Showing papers in "Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement in 1994"

Value in Nature and the Nature of Value

Abstract: I offer myself as a nature guide, exploring for values. Many before us have got lost and we must look the world over. The unexamined life is not worth living; life in an unexamined world is not worthy living either. We miss too much of value.

Awe and Humility: Intrinsic Value in Nature. Beyond an Earthbound Environmental Ethics

Abstract: This paper will argue for a conception of intrinsic value which, it is hoped, will do justice to the following issues: (1) that Nature need not and should not be understood to refer only to what exists on this planet, Earth; (2) that an environmental ethics informed by features unique to Earth may be misleading and prove inadequate as technology increasingly threatens to invade and colonize other planets in the solar system; (3) that a comprehensive environmental ethics must encompass not only our attitude to Earth, but to other planets as well—in other words, it must not simply be an Earthbound but virtually an astronomically bounded ethics. What is unique about Earth? That it has water and an atmosphere which supports life. Its atmosphere preserves a constant 0·03% of carbon dioxide, 1·7 ppm of methane, 21% of oxygen, 79% of nitrogen, a surface temperature of 13°C. Water covers roughly two thirds of its surface. By contrast, planets like Venus and Mars which have no life and no water (at least today) have no methane either, but respectively 96·5% and 95% of carbon dioxide, 3·5% and 2·7% of nitrogen, a mere trace and 0·13% of oxygen, and surface temperatures of 459°C and -53°C (see Lovelock, 1988, p. 9).

The end of anthropocentrism

Abstract: Are human beings in some sense central to the cosmos? It used to seem obvious that they were. It seems less obvious now. But the idea is still powerful in our thinking, and it may be worth while asking just what it has meant.

Mental disorder, illness and biological disfunction

Abstract: L'A. examine la relation entre le desordre mental et le desordre physique, ainsi que la connexion de ces notions avec celle de maladie. Les arguments avances sont plus d'ordre philosophique qu'empirique et sont fondes sur de recentes analyses philosophiques de concepts tels que etat mental et but biologique

Emotion and Memory: The Second Cognitive Revolution

Abstract: During the last fifty years three major ways of defining a science of psychology have been proposed and tried out.

Rehabilitating Nature and Making Nature Habitable

Abstract: Can nature be reconstituted, recreated or rehabilitated? And would the goal of doing so be a desirable one? There again, is wild nature intrinsically valuable, or are parks, gardens and farms sometimes preferable or of greater value? This cluster of questions arises from recent debates about preservation, restoration, wilderness and sustainable development. In discussing them I hope to throw some light on both the concept and the value of nature, and in due course on the attitudes which people should have towards it, the policies which should guide their practice, and thus on the proper role of humanity with regard to the natural world. To begin with, we need a clear sense of ‘nature’, and thus to turn to John Stuart Mill's celebrated essay on that subject (Mill, 1874). Now when the possibility of nature being restored is at issue, ‘nature’ cannot be used in Mill's first sense, ‘all which is—the powers and properties of all things’. For in this sense there is no possibility of nature being destroyed or damaged, let alone reconstructed. Mill's second sense of ‘nature’, rather, is the relevant one: ‘what takes place without … the voluntary and intentional agency of man [sic]’. Nature (in this sense) can obviously be modified by human activity. Moreover a difficulty already emerges about the possibility of restoring it: how can anything be restored by human agency the essence of which is to be independent of human agency? This is a question to which we shall return.

Personal Identity and Psychiatric Illness

Abstract: L'A. decrit et met en opposition deux cas cliniques, inexplicables du point de vue philosophique, de demence et de manie benine, issus de la pratique psychiatrique

Personalistic Organicism: Paradox or Paradigm?

Abstract: Many environmental thinkers are torn in two opposing directions at once. For good reasons we are appalled by the damage that has been done to the earth by the ethos of heedless anthropocentric individualism, which has achieved its colossal feats of exploitation, encouraged to selfishness by its world view—of relation-free atoms—while chanting ‘reduction’ as its mantra. But also for good reasons we are repelled, at the other extreme, by environmentally correct images of mindless biocentric collectivisms in which precious personal values are overridden for the good of some healthy beehive ‘whole’.

