Results for 'George A. Sher'

955 found
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  1.  53
    Armstrong and the interdependence of the mental.George A. Sher - 1977 - Philosophical Quarterly 27 (July):227-235.
  2.  26
    Social and Political Philosophy: Contemporary Readings.Baruch A. Brody & George Sher - 1999 - Cengage Learning.
    [TofC cont.] Social ideals: Justice, A utilitarian theory of justice / J.S. Mill, Egalitarianism with changed motivation / G. Cohen; Equality, Multidimensional equality / M. Walzer, Equality of capacity / A. Sen; Liberty, rights, property, and self-ownership, A defense of the primacy of liberty rights / L. Lomasky, Atomism and the primacy of rights / C. Taylor -- Social institutions: Education, Educating about familial values / W. Galston, For vouchers and parental choice / M. Friedman; Family, In defense of filial (...)
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  3.  21
    A Wild West of the Mind.George Sher - 2021 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    This book addresses two main topics—first, the morality of thought and, second, what’s involved in having a free mind. It connects these topics by arguing that to have a free mind, a person must be willing to follow his thoughts wherever they lead, and that this just isn’t possible if the person thinks that some thoughts are morally off limits. The book therefore defends the unpopular position that it is not morally wrong to have even the nastiest of attitudes, the (...)
  4. A Wild West of the Mind.George Sher - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (3):483-496.
    abstractThis paper addresses the relation between morality and private thought. It is widely agreed that government and society have no business trying to control our thoughts—that, as long as we d...
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  5.  95
    In Praise of Blame.George Sher - 2005 - New York, US: Oup Usa.
    Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically-oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book's most important conclusion is that blame is inseperable from morality itself - that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnation of those (...)
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  6. Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics.George Sher - 1997 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Many people, including many contemporary philosophers, believe that the state has no business trying to improve people's characters, elevating their tastes, or preventing them from living degraded lives. They believe that governments should remain absolutely neutral when it comes to the consideration of competing conceptions of the good. One fundamental aim of George Sher's book is to show that this view is indefensible. A second complementary aim is to articulate a conception of the good that is worthy of (...)
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  7. Who Knew?: Responsiblity Without Awareness.George Sher - 2009 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
    To be responsible for their acts, agents must both perform those acts voluntarily and in some sense know what they are doing. Of these requirements, the voluntariness condition has been much discussed, but the epistemic condition has received far less attention. In Who Knew? George Sher seeks to rectify that imbalance. The book is divided in two halves, the first of which criticizes a popular but inadequate way of understanding the epistemic condition, while the second seeks to develop (...)
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  8. Real-world luck egalitarianism.George Sher - 2010 - Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (1):218-232.
    Luck egalitarians maintain that inequalities are always unjust when they are due to luck, but are not always unjust when they are due to choices for which the parties are responsible. In this paper, I argue that the two halves of this formula do not fit neatly together, and that we arrive at one version of luck egalitarianism if we begin with the notion of luck and interpret responsible choice in terms of its absence, but a very different version if (...)
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  9. What makes a lottery fair?George Sher - 1980 - Noûs 14 (2):203-216.
  10.  17
    Me, You, Us: Essays.George Sher - 2017 - New York, NY: Oup Usa.
    Me, You, Us addresses a range of issues in moral and political philosophy and moral psychology, but are unified by their starkly individualistic view of the moral subject. They challenge recent tendencies to conceptualize normative issues in terms of relationships, collectivities, and social meanings.
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  11. Equality for Inegalitarians.George Sher - 2014 - Cambridge University Press.
    This book offers a new and compelling account of distributive justice and its relation to choice. Unlike luck egalitarians, who treat unchosen differences in people's circumstances as sources of unjust inequality to be overcome, Sher views such differences as pervasive and unavoidable features of the human situation. Appealing to an original account of what makes us moral equals, he argues that our interest in successfully negotiating life's ever-shifting contingencies is more basic than our interest in achieving any more specific (...)
     
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  12.  47
    Comment on R. Taylor, 'agent & patient: Is there a distinction?'.George Sher - 1982 - Erkenntnis 18 (2):233 - 237.
