According to Jacques Monod, the Nobel prize-winning biologist, ‘the universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man’.

The work of the neurobiologist Benjamin Libet is often taken to show that free will is an illusion. When we ‘freely’ decide to do something, a good half-second before our conscious decision, there is unconscious cerebral initiation of the behaviour we mistakenly believe ourselves to be choosing later.

Joseph Conrad's novel, Lord Jim centres round the incident when, as a young man the seaman Jim jumps from his sinking ship into a lifeboat, leaving hundreds of passengers to their fate. All his life Jim ponders that decision. Did he choose to jump, or was he—in a metaphysical sense—pushed?

In his recent book Straw Dogs John Gray takes the episode of Jim and the lifeboat and the Libet data to show that we are not really free, and more radically that human agency and selfhood are illusions. Like many others, he is also more than content with the deflationary implications of Monod's conclusion: life itself is a fluke, and we ourselves no more than a lucky throw in the cosmic lottery. And humanity itself, in its despoliation of the planet, is a plague animal. Along with James Lovelock, Gray concludes that ‘Gaia is suffering from a plague of people’.

Maybe so, and Gray's position is certainly one for which reasons can be given. But do the facts compel us to hold it? How could one fraught and problematic incident in a novel show us that there was no such thing as human freedom? At the very most it shows that in moments of panic and crisis we know not what to do.

Nor are the Libet data inconclusive. For one thing the experimental set-up is such that the subject has already decided to act in the way prescribed, having agreed to the experimenter's request to execute a particular finger-movement in a tightly controlled situation; only the moment of action is uncertain. Nor, as John Searle has pointed out, is it clear that the finger movement follows directly on the unconscious readiness potential. There is a temporal gap between that and the conscious intention, and also another gap between that and the action. In any case Libet's subjects could at any time demonstrate a higher-level freedom by simply withdrawing from the experiment.

And if Monod interprets biology in one way, another Nobel prize winning biologist from France offers us a completely opposite interpretation. In his book Vital Dust Christian de Duve provides a detailed and elegant demonstration of the way elements of randomness both prior to the emergence of life and subsequently are going to be so constrained by the environment and by the possibilities internal to matter, organic and inorganic, as to make both life itself and intelligent life like ours highly likely.

So are we rational vital dust or an irrational self-deluding plague?

D. H. Lawrence wrote of the novel that it ‘incapable of the absolute’; it is ‘quick’ and in it there is always ‘a tom-cat, a black tom-cat that pounces on the white dove of the Word.... A theosophist, or a Christian or a Holy Roller may be contained in a novelist. But a novelist may not put up a fence’. No more, it seems, should a philosopher.

I argue that itches, tickles, aches and pains—sensations of all sorts—are generally in the places where we say they are. So, for example, if I say that I have an itch in the big toe on my left foot, then, by and large, that is the very place where the itch is. James denied this in the 1890s; Russell and Broad denied it in the 1920s; Wittgenstein and Ryle denied it in the 1940s; Lewis and Armstrong denied it in the 1960s; and since then various kinds of materialists have denied it. But if itches etc. are states of the sensitive parts of bodies, then it is true.

The difference between right and wrong is not something that is taught; it is, necessarily, picked up by a child in the course of learning its native language, and parents have no choice about this. In learning the meaning of ‘steal’, for example, the child learns that such actions are wrong. It also develops, through a kind of conditioning, the appropriate feelings and attitudes. The very concept of a reason has a moral content; so that, in acquiring this concept, the child learns what counts as a good reason; and this includes altruistic and other moral reasons, no less than reasons of self-interest.

Invisible Hand accounts of the operations of the competitive market are often thought to have two implications for morality as it confronts economic life. First, explanantions of agents economic activities eschew constitutive appeal to moral notions; and second, such moralism is pernicious insofar as it tends to undermine the operations of a socially valuable social process. This is the Mandevillean Conceit. The Conceit rests on an avarice-only reading of the profit-motive that is mistaken. The avarice-only reading is not the only way of characterising the profit-motive, and there are some positive grounds for thinking the benefits of profit pursuit are better attributed to the “lucrephile”, and not the avarice-only “lucrepath”.

A defence of the possibility of amoralism is important to discussions about the foundations of ethics and the justification of morality. I argue against Michael Smith's attempt to show, through a defence of internalism, that amoralism is incoherent. I argue first, that a de dicto reading of the externalist's explanation of changes in motivation which are pursuant upon changes in judgement is not objectionable or implausible as Smith contends; and second, that internalism cannot account for the effort of the will required to make such changes in motivation. I also argue that the internalism/externalism debate can be diffused by considering the epistemic difficulties associated with identifying motivating states and by rejecting the notion that motivation can be understood in terms of psychlogical states.

This paper considers an obvious argument against marriage; (a) most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with great antipathy; (b) the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence (c) when we marry we are putting ourselves in the position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable, and this is a mistake. I consider various ways of attacking this argument, and try to show that it may be worth taking more seriously than most people seem inclined.

Claims that the self and experience in general are narrative in structure are increasingly common, but it is not always clear what such claims come down to. In this paper, I argue that if the view is to be distinctive, the element of narrativity must be taken as literally as possible. If we do so, and explore the consequences of thinking about our selves and our lives in this manner, we shall see that the narrative view fundamentally confusues art and life. We learn from art itself that our selves and lives transcend narratives and that thinking in a narrative manner ignores the rich complexity of individual persons.

John Campbell proposed a so-called simple view of colours according to which colours are categorical properties of the surfaces of objects just as they normally appear to be. I raised an invertion problem for Campbell's view according to which the senses of colour terms fail to match their references, thus rendering those terms meaningless—or so I claimed. Gabriele de Anna defended Campbell's view against my example by contesting two points in particular. Firstly, de Anna claimed that there is no special problem here for the simple view of colours, a similar invertion story could apply to primary qualities terms for shapes. Secondly, de Anna purported to give an account of the senses and references of colour terms in my invertion story which renders the senses and references of those terms mutually consistent.

In this paper I contested both of de Anna's claims. Regarding the first, I argue that his imagined invertion of apparent shapes is not epistemically stable, in contrast to the invertion of apparent shapes is not epistemically stable, in contrast to the invertion of apparent colours. Hence the victims of apparently inverted shapes would be able to discover the mismatch of senses and refences of their shape terms, in contrast to the victims of apparent invertions of colours. Regarding the second, I argue that de Anna's account of the victim's colour terms itself uses and not merely mentions so-called colours terms. Hence de Anna' account of them is itself meaningless due to a mismatch of sense and reference. So I conclude that my objection to Campbell's simple view of colours stands.

Ethical relativists and subjectivists hold that fact must be distinguished from value, ‘is’ from ‘ought’ and reason from emotion. Their distinctions have been called into question, notably by Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness 2001), also by Alasdair Macintyre (Dependent Rational Animals 1999).

Reason in the form of the life sciences—ethology, biology—indicates that what is good or bad for an individual animal and its species are matters of objective fact. There is nothing relativistic about the idea that fresh meat is good for wolves and it is a fact, a paradigm fact, that polluted water is bad for dolphins. Moreover what is good for an animal is often something that is good about it. Sharp ears and great speed are good for deer and are also what makes a deer a good specimen of its kind.

These general remarks apply to the human animal as well as to ‘ordinary’ animals. The good and bad discussed by moral philosophers cannot be radically different from the good and bad known through reason. But if it were it would normally be a remarkably indigent field of study.