It is not uncommon for contemporary moral philosophers to appeal, in support or in criticism of one moral theory or another, to supposed features of or facts about persons. Rawls, for example, maintains that ‘utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons,’ and that since ‘the correct regulative principle for anything depends on the nature of that thing,’ we should not expect utilitarianism to be the correct regulative scheme for human beings. Nozick, in a similar spirit, suggests that the deontological restrictions he calls ‘side constraints’ are desirable components of a moral conception because, without them, a moral scheme is unable to ‘sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that … [each individual] is a separate person,’ unable to take account of the fact that, with respect to each individual, ‘his is the only life he has.’ And Williams, to cite still another example, suggests that utilitarianism is a defective moral theory because ‘it cannot coherently describe the relations between a man's projects and his actions.'

One of the aims of Ronald Dworkin's recent book, Taking Rights Seriously, is to provide a theory of natural rights. His theory is novel and interesting in two respects. First, Dworkin argues that the commonly held belief that liberty and equality are fundamentally opposed to one another is false. Rights to various liberties are themselves derived from a form of a right to equality — what Dworkin calls the right to equal concern and respect. Second, Dworkin thinks that the notion of a general right to liberty, which can be opposed to egalitarian claims, is incoherent.

Answering the question, ‘Who is a rational agent?’ is of utmost importance for all moral theories which conceive of the rational agent as their basic moral unit (I call these theories ‘the rational theories of morality’). Surprisingly enough, these theories do not pay much attention to this question, and assume, without offering detailed discussions, certain characterizations of the rational agent. In this paper, I examine what kind of attribute ‘rational’ is. In light of this examination I claim that the rational moral theories are based on a mistaken characterization of the rational agent.

It is obvious that identical events must occur at the same time. This follows simply from the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals and from the fact that events have temporal features among which are those which attribute to events times of occurrence. Thus,

• (1) (x) (y) (x is an event & y is an event ﬤ (x=y ﬤ (t) (x occurs at t ≡ y occurs at t))).

But from the fact that (1) is true, and is, indeed, true necessarily, it does not follow that events necessarily occur at the times at which they in fact occur. This latter claim about events is expressed as follows:

• (2) (x) (t) (x is an event & t is a time & x occurs at t ﬤ ◻ (y) (y=x ﬤ y occurs at t)),

Given a descriptive word, what is the nature of the relation between it and the features of the object(s) to which it is supposed to apply? What is it that entitles one to assert ‘this is a horse’?

A traditional answer has been in terms of ‘Merkmal’: a (minimal) collection of features, or properties, severally necessary and Jointly sufficient for the application of the word in question. This relation - call it the Merkmal relation - between word and features is common to a variety of theories of meaning that may otherwise be in disagreement about the status of the features themselves in their relation to the object: whether they be actual or believed, perceptual or ‘essential,’ phenomenal or ‘real,’ etc.

Many significant moral theories, ones to which a large number of philosophers pledge themselves, employ in a fundamental way the criterion of universalizability. This is true not only of Kant and his more illustrious successors, but also utilitarians of many sorts. But concomitant with adherence to universalizability as a moral criterion is adherence to the belief that certain features (properties) of putatively moral (right) acts and immoral (wrong) acts are relevant and others irrelevant to the determination to the rightness or wrongness of those acts. Despite the fact that this belief is problematic, few moral philosophers have openly struggled with the problem of relevant descriptions (or ‘relevance’ for short). It is as if investigation of this problem would invite unsettlable doubts about universalizability itself.

Scheffler's paper divides into two parts. In the first, he argues that Parfit's argument from the complex view of personal identity neither can, nor is intended to, establish any moral theory; in particular, it cannot establish utilitarianism. Rather, Parfit's aim must have been simply to weaken our attachment to non-utilitarian theories. In discovering that the only philosophically respectable view of personal identity holds it to consist simply in bodily or psychological continuities and connections, we come to see that the distinctness of persons is a less deep fact than we naively supposed that it was. And this weakens the attraction of moral theories which take the distinctness of persons as fundamental and reject utilitarianism on that account. Scheffler points out that Parfit's argument cannot establish, nor can it be extended to establish, anything stronger than this. For the complex view can only rule out nonutilitarian theories if it simply denies that in any sense persons exist over time. But this view rules out not only non-utilitarian moral theories, but every moral theory.

In ‘Naming and Necessity,’ Saul Kripke defends a number of essentialist claims. One of them is that having a certain origin is a necessary property of a material thing. Used in connection with a human being or, presumably, a living thing of another kind whose members sexually reproduce, ‘necessity of origin’ means that the organism must have been born of those individuals who are its parents, i.e., whose body tissues are sources of the sperm and egg from which it issued, in the actual world. To say that the origin of an inanimate material thing is necessary is to say that having its origin in the hunk of matter from which it came is essential to it.

