Is doing nothing sometimes as bad as doing something bad? In this or some less naive form the question I address in this paper is an old one that has been asked not only by philosophers and religious thinkers but also by ordinary people in their more reflective moments. We have recently seen its relevance to such issues as abortion, euthanasia, and the legitimate conduct of war. Active euthanasia is distinguished from passive, aiming to kill from killing as an unintended effect of one's aims, bringing about harm from letting it happen. The Catholic doctrine of the double effect endorses the moral distinction between what one positively does and what one allows to occur.

A puzzling feature of Spinoza's discussion of the good is that it takes place on two different levels whose compatibility seems uncertain. He advances a view of the nature of ascriptions of “good” to certain individual things, but he also devotes a large part of the Ethics to recommending a particular conception of the good person. The first theory appears to undermine the force of the second. For Spinoza's view of ascriptions of “good” to any objects apparently leads in the direction of subjectivism; what is good from one person's viewpoint may be bad for another's, and no viewpoint is privileged. Yet a subjectivist view of ascriptions of good would mix poorly with Spinoza's own presentation of a standard for human conduct; he himself voices a view of human good which he takes to be more than just another sound in the chorus of ethical opinions. Professor E.M. Curley expresses concern with such a difficulty in his recent article “Spinoza's Moral Philosophy: “

Most contemporary action theorists accept – or at least find plausible – a belief condition on intention (especially on intention in action) and a knowledge condition on intentional action. The belief condition says that I can only intend to ɸ if I believe that I will ɸ or am ɸ-ing, and the knowledge condition says that I am only intentionally ɸ-ing if I know that I am ɸ-ing. The belief condition in intention and the knowledge condition in action go hand in hand. After all, if intending implies belief, and if ɸ-ing intentionally implies intending to ɸ, then in ɸ-ing, I intend to be ɸ-ing, and, by the belief condition, I believe that I am ɸ-ing, and if this belief is justified, and we are not in a Gettier situation, etc., then, I will also satisfy the knowledge condition. Moreover, the claim that when intentions properly result in action, the corresponding belief constitutes knowledge is a relatively safe assumption, at least as an assumption about what it is generally the case.

Philosophy begins in wonder, or astonishment. We start out by wondering about problems that are ‘there,’ ready at hand for us as human beings (ta procheira). The natural response is flight from ignorance. Ignorance is simply the privation of knowledge, or understanding, and we have knowledge most of all when we understand first causes and principles. Hence it is part of our nature as human beings to desire to know the causes and principles of things.

The first causes and principles are the most knowable, and the other (knowable) things are known through these causes. Our knowledge is systematic, and we are systematic understanders. Some things we understand through themselves. The rest we understand by systematically relating it to what is known through itself. Since by nature we desire to know, and since we do succeed in knowing, it follows that we are by nature systematic understanders.

Molecular biology has as its primary objective the elucidation of the coupling between genotype and phenotype. This goal has so far been pursued within a neoDarwinian theoretical framework which is relatively limited. Within this framework we can indeed understand remarkably well the mechanisms of replication and expression of genes and the means by which replication and expression are regulated in cells; we know how genotype determines phenotype at the molecular level, in single cells. We are also close to an understanding of the relationship between genes and development in muticellular animals and plants.

It is even possible to write philosophically on ethics and nuclear issues? In spite of the growing literature which seeks to apply ethical reasoning to nuclear issues doubts run deep here. They reflect more than hesitation between consequentialist and action-based conceptions of ethical reasoning, or over paradoxes of deterrence that can be generated by mixing these. We may even doubt whether nuclear arms and dangers either can or should be treated as ‘problems’ for ethical analysis. Won't methods that pass muster for diagnosing and discussing lesser, more local crises fail here, distract from other (perhaps more ‘realistic’) responses, and even risk further dangers? Perhaps philosophical inquiry is not only irrelevant, because it cannot help solve nuclear ‘problems,’ but also impossible because we cannot convincingly identify the deepest ethical difficulties, the real constraints on their solution, or the most promising agents of change.

The announced project of the Meditations, it is usually supposed, is to get rid of all error by rejecting everything that might be false, thus retaining only what is certainly true; the next step is to acquire further certainly true beliefs by valid inference from that foundation.