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  13. But I Could Be Wrong.George Sher - 2001 - Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (2):64.
    My aim in this essay is to explore the implications of the fact that even our most deeply held moral beliefs have been profoundly affected by our upbringing and experience—that if any of us had had a sufficiently different upbringing and set of experiences, he almost certainly would now have a very different set of moral beliefs and very different habits of moral judgment. This fact, together with the associated proliferation of incompatible moral doctrines, is sometimes invoked in support of (...)
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  14.  60
    Ethics, Character, and Action.George Sher - 1998 - Social Philosophy and Policy 15 (1):1.
    According to one long-standing tradition, the organizing question of ethics is “What are we morally obligated to do?” However, many philosophers, inspired by an even older tradition, now urge a return to the question “What kind of person is it best to be?” According to these philosophers, the proper locus of evaluation is character rather than action, and the basic evaluative concept is virtue rather than duty. Following what has become common usage, I shall refer to the first approach as (...)
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  15.  23
    Health Care and the 'Deserving Poor'.George Sher - 1983 - Hastings Center Report 13 (1):9-12.
    The idea that some poor persons "deserve" to be helped while others do not has long been influential in the USA. In the nineteenth century, "paupers" were relegated to poorhouse and subjected to onerous conditions for relief, while the blind, the deaf-mute, and others were helped in much less humiliating ways. A similar distinction underlay the categories of the comprehensive social Security Act of 1935; and its continuation has motivated various attempts to revise the welfare system by redrawing its boundaries (...)
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  16. Too Much Morality.George Sher - 2023 - Public Affairs Quarterly 37 (2):125-137.
    This paper is a critical discussion of the recent tendency to moralize various aspects of life that were previously viewed as private and discretionary. The paper takes as its starting point six recently unearthed moral prohibitions, and it examines the prospects for defending each as an extension of some familiar moral requirement. Its conclusion is not only that none of the extended prohibitions are defensible, but also that each impedes morality's function by limiting the ability of those whose lives it (...)
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  17.  55
    Ethics: Essential Readings in Moral Theory.George Sher (ed.) - 2012 - New York: Routledge.
    Ethics: Essential Readings in Moral Theory is an outstanding anthology of the most important topics, theories and debates in ethics, compiled by one of the leading experts in the field. It includes sixty-six extracts covering the central domains of ethics: why be moral? the meaning of moral language morality and objectivity consequentialism deontology virtue and character value and well-being moral psychology applications: including abortion, famine relief and consent. Included are both classical extracts from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Mill, as (...)
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  18.  8
    (1 other version)In Praise of Blame.George Sher - 2005 - In In Praise of Blame. New York, US: Oup Usa.
    This final chapter develops an account of blameworthiness that dovetails with the previous chapter’s account of blame. Because the core constituents of blame consist of a desire and a belief, the norms that determine when blame is called for are the ones that correspond to these elements. On the resulting account, blame is called for when the blamer’s belief that the blamee has acted badly is true, and the blamer’s desire that the blamee not have violated a moral principle to (...)
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  19.  6
    Approximate Justice: Studies in Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy.George Sher - 1997 - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
    In this engaging and provocative book, Sher explores the normative moral and social problems that arise from living in a decidedly non-ideal world_a world that contains immorality, evil, and injustice, and in which resources are often inadequate. Sher confronts difficult issues surrounding preferential treatment and equal opportunity, compensatory justice and punishment, the allocation of goods, and moral compromise.
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  20.  53
    Precis of A Wild West of the Mind.George Sher - 2023 - The Journal of Ethics 27 (2):119-121.
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  21.  76
    Living in the Moment is for Oysters.George Sher - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1):19-28.
    The idea that we should simply live in the moment, and should not concern ourselves about the future or the past, has long been a staple of popular philosophy. In this paper, I first attempt to clarify the doctrine and then examine the case for accepting it. My conclusions are, first, that a number of its implications seem quite unpalatable; second, that the main advantages that living in the moment are said to yield are greatly overstated; and, third, that to (...)
