A familiar complaint against the principle that “ought” implies “can” is that it seems that agents can intentionally make it the case that they cannot perform acts that they nonetheless ought to perform. I propose a related principle that I call the principle that “the thing to do” implies “can.” I argue that the principle that “the thing to do” implies “can” is implied by important but underappreciated truths about practical reason, and that it is not vulnerable to (...) the familiar complaint against “ought” implies “can.” Moreover, I suggest that “the thing to do” implies “can” has interesting implications for “ought” implies “can” - implications that depend on the relation between claims about what we ought to do and claims about the thing to do. (shrink)

The Things We Do and Why We Do Them argues against the common assumption that there is a kind of thing called "action" which all reason-giving explanation of action are geared towards. Sandis explains why all theories concerned with the form which any such explanation must take fail from the outset, and shows how various debates on the nature of so-called motivating reasons only arise because the participants all share a number of mistaken views which follow from the basic (...) assumption under attack. In so doing, he urges philosophers and psychologists alike to stop asking whether the explanation of action is causal, and to focus instead on its multifarious objects. This book will appeal to anyone interested in motivational psychology, the reasons for which we act, and the philosophy of explanation in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When the Morally "Right" Thing to Do Is Difficult:Reflections on a True "Pastoral" Approach in John Paul II's Veritatis SplendorIrene AlexanderIn the moral life, there are situations in which it is difficult to know what is the right thing to do. On the other hand, there are types of moral actions in which no such intellectual difficulty exists, where the right thing to do is very (...) clear, yet hesitation or even rejection of the moral law arises because to persist in virtuous living seems too difficult. For example, as St. Augustine writes in his Confessions: "Lord, give me chastity, but not yet." Augustine is not unclear about what he ought to do, yet he perceives that there remains a real gap between the truth of the moral law and his own ability to live virtuously what love demands.Christian moral theology reveals that this "gap" is not at all unusual, nor even surprising. Given original sin and its effects on the human heart, man stands in genuine need of a redeemer. For this reason, the task of moral theology today cannot involve merely presenting the truth of the moral law, important as it is; it must empower the human heart to live it. I argue that, to inspire and transform hearts, moral theology must be presented within the biblical story of salvation and lead to a personal encounter with Christ. Indeed, this is precisely what the Second Vatican Council called for when it insisted that theologians take "special care" in the renewal of moral theology. The Council fathers insisted that, in its presentation, moral theology needs to be more deeply animated by Scripture, to integrate with dogmatic theology, and most of all, to find its place within the mystery of Christ.1 [End Page 333]In this paper, I would like to demonstrate how Pope John Paul II's insights in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (VS) can aid in a pastoral approach to morally difficult situations.2 It is no secret that he wrote this encyclical to address the widespread dissent among Catholic moral theologians who dissented from the magisterium on difficult moral issues such as contraception, abortion, divorce, in vitro fertilization, and homosexuality by attempting to reinvent the foundational principles of morality, which led to a whole host of errors. Yet, even though one can prove demonstratively the truth of the moral law, there still remains the pastoral question: "But what am I to do, if remaining faithful is very difficult?" "What can I do when I cannot seem to rise to what love demands, or I am afraid of what love will cost me?" In this paper, I will share three key insights from his work that lead to an effective pastoral response: (1) to rediscover the purpose of living a moral life, (2) to recognize the missing human good in difficult circumstances, (3) to receive the fullness of sacramental grace. Whereas some theologians openly encourage dissent from the Church's moral teaching for "pastoral" reasons, John Paul II argues that there is nothing more "pastoral" than the power of sacramental grace.Rediscover Purpose: The Moral Life as a Call to Divine Intimacy and MissionIn his book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek has powerfully argued that all great leaders lead by answering the most important question: why does this organization or company or rule exist? Great leaders inspire with the purpose. Not surprisingly, when it comes to the question "why should I follow the moral law?," Jesus Christ, in Matt 19, also leads the rich young man with the "why."In the encounter, Christ acknowledges the young man's predicament when he approaches him with the question, "Teacher, what good must I do to have eternal life?" Merely remaining obedient to the law as though it were nothing more than a checklist is not enough to satisfy the deep [End Page 334] longings of the young man's heart. John Paul II comments that "the young man's question is not so much about rules to be followed, but about the full meaning of life. This is in fact the aspiration at the heart... (shrink)

Farrell, Marie T Review(s) of: The first thing to do is live: Essays sacred and secular, by Adrian Lyons SJ (Melbourne: David Lovell Publishing, 2013), pp. 136, pb $27.95.