Professor Clark's splendid essay represents a step forward from which there should be no retreat. Our de facto moral cognition involves a complex and evolving interplay between, on the one hand, the non discursive cognitive mechanisms of the biological brain, and, on the other, the often highly discursive extra-personal “scaffolding” that structures the social world in which our brains are normally situated, a world that has been, to a large extent, created by our own moral and political activity. That interplay extends the reach and elevates the quality of the original nondiscursive cognition, and thus any adequate account of moral cognition must address both of these contributing dimensions. An account that focuses only on brain mechanisms will be missing something vital.

Why is it that philosophers find it so hard to come to agreement? Many disputes that have gone on for centuries or even millennia are still unresolved, even though there has been increased conceptual sophistication on the part of the contending parties. Consider, for example, the question of free will, where libertarians still contest the field with determinists and compatibilists (who need not deny quantum mechanical indeterminism at the micro level).

Eleonore Stump argues in her article in this volume that Aquinas’s theory of knowledge is not classical foundationalism, as it has sometimes seemed to be, but, instead, a version of reliabilism. I'm convinced that her thesis is important and well-supported, and it has led me to begin a re-examination of one aspect of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge from the new viewpoint Stump’s work provides. I think the results tend to confirm her account while revealing further details of Aquinas’s reliabilism.

My topic is not reliabilism itself. Instead, I am focusing on Aquinas’s account of the reliability of the fundamental operations of the two human cognitive faculties, sense and intellect. Accounts of cognitive reliability have a place in most theories about the justification of belief, of course, and so they are found in more than one sort of epistemology; but reliabilism might be said to need them most.

This paper argues that exploitation is a central and non-redundant concept in a Marxian understanding of capitalism. This finding runs counter to John Roemer’s conclusion in his critical reexamination of exploitation. For a static setting with perfectly competitive markets, Roemer shows that exploitation is a property of agents which derives from unequal wealth endowments, that is, from differential ownership of productive assets (DOPA), not a social relation between capitalists and workers. Further, he shows that DOPA suffices in this setting to generate core phenomena in Marxian theory-accumulation, domination, alienation, and inequality-with no reference to an independent notion of exploitation. Roemer concludes that DOPA is the central analytical category in Marxian theory, and exploitation a redundant, indeed incorrect, concept therein. A direct implication is that distributive justice should be Marxism’s central ethical concern. The basis for Roemer’s sweeping conclusion is that his model is general, incorporating no special institutional assumptions and abstracting from any impediments to market equilibria. That is, his conclusion rests on an ahistorical, timeless economic model.

A good deal of political theory over the last fifteen years or so has been shaped by the realization that one cannot, and ought not, consider the distribution of resources within a country in isolation from the distribution of resources between countries. Thus, thinkers such as Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge advocate extensive global distributive policies; others, such as Charles Jones and David Miller, explicitly reject the view that egalitarian principles of justice should apply globally and claim that national communities have only duties to help other countries be viable economically and meet the basic needs of their members. In the global justice debate, pretty much all parties acknowledge that we have obligations of distributive justice to for-eigners. The question is how strong those obligations are, and in particular whether national boundaries can make any difference to the distribution of resources between members of different countries.

Reid defended common sense against scepticism by appeal to the claim that our faculties should be considered trustworthy until some argument proves them to be untrustworthy. He believed, of course, that no such argument would be forthcoming. In this paper, we shall investigate Reid's defense of the faculty of perception and the evidence of the senses by analogy with the faculty of language and the evidence of testimony. Reid argued that the evidence of testimony should be trusted unless there is reason to think it untrustworthy and by analogy, that the evidence of the senses should be trusted unless there is reason to think it untrustworthy. He admitted the fallibility of such evidence but contended that such fallibility is characteristic of all our faculties. Moreover, and perhaps most important, Reid developed a psychological theory of the faculties of perception and language that showed the analogy between these two faculties to be very exact indeed.

In the fourth book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke hints that he could explain how God may have created matter exnihilo, but refrains from doing so. Leibniz, when he came upon this passage, pricked up his ears. There ensued a sequence of personal events which are not without charm and piquancy, and a sequence of philosophical events which are of some interest. In this paper we tell the tale.