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  22. Compensation and transworld personal identity.George Sher - 1979 - The Monist 62 (3):378–91.
    A natural way of viewing compensation is to see it as the restoration of a good or level of well-being which someone would have enjoyed if he had not been adversely affected by the act of another. This view underlies Nozick’s assertion that “something fully compensates … person X for Y’s action A if X is no worse off receiving it, Y having done A, than X would have been without receiving it if Y had not done A”; and it (...)
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  23. Who’s in Charge Here?: Reply to Neil Levy.George Sher - 2008 - Philosophia 36 (2):223-226.
    In his response to my essay “Out of Control,” Neil Levy contests my claims that (1) we are often responsible for acts that we do not consciously choose to perform, and that (2) despite the absence of conscious choice, there remains a relevant sense in which these actions are within our control. In this reply to Levy, I concede that claim (2) is linguistically awkward but defend the thought that it expresses, and I clarify my defense of claim (1) by (...)
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  24.  6
    Introduction.George Sher - 2005 - In In Praise of Blame. New York, US: Oup Usa.
    This chapter sets the stage for a discussion of blame by asking how a world that did not contain it would differ from our world. The chapter poses the problems that the remainder of the book attempts to resolve and outlines the arguments of the chapters to come.
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  25.  8
    What Blame Is Not.George Sher - 2005 - In In Praise of Blame. New York, US: Oup Usa.
    This chapter asks what blaming someone adds to believing that he has acted badly. It examines three of the most popular accounts of the additional element: roughly, those which construe it as a public expression of one’s disapproval, as a belief that the agent’s misdeeds have marred his moral record, and as a negative emotional reaction. Of these familiar accounts, each is shown to be inadequate.
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  26.  33
    Review Essay on Matt King, Simply Responsible.George Sher - 2024 - The Journal of Ethics 28 (3):599-606.
    This review essay discusses Matt King’s recent book Simply Responsible, in which he defends a unifying account of responsibility that spans not only moral responsibility, but also prudential and epistemic responsibility, among other forms. The first half of the essay summarizes the three key elements of King’s account--his treatment of basic responsibility, basic blame, and basic desert--while the second half takes a more critical look at each element.
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  27.  53
    Causal explanation and the vocabulary of action.George Sher - 1973 - Mind 82 (325):22-30.
    It seems plausible to suppose that (a) the vocabulary of action is distinct from and irreducible to that of mere movement, And (b) the causal laws of the natural sciences are couched solely in terms of the latter vocabulary. From these two suppositions, The falsehood of determinism has sometimes been said to follow. I argue that whether this does follow depends on our conception of causal explanation; on the interpretation of this concept that seems to me the most interesting, The (...)
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  28.  9
    When Good People Do Bad Things.George Sher - 2005 - In In Praise of Blame. New York, US: Oup Usa.
    This chapter examines the Humean thesis that agents can only be blamed for their bad acts insofar as those acts are manifestations of defects in their characters. Several versions of this thesis are distinguished and criticized. The criticisms include both the familiar charge that the Humean can’t explain how someone can deserve blame for an act whose badness is “out of character” and the less familiar charge that on the Humean account, the badness of the act itself drops out as (...)
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  29. Blameworthy Action and Character.George Sher - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2):381-392.
    A number of philosophers from Hume on have claimed that it does not make sense to blame people for acting badly unless their bad acts were rooted in their characters. In this paper, I distinguish a stronger and a weaker version of this claim. The claim is false, I argue, if it is taken to mean that agents can only be blamed for bad acts when those acts are manifestations of character paws. However, what is both true and important is (...)
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  30.  41
    Liberal Purposes by William A. Galston. [REVIEW]George Sher - 1993 - Journal of Philosophy 90 (1):49-52.
  31.  84
    Kripke, cartesian intuitions, and materialism.George Sher - 1977 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (2):227-38.
    In his influential “Naming and Necessity,” Saul Kripke has deployed a new sort of analytical apparatus in support of the classical Cartesian argument that minds and bodies must be distinct because they can be imagined separately. In the initial section of this paper, I shall first paraphrase Kripke's version of that argument, and then suggest a way in which even one who accepts all of its philosophical presuppositions may avoid its conclusion. In the second section, I shall defend this suggestion (...)