Kant and the Moral Considerability of Non-Rational Beings

Abstract: Kant's ethics is widely viewed as inimical to environmental values, as arbitrary and morally impoverished, because, while exalting the value of human, rational, beings, it denies moral consideration to non-human, or non-rational, beings. In this paper I seek to show how, when specific statements of this general view are examined, they turn out to involve some significant inaccuracies or confusions. This will lead me to suggest that Kant might have more to offer to environmental ethics than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Dangerousness and Mental Disorder

Abstract: Unlike topics such as criminal responsibility, dangerousness has only recently begun to interest philosophically minded penologists. The most likely explanation is that until the middle of this century the periods for which people who had done serious harm to others were incarcerated in the UK so long that when they were released their age or condition or circumstances made them unlikely to repeat their crimes. It was only when pressure of resources—in plain terms overcrowded prisons and mental hospitals—forced the shortening of these periods that it became politically necessary to worry about the possible dangerousness of really substantial numbers of prisoners and patients who became eligible for release. The problem was not entirely new. A few lifers, for example, had been set free each year, under licences which lasted for the rest of their lives; and the Special Hospitals which housed the violent insane had discharged carefully selected inmates, also under supervision. But by the late 1960s the introduction of parole, the Mental Health Act and the abolition of capital punishment had greatly increased the number of cases in which the problem of dangerousness had to be faced, and difficult decisions had to be taken. The United States had had to recognise the problem much earlier, because parole had been an earlier development in their penitentiary systems. Their mental hospitals were slower to recognise it; but in the late 1960s the famous Baxstrom case awakened them to it.

Ecology and the Ethics of Environmental Restoration

Abstract: Some people think that nature has intrinsic value, that it has value in itself quite apart from its present and future economic, intellectual, recreational and aesthetic uses. Some people think that nature's intrinsic value grounds an obligation to preserve it and to minimise human interference with it. I agree. It is important, however, to try to say exactly why nature has intrinsic value, to go beyond merely stating some idiosyncratic attitude and to provide some justification of that attitude with which others might engage. Presumably there are properties that wild nature exemplifies in virtue of which it is intrinsically valued. Only when these are indicated is rational debate as to whether wild nature has intrinsic value possible. Only when these are indicated is it possible to begin to persuade dissenters to change their views. Indeed, unless one can at least begin to say what these properties are it is not clear that the attitude could have any meaningful content. While it is perhaps possible to value something without immediately understanding what it is about the thing that makes it valuable, the failure to come up with any candidate value-adding property after some reflection suggests that the initial value-judgment is vacuous. Williams puts the problem as follows: there are serious questions of how human answers can represent to us the value of things that are valued for reasons that go beyond human interests. […]

Environmental and Medical Bioethics in Late Modernity: Anthony Giddens, Genetic Engineering and the Post-Modern State

Abstract: L'A. tente d'expliquer les metaphores schematiques et les abstractions d'A. Giddens (« The Consequences of Modernity », 1990) en appliquant a l'ingenierie genetique sa caracterisation typologique de la modernite tardive. Ainsi, cherche-t-il non seulement a tester la theorie de la modernite de Giddens, mais aussi a eclairer une hermeneutique des relations sociales de l'ingenierie genetique moderne qui radicalisent la bioethique environnementale et medicale

Making Sense on the Boundaries: On Moving Between Philosophy and Psychotherapy

Abstract: The philosopher is the man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of the understanding before he can arrive at the notions of the sound human understanding. (Wittgenstein, 1967, no. 302)

Wild beasts and idle humours: legal insanity and the finding of fault

Abstract: L'A. fait une analyse globale, philosophique et juridique des diverses perceptions et explications de la folie en Grece antique et a Rome, durant la christianisation, le Moyen Age et les temps modernes

Integrity, boundary and the ecology of personal processes

Abstract: Some definitions I shall be employing a number of terms that have a variety of usages as in other contexts. The definitions I shall be using in this article are given below. Psyche By this I mean the field of the mind of a human being. It includes conscious and unconscious mental contents, and items which the self endorses and owns; but it also includes items which it does not own, and which are experienced as alien. Person This I understand as the centre or epicentre from which the various contents of the psyche appear to emerge, get organised, develop and change. There are many ways in which this happens, but I shall concentrate on two distinctive and complementary functions of the person in this paper: the individuating and the participative. The former crystallises out and separates subjects and objects from experiential life, while the latter unites and reconnects them. On this account a person is an achievement rather than something that is given; there can thus be both pre-personal states of the psyche, and also relatively well developed and relatively undeveloped persons. Personal integrity By the above definition persons are processes. The integrity of these processes can then be understood in terms of: (i) the well-connectedness of its parts and functions, (ii) their success in mediating an optimum relationship between self and environment.

The Idea of the Environment

Abstract: This is in part a reflection on issues raised by David Cooper in his paper entitled ‘The Idea of Environment’ (Cooper, 1992), a paper that I have an ambiguous attitude towards. On the one hand it has opened my eyes to a way of thinking about the environment, namely as a field of significance, but on the other hand it seems to be unfortunate in its tone of negative criticism of much of the thinking of deep environmentalists, and wrong in its dismissal of the idea that the environment as a whole should be a field of significance.