Locke has been discussing the view that the creation of matter out of nothing is so inconceivable — it is so utterly impossible to think of how it might be done — that not even omnipotence could bring off such a feat, and matter must therefore be co-eternal with God.

Frege taught us to strictly distinguish between the logical and the psychological. This doctrine has deeply influenced the analytic tradition in the philosophy of mind, language and logic. And it was praised, of course, by Wittgenstein, early and late. On closer inspection, however, the way in which Frege frames his anti-psychologism opens a crack in his system that appears in several places. I want to suggest that Wittgenstein's so called ‘rule-following considerations” address this difficulty and are intended to show that the ‘crack’ eventually brings down the whole edifice and with it this way of framing the celebrated distinction between the logical and the psychological. The investigation of how the rule-following paradox arises within Frege sheds, I think, light on the systematic difficulty and brings out the fact that the solutions that have been proposed in the literature don't get to the root of the problem.

For most philosophers of psychology and cognitive science, inquiry into human cognitive activity begins at the level of intrapersonal processes. A central question is whether these processes are sufficiently autonomous from more basic neurophysiological processes to be investigated in their own terms, or whether all explanations must be in neurophysiological terms. Some philosophers have insisted on the relative autonomy of the cognitive level. One currently quite popular view, eliminative materialism, however, holds that the explanations that have been advanced at the intrapersonal cognitive level are misguided, and must be replaced by accounts developed from an understanding of the underlying neurophysiological processes.

There is a rich philosophical literature on the value of equality: on whether and why it matters, what its “currency” ought to be, and whether it should be balanced against other important values, such as freedom, or conceptualized in terms of equal access to them. Most of this literature is a contribution to debates about distributive justice: it is concerned with how we should understand equality when our aim is to arrive at general principles of justice that could guide social or political authorities in distributing goods under their control. But there is also a different context in which we can, and do, ask about equality. Sometimes, when we ask whether someone has been treated equally, our aim is to assess whether they have faced discrimination. This is, of course, what courts and human rights tribunals do when interpreting constitutional or statutory equality rights – for these rights are usually understood not as general rights to equal treatment in the distribution of social goods, but rather as rights not to be discriminated against on the basis of a select number of prohibited grounds.

There are nationalisms and nationalisms, and as nationalisms vary from barbarous and murderous to benign and, all things considered, perhaps desirable, so theories of nationalism vary from irrational or turgid metaphysical accounts to reasonable and carefully articulated and argued theories of nationalism. André Van de Putte has well described some of the former (without at all falling into that category himself) while David Miller, Yael Tamir, Geneviève Nootens, Ross Poole, and Robert X. Ware have carefully argued for some modest forms of nationalism, sometimes explicitly and sometimes only by implication. But there are also, as the reader will have seen, forcefully argued and systematic theories setting themselves against even the most sophisticated and plausible defences of nationalism. The articles of Harry Brighouse, Omar Dahbour, and Andrew Levine fall explicitly into that category and, we would argue, so does Allen Buchanan's carefully wrought article, though implicitly and by implication but not by programmatic intent.

Is amnesia the mother of discontinuity? Perhaps surprisingly, amnesia is perfectly compatible with psychological continuity. Think, for example, of David Wiggins’ version of Locke. Wiggins first describes a relation C of strong co-consciousness which gives continuity ‘between person Ptj and person Qtk such that, for some sufficiency of things actually done, witnessed, experienced, … at any time by Ptj, Qtk should later have sufficient real or apparent recollection of then doing, witnessing, experiencing, … them.’ Wiggins continues:

The interpretation of the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill has been a matter of controversy at least since J.O. Urmson published his well known paper over twenty-five years ago. Urmson attributed to Mill a form of “rule-utilitarianism”, contrasting his reading with the “received view” on which Mill held a form of “act-utilitarianism”. Since then, the interpretive problem has typically been seen to be that of determining which of these two types of theory should be attributed to Mill, or, at least of determining whether Mill was a “rule-utilitarian”. However, as the distinction is typically made, it is possible to have a utilitarian theory which is neither an act- nor a rule-utilitarian theory (nor a form of “utilitarian generalization“). 1n particular, as I will attemptto show, Mill's theory is of neither type but is an example of a sophisticated type of utilitarianism which we might call “iterated-utilitarianism”, for reasons which will become clear in what follows.