrink)

A renowned scholar investigates the "human crisis" that Albert Camus confronted in his world and in ours, producing a brilliant study of Camus's life and influence for those readers who, in Camus's words, "cannot live without dialogue and friendship. As France--and all of the world--was emerging from the depths of World War II, Camus summed up what he saw as 'the human crisis'. 'We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines (...) or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.' In the years after he wrote these words, until his death fourteen years later, Camus labored to address this crisis, arguing for dialogue, understanding, clarity, and truth. When he sailed to New York, in March 1946--for his first and only visit to the United States--he found an ebullient nation celebrating victory. Camus warned against the common postwar complacency that took false comfort in the fact that Hitler was dead and the Third Reich had fallen. Yes, the serpentine beast was dead, but "we know perfectly well," he argued, "that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts." All around him in the postwar world, Camus saw disheartening evidence of a global community revealing a heightened indifference to a number of societal ills. It is the same indifference to human suffering that we see all around, and within ourselves, today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Revisiting the Launching of the Kennedy Institute: Re-visioning the Origins of BioethicsWarren Thomas Reich (bio)Twenty-five years ago, on October 1, 1971, at a press conference held at Georgetown University, the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics, later called the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, was officially inaugurated. To revisit that event—and the Institute’s five founding collaborators who spoke at it—provides an opportunity (...) to re-vision some of the most significant intellectual, moral, cultural, and political factors that shaped both this Institute and the then-nascent field of bioethics.Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who spoke at the press conference, was intensely committed to a new sort of philanthropy that would effect socio-political change in favor the dignity and well-being of the mentally disadvantaged. As executive vice-president of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, she had already applied the Foundation’s vision and resources to the task of harnessing the best of the “biological revolution” of the 1960s to prevent developmental disorders. Prompted by the values at stake in the care of the disadvantaged, she turned the Foundation toward the creation of the Institute in 1971.Just prior to the opening of the Institute, Mrs. Shriver had produced and appeared as introducer in a highly influential film, “Who Shall Survive?”, which dealt with a “mongoloid baby” who was allowed to die in the newborn clinic because of its condition. Showcased at a highly publicized symposium involving 2000 people (Editorial 1971) and widely discussed in the press, the film helped to establish neonatal ethics as paradigmatic for the emerging field of bioethics (Bedeviling Question 1971; Rothman 1991, pp. 190–221). Undoubtedly under the influence of her involvement in the publicizing of those issues, Mrs. Shriver commented at the press conference that she hoped the Institute would re-emphasize the value of children in face of the widespread feeling that children are a burden (Kennedys 1971, p. 19).At the press conference, then president of Georgetown University, Robert J. Henle, S.J., announced the Kennedy Foundation’s grant of $1.35 million to establish the Institute. Henle was undoubtedly alert to the fact that certain issues, such as abortion and terminating the lives of infants, would be perceived [End Page 323] as highly controversial when raised at a Catholic university. Not surprisingly, reporters at the press conference raised provocative questions about how Georgetown University would reconcile Catholic moral doctrine with the Institute’s broadly-based inquiries. Henle replied tersely that the Institute “will be a ‘truly ecumenical and catholic effort,’ defining catholic in its classical meaning of universal” (Helping 1971). The reporters might have found it quite ironic that within a few years Georgetown’s ecumenical vision had provided the intellectual environment that permitted the Institute to become famous for development of the first systematic, secular (principle-based) approach to bioethics (Reich 1995).Father Henle was probably also aware that by launching the Kennedy Institute he was creating the first institute principally devoted to ethics research ever established at a university. It took a special sort of university to take this first step into bioethics research and policymaking. In 1971, ethics was regarded as belonging to religion, and religion was generally regarded as suspect academically. While it was difficult, in that atmosphere, for a nonreligious university to take such a bold step, Henle’s Georgetown University offered a promising setting that could scarcely have been found in any other university. It departed from the common mold of Catholic-college-as-indoctrination-center, yet it had an explicit and unashamed commitment to the investigation of religious and secular values in an environment of academic freedom. It was an increasingly cosmopolitan university, committed to developing the best of secular scholarship. Furthermore, Henle was willing to experiment with as-yet unproven interdisciplinary studies.Sargent Shriver—god-father of the Kennedy Institute, chairman of its first Advisory Board, and a constant dialogue partner of his friend and the Institute’s founding director, Dr. André Hellegers—was intensely interested in linking scientific progress with religious belief, unfettered moral debate, and commitment to disadvantaged humans.At the inaugural event, the new Institute was described as... (shrink)

