The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring long?term storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply (...) to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights?going?out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. (shrink)

An Adequate theory of meaning and truth is semantically important. Such a theory necessarily includes in its analysis nonentities, items that do not exist. So what is semantically, and hence logically, important is bound to include nonentities. In virtue of the modifier ‘semantically“, the first premiss is analytic, and it is comparatively uncontroversial. By contrast the second premise of the syllogism, which we want to stick to, is decidedly controversial. So too is the thesis – which implies the inadequacy of (...) classical logical theories – that there are a great many natural language statements, statements an adequate theory should be able to treat of, which cannot be analysed logically, and semantically, without the equivalent of an appeal to nonentities. Defence of the thesis has been somewhat piecemeal, taking the form that all the theories so far offered which try to dispense with nonentities break down or run into insuperable difficulties, difficulties which are readily surmounted given appropriate talk about nonentities. In what follows we shall outline more general sorts of argument for the thesis, designed to show that no theory which dispenses with nonentities as objects of discourse can do justice to the data. (shrink)

This second volume continues Richard Routley’s explorations of an improved Meinongian account of non-referring and intensional discourse. It focuses on the essays 2 through 7 of the original monograph, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, following on from the material of the first volume and explores its implications of the Noneist position. It begins with a further development of noneism in the direction of an ontologically neutral chronological logic and associated metaphysical issues concerning existence and change. What follows includes: a detailed (...) response to Quine’s On What There Is; a defense against further objections to noneism; a detailed account of Meinong’s own position; arguments in favour of noneism from common-sense; and a noneist analysis of fictional discourse. We present these essays separately and provide additional scholarly commentaries from a range of philosophers including Fred Kroon, Maria Elisabeth Reicher-Marek and a previously unpublished commentary on noneism by J.J.C. Smart. (shrink)

This second volume continues Richard Routley’s explorations of an improved Meinongian account of non-referring and intensional discourse. It focuses on the essays 2 through 7 of the original monograph, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, following on from the material of the first volume and explores its implications of the Noneist position. It begins with a further development of noneism in the direction of an ontologically neutral chronological logic and associated metaphysical issues concerning existence and change. What follows includes: a detailed (...) response to Quine’s On What There Is; a defense against further objections to noneism; a detailed account of Meinong’s own position; arguments in favour of noneism from common-sense; and a noneist analysis of fictional discourse. We present these essays separately and provide additional scholarly commentaries from a range of philosophers including Fred Kroon, Maria Elisabeth Reicher-Marek and a previously unpublished commentary on noneism by J.J.C. Smart. (shrink)

This third volume continues Richard Routley's explorations of an improved Meinongian account of non-referring and intensional discourse. It focuses on the essays 8 to 12 of the original monograph, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, following on from the material of the first two volumes and further explores aspects and implications of the Noneist position. It begins with a discussion of the value of nonexistent objects championed by noneism, especially as regards theories of perception, universals, value theory and a commonsense account (...) of belief. It continues with: a detailed analysis of what it means to exist; the importance of nonexistent objects to adequate accounts of mathematics and the theoretical sciences; and an account of noneisms' distinctiveness from other accounts of nonexistent objects. These essays are supplemented with scholarly essays from Naoya Fujikawa, and Maureen Eckert and Charlie Donahue. (shrink)

Donald C. Lee’s “On the Marxian View of the Relationship between Man and Nature” is one of a number of recent attempts to interpret Marxian doctrine in an environmentally attractive way. I argue that Lee does not really succeed, that many of the assumptions of the Marxian theory which Lee still retains are in conflict with a satisfactory environmental ethic and with the current process of revision of theconventional ethic. The central doctrine Lee expounds, the superficially attractive Marxian thesis of (...) unity between man and nature, is attractive only because the real basis of this “unity”-the transformation of nature into a human expression-is not spelled out. Such unity-through-transformation is incompatible with retention and respect for untransformed nature, i.e., wilderness. The Marxian position Lee expoundsis environmentally unsatisfactory in many other ways also: it continues to laud the “objectification” of nature, retains a highly homocentric view of man’s relation to nature, and encourages human hubris. Other specific elements of the position Lee presents which are in conflict with environmentalism are the doctrine of the historical necessity of the capitalist stage, with its acquiescence in the destructive technology of advanced capitalism, the chauvinistic Marxian material on animals appealed to by Lee, and the treatment of liberation as the maximization of leisure and the minimization of bread labor. To obtain an environmentally sound noncapitalist society it is necessary to discard many central elements of Marxian doctrine and to move beyond Marx. (shrink)

Donald C. Lee’s “On the Marxian View of the Relationship between Man and Nature” is one of a number of recent attempts to interpret Marxian doctrine in an environmentally attractive way. I argue that Lee does not really succeed, that many of the assumptions of the Marxian theory which Lee still retains are in conflict with a satisfactory environmental ethic and with the current process of revision of theconventional ethic. The central doctrine Lee expounds, the superficially attractive Marxian thesis of (...) unity between man and nature, is attractive only because the real basis of this “unity”-the transformation of nature into a human expression-is not spelled out. Such unity-through-transformation is incompatible with retention and respect for untransformed nature, i.e., wilderness. The Marxian position Lee expoundsis environmentally unsatisfactory in many other ways also: it continues to laud the “objectification” of nature, retains a highly homocentric view of man’s relation to nature, and encourages human hubris. Other specific elements of the position Lee presents which are in conflict with environmentalism are the doctrine of the historical necessity of the capitalist stage, with its acquiescence in the destructive technology of advanced capitalism, the chauvinistic Marxian material on animals appealed to by Lee, and the treatment of liberation as the maximization of leisure and the minimization of bread labor. To obtain an environmentally sound noncapitalist society it is necessary to discard many central elements of Marxian doctrine and to move beyond Marx. (shrink)