It is a surprising fact that moral philosophers have rarely examined the distinction between what I shall call ‘positive’ or ‘social’ morality on the one hand and ‘autonomous’ or ‘individual’ morality on the other. Accordingly, conceptual and moral issues of the greatest importance have been neglected. The distinction is, I take it, recognised by Hegel, when he contrasts Sittlichkeit with Moralität. However, the rival sides who give a conceptual or a moral preference to one concept over the other rarely come to grips with one another, and the deep conflicts between them are concealed instead of being brought out into the open. Only in Burke's diatribe against Rousseau, Bradley's critique of Sidgwick (Collected Essays I, 122), Hobhouse's crusade against Bosanquet (Metaphysical Theory of the State), Prichard's attack on Green (Moral Obligation, p. 75), Hart's criticism of Hare (‘Legal and Moral Obligation’ in Essays in Moral Philosophy, edited by Melden), and above all in Oakeshott's onslaught on Rationalism (Rationalism in Politics, passim) do we get a glimpse of one of the main issues of moral philosophy and of morality. For just as we have two concepts, so we have two moral conceptual schemes, each of which gives a central place to one concept at the expense of the other. Those who suppose that morality is or ought to be wholly or mainly a social concept may recommend submission to a tradition. Those, on the other hand, who suppose morality to be primarily an individual or independent concept will recommend independent decisions. I want in this paper, firstly, to explain the differences between the two concepts, secondly, to show that neither of them is conceptually illegitimate or degenerate, and lastly, to determine what place, if any, each ought to have in a rational morality.

The concept of moral responsibility has many applications. We speak, for example, of a person's responsibilities, and mean his professional or domestic commitments. In this sense a person can be said to have too many responsibilities, or none at all, and he can be said to be responsible to or for another person. Again, we can speak of the person himself as being responsible or irresponsible, and mean that he is conscientious and trustworthy in the performance of his duties or that he has a sense of responsibility. Finally, we can speak of a person as accepting responsibility for an action or another person. A thorough analysis of these complexities of usage would require the investigation of a number of background concepts, but in this paper I have the more limited object of classifying some of the usages. I propose to do this by constructing three analytical models based on the concept of a social role.

In a recent essay Duncan Pritchard argues that there is no fundamental epistemological distinction between religious belief and ordinary or non-religious belief. Both of them – so he maintains in the footsteps of Wittgenstein's On certainty – are ultimately grounded on a-rational commitments, namely, commitments unresponsive to rational criteria. I argue that, while this view can be justified theologically, it cannot be advanced philosophically as Pritchard assumes.

I offer an account of Aquinas's reflection on faith and reason to show that the theologian – not the philosopher – is entitled to deal with a-rational commitments, because the truths of faith can be seen as simply intellectual – like the rational statements considered by the philosopher – but also as decisions made by way of divine grace. I also suggest that Pritchard's thesis may be re-proposed on a new basis, if Aquinas's theological stance were reinterpreted so as to point out unexpected connections between theology and philosophy.

Wittgenstein made numerous pronouncements about philosophical method. But did he practice what he preached? Cook addresses this question by studying Wittgenstein’s treatment of the problem of other minds, tracing a line of argument that runs through his writings and lectures from the early 1930s to the 1950s. Cook finds that there is an inconsistency between Wittgenstein’s methodological advice and his actual practice. Instead of bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use, he allows himself to use uncritically words whose provenance is clearly metaphysical.

This article is an explanation of the causes of war. It shows the inadequacy of existing explanations in terms of competition for scarce resources, aggressiveness as a trait inherent in human nature, and struggle for power. It constructs a new explanation that combines the defensible elements of the inadequate explanations and adds to them conflicts between systems of value on which the identity of the warring parties depends as the most important of the causes of war. It concludes that since values are plural and conflicting, conflicts between systems of value are ineliminable. This has the consequence that war is a permanent adversity that is an unavoidable obstacle to the improvement of the human condition.

Often a concern for truthfulness becomes the celebration of radical truthfulness, where this involves both the utter refusal of deception and that all moral and political beliefs be fit to survive publicity. An unfortunate consequence of this is that it has blinded us to a fair and accurate understanding of the nature and role of an important technique of virtue—temperance. Temperance implies a strategy of renunciation and withdrawal from the full content of our psychological lives. It involves us in pursuing and sustaining a practice of deliberative silence about those purposes and ends which, as we see things, threaten us with corruption and the world with evil.

Intuitions are widely assumed to play an important evidential role in ethical inquiry. In this paper I critically discuss a recently influential claim that the epistemological credentials of ethical intuitions are undermined by their causal pedigree and functional role. I argue that this claim is exaggerated. In the course of doing so I argue that the challenge to ethical intuitions embodied in this claim should be understood not only as a narrowly epistemological challenge, but also as a substantially ethical one. I argue that this fact illuminates the epistemology of ethical intuitions.

This paper discusses how we are to understand claims to the effect that something is good relative to a person. It is argued that goodness relative to should not be equated with good for as the latter is a relational value notion and the former is a value theoretical notion. It is argued further that good relative to a person should be understood as good from the perspective or the point of view of the person. But this analysis of the notion ‘good relative to’ leaves open questions about the full nature of relative goodness. For that, a positive proposal about what it is for something to be good relative to a person's point of view is needed. One such proposal is put forward on which the relevant perspective is determined or fixed in terms of the pro and con attitudes of the individual person.