Peter Unger has recently attempted to defend skepticism by means of a novel and ingenious theory about certain general features of our language. According to his theory, skepticism is a logical consequence of the fact that certain epistemic terms, including ‘certain’ and ‘know,’ belong to a much wider class of absolute terms whose strict meaning is such that they have little or no positive application to things in the world. The purpose of this paper is to enquire whether Unger's theory of absolute terms provides a stronger basis for skepticism than do other, more familiar, approaches. I shall argue that the theory cannot be regarded as an explication of the ordinary meaning of the terms in question; that the ordinary meaning of these terms can be understood by means of an alternative, if less exciting, model; and that the logic of our language does not commit us to skepticism.

Within Robert Nozick's theory of Justice as presented in his Anarchy, State and Utopia, does the Lockean proviso dovetail with the theory of entitlement? The main burden of this paper is to establish that far from dovetailing, there is a serious conflict between the two.

Nozick's theory of Justice consists of at least three principles, namely, the principle of Justice in acquisition, the principle of Justice in transfer, and the principle of rectification of injustice. These principles treat the topics of how unheld things came to be held, how they came to be transferred, and how injustice in respect to them came to be corrected or rectified. Although Nozick does not provide a detailed philosophical picture of these principles of Justice, he says enough about each of them by way of examples and explanations to constitute a powerful, criticizable doctrine.

A.N. Prior once showed that on certain apparently reasonable assumptions, a thesis sometimes associated with the name of Hume to the effect that no set of factual statements can ever entail an evaluative statement (call this principle ‘H’), is quite untenable. We assume only that there is at least one statement of each kind, and that the negation of a factual statement (evaluative statement) is factual (evaluative, respectively) — a principle we may call ‘N'. Now consider the disjunction F V E of some factual with some evaluative statement. Since the disjunction is entailed by F, a factual statement, it must, if principle H is correct, be classified as factual. But by N, ∽ F is also factual, and this together with F V E entails E, thus violating H since E was exhypothesi an evaluative statement.

From the pre-Socratics to the present, one primary aim of philosophy has been to learn from arguments. Philosophers have debated whether we could indeed do this, but they have by and large agreed on how we would use arguments if learning from argument was at all possible. They have agreed that we could learn from arguments either by starting with true premises and validly deducing further statements which must also be true and therefore constitute new knowledge, or that we could start from putative premises and validly deduce false consequences thereby showing that our premises were false. Our aim in this paper is to suggest a third alternative: we can learn from plausible arguments (invalid arguments which meet some other unspecified desiderata of approximation to valid arguments) through criticism of such arguments which enable us to discover new problems.

Discusssion of passages 243 et. seq. of Wittgenstein's Philosophical lnvestigations tends to concentrate on the argument supporting the thesis that a logically private language is impossible. When the discussion becomes broader, the presumption is generally that this thesis is one premifs of an argument against solipsism. I believe that the passages will support a valid argument that might, at first glance, give comfort to someone in the egocentric predicament, but that this comfort would quickly grow cold on closer examination. I do not mean to suggest that Wittgenstein offers no escape from the predicament, only that the escape (if successful) will not be a consequence of the pluralism necessary to the existence of language, but rather a byproduct of his discussion of the logic of mental discourse. In this paper (sees. II through VI), I state an alternative to the contra-solipsist reading of the passages, taking Wittgenstein there to be reflecting a three part dispute, the other participants of which are a skeptic and a philosopher I'll call ‘the Realist'.

In ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ John Taurek asks whether the relative numbers of people whose welfare is affected by a given choice is ever of itself a determining factor in moral trade-off situations. No one raises a question like this unless they have a surprise, and so Taurek unsurprisingly concludes that numbers alone should not, or need not, ever be regarded as significant in moral decision. Taurek's strategy is to argue that the common belief that, other things being equal, we are morally required to help the greater number is incompatible with other things that many of us commonly believe. He additionally argues that the preference for higher numbers in itself represents a dubious and confused way of thinking.

It has long been argued, and often admitted, that utilitarianism cannot account for distributive Justice. The purpose of this paper is to show that utilitarianism cannot make sense of the moral issues involved in having children. In particular, it cannot take account of the differences between infanticide, abortion, contraception and chastity. Importantly, the two difficulties stem from a common feature of utilitarianism, that since it is a sum-ranking decision procedure, it is structurally indifferent to who experiences utility. Children and Justice are two cases where it makes every difference how the utility total is distributed among people.