In his analysis of the concept of causality, Hume finds that all events accounted causes and effects are contiguous and successive. No object can act efficaciously upon another so long as the objects are at a distance from each other. It may sometimes appear that “distant objects are productive of one another,” but on examination it is discovered that they are linked together by a series of intermediate causes which are contiguous among themselves; and even where examination does not directly (...) disclose the intermediate causal chain, it is still presumed that it exists. Also the cause is temporally prior to the effect. If I throw a stone through a window, the smashing of the glass follows the act of throwing the stone. It is only after the realization of the cause that the effect appears. Thus a cause is an object that is precedent to and contiguous with another object that is called the effect. (shrink)

Theism is sometimes defined by reference to the contrasted doctrines of Deism and Pantheism. Deism, it is said, lays stress on God's transcendence, while Pantheism emphasizes his immanence to the exclusion of his transcendence. Theism, on the other hand, mediates between these two one-sided doctrines and affirms that God is at once both immanent and transcendent. He is in the world and yet beyond it. This definition, however, can only be accepted with qualification because some forms of Pantheism are arrived (...) at by stressing, not the immanence, but the transcendence of God. According to Neo-Platonism, for example, the ineffable Absolute is so transcendent in existence and value that the world is reduced to the humble status of a mere illusory appearance and all veritable reality is absorbed in the Divine. This complication of the matter means that when studying the nature of Theism it is necessary to consider the opposition between Cosmism and Acosmism as well as that between transcendence and immanence The cosmistic tendency is to affirm, whereas the acosmistic tendency is to deny, the ultimate reality of the finite individual's effective autonomy. Theism is cosmistic, in the sense that it refuses to reduce the finite individual to a mere dependent mode of God. Nevertheless, the acosmistic tendency is very evident in many so-called theistic systems—so much so in some cases, indeed, that what is alleged to be Theism really amounts to Pantheism in disguise. (shrink)

Thus Pascal sets forth the romanticist thesis that reason has nothing to do with the deep intimations of the worshipping soul. Religion is an affair of the heart, and the productive Source of all things cannot be comprehended by the exercise of the finite intellect. This doctrine foreshadows the Kantian dichotomy between phenomena and noumena: the understanding can legitimately operate only within the sphere of space, time and natural causality, as it knows nothing of the transcendental postulates of the moral (...) life. In Kant's case, however, the opposition is worked out by means of a sustained and systematic analysis of man's faculties of cognition, and the intuitions of moral feeling are not without a rationality of their own. One might say that in Kant's view there is a logic of ethical sentiment as well as a logic of the scientific understanding, the former being practical, the latter theoretical. In the practical domain of morality the categories of the scientific understanding do not apply: the individual who acts from a sense of duty is free and immortal, besides being destined to receive rewards from the hand of God according to his deserts. The practice of the moral life therefore creates a sort of categoreal vacuum, the individual becoming a noumenon, emancipated from the shackles of the sensible world; from an empirical point of view, morality means self-transcendence. (shrink)

I have long been fascinated by the process of argument, so it seemed natural to study philosophy and logic at university, then, as a University teacher, to teach them. Since I gradually realised these subjects didn’t help students to reason and argue well, I tried to devise materials which would. This led first to my writing The Logic of Real Arguments and later, Critical Thinking: An Introduction. If you wish to teach thinking skills it is important to assess whether your (...) methods work, and I have developed several tests of critical thinking for different contexts, including a new UK Critical Thinking examination, now taken by thousands of school students. I worked with Richard Paul, Michael Scriven , Robert Swartz, Robert Ennis and many others. The emergence of the Informal Logic and Critical Thinking movement was an exciting time and I feel fortunate to have been part of it. (shrink)

Gideon Yaffe’s “subjectivism about attempts” rest on the Transfer Principle: “If a particular form of conduct is legitimately criminalized, then the attempt to engage in that form of conduct is also legitimately criminalized.” From the perspective of a moral concern with culpability, this principle seems to get to the heart of the matter: the true essence of what is wrong with attempting to commit a crime. Unfortunately, Yaffe’s argument for the Transfer Principle is based on an equivocation and therefore logically (...) unsound. The moral core of the Principle is still sound, but we can’t tell from Yaffe’s book how far that principle would take us in the criminal law. (shrink)

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts holds the Upper Midwest's most significant permanent collection of fine photographs. Covering the entire history of the medium, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. This beautiful book opens with an 1845 salt print by the English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot and closes with a 2002 color portrait by Alec Soth from his series Sleeping by the Mississippi. In between, selected images represent the genres of documentary photography, photojournalism, and street photography. Included (...) are Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" and Arthur Rothstein's "Dust Storm," as well as Edward Weston's "Pepper No. 30" and Ansel Adams's "Moonrise, Hernandez." Commemorating the collecting legacy of Carroll T. Hartwell, the founding curator of the museum's department of photographs, this book reveals Hartwell's critical eye for singular historical photographs and his belief in the influence and vitality of accomplished contemporary photographers. In an introductory essay, Christian A. Peterson recounts the history of the museum's photography collection and Hartwell's indelible imprint on the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. (shrink)

Alec Hyslop defends a (modified) version of the traditional analogical inference to other minds and rejects alternatives, but only after subjecting each of...

