According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power as Wille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says, ‘Nietzsche’s authority, from which this [Foucault’s] utterly unsociological concept of power is borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage.’ Charles Taylor finds in Nietzsche ‘a doctrine which Foucault seems to have made his own,’ viz., that ‘there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life.

Contractarians view justice (or, more ambitiously, all of morality) as being defined by a contract made by rational individuals. No one supposes that this contract is actual, and the fact that it is merely hypothetical raises a number of questions both about the assumptions under which it would be actual and about the force of hypothetical agreement that is contingent on these assumptions.

Particular contractarian theories must specify the circumstances of the agreement and the endowments, beliefs, desires, and degree and type of rationality of the agents. How these issues are settled determines the force of the hypothetical agreement. The fact that ignorant people who desired only universal suffering would, under duress, agree to a certain principle gives us no reason to believe the principle is a correct moral principle or to think it rational to accept or act on it: some counterfactual assumptions undermine entirely the moral force of hypothetical agreement. On the other hand, to take people just as they are, with their current beliefs, desires, endowments, and all, is to endorse their ignorance and mistakes as well as any previous injustice that affects their bargaining power.

A common strategy unites much that philosophers have written about the virtues. The strategy can be traced back at least to Aristotle, who suggested that human beings have a characteristic function or activity (rational activity of soul), and that the virtues are traits of character which enable humans to perform this kind of activity excellently or well. The defining feature of this approach is that it treats the virtues as functional concepts, to be both identified and justified by reference to some independent goal or end which they enable people to attain (human flourishing, rational perfection, participation in practices, ‘narrative unity’ in a life). Some recent philosophers seem to have hoped that by following this perfectionist strategy, we might attain a more convincing account of our moral practices than rule-based theories of ethics have been able to provide.

My topic is Alvin Plantinga’s ’solution’ to one of the many forms that the problem of evil takes: the modal abstract form. This form of the problem is abstract in that it does not deal with the amounts or kinds of evil which exist, but only with the fact that there is some evil or other. And it is modal in that it concerns the compossibility of the following propositions, not any evidential relation between them:

The moral problem of abortion seemed simple to describe, if not resolve. There was consensus that at least some methods of birth control—avoiding or preventing the development of a conceptus—were not wrong. There was consensus that it was wrong to kill another person like ourselves. The problem seemed to be this: when in the development toward adult life does it become wrong to prevent or terminate that development? The conservatives said, ‘from conception.’ Liberals said that it became wrong after viability, or after birth, or after early infancy. Some moderate liberals have argued that there is an intermediate stage where stopping the development of a fetus is wrong—but not the same as killing a person—because of the fetus’s similarity to or potential to become a person. While all agree on the moral principle that it is wrong to kill another person, there has been little progress toward agreement on how this principle applies to the fetus.

Whatever disagreements analysts of indexical expressions may have, there is nearly universal agreement that the referents of utterances of ‘I,’ ‘here,’ and ‘now’ are, respectively, the utterer, the place of utterance, and the time of utterance. This seems to lead to the result that utterances of ‘I am here now’ are always true (or, if you like, true at the time of utterance). While they do not express necessary truths — no one is essentially at any particular place at any particular time — it looks like they should necessarily express truths; in this, ‘I am here now’ seems to resemble ‘I exist’. And we are sometimes aware of this sort of vacuity in these utterances; the theoretical result meshes well with our everyday experience.