Die ästhetische Bedeutung der Kraft mit ihren semantischen Nachbarn Intensität und Energie wird seit einigen Jahren verstärkt in der Literaturwissenschaft untersucht und findet innerhalb der philosophischen Ästhetik zunehmend Beachtung. Eine historische und interdisziplinäre Auseinandersetzung mit diesen zentralen Begriffen künstlerischer Produktion und Wirkung steht aber noch aus. Der vorliegende Band erkundet dieses kaum vermessene und reich profilierte Gelände. Die Beiträge gehen von der Annahme aus, dass die Beziehungen zwischen ästhetischen und naturphilosophischen Wissensfeldern, zwischen künstlerischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Modellierungen im Zeichen der (...) Kraft enger sind, als bisher vermutet wurde. (shrink)

Nombre de juristes, à travers l’histoire, se sont accommodés de la barbarie pourvu qu’elle s’insère dans des procédures respectées à la lettre, même si l’esprit – quel qu’il soit – en est totalement absent. La notion « d’état de droit », communément utilisée aujourd’hui dans l’ordre interne, relève de la mystification car elle supporte toutes les définitions : le droit nazi lui-même avait ses subtilités et tous les pouvoirs n’appartenaient pas au Chancelier du Reich. Concernant l’ordre intern...

Nietzsche, the Godfather of Fascism? What can Nietzsche have in common with this murderous ideology? Frequently described as the "radical aristocrat" of the spirit, Nietzsche abhorred mass culture and strove to cultivate an Übermensch endowed with exceptional mental qualities. What can such a thinker have in common with the fascistic manipulation of the masses for chauvinistic goals that crushed the autonomy of the individual? The question that lies at the heart of this collection is how Nietzsche came to acquire the (...) deadly "honor" of being considered the philosopher of the Third Reich and whether such claims had any justification. Does it make any sense to hold him in some way responsible for the horrors of Auschwitz? The editors present a range of views that attempt to do justice to the ambiguity and richness of Nietzsche's thought. First-rate contributions by a variety of distinguished philosophers and historians explore in depth Nietzsche's attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, Christianity, anti-Semitism, and National Socialism. They interrogate Nietzsche's writings for fascist and anti-Semitic proclivities and consider how they were read by fascists who claimed Nietzsche as their intellectual godfather. There is much that is disturbingly antiegalitarian and antidemocratic in Nietzsche, and his writings on Jews are open to differing interpretations. Yet his emphasis on individualism and contempt for German nationalism and anti-Semitism put him at stark odds with Nazi ideology. The Nietzsche that emerges here is a tragic prophet of the spiritual vacuum that produced the twentieth century's totalitarian movements, the thinker who best diagnosed the pathologies of fin-de-siècle European culture. Nietzsche dared to look into the abyss of modern nihilism. This book tells us what he found. The contributors are Menahem Brinker, Daniel W. Conway, Stanley Corngold, Kurt Rudolf Fischer, Jacob Golomb, Robert C. Holub, Berel Lang, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Alexander Nehamas, David Ohana, Roderick Stackelberg, Mario Sznajder, Geoffrey Waite, Robert S. Wistrich, and Yirmiyahu Yovel. (shrink)

The abstract structure of inquiry - the process of acquiring and changing beliefs about the world - is the focus of this book which takes the position that the "pragmatic" rather than the "linguistic" approach better solves the philosophical problems about the nature of mental representation, and better accounts for the phenomena of thought and speech. It discusses propositions and propositional attitudes (the cluster of activities that constitute inquiry) in general and takes up the way beliefs change in response to (...) potential new information, suggesting that conditional propositions should be understood as projections of epistemic policies onto the world.Robert C. Stalnaker is a professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Fact of Pluralism Common Schools and the Normative Significance of Pluralism Educational Choice and the Normative Significance of Pluralism Reconciling Common Schooling with Educational Choice Acknowledgments References.

