A classic exposition of Kant's ethical thought.

summaryThis paper discusses objections against the idea that the meaning of a word is its use. Sct. 1 accepts Rundle's point that ‘meaning’ and ‘use’ are used differently, but insists that this is compatible with holding that use determines meaning, an therefore holds the key to conceptual analysis. Scts. 2–4 rebut three lines of argument which claim that linguistic philosophy goes astray by reading into the meaning of words non‐semantic features of its use: Searle's general speech act fallacy charge, Hacker's (...) use of the Frege‐point against Wittgenstein's account of avowals, and Grice's attack on Wittgenstein's discussion of ‘trying’. Sct. 5 argues that Grice's doctrine of conversational implicature fails to show that the features he disregards are pragmatic rather than semantic. Sct. 6 ends with some suggestions about how use can be related to meaning without being abused. (shrink)

The moral case for experimentation on animals rests both on the goods to be realized, the evils to be avoided thereby, and on the duty to respect persons and to secure them in the enjoyment of their natural moral rights. Some experimentation on animals presents no problems of justification as it involves no harm at all to the animals which are the subject of experiments and is such as to seek to achieve an advance in knowledge. Experiments on non-sentient animals, (...) like those on plant life, may harm the subjects but in ways that in themselves need raise no morally significant issues. Moral issues may arise if the subjects of experiments are members of an endangered species and for like reasons but not simply on account of the harm caused by the experiment to the subjects. Other experimentation on animals is to be justified solely in terms of its benefit to animals, even though it involves harm to the animals upon which experiments are performed. There are many poisons and diseases to which animals and not human beings are exposed which give rise to the need for experiments to determine effective therapies, treatments, or other remedies. Examples include annual rye grass toxicity, foot-and-mouth disease, the many fowl diseases, and so on. Human beings commonly have an interest in successfully experimenting to find effective remedies, either a financial interest as with farm animals, race horses and the like, amusement interest as with pets, or a concern not to have a species or variety become extinct. The moral case for such experiments may be strengthened by reference to such interests if they in turn have a moral basis, but generally it does not depend for its validity on this. Other experimentation that harms the animals involved is to be justified in terms of the benefits to be realized and evils lessened for persons by the knowledge and the use of the knowledge gained, where the knowledge is used to secure the enjoyment of their moral rights by persons. Much experimentation benefits both persons, contributing to the securing of their enjoyment of their moral rights, and animals which do not possess moral rights, and is to be morally justified on both counts. Obviously a great amount of experimentation occurs today which does not admit of justification along any of these lines, and hence, is such that it must be condemned as being morally wrong. (shrink)

Liberalism is commonly believed, especially by its exponents, to be opposed to interference by way of enforcing value judgments or concerning itself with the individual's morality. My concern is to show that this is not so and that liberalism is all the better for this. Many elements have contributed to liberal thought as we know it today, the major elements being the liberalism of which Locke is the most celebrated exponent, which is based upon a belief in natural, human rights; (...) the liberalism of which Kant is the best known exponent, which is based on respect for persons as ends in themselves; and the liberalism of Bentham and the Mills, which is based upon utilitarian ethical theories and most especially with concern for pleasure and the reduction of pain. These different elements of liberalism have led to different emphases and different political and social arrangements, but all have involved a concern to safeguard values and to use force to that end. Today they constitute strands of thought which go to make up liberal thought as we now know it, hence it is not simply a historical fact about liberalism, but a fact about its philosophical basis, that liberalism is firmly involved in certain value and moral commitments. In the remainder of this paper I shall seek to bring this out. (shrink)

The concept of prima facie duty is deemed important by ross and the author. The author thinks ross and others have not elucidated the concept and the relation between prima facie and 'absolute' duty. He concludes that "we must explain the obligatoriness of absolute duties in terms of prima facie duties, As being derived from them, And not vice versa, As ross attempted." (staff).

L'A. esamina i commentari al De anima di Filopono, dello pseudo-Filopono e dello pseudo-Simplicio.

Quantum entanglement has been focus of fundamental debate since the original paper of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [1] and the work of Bell [2], discussing its implications on fundamental issues related to the concepts of physical reality and locality. It has only been during the last few years when it has been recognized that this feature of Quantum Mechanics may also have important applications in the fields of communication and computation. In particular, it has been shown that using entanglement would (...) allow to perform certain computational tasks, such as factoring, much faster. On the other hand, it provides the basis for provably secure secret communication and cryptography. (shrink)

The controversy between teleologists and deontologists, whether under these names or in other guises, is one of the long-standing disputes of ethics. In different branches of philosophy the perennial nature of a dispute may point to different things: in some, for example, it may properly incline one to say “a plague on both your houses” and thereafter to look for some way of disposing of the whole problem around which the philosophical problem has raged; in ethics, on the other hand, (...) root-and-branch methods of excision are to be deplored, for here a perennial issue usually draws attention to points of view which have somehow to be reconciled if the problems underlying them are to be overcome. The deontology-teleology controversy seems to me a case in point. Here, if anywhere in ethics, a reconciliation must be effected; and in the present paper my primary aim is to induce deontologists and teleologists to abandon their mutual hostility. 1 I shall attempt to carry out this mission of philosophical good will through examining the ways in which we justify imperatives. In the first section of the paper I shall say something about the controversy itself, making it clear that I consider that it has roots which it would be inconvenient to expose at this stage of the inquiry; in the second I shall study the justification of a number of typical non-moral imperatives; in the third I shall apply the findings of the second to the justification of moral imperatives; and finally, in the fourth section I shall return to the deontology-teleology controversy and attempt to elucidate how it arises, to point out the two levels on which the same dispute can be found, and to suggest a way in which the essentials of the rival views may be accepted and combined. (shrink)

?Moral Black? and Whitemail? is a study of those modes of action which involve what I propose to call ?a raising of the moral stakes?. Illustration: A wants B to do X, and B wants to do Y; so A creates a situation in which doing Y would either be morally objectionable or more objectionable than it would have been but for A's intervention. Such modes of action include all the varieties of moral blackmail as well as such practices as (...) those of returning good for evil, putting people on trust, and some kinds of non?violent resistance. I try to expose the distinguishing marks of moral blackmail, why it is thought so objectionable, and how it is related to these other practices that also involve a raising of the moral stakes. The study as a whole is intended to underline the ambiguous nature of human action. (shrink)

This article examines the bases and limits to the right to liberty of expression. Both the extreme libertarian and the orthodox liberal views are rejected. Against them, It is argued that the right to liberty is to be defended both as a prima facie intrinsic moral right derivative from man's autonomy and as a conditional right deriving from man's right to access to intrinsic goods including knowledge, True belief, Self-Development. The rights so derived are not absolute rights, But rights to (...) be limited by concern for justice, Other rights, Morality, Knowledge and true belief, And morality. (shrink)

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