Naming and necessity

Conclusions and Recommendations, are particularly interesting in view of the controversies aroused by the Warnock Report. Many of the recommendations contained here are similar to Warnock's (for example, concerning the legitimacy of AID children, the need for a licensing authority to supervise the work ofAID and IVF centres, etc), but others are at odds with the corresponding Warnock recommendations. In general, the authors place higher value on the family as an institution than did the Warnock Committee and display a much livelier awareness of the possible social dangers of the new techniques. One weakness of the book is that since its authors are approaching these topics from the standpoint of social scientists, their recommendations for legislative action which surely must be based on properly ethical considerations, not merely sociological ones seem devoid of any satisfactory rational support. For example, they concede that experimentation on human embryos is an objectionable practice, since 'the material acting as the subject of the experimentation is a human being at the beginning of its individual development' (p 178); but the practical recommendation which they make concerning this practice is disappointingly feeble:

https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/12/3/165.full.pdf

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

The Right and the Good

The Language of Morals

This volume collects Davidson's seminal contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action. Its overarching thesis is that the ordinary concept of causality we employ to render physical processes intelligible should also be employed in describing and explaining human action. In the first of three subsections into which the papers are thematically organized, Davidson uses causality to give novel analyses of acting for a reason, of intending, weakness of will, and freedom of will. The second section provides the formal and ontological framework for those analyses. In particular, the logical form and attending ontology of action sentences and causal statements is explored. To uphold the analyses, Davidson urges us to accept the existence of nonrecurrent particulars, events, along with that of persons and other objects. The final section employs this ontology of events to provide an anti-reductionist answer to the mind/matter debate that Davidson labels 'anomalous monism'. Events enter causal relations regardless of how we describe them but can, for the sake of different explanatory purposes, be subsumed under mutually irreducible descriptions, claims Davidson. Events qualify as mental if caused and rationalized by reasons, but can be so described only if we subsume them under considerations that are not amenable to codification into strict laws. We abandon those considerations, collectively labelled the 'constitutive ideal of rationality', if we want to explain the physical occurrence of those very same events; in which case we have to describe them as governed by strict laws. The impossibility of intertranslating the two idioms by means of psychophysical laws blocks any analytically reductive relation between them. The mental and the physical would thus disintegrate were it not for causality, which is operative in both realms through a shared ontology of events. Essays on Actions and Events Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in In memory of Nancy Hirschberg I 2 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © in this collection Donald Davidson 2001 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1980 This edition first published 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-924626-2 (Hbk.) ISBN 0-19-924627-0 (Pbk.) In memory of Nancy Hirschberg Intention and Action

Essays on Actions and Events.

1. INTRODUCTION: Vojko Strahovnik: Challenging Moral Particularism 2. Brad Hooker: Moral Particularism and the Real World 3. Robert Audi: Ethical Generality and Moral Judgment 4. Mark Lance and Margaret Little: From Particularism to Defeasibility in Ethics 5. Pekka Vayrynen: Usable Moral Principles 6. Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge: Particularism and the Contingent A Priori 7. Jonathan Dancy: Are Basic Moral Facts both Contingent and A Priori? 8. Terry Horgan and MatjaA Potrc: Contextual Semantics and Particularist Normativity 9. Nenad MiA cevic: When the Plot Thickens: Dancy on Thick Concepts 10. David McNaughton and Piers Rawling: Holism about Value 11. Anthony W. Price: Particularism and Pleasure 12. David Bakhurst: Laughter and Moral Ambiguity: Particularist Reflections on the Ethical Dimensions of Humour REFERENCES & BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTRIBUTORS INDEX

Challenging Moral Particularism

The paper discusses the notion of defeasibility and focuses specifically on defeasible (moral and legal) norms. First, it delineates a robust notion of the phenomenon of defeasibility, which poses a serious problem for both moral and legal theory. It does this by laying out the conditions and desiderata that a model of defeasibility should be able to meet. It further focuses on a specific model of defeasibility that utilises the notion of normal conditions (normalcy) to expound the robust notion of defeasibility. It argues that this model fails in its attempt to do this, particularly since it presupposes further pertinent norms and we have reasons to doubt if these are defeasible. It thus does not allow defeasibility to go “all the way down” in the normative domain and limits it merely to a feature of some sort of mid-level norm. In conclusion, it draws lessons from this and positions defeasibility models within a more general pluralistic approach to norms.

Defeasibility, norms and exceptions: normalcy model

The problem of aesthetic principles and that of the nature of aesthetic reasons get confronted. If aesthetic reasons play an important role in our aesthetic evaluations and judgments, then both some general aesthetic principles and rules could support them (aesthetic generalism) or again their nature may be particularistic (aesthetic particularism). A recent argument in support of aesthetic generalism as proposed by Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar is presented and criticized for its misapprehension of particularism. Their position of irreversible aesthetic generalism is questioned. Aesthetic particularism is restated by the help of proposals by Jonathan Dancy’s version of moral particularism.

The Riddle of aesthetic principles

We argue, primarily by appeal to phenomenological considerations related to the experiential aspects of agency, that belief fixation is broadly agentive; although it is rarely (if ever) voluntary, nonetheless, it is phenomenologically agentive because of its significant phenomenological similarities to voluntary-agency experience. An important consequence is that epistemic rationality, as a central feature of belief fixation, is an agentive notion. This enables us to introduce and develop a distinction between core and ancillary epistemic virtues. Core epistemic virtues involve several inter-related kinds of epistemic rationality in belief fixation. Other “habits of mind” pertinent to belief fixation constitute ancillary epistemic virtues. Finally, we discuss the relationship between both kinds of virtues, offering a unified account of epistemic virtuousness.

Core and Ancillary Epistemic Virtues

The aim of the paper is to analyse the concept of moral perception. Moral perception gets characterized as a distinctive, non-inferential moral response to concrete situations. In order to relate moral perception with a suitable model of moral cognition the position labelled morphological rationalism is elaborated. Moral judgment follows a dynamical model of reasons, according to which reasons are situated in an agent’s structured morphological background, chromatically illuminating the judgment. The key claim is that such a model is particularly well-suited to accommodate moral perception. From such a perspective some practical implications are elaborated (disagreement, intercultural dialogues).

Vojko Strahovnik

Papers

Challenging Moral Particularism

Defeasibility, norms and exceptions: normalcy model

The Riddle of aesthetic principles

Core and Ancillary Epistemic Virtues

Moral Perception, Cognition, and Dialogue