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  32.  41
    The Weight of the Past.George Sher - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):152-164.
    ABSTRACT The question that this paper seeks to answer is that of whether the resistance to change that characterizes the conservative temperament has any rational basis. More precisely, my question is whether we have good grounds for accepting any version of the principle that if something exists then we need a reason to change it but don’t need a reason to keep it. The paper defends a version of this principle whose scope is restricted to familiar traditions and customs on (...)
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  33.  5
    What Blame Is.George Sher - 2005 - In In Praise of Blame. New York, US: Oup Usa.
    This chapter develops a new account of what blame adds to the belief that someone has acted badly. According to the proposed account, the additional element consists of a set of dispositions which are explained by the combination of the belief that the agent has acted badly and a desire that he not have done so. Unlike most desires, this one is oriented to the past rather than the future. Nevertheless, it remains a source of motivation that is capable of (...)
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  34.  54
    My Profession and Its Duties.George Sher - 1996 - The Monist 79 (4):471-487.
    Much that is written about professional ethics concerns the requirements imposed by specific roles. We are often told what professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers should do—or, alternatively, what a good doctor, lawyer, or teacher will do. In this paper, I shall try to clarify these claims as they pertain to one particular role—that of a faculty member at a college or university—by asking what special requirements the role imposes, and why faculty members are obligated to live up to (...)
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  35.  93
    Responsibility Matters.Retribution Reconsidered: More Essays in the Philosophy of Law.Desert.Michael J. Zimmerman, Peter A. French, Jeffrie G. Murphy & George Sher - 1995 - Noûs 29 (2):248.
  36.  7
    The Structure of Blameworthy Action.George Sher - 2005 - In In Praise of Blame. New York, US: Oup Usa.
    This chapter exploits the insight that emerged in the previous chapter — that a bad act may be rooted in an agent’s character without manifesting a defect in that character — to explain how an act’s badness can render an agent blameworthy. According to this explanation, the crucial fact is that the act’s bad-making features can be traced to the interplay of the very same desires, beliefs, and dispositions that also make the agent the person he is. By assigning character (...)
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  37.  62
    Sher, George. A Wild West of the Mind.Alexis Burgess - 2023 - Ethics 133 (4):630-632.
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  38.  40
    Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal Theory.Bruce Ackerman, Richard J. Arneson, Ronald W. Dworkin, Gerald F. Gaus, Kent Greenawalt, Vinit Haksar, Thomas Hurka, George Klosko, Charles Larmore, Stephen Macedo, Thomas Nagel, John Rawls, Joseph Raz & George Sher - 2003 - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
    Editors provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible.
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  39.  80
    George Sher’s Theory of Deserved Punishment, and the Victimized Wrongdoer.Stephen Kershnar - 1997 - Social Theory and Practice 23 (1):75-91.
    George Sher's theory of deserved punishment is unable to account for cases in which wrongdoing does not result in unfair advantages. Sher attempts to connect punishment with distributive justice by suggesting that punishment is deserved inasmuch as the unfair advantage gained by wrongdoing is offset. According to Sher's diachronic theory of fairness, punishment is also deserved when it occurs in response to transgression of a first-order ethical norm. A problem for the theory concerns the justification it (...)
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  40.  57
    Review of George Sher, Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness[REVIEW]Neal A. Tognazzini - 2010 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (1).
  41.  42
    A Defense of Weak Moralism: A Reply to Sher.D. Justin Coates - 2023 - The Journal of Ethics 27 (2):131-140.
    George Sher’s recent book A Wild West of the Mind offers a sustained argument against moralism: the view that private mental states are not subject to the authority of moral obligation. In developing this argument, Sher first argues that leading normative theories cannot account for the wrongness of private mental states like beliefs, desires, or emotions. He then offers an argument that the countervailing value of moral freedom is itself a positive reason to reject moralism. Against (...), I argue for a form of weak moralism. To do this, I first argue that the value of moral freedom does not clearly trump other significant values. I then support this argument by arguing that valuing anything at all puts rational constraints of private mental states. And because we have reason to value objects of moral value, we therefore have reason to conform our mental lives to those constraints. (shrink)
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  42.  48
    George Sher: A Wild West of the Mind. [REVIEW]Romy Eskens - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (5):895-897.
