Showing papers in "Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume in 1972"

Voluntary Obligations and Normative Powers

Abstract: Civil lawyers at least since the time of Gaius have been in the habit of taking 'the law of obligations' as a separate branch of study; within obligations, the practice of distinguishing 'voluntary obligations' from what Lord Stair called 'obediential obligations' is also fairly venerable. Voluntary obligations are of course those which arise from contracts and promises, obediential include, e.g., those whose incidence is determined by the law of delict. The point of the distinction is clear enough; I can choose whether or not to buy your house, and only if I choose to do so will I incur an obligation to pay you the price. If on the other hand I wilfully burn your house down, I am in breach of an obligation which applies to me whether I like it or not; and the existence of my consequential obligation to compensate you is equally independent of my choice. In the seventeenth century, at least, legal theorists such as Grotius, Pufendorf and Stair treated it as a very significant question to inquire into the nature and basis of voluntary obligation-how can the will obligate itself? Sometimes such disputes had significant practical results. For example, according to Grotius, it is of the essence of promises that they cannot bind without acceptance, whereas Stair took the opposite view. Grotius' view prevailed in most continental systems, but in relation for example to the rights of third parties under contracts, Stair's view is the basis of the modern Scots law.

Varieties of Necessity

Abstract: Terms like "necessary", "possible" and "impossible", that is, the terms commonly called "modal", are, we shall find, put to three entirely disparate types of use within human thought and speech. These I am going to call respectively, Factual, Judgmental and Volitional. The main aim of this paper is to vindicate the Factual and quasi-physical notion of necessity, and rescue it from confusion with Judgmental or quasi-epistemological notions. The clue to the differences between the three types of use here concerned, and to the three utterly different types of meaning involved in the respective cases, lies, I believe, in the way in which these three types of use connect up, each of them with a different kind of "Why"-question.

Reasons for Action and Desires

Abstract: In this paper I want to examine the connexion between desires and reasons for acting, and to make some observations of a negative kind about the concept of a reason for an action. It has been generally recognised that the concept of a reason for an action stands at the point of intersection, so to speak, between the theory of the explanation of actions and the theory of their justification. I shall be concerned solely with what it is for something to count as a reason for acting, and not with the analysis of what it is for something to constitute the reason why something was done. Plainly, we can consider whether R was a reason for a certain specified action whether it was performed or not, and in general we can settle whether someone had a reason for acting in a certain way irrespective of whether, if the person did act in that way, that was his reason for doing so-that was why he did so. So it does seem to be possible to enquire into what makes a consideration count as a reason for acting without going into the problems concerning reasons as explanations of action, whether such explanations are a form of causal explanation, and so on. Indeed, it looks as if giving an account of what it is for a reason to be the reason for which something was done presupposes an account of what it is for a consideration to be a reason at all. So an account

The Euthyphro Dilemma

Abstract: but sometimes searching arguments of the Euthyphro, and in the obviously parallel passage in Republic 378(a) to 383(c). Both the early dialogue and the passage in the Republic concerning the censorship of what may legitimately be said concerning the gods involve several metaphysical assumptions. Thus, in the passage in the Republic the representation of divine metamorphosis is ruled out as a self-contradiction. God, if he exists, is perfect in beauty and in every excellence; he is complete, self-sufficient, requiring nothing, no quality to be added to adorn his finished splendour, in nothing deficient, a being therefore whose nature is seen to be incompatible with change. The argument is a characteristic piece of high metaphysical speculation, drawing out the consequences of accepting God as necessarily perfect and complete in himself. That God is perfect and complete in himself is nowhere argued by Plato; it is taken for granted, and indeed he claims that in the world of metaphysical theology the student is more at home intellectually

Art and Politics

Abstract: Not, however, because they fail to give rise to philosophical problems, but rather because, no sooner do we identify philosophical problems in these areas than they seem to die on us, like streams in the desert. One often suggested reason for this can be restated briefly, as follows. Philosophical issues are always, in some sense, issues of principle. But in the fields of art and of politics all proposed principles-whether of identification, demarcation or assessment-seem to require so much, indeed such unending qualification, that any attempt to systematise them is evidently doomed to failure. This may be part of the explanation, but not, I now think, an important part of it. The main cause of the unsatisfactory state of political philosophy and philosophical aesthetics is the one-sided, almost exclusively epistemo-centred approach which philosophers adopt towards them. Not all philosophers in these fields have lacked penetration and logical sensitivity. What they have much more obviously lacked is a sense of the many-sidedness, or the contextual complexity, of the topics in question. To give some examples. Common to, and central to, both Kant's and Wittgenstein's contributions to aesthetics, is the question: are aesthetic judgments genuine judgments in the sense of being rule-governed-in contrast to mere expressions or affirmations of personal likes and dislikes ? Both philosophers begin by pointing to certain usually recognised expectations and ways of speaking which suggest that aesthetic judgments are intended to be accepted as correct: yet both acknowledge that, in