Judgments about right are normally circumscribed and balanced by other considerations but it is possible to imagine ‘rights thinking’ as occurring without any such admixture. This pure rights thinking is characterized by several distinctive features. First, resentment, respect, and other passions of rectitude overrule sympathetic feelings of concern and compassion, love and affection. One responds simply as justice demands, never allowing extraneous factors to interfere with satisfaction of this moral ideal. Second, when claims of rights collide with personal attachments or calculations of benefit, the right systematically prevails. For example, rights thinking resists assertions presented to justify breaking promises to friends for their supposed greater good. Third, although rights entail obligations to their holders, responsibilities to others extend no further than these entailments within pure rights thinking. No general obligation of benevolence is recognized, for example, since no one in particular has a right to one's benevolence. Hence, fourth, as well as entailing moral protections for their holders and defining centres of independent agency, the perception of rights also promotes one's fundamental separateness from others.

It is a commonplace that Frege thought ordinary language to be seriously defective. Yet his remarks about ordinary language are not always unflattering. Comparing the relation between his formal language and ordinary language to the relation between the microscope and the eye, Frege remarked: ‘[the eye], because of the range of its applicability and because of the ease with which it can adapt itself to the most varied circumstances, has a great superiority over the microscope’. The point, of course, is that, for Frege, the deficiencies of ordinary language arise in connection with the scientific endeavour: ordinary language is not an acceptable medium in which to pursue truth. As he goes on to observe: ‘… viewed as an optical instrument [the eye] reveals many imperfections … as soon as scientific purposes place strong requirements upon sharpness of resolution, the eye proves to be inadequate. On the other hand, the microscope is perfectly suited for just such purposes’.

Questions about the meaning of life have traditionally been regarded as being of particular concern to philosophers. It is sometimes complained that contemporary analytic philosophy fails to address such questions, but there do exist illuminating recent discussions of these questions by analytic philosophers.1 Perhaps what lurks behind the complaint is a feeling that these discussions are insufficiently close to actual living situations and hence often seem rather thin and bland compared with the vivid portrayals of such situations in autobiography or fiction. I therefore want to focus on two works by Tolstoy—one autobiographical, one fictional—and try to see what philosophical lessons can be learned from them, particularly with regard to questions about the relation of death to the meaning of life.

His “practical purpose” was first to express the popular notion of responsibility and then to relate it to the philosophical theories of “freewill and necessity.” For he could not approve the suggestion that to understand popular comments on morality was a worthless occupation; indeed, while he respected the Westminster Reviewers for the blunt declaration that vulgar responsibility was a “horrid figment of the imagination,” he plainly considered it his business as a philosopher to examine ordinary morality and to reconcile it, if possible, with philosophical theory.

At the very heart of the causal theory of perception are the peculiar examples sometimes called veridical hallucinations. These examples originate with Grice, who used them to prove ‘conclusively’ that when we say, for example, ‘Jane saw John’, we mean that John is the cause of certain visual experiences or impressions had by Jane.

As has often been observed, neither the thinkers of antiquity nor those of the Middle Ages exhibited a great theoretical interest in the social value or even the ethical significance of labour. Throughout this long period of history, the labour an individual had to carry out to make a living, and thus under compulsion, was understood more or less solely as a heavy burden. It signified daily toil and the state of personal dependency attaching to a lowly social rank. Consequently, there was no cause to subject it to any kind of moral consideration. Indeed, as Moses Finley reports (1999, p. 81) ‘[n]either in Greek nor Latin was there a word with which to express the general notion of ‘labour’ or the concept of labour as a general social function’ (see too Arendt, 2013 [1958], pp. 81 ff.). Famously, with the advent of modernity, the very opposite begins to become the case. In this period, in the wake of various intersecting processes of cultural revaluation and economic transformation, labour developed into a positive credential of free existence and a presupposition of social integrity: the Protestant ethic led to a gradual upgrading of the value of labour, because it was interpreted as a sign that one possessed a capacity for inner-worldly asceticism. In the course of the establishment of capitalist economic practices, the liberation of labour from personal dependency in legal terms gave rise to the idea that gainful work could henceforth be proof of a free decision, and it thus provided the precondition of individual independence. And over time, the more the intellectual union between these two revolutions was strengthened, the more it would go on to influence the cultural self-understanding of modern societies in the capitalist west: what was previously the sheer necessity of earning a daily crust was now understood as proof of social emancipation and freedom. Nobody provided a better conceptualisation of this transformed self-conception than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who devoted an entire chapter of his ‘Philosophy of Right’ of 1821 to the emancipatory value of labour; here, he tells us that every (male) member of civil society ‘is somebody’ through ‘his competence’ and his ‘regular income and means of support’, i.e. possesses the social status of a full-fledged citizen, and will find ‘his honour’ in this recognised existence as a professional (Hegel 1991 [1821], § 253).