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  43. Restoring control: Comments on George Sher[REVIEW]Neil Levy - 2008 - Philosophia 36 (2):213-221.
    In a recent article, George Sher argues that a realistic conception of human agency, which recognizes the limited extent to which we are conscious of what we do, makes the task of specifying a conception of the kind of control that underwrites ascriptions of moral responsibility much more difficult than is commonly appreciated. Sher suggests that an adequate account of control will not require that agents be conscious of their actions; we are responsible for what we do, (...)
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  44.  72
    You’ve Earned It!: A Criticism of Sher’s Account of Desert in Wages.Ryan Jenkins - 2011 - Social Philosophy Today 27:75-86.
    Desert is a notion ubiquitous in our moral discourse, and the importance of its dictates is perhaps clearest when dealing with the distribution of material resources. George Sher has provided one account of desert in wages, answering the question, “How do workers deserve their wage?” Sher relies on the violation of preexisting “independent standards” that dictate how much of a certain good we think people are entitled to in general. When these standards are violated, they call for (...)
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  45. Blameworthiness and the Affective Account of Blame.Neal A. Tognazzini - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (4):1299-1312.
    One of the most influential accounts of blame—the affective account—takes its cue from P.F. Strawson’s discussion of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone, on this account, is to target her with resentment, indignation, or (in the case of self-blame) guilt. Given the connection between these emotions and the demand for regard that is arguably central to morality, the affective account is quite plausible. Recently, however, George Sher has argued that the affective account of blame, as understood both by (...)
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  46.  90
    Equality for Inegalitarians, by George Sher: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. x + 182, £17.99. [REVIEW]Rekha Nath - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2):408-411.
    What are society's distributive obligations to its members? The central contribution of this book lies in its novel response to this question. The response is hard to classify. In featuring a largely hands-off government and allowing for significant material inequality, Sher's vision of a just society has a distinctively (right-)libertarian flavour. However, he does not give an historical account of legitimate holdings. Indeed, he embraces a commitment that suggests an allegiance with liberal egalitarians: namely, that a society owes to (...)
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  47. Sher’s defense of blame. [REVIEW]Pamela Hieronymi - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 137 (1):19-30.
    In his In Praise of Blame, George Sher aims to provide an analysis and defense of blame. In fact, he aims to provide an analysis that will itself yield a defense by allowing him to argue that morality and blame "stand or fall together." He thus opposes anyone who recommends jettisoning blame while preserving (the rest of) morality. In this comment, I examine Sher's defense of blame. Though I am much in sympathy with Sher's strategy of (...)
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  48.  49
    Deserved punishment.J. L. A. Garcia - 1989 - Law and Philosophy 8 (2):263 - 277.
    The essay contrasts the thesis that deserved punishment is punishment which, as deserved, is obligatory with the weaker thesis that it is punishment which, as deserved, is permissible. The author first outlines an account of the meaning of desert-claims which entails only the weaker thesis and then defends this account against criticisms levied in a recent article that it is ambiguous, cannot explain the moral significance of desert, justifies letting people profit from their crimes, and permits unequal treatment. The essay (...)
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  49.  30
    Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism.George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller - 2009 - Princeton University Press.
    "This book is a sorely needed corrective. Animal Spirits is an important--maybe even a decisive--contribution at a difficult juncture in macroeconomic theory.
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  50. Character, blameworthiness, and blame: comments on George Sher’s In Praise of Blame.Angela M. Smith - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 137 (1):31-39.
    In his recent book, In Praise of Blame, George Sher argues (among other things) that a bad act can reflect negatively on a person if that act results in an appropriate way from that person's "character," and defends a novel "two-tiered" account of what it is to blame someone. In these brief comments, I raise some questions and doubts about each of these aspects of his rich and thought-provoking account.
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