In this paper, I argue that we face a challenge in understanding the relationship between the ‘value-oriented’ and ‘other-oriented’ dimensions of shame. On the one hand, an emphasis on shame's value-oriented dimension leads naturally to ‘The Self-Evaluation View’, an account which faces a challenge in explaining shame's other-oriented dimension. This is liable to push us towards ‘The Social Evaluation View’. However The Social Evaluation View faces the opposite challenge of convincingly accommodating shame's ‘value-oriented’ dimension. After rejecting one attempt to chart a middle course between these extremes, I argue that progress can be made if we reject the widespread assumption that the other-oriented dimension of shame is best understood primarily terms of our concern with the way we appear to others. Instead, I outline an account which treats shame as manifesting our desire primarily for interpersonal connection and which elucidates the property of shamefulness in terms of merited avoidance (or rejection).

It is often asserted that even our own past is a foreign country: the ideas of past thinkers are, in some ways, alien to us today. For the European historian of non-European philosophy, not only is the past held to be a different country, but it is also the past of a different country. This is both convenient and problematic all at once. The ‘Western’ historian of non-European philosophy faces a double separation from his/her subject matter; she is both a foreigner and an alien. In this paper, I approach questions of how this historian should orientate herself towards her subject, and why she (and we) should care about it at all.

Scientific realism holds that the terms in our scientific theories refer and that we should believe in their existence. This presupposes a certain understanding of quantification, namely that it is ontologically committing, which I challenge in this paper. I argue that the ontological loading of the quantifiers is smuggled in through restricting the domains of quantification, without which it is clear to see that quantifiers are ontologically neutral. Once we remove domain restrictions, domains of quantification can include non-existent things, as they do in scientific theorizing. Scientific realism would therefore require redefining without presupposing a view of ontologically committing quantification.

Materialism claims that everything is physical; everything can be exhaustively described and explained in principle by physics. For over half a century challenges to materialism have focused on mental phenomena such as consciousness, reason, and value. The tacit assumption among most materialists – one shared by most of their critics – has been that more basic biological phenomena, such as metabolism and reproduction, do not pose a serious obstacle to the materialist program, that these can be easily accommodated within a materialist framework. But there is reason to think that this assumption is false. Thomas Nagel has recently argued that materialism cannot countenance biological phenomena at large. Like so many anti-materialist arguments, however, his focuses on mental phenomena. After explaining why this is a liability for him and other would-be critics of materialism, I advance an anti-materialist argument that appeals directly to biology. Materialism is false, it says, because our best empirical descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena appeal to biological organization or structure, and there is good reason to think that these appeals cannot be eliminated, reduced to, or paraphrased in favor of descriptions and explanations framed in exclusively physical terms. As a result, not everything can be described and explained exhaustively by physics. Materialism must be false. The reason, however, has nothing to do with mental phenomena specifically.

The argument is currently made that hunting seriously compromises the welfare of the hunted animal, in a way that is morally unacceptable. The paper presents a theory of animal minds, and a theory of our duties of care towards members of other species. It goes on to examine what is meant by compromising welfare, discusses the crucial concept of stress as this concept features in animal welfare science, and explores the conditions under which stress becomes distress. The argument moves towards the conclusion that there are conditions under which distress inflicted by a human being is morally unacceptable, but that these conditions are not met by the normal methods of hunting with hounds, even though they are frequently met by shooting and trapping.

Let me first explain what I am not attacking in this paper. I am not attacking, for instance, the right of free speech or any of the other specific rights listed in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights or the United Nations' Charter. I am, rather, attacking any specific right's being called a ‘human right’. I mean to show that any such designation is not only fraudulent but, in case anyone might want to say that there can be noble lies, grossly wicked, amounting indeed to genocide.

R. M. Hare has argued1 that there are conceivable (though unlikely) circumstances in which it would be right not to abolish the institution of slavery: in the imaginary land of Juba established slave-plantations are managed by a benevolent elite for the good of all, no ‘cruel or unusual ’ punishments are in use, and citizens of the neighbouring island of Camaica, ‘free ’but impoverished, regularly seek to become slaves. Hare adds that it is unlikely, given human nature, that ‘masters ’would treat ‘slaves ’humanely, and avoid a gradual corruption of their moral consciousness which would cancel out any possible advantages of the system. Slavery is wrong, he argues, not because it violates ‘fundamental human rights’, but I because it would in practice generally increase misery.

W. A. Hart argues that Martha Nussbaum does not make a convincing case there are genuine moral dilemmas to be found in Aeschylus' Agamemnon. Hart claims that the impossibility of moral dilemmas flows from the Kantian principle that ‘ought implies can’. A certain understanding of OIC does rule out the possibility of moral dilemmas. However, this particular formulation of the OIC principle does not fit well with the eudaimonist framework common to ancient moral philosophy. It emerges that there are trade offs to be made between the ancients' views on the point of moral evaluation and ours. Thus the possibility of moral dilemmas is an issue that in inextricably enmeshed in larger issues in moral philosophy.

Politicians of all stripes are committed to equality of opportunity. At least almost all of them put it in their statements of fundamental principle. It sounds like something we should all in fairness support, and it is supposed to be free of the radically redistributive and tyrannical implications of attempting to ensure equalities of outcome.

The article on my theory of descriptions by Mr. Lejewski raises two points. One is as to the copula. I do not quite understand why it is thought that an ambiguity in the meaning of the word “is” is relevant in regard to my theory of descriptions. There are many problems in regard to which it is relevant. I have mentioned one of these in criticizing Hegel in Our Knowledge of the External World on p. 39n of the original edition (1914). But, although I have read Mr. Lejewski's argument several times, it still seems to me quite clear that in “Scott is the author of Waverley” the “is” is that of identity. Nor have I been able to understand why he considers his theory of descriptions preferable to mine. I am, however, quite willing to believe (and I say this in all sincerity) that there is some point that I have missed in his discussion.