Principles can seem as entrenched in moral experience as Kant thinks space, time, and the categories are in human experience of the world. However not all cultures have such a view. Classical Indian and Chinese philosophies treat modification of the self as central to ethics. Decisions in particular cases and underlying principles are much less discussed.

Ethics needs comparative philosophy in order not to be narrow in its concerns. A broader view can give weight to how people sometimes can change who they are, in order to lead better lives.

I would like to make some further clarifying remarks about the nature of learning machines, or finite automata as they are more generally known these days. It is clear from much that has recently been written on this subject that there are still many misunderstandings about their capacity and significance.

Statements of identity with a plural subject, of the form ‘They are (were, etc.) the same person (thing, etc.),’ as illustrated in each of the answers to the above two questions, give rise to a philosophical problem.

Whatever good or ill it did to Guy Fawkes, his resuscitation at the hands of Bernard Williams has, by any utilitarian reckoning, been a Good Thing. A casual glance at the literature that has accumulated over the past thirty-five years leaves no doubt that the topic has been reduplicated many times over, to the great enjoyment of undergraduates, who have been able to write science fiction under the guise of essays in the Philosophy of Mind, and of dons, who in an age of cvs and Assessments, have been able to notch up page after page of counter-replies to replies to rebuttals of previous papers, not to mention an often welcome tally of references in the citation index. But the actual arguments adduced by Williams can be turned to support a much more traditional view of the self, as a necessarily unique agent whose individuality is established by his capacity for autonomous action.

It is tempting and even useful to read the history of ethics from Hobbes to Rousseau, and even to Kant, as a response to the devastation of making self-interest—the movement to the satisfaction of particular ego-oriented desires—either the basic motive, or the basic form of motivational explanation. After Hobbes, philosophical ingenuity allied with Christian sensibility to search for countervailing forces.

I Am grateful for the honour of being invited to give the second Manson Lecture. Dr. Manson believed that the study of sick people leads into the widest fields of thought, but that increasing specialization within medicine diverts the doctor from seeing man and his nature whole: the chief question seems to be (he wrote in 1930), “whether medicine is in the bondship of practice, whether it is a skilled art, or whether it can emerge to give its own contribution to abstract thought and philosophy.” Indeed, pleading with doctors to join this Institute of Philosophy, he declared that medicine should be the most philosophic of the professions. In this he was reviving an ancient claim: the arguments for it have lately been restated with much Aristotelian piety by Scott Buchanan. Now here I find myself in a difficulty at the outset: I am to speak of the relationship between philosophy and medicine, at a lecture founded by a passionate believer in their conjunction, yet I am engaged in a particular branch of medicine which was for longer than any other preoccupied with philosophy and dependent on it, but had so little profit from its fidelity that it reckons progress from the time when it struggled away from this allegiance. Psychiatry has not been able to refrain since then from many a backward glance at the older philosophy she once swore by, and she has been much influenced by the philosophies of later times: she has—doubtless in punishment for her defection—become entangled now and then in bad, unrecognized philosophy of her own making. She has, at all events, never achieved more than a temporary indifference to philosophic thought.

In this article I propose to examine Bishop Butler's view of the nature of moral judgment, the epistemological problem which so greatly exercised some of the British moralists of his age. I have discussed the views of four of them in The Moral Sense. The problem seems to have been peculiarly lacking in interest for Butler. This may seem at first sight an odd statement: the moral faculty, or conscience, it would be said, is the chief subject of Butler's moral writings. This is true enough. But although Butler's description of the working of conscience is unsurpassed, he gives no clear definition of the faculty. That is, he does not clearly consider the question whether the moral faculty can be said to be identical with some faculty usually called by another name, or whether it is sui generis.