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

This work presents a conception of Hume's overall philosophical stance which is derived from a focus on his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. A broad context is provided by frequent references to A Treatise of Human Nature and to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding as well as to other relevant essays and letters written by Hume. Religious Naturalism is a complex tapestry woven of aesthetic, ethical, epistemological and metaphysical elements. The religious element in Hume's writings, (...) which some commentators see as a transcendent position, is interpreted as an immanentist religiosity akin to that of Spinoza and Einstein. Hume's three "strong natural beliefs" in "self", objects and causality, come together as a metaphysical faith in the ultimate reality of a shared cosmos. Hume's aesthetic response is expressed as a sense of the sublimity of the cosmos even in the midst of skeptical doubt. In Hume's religious naturalism his epistemological skepticism casts doubt on and tempers his metaphysical faith. It is shown that Hume's overriding ethical concern was to further the happiness of humanity by replacing the "pernicious superstition" of supernaturalism with an immanentist position which affirms the inexplicable presence of an eternal cosmos. This position is what is here termed Religious Naturalism. (shrink)

Robert B. Brandom is one of the most original philosophers of our day, whose book Making It Explicit covered and extended a vast range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language--the very core of analytic philosophy. This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out. A tour of the earlier book's large ideas and relevant details, Articulating Reasons offers an easy entry into two of the main themes of Brandom's (...) work: the idea that the semantic content of a sentence is determined by the norms governing inferences to and from it, and the idea that the distinctive function of logical vocabulary is to let us make our tacit inferential commitments explicit. Brandom's work, making the move from representationalism to inferentialism, constitutes a near-Copernican shift in the philosophy of language--and the most important single development in the field in recent decades. Articulating Reasons puts this accomplishment within reach of nonphilosophers who want to understand the state of the foundations of semantics. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism 2. Action, Norms, and Practical Reasoning 3. Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism 4. What Are Singular Terms, and Why Are There Any? 5. A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing 6. Objectivity and the Normative Fine Structure of Rationality Notes Index Displaying a sovereign command of the intricate discussion in the analytic philosophy of language, Brandom manages successfully to carry out a program within the philosophy of language that has already been sketched by others, without losing sight of the vision inspiring the enterprise in the important details of his investigation ' Using the tools of a complex theory of language, Brandom succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which the reason and autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are expressed. --J'rgen Habermas. (shrink)

Tools for coping with a deceptive world.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize With a new preface by the author In his most powerful and important book, renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton presents a brilliant analysis of the crucial role that German doctors played in the Nazi genocide. Now updated with a new preface, The Nazi Doctors remains the definitive work on the Nazi medical atrocities, a chilling exposé of the banality of evil at its epitome, and a sobering reminder of the darkest side (...) of human nature. (shrink)

This chapter examines the distinction among observers, participants, and agents from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. It first examines an exemplary discourse on the nonscientific theme of “beauty” using the evil stepmother in “Snow White” as an example. It discusses this theme from the perspective of interactive constructivism and interprets it as a problem between universalist and anti-universalist approaches. The chapter then demonstrates numerous connections between constructivism and Dewey's Pragmatic theory of inquiry. Dewey, for example, had (...) already distinguished spectators, agents, and participants, even though he did not articulate those distinctions in a systematic way. This chapter follows upon Dewey's insights, suggesting ways in which a constructivist theory of observation can enrich contemporary Pragmatist arguments. (shrink)

In a new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel's classic The Phenomenology of Spirit, Robert Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take Hegel's radical form of magnanimity and trust, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

This paper revisits some foundational questions concerning the abstract representation of a discourse context. The context of a conversation is represented by a body of information that is presumed to be shared by the participants in the conversation – the information that the speaker presupposes a point at which a speech act is interpreted. This notion is designed to represent both the information on which context-dependent speech acts depend, and the situation that speech acts are designed to affect, and so (...) to be a representation of context that is appropriate for explaining the interaction of context and the contents expressed in them. After reviewing the motivating ideas and the outlines of the apparatus, the paper responds to a criticism of the framework, and considers the way it can help to clarify some phenomena concerning pronouns with indefinite antecedents. (shrink)