Mind and Madness: New Directions in the Philosophy of Psychiatry

Abstract: These are exciting times for philosophy and psychiatry. After drifting apart for most of this century, the two disciplines, if not yet fully reconciled, are suddenly at least on speaking terms. With hindsight we may wonder why they should have ignored each other for so long. As Anthony Quinton pointed out in a lecture to the Royal Institute of Philosophy a few years ago, it is remarkable that philosophers, in a sense the experts on rationality, should have had so little to say about the phenomena of ir rationality (Quinton, 1985, ch. 2). There have been partial exceptions, of course. Descartes and Kant both touched on madness; and there were, notably, important philosophical influences on the development of modern psychiatry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Zilboorg and Henry, 1941). Yet even John Locke, who was a doctor as well as philosopher, confined himself to a fairly superficial distinction between what we should now call mental illness and mental defect—those with, in Locke's view, respectively too many ideas and too few (Locke, 1960). The question that now arises is where do we go from here? Is this a brief conjunction of the two disciplines, a fin de siecle phenomenon, like that experienced at the end of the last century? Or is it the beginning of a more enduring relationship? Things could go either way, I believe. On the one hand, there are a number of factors, both practical and theoretical, which could work against the relationship.

Vices and the Self

Abstract: I am interested in those vices which appear on lists of ‘deadly sins’, not from any theological point of view but because of the insight revealed in their selection as being ‘death to the soul’, which I understand as ‘corruptive of the self’. ‘Corruption’ is here to be taken in a literal sense as ‘destruction or dissolution of the constitution of a thing which makes that thing what it is’ (OED). Such corruption is to be found in the structure of the will. Aquinas thought that vice consists in desire gone wrong because uncontrolled by reason. Perhaps what follows can be seen as an interpretation and filling out of this view.

Some Philosophical Assessments of Environmental Disobedience

Abstract: Since the late 1970s there has been within the world-wide environmental movement increasing dissatisfaction with moderate or reform environmentalism, and more radical tactics have been advocated and used to respond to the human destruction of nature. These range from typical kinds of political protest, such as rallies and marches, to environmental civil disobedience and the more militant environmental actions known as ‘monkey-wrenching’, ‘ecotage’, or ‘ecosabotage’. The use of these ‘ecotactics’ has led inevitably to controversy in the environmental movement itself and in public discussions of environmentalism in North America and elsewhere. The same cannot be said, however, about academic philosophy, where it is rare to find assessments of these actions or of their connections to the wealth of philosophical ideas in environmental ethics and ecophilosophy. At the same time there are many traditional philosophical theories that have implications for these kinds of behaviour even though the theories were constructed originally without examples of ecotactics in mind. In particular, theories about the nature and justifications of civil disobedience provide yardsticks by which some forms of environmental disobedience can be assessed, and I will turn to two widely known philosophical accounts, those of John Rawls and Carl Cohen, to consider how well they accomplish this task.

Highlights and Connections

Abstract: Given this chance to express my general reflections on our collection of papers, I shall highlight the themes that are of greatest importance to me and make connections between my own views and the views of the other authors (about half the total) who have chosen to address the same themes. This exercise in triangulation on the logical map created by the collection has been illuminating for me; I hope the following may serve to make some of the major features of our common terrain come into focus more clearly, thus underscoring which important issues concern many of us at present, despite our specific differences.

Multiple Personality and Computational Models

Abstract: Some readers may have seen the re-runs, on BBC-TV recently, of the ‘Face to Face’ interviews done by John Freeman in the 1960s. One of these was with the singer Adam Faith, then a startlingly beautiful young man with the grace to be amazed at being chosen to be sandwiched between Martin Luther King and (if I remember aright) J. K. Galbraith. The re-runs were accompanied, where possible, with a further interview with the same person. What I found almost as startling as his lost beauty was Faith's referring to himself-when-young in the third person. After watching the rerun interview, the now middle-aged man commented to Freeman, on several occasions, that ‘He said such-and-such’, ‘He told you so-and-so’, and the like.

Meaning and Mechanism in Psychotherapy and General Psychiatry

Abstract: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing (Pope) If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger (T. H. Huxley) On New year's Eve 1992 a man suffering from schizophrenia climbed into a lions' cage at the London Zoo and was badly mauled. This event provoked a full-scale moral panic among the media and government, the tragedy seeming to violate many of the comfortable myths about progress in psychiatry, echoing the impact of the civil war in former Yugoslavia which had shattered the hope of an era of unbroken European peace following the end of the cold war. Whatever we may wish in reality the lion does not lie down with the lamb. Daniel the visionary, the interpreter of dreams, the one who asserted that his God, the God of angels and saints with power over man and beasts would eventually endure, while all earthly kings were found wanting, emerged from the lions' den unscathed—but secular, psychiatric, suffering, decarcerated, visionless, late-twentieth-century man does not. In Daniel the vision and the reality, the soothsayer and the king, are kept separate. The story of the triumph of spiritual powers is perhaps a compensatory phantasy expressing the aspirations of an oppressed and displaced Jewish nation. In our society psychotherapists are cast in the role of visionaries, while psychiatry represents power and adaptation.