Showing papers in "Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume in 1975"

How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina

Abstract: i. That men feel concern for the fate of others, that they have some interest, and a warm and benevolent one in what happens to at least some other men, may be simply a brute fact about men, though a happy one. By this I mean that we can conceive that men might have been different in this respect, and so it is possible for us to be puzzled by the fact that they are not different. In a situation where men did not feel concern

It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It

Abstract: There are some arguments used to justify people doing things, otherwise admitted to be wrong, which are puzzling. They are ‘ms that, while a certain act will be bad in its outcome, that it would be better if it were not performed at all, it makes only an insignificant difference, or even no difference all, if I am the person to do it. One such argument is that used by a scientist who takes a job developing means of chemical and biological warfare, and who admits that it would be better his country did not sponsor such research, but who says (correctly) “If I don’t do it, someone else will.” This type of argument also appears as an attempted justification of Britain selling arms to South Africa. If we accept this as a justification, it c hard to see what acts, however otherwise wicked, could not be defended in the same way. The job of hired assassin, or controller of the gas supply at Belsen, or chief torturer for the South African Police, will surely be filled by someone, so it seems to make no difference to the total outcome whether I accept or refuse such a job. When we think of these cases, most of us are probably reluctant to allow weight to this defence. Yet it is hard for those of us who think that moral choices between courses of action ought to be determined, either largely or entirely, by their different outcomes, to explain what is wrong with such a defence. “If I don’t do it, someone else will” is only one member of a family of arguments relating to the insignificance of a single person’s act or omission. It is necessary to distinguish between some of these related defences in order to examine them separately.

Three Concepts of Free Action

Abstract: There are many situations in which a person performs an action because he prefers it to any other among those he thinks are available to him, or because he is drawn more strongly to it than to any other, and yet is reluctant nonetheless to describe himself without qualification as having acted willingly. He may acknowledge that he did what in some sense he wanted to do, and that he understood well enough what he wanted and what he did. But at the same time he may think it pertinent and justifiable to dissociate himself in a way from his action – perhaps by saying that what he did was not something he really wanted to do, or that it was not something he really wanted to do. Situations of this sort fall into several distinct types. In situations of Type A, the person's feeling that he acted unwillingly derives from the fact that the external circumstances under which he acted were, as he perceived them, discordant with his desires. It is nearly always possible, of course, for a person to imagine being in a situation that he would like better than the one he is actually in. There is, however, a substantial difference – often easy enough to discern, though difficult to explicate precisely – between recognizing that a state of affairs is less than ideal and being actively discontented by it or resistant to it.

The Philosophical Significance of Intensional Logic

Abstract: Why and how is intensional logic important for philosophy? An adequate answer to this question would require a book. I will here consider some related problems which we must solve before we can begin to understand what is involved in any such answer. They are (i) What is intensional logic ? and (ii) What is the relation between intensional logic and the extensional logics with which most of us are so much more familiar. I will dwell on a particular aspect of the second problem in some detail. The only coherent formulations of the semantics for intensional logic which-to my knowledge at least-are available at the present time take the form of extensional theories which compensate for the lack of intensionality of their underlying logic by referring explicitly to possible worlds. This raises two further questions: (i) Can such a semantic theory ever be adequate? and (ii) Would this mean that intensional logic is reducible without remainder to extensional logic. There will be no room to discuss the last of these two. But I will have a number of things to say about the first.