This collection of papers (including three completely new ones) by one of the foremost philosophers in epistemology transcends two of the most widely misunderstood positions in philosophy--foundationalism and coherentism. Audi proposes a distinctively moderate, internalist foundationalism that incorporates some of the virtues of both coherentism and reliabilism. He develops important distinctions between positive and negative epistemic dependence, substantively and conceptually naturalistic theories, dispositional beliefs and dispositions to believe, episodically and structurally inferential beliefs, first and second order internalism, and rebutting as (...) opposed to refuting skepticism. These contrasts are applied not only to rational belief, but to rational action and the rationality of desires and intentions. The overall position is a pluralist, moderately rationalistic, internalist theory of justification and a partly externalist conception of knowledge. However, by virtue of offering a theory of rationality as well as an account of knowledge and justified belief, it will interest philosophers of ethics, science, and the social sciences and teachers and students of epistemology. (shrink)

Classical American pragmatism: the pragmatist -- Enlightenment-and its problematic semantics -- Analyzing pragmatism: pragmatics and pragmatisms -- A Kantian rationalist pragmatism: pragmatism -- Inferentialism, and modality in Sellars's arguments against -- Empiricism -- Linguistic pragmatism and pragmatism about norms: an arc of -- Thought from Rorty's eliminative materialism to his pragmatism -- Vocabularies of pragmatism: synthesizing naturalism and -- Historicism -- Towards an analytic pragmatism: meaning-use analysis -- Pragmatism, expressivism, and anti-representationalism: -- Local and global possibilities.

This is a paradigmatic work of contemporary philosophy.

_A moving meditation on recent geopolitical crises, viewed through the lens of ancient and modern tragedy__ “Spare, elegant and poignant.... If there is a single contemporary book that should be pressed into the hands of those who decide issues of war and peace, this is it.”—John Gray, _New Statesman_ “It is tragic that Robert D. Kaplan’s luminous _The Tragic Mind_ is so urgently needed.”—George F. Will_ Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan has (...) learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In _The Tragic Mind_, he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power. The great dilemmas of international politics, he argues, are not posed by good versus evil—a clear and easy choice—but by contests of good versus good, where the choices are often searing, incompatible, and fraught with consequences. A deeply learned and deeply felt meditation on the importance of lived experience in conducting international relations, this is a book for everyone who wants a profound understanding of the tragic politics of our time. (shrink)

What kind of mental state is episodic memory? I defend the claim that it is, in key part, imagining the past, where the imagining in question is experiential imagining. To remember a past episode is to experientially imagine how things were, in a way controlled by one’s past experience of that episode. Call this the Inclusion View. I motive this view by appeal both to patterns of compatibilities and incompatibilities between various states, and to phenomenology. The bulk of the paper (...) defends the account against four objections. Imagining and remembering seem to differ in whether they are active or passive, in the forms of singular content they involve, in their relations to observation and in their relations to belief. I argue that these differences can be accommodated, and some even explained, once we flesh out what else is involved in episodic memory, in addition to imagining the past. (shrink)

It is almost unanimously accepted that Kant denies resultant moral luck—that is, he denies that the lucky consequence of a person’s action can affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Philosophers often point to the famous good will passage at the beginning of the Groundwork to justify this claim. I argue, however, that this passage does not support Kant’s denial of resultant moral luck. Subsequently, I argue that Kant allows agents to be morally responsible for certain kinds of lucky (...) consequences. Even so, I argue that it is unclear whether Kant ultimately endorses resultant moral luck. The reason is that Kant does not write enough on moral responsibility for consequences to determine definitively whether he thinks that the lucky consequence for which an agent is morally responsible can add to her degree of praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. The clear upshot, however, is that Kant does not deny resultant moral luck. (shrink)

Our primary focus is on analysis of the concept of voluntariness, with a secondary focus on the implications of our analysis for the concept and the requirements of voluntary informed consent. We propose that two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions must be satisfied for an action to be voluntary: intentionality, and substantial freedom from controlling influences. We reject authenticity as a necessary condition of voluntary action, and we note that constraining situations may or may not undermine voluntariness, depending on the (...) circumstances and the psychological capacities of agents. We compare and evaluate several accounts of voluntariness and argue that our view, unlike other treatments in bioethics, is not a value-laden theory. We also discuss the empirical assessment of individuals? perceptions of the degrees of noncontrol and self-control. We propose use of a particular Decision Making Control Instrument. Empirical research using this instrument can provide data that will help establish appropriate policies and procedures for obtaining voluntary consent to research. (shrink)

In the Western world it is usually taken as given that we all want happiness, and our educational arrangements tacitly acknowledge this. Happiness, Hope, and Despair argues, however, that education has an important role to play in deepening our understanding of suffering and despair as well as happiness and joy. Education can be uncomfortable, unpredictable, and unsettling; it can lead to greater uncertainty and unhappiness. Drawing on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Simone Weil, Paulo Freire, (...) and others, Peter Roberts shows why these features of educational life need not be feared; to the contrary, they can be seen as a source of hope and human fulfilment. After years of negotiating an education system dominated by the language of competition, performance, and economic advancement, students and teachers often long for something different; they seek not just measurable success but also opportunities to ask searching questions of themselves and the world they encounter. Happiness, Hope, and Despair makes an important contribution toward meeting this need. It fosters a rethinking of the nature, purpose, and value of education, and opens up possibilities for further scholarly and professional inquiry. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of the history of the notion of essence in 20th century analytic philosophy, focusing on views held by influential analytic philosophers who discussed, or relied on essence or cognate notions in their works. It in particular covers Russell and Moore’s different approaches to essence before and after breaking with British idealism, the (pre- and post-)logical positivists’ critique of metaphysics and rejection of essence (Wittgenstein, Carnap, Schlick, Stebbing), the tendency to loosen the notion of logical necessity (...) to accommodate certain metaphysical truths in Wittgenstein and others, Quine’s logical rehabilitation of metaphysics and criticism of de re modality, the modal view of essence promoted by the development of quantified modal logic (C. I. Lewis, Barcan Marcus, Kripke) and direct reference theory (Barcan Marcus, Kripke, Putnam), and the emergence of the notion of metaphysical necessity (Kneale, Kripke), and finally Fine’s re-establishment of a Neo-Aristotelian, hyperintensional notion of essence in contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

The prophets Nathan (2 Samuel 12:1–15) and John the Baptist (Mark 6:16–28) had comparable tasks before them: to convince their respective kings about the wrongs of taking somebody else's wife and marrying her. Nathan succeeded, while John failed and furthermore lost his life. What made the difference? One possible explanation is that Nathan proceeded in two steps: (1) Tell an interesting, nonthreatening story that nevertheless makes the point at issue; (2) transfer that message to the case at hand. In contrast, (...) John used a direct approach, which raised apprehension, even fear (on the part of Herodias, the woman involved), and led to failure. That lesson has wider applications, as illustrated here for teaching the biblical Genesis narration. The other ingredient in this teaching is relational and contextual reasoning (RCR), the use of which is also indicated for other issues besides teaching Genesis. (shrink)

Philosophers often consider problems of free will and moral luck in isolation from one another, but both are about control and moral responsibility. One problem of free will concerns the difficult task of specifying the kind of control over our actions that is necessary and sufficient to act freely. One problem of moral luck refers to the puzzling task of explaining whether and how people can be morally responsible for actions permeated by factors beyond their control. This chapter explicates and (...) assesses skeptical, compatibilist, and libertarian approaches to moral luck. First, I argue that what makes the above problems of free will and moral luck distinct is largely their emphasis on different kinds of luck. Second, I describe and evaluate skeptical arguments from constitutive and circumstantial luck that it is impossible to act freely. Third, I explicate and assess various support and implication relationships between various kinds of compatibilism and libertarianism, on the one hand, and causal, constitutive, circumstantial, and resultant moral luck, on the other. (shrink)

In this essay I sketch some vices of virtue ethics, draw on inference about the philosophical source of the vices, and conclude with a recommendation concerning future efforts in moral theory construction. The source of the vices, I argue, lies in a mononomic or single-principle strategy within normative theory construction, a reductionist conceptual scheme which distorts certain integral aspects of our moral experience. My recommendation is that this strategy be abandoned, for the moral field is not unitary -- mononomic methods (...) are not the best tools for moral theorists. (shrink)