This paper explores the role of ethics and responsibility as drivers of a transition to a more sustainable agri-food system, by drawing on an investigation of the governance of social sustainability in the UK’s conventional food supply. The paper investigates how and why various non-state actors in the conventional food supply construe certain social obligations as being part of the remit of the food supply; whether ethics plays a motivating role; and the extent to which their activities are linked to (...) sustainability. The paper uses data collected via two surveys of diverse entities in the conventional food supply, the first a survey of public-facing websites, the second a series of in-depth interviews. The entities ranged from primary producers, manufacturers and food service operators to consultancies, standard-setting organisations and advocacy groups. The study finds that actors view a variety of socially focused or socially beneficial activities as legitimate governance concerns for the conventional food supply, and that ethics plays a role in motivating or justifying these activities. However, the activities are inconsistently associated with sustainability, a finding that may undermine the use of sustainability programmes as tools for driving ethical agendas. Moreover, the dominant business framing of the conventional food supply means that ethical considerations are often expressed in terms of more instrumental priorities. Social sustainability or responsibility actions can be justified on moral grounds as ‘the right thing to do’ but usually have to be backed up in more pragmatic terms as a way of ‘doing well by doing good’. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical analysis of some of the things faculty do to maximize their Student Evaluation of Teachers scores. It examines 28 practices that are claimed to be unethical methods for maximizing SET scores. The paper offers an argument concerning the morality of each behavior and concludes that 13 of the 28 practices suggest unethical behavior. The remaining 15 behaviors are morally permissible.

I argue that it is possible, in the right circumstances, to see what the kind thing is to do: in the right circumstances, we can, literally, see deontic facts, as well as facts about others’ emotional states, and evaluative facts. In arguing for this, I will deploy a notion of non‐inferential perceptual belief or judgement according to which the belief or judgement is arrived at non‐inferentially in the phenomenological sense and yet is inferential in the epistemic sense. The ability (...) to arrive at these kinds of beliefs and judgements is part of virtue, and is also part of what it is to grasp thick ethical concepts in an engaged way. When we come to thinner evaluative and deontic facts and thinner ethical concepts, however, the requirements for non‐inferential perceptual belief and judgement are less easily met. Seeing what is the kind thing to do is one matter; seeing what is the right thing to do is another. (shrink)

Rüdiger Bittner argues that the aim of thinking about what to do, of practical reason, is to find, not what we ought to do, but what it is good to do under the circumstances. Neither under prudence nor under morality are there things we ought to do. There is no warrant for the idea of our being required, by natural law or by our rationality, to do either what helps us attain our ends or what is right for moral reasons. (...) While common moral understanding is committed to there being things we ought to do and to our being guilty and deserving blame if we fail to do them, we can lay aside these notions without loss, indeed with benefit. The volume also explains what it is for something to be good to do under the circumstances and argues for understanding practical reason in these terms. What is good to do we find by experience: what we go through teaches us what helps and what hinders, and helps us figure out what is prudentially useful and what is morally right to do-although ultimately this difference itself gives way, and morality turns out to be a part of prudence. (shrink)

Cognitive partitions are useful. The notion of numerical identity helps us induce them. Consider, for instance, the role of identity in representing an equivalence relation like taking the same train. This expressive function of identity has been largely overlooked. Other possible functions of the concept have been over-emphasized. It is not clear that we use identity to represent individual objects or quantify over collections of them. Understanding what the concept is good for looks especially urgent in light of the fact (...) that numerical identities themselves are tangibly trifling. (shrink)

After a brief overview of ethical issues in an Australian context catalyzed by the current pandemic, this article focuses on data protection in the light of recent debates about COVID-19 data tracking in Australia and globally. This article looks at the issue of trust as a fundamental principle of effective and ethical COVID-safe measures undertaken by the government. Key to ensuring such trust are Habermasian participatory dialogs, which assume trust as a condition of authentic illocution, and an emphasis on short-term (...) data capture. (shrink)

The four principles and consequentialism assist in teasing out moral dilemmas in medicine but often fail to account for the texture of our moral experience. In particular, these ethical approaches fail to account for the moral dilemma and the resultant distress. Conversely, by considering the relationships, emotionality, and motivations of human beings, Simone de Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity furnishes a more robust ethical analysis and encourages a deeper understanding of how we actually negotiate relationships of care in medicine. I argue (...) that moral distress not only reveals our need for a fuller understanding of intersubjectivity—one not on offer by principalism or consequentialism—but also exposes the deeply ambiguous and agonizing nature inherent in our relationships with others. A case study is presented and analyzed via de Beauvoir's ethics so as to broaden our understanding of ethical decision-making in medicine. (shrink)

This study examines how individual members of the public make moral sense of the potentially conflicting “economic problem” or “public health problem” representations of the COVID-19 crisis when judging responsible business behavior. The data are based on a qualitative survey involving a thought experiment with 119 participants in the United States conducted at the initial stage of the pandemic. This article proposes a typology matrix using the theories of cognitive polyphasia and cognitive dissonance to understand better individual moral sensemaking of (...) responsible business behavior in the context of a societal paradox in which there are contradictory and interdependent demands between important social objectives. The typology, referred to as the 4R Model of Moral Sensemaking of Competing Social Problems, provides insights for how companies may be perceived when responding to competing social problems, expanding the micro-CSR (corporate social responsibility) and paradox literatures. (shrink)

Decisions, decisions -- Unpacking ethical responsibility -