Showing papers in "Analysis in 1976"

On frustration of the majority by fulfilment of the majority's will

Abstract: Here we have eleven voters, A-K, voting on eleven questions. Seven of them, A-G, vote in the minority in a majority of the decisions: A-F in seven out of the eleven cases, G in six. The majority is always 6-5. These figures can of course be varied. If we imagine an ideal democracy with a whole population voting directly on all questions, there will obviously be room for much variation in results over a long period, all of which however conform to the description: the majority votes in the minority in a majority of cases. This fact, I thought when I stumbled on it, must be familiar to voting experts. But I have not found it remarked upon. It sometimes startles people, eliciting the reaction: 'But doesn't this make nonsense of democracy?' In the West, and perhaps in the whole world where Western forms of education prevail, men are brought up in a conviction of the unique fairness of democracy. It is even conceived to be as it were the sole legitimate form of government. 'It's not democratic' is a condemnation. Pope Pius XII once spoke in a Christmas allocution of the right of democracies to defend themselves by whatever means they might think necessary. One could hardly have better proof of the pervasiveness of

Absolute principles and double effect

Abstract: MORALISTS have traditionally appealed to the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) in order to maintain certain absolute moral prohibitions, such as that against the intentional killing of human beings, in the face of situations which seem to reduce them to absurdity or incoherence. Mr Hanink ('Some Light on Double Effect', ANALYSIS 35.5, 147-15 ) believes that Mr Geddes' version of the PDE ('On the Intrinsic Wrongness of Killing Innocent People', ANALYSIS 333., 93-97) can, when expanded and modified, serve this purpose and be defended against my criticism that it generates sophistical and unacceptable conclusions and reduces both the PDE and the absolute prohibitions it is meant to support to vacuity ('Intentionally Killing the Innocent', ANALYSIS 34-1, 16-19). On Hanink's account (p. 15 o), we may perform a single act with both an intended good and a foreseen bad effect, so long as the act itself, apart from its bad effect, is legitimate; the bad effect is not intended, as an end or as a means; and the good effect outweighs the bad. These conditions are satisfied by a craniotomy performed to save the mother's life, and by the setting of an explosive charge under the man who is blocking the only exit from a flooding cave. But in each of the other four cases which I discussed-the cannibalistic killing of the cabin-boy; the use of a man's body for transplant surgery; Gerstein's co-operation with the S.S.; and the execution of a scapegoat-at least one condition is not satisfied: the act itself may be an illegitimate assault, apart from its fatal outcome; the good effect may not outweigh the bad; or the act which has the bad effect is not itself the act which has the justifying good effect but a means to it, so that we cannot outweigh the bad effect by any good effect of the same act.

Logical subtraction and the analysis of action

Abstract: Critique des idees de J. L. Hudson sur la soustraction ("Logical Subtraction", ibid., 1975, 35, n4, 130-5) et de leur application a l'action (comparaison avec D.M. Armstrong), a propos de la question posee par Wittgenstein: "Que reste-t-il si je soustrais le fait que mon bras s'eleve du fait que je leve le bras?".

Tenses and Meaning Change

Abstract: Maintenir que des repliques non simultanees de phrases temporelles different dans leur sens tandis que des repliques non simultanees de phrases non temporelles ne differeraient pas est inexact. C'est un fait brut du langage.

Chandler on the contingently possible

Abstract: A propos de S. Chandler "Plantinga and the Contingently Possible" (ibid., 36.2) sur le possible contingent et l'identification des choses a travers les divers mondes possibles inspiree d'une identification dans le temps.

Names, indices and individuals

Abstract: N this paper I will extend Geach's account of an 'act of naming',' which I will suggest can help to elucidate Kripke's account of names as rigid designators.- The importance of acts of naming for our understanding of names is that it is through such acts that names acquire the elusive indexical character which Russell, for example, was able to locate only in the case of demonstratives; and which led him to an acquaintance theory of reference.3 Russell seems ultimately to have been driven to the conclusion that the only items to which one can directly refer are objects of one's immediate experience-sense data. This conclusion, I suggest, is untenable; and Kripke's account of names as genuine indices -which I will argue for by comparing it with the account of names proposed by Peirce4-provides an effective way of avoiding Russell's conclusion. It is through the use of names in acts of naming that these expressions come to designate rigidly. I shall go on to suggest that the notion of a rigid designator is helpful in turn for coming to grips with the basic notion of an individual.