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

This text meets the requirements of the OCR AS specification for critical thinking. Alec Fisher shows students how they can develop a range of creative and critical thinking skills that are transferable to other subjects and contexts.

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

The standard of proof in criminal trials in many liberal democracies is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the BARD standard. It is customary to describe it, when putting a number on it, as requiring that the fact finder be at least 90% certain, after considering the evidence, that the defendant is guilty. Strikingly, no good reason has yet been offered in defense of using that standard. A number of non-consequentialist justifications that aim to support an even higher standard have been (...) offered; all are morally unsound. Meanwhile, consequentialist arguments plausibly support a substantially lower standard — in some cases so low as to undermine the idea that punishment is what is at stake. In this paper, I offer a new retributive justification that supports excluding the instrumental benefits of punishment from the balance that sets the standard. The resulting balance supports a standard arguably in the ballpark of the customary understanding of BARD: a standard requiring that the fact finder have a high, though not maximally high, degree of confidence that the defendant is guilty. (shrink)

This book develops an alternative account of rights according to which rights forfeiture has a much smaller role to play because rights themselves are more contextually contingent. For example, those who threaten to cause harm without a right to do so have weaker claims not to be killed than innocent bystanders or those who have a right to threaten to cause harm. By framing rights as the output of a balance of competing claims, and by laying out a detailed account (...) of how to balance competing claims, Walen provides a more coherent account of when killing in war is permissible. (shrink)

A robust, if not absolute, prohibition on treating people merely as a means seems to sit at the core of common sense deontological morality. But the principle prohibiting such treatment, the ‘means principle’ (MP), has been notoriously hard to defend: both the subjective, intention-focused and the objective, causal-role-focused interpretations of what it means to use someone as a means face potent objections. In this paper, my goal is not to defend the MP, but to articulate and defend a new principle, (...) which I call the Restricting Claims Principle (RCP), that explains why a person’s causal role is morally significant. The RCP broadens the basic frame of relevant considerations from the MP’s concern with the dyadic relationship between agent and patient to a global balance of patient-claims on an agent. It distinguishes two kinds of patient-claims that weigh in that balance: restricting and non-restricting. In most cases, these can be distinguished as follows: Restricting claims, if respected as rights, would restrict an agent from doing what she could otherwise permissibly do if the claimant (or his property) were absent; non-restricting claims, if respected as rights, would not in that way restrict an agent. Only restricting claims press to make others worse off than if the claimant were absent. The RCP holds that restricting claims must therefore be substantially weaker than non-restricting ones. The claims of those who would be used as a means are non-restricting, while the claims of those who would be harmed as a side effect are restricting. Thus the RCP can account for the same cases (mostly) as the MP, without having to rely on the MP to do so. (shrink)

Discussions of risk have assumed that risk must be modeled the same in all cases. This is a mistake. Normally, if people know that those affected by an agent’s choice have conflicting interests, th...

We know our own intentional actions in a distinctively first-personal way. Many accounts of knowledge of intentionally doing something, A, assume that grounds for the knowledge would have to establish or indicate that it is true that one is intentionally doing A. In this paper, I argue against this assumption, showing how it entails being in a Moore-paradoxical situation. I argue that if knowledge of intentionally doing A were such that grounds for it must be truth-indicating, then one could always (...) wonder, when doing A, whether A is for one a goal. However, just as wondering whether p is true is incompatible with thinking that one believes p, so wondering whether A is for one a goal is incompatible with thinking that one is intentionally doing A. We must allow, then, that one’s knowledge of intentionally doing A is itself a representation of A as a goal to be accomplished, apt to be grounded by reasons for doing A. I show that the first-personal character of knowledge of acting intentionally resides in its being practical rather than theoretical. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 245-258, March 2022.

This paper examines the relations between, on the one hand, accounts of the distinction between an agent's identifying with, as opposed to feeling alienated from, their attitudes; and on the other, metaphysical accounts of action. It claims that a commitment to an event-causal conception of agency, which would analyse agency in terms of the causal potency of psychological states and events, appears to render mandatory a particular style of account of identification and alienation – namely, the hierarchical model offered by (...) Harry Frankfurt and Michael Bratman. It is argued that such accounts fall foul of a dilemma: the Authority Problem. The failure of attempts to avoid the Authority Problem is then used to motivate an attractive alternative style of account of the distinction, offered by Richard Moran. However, it is pressed that Moran's account rests on claims about agency which seem incompatible with the event-causal conception of agency. By making the links between the metaphysics of agency and accounts of identification and alienation more explicit, the paper allows us to better comprehend both the apparent need for and characteristic failures of some traditional accounts of identification and alienation, as well as make clear the action-theoretical debt incurred by those who would offer an alternative. (shrink)

In an earlier article, I introduced the “restricting claims principle” to explain what is right about the means principle: the idea that it is harder to justify causing or allowing someone to suffer harm if using him as a means than if causing or allowing harm as a side effect. The RCP appeals to the idea that claims not to be harmed as a side effect push to restrict an agent from doing what she would otherwise be free to do (...) for herself or others, given an appropriate account of her baseline freedom. Claims not to be harmed as a means are not in that way ‘‘restricting.’’ The original RCP relied on a counterfactual account of the agent’s baseline freedom: What could the agent permissibly do if the patient were not present? I argue here that that counterfactual baseline fails. The revised RCP relies instead on a ‘‘toolkit baseline’’: Do the patient claims concern the property the agent needs to use? This toolkit baseline reflects the different ways that agents relate to others: as fellow agents with whom they divide up the resources of the world, and as patients who might be affected by their actions. The toolkit baseline, resting on this agent-patient divide, provides a superior account of an agent’s baseline freedom, and a better account of the moral ground for the means principle. (shrink)

S. Matthew Liao and Christian Barry argue that the patient-centered approach to deontology that I have developed—the restricting claims principle —‘is beset with problems.’ They think that it cannot correctly handle cases in which a potential victim sits in the path of an agent doing what she needs to do for some greater good, or in which a person’s property is used to benefit others and harm her. They argue that cases in which an agent does what would be permissible (...) but acts on a malicious reason show that agent intentions, rather than patientclaims, are fundamental to deontology. And they claim that the RCP presupposes the means principle in a way that shows that it is not really offering anything new. I argue here that all of these charges are mistaken. Doing so allows me to offer important refinements to the RCP, to highlight two common mistakes in reasoning about cases, and to set challenges for agentcentered approaches to deontology. (shrink)

According to the Doctrine of Illicit Intentions, it is impermissible both to form and then to act on an illicit intention. An intention is illicit, roughly, if it causes the agent who has it to be, in a certain way, disposed to perform actions that are impermissible. If the range of actions an agent might be directed to perform by an intention includes impermissible actions, then it may be impermissible to form or act on that intention even if, in the (...) end, the agent performs no action that is impermissible (other than forming and acting on an illicit intention itself). (shrink)

Alec Kassman; XIV*—On Punishing, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 221–246, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/7.

Antony Duff’s The Realm of Criminal Law offers an appealing moral reconstruction of the criminal law. I agree that the criminal law should be understood to predicate punishment upon sufficient proof that the defendant has committed a public wrong for which she is being held to account and censured. But the criminal law is not only about censoring people for public wrongs; it must serve other purposes as well, such as preventing people from committing serious crimes and more generally from (...) violating reasonable regulations. These purposes, and perhaps retributive justice, require the criminal law also to mete out harsh treatment, but only insofar as such treatments are proportional to the culpable wrong committed. The problem for the criminal law is that many mala prohibita crimes consist of a minor wrong but also call for a relatively severe punishment. To accommodate that mismatch, it is necessary to complement the criminal law, as Duff and I conceive of it, with what I call “penal law.” Penal law relies on forfeiture to explain why hard treatment is permissible. The forfeiture must be fair, and it comes with its own proportionality limits. But those limits are not as strict as the limits implicit in the criminal law. It allows for penalties that are harsher than the punishments that could justifiably be meted out for many mala prohibita offenses. One and the same act can count as a crime and a penal infraction, and one and the same criminal justice system can and should handle both crimes and the penal infractions. It is, I think, only in that way that we can accommodate both the need to prevent public wrongdoing and the distinct importance of holding people accountable for the commission of public wrongs. (shrink)

The atheist who begins to argue his case by saying, ‘Suppose there is an omniscient Being of the sort in which Christians believe ...’ is employing a very familiar move in argumentation. However, most books on argumentation theory ignore ‘suppositions’ completely. Searle omits suppositions entirely from his taxonomy of speech acts and this appears to lead to a similar omission in Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions by van Eemeren and Grootendorst.This paper argues that ‘suppositional argument’ is elegant, powerful and extremely (...) common, that the correct way to understand it is based on Gottlob Frege's distinction between ‘asserted’ and ‘unasserted’ propositions and hence that suppositions are neither assertions nor (and this is more important) assertives. The paper discusses the connections between suppositions and conditionals; it argues that argumentation theory which ignores suppositions is systematically misleading; and it concludes by indicating some possible developments in argumentation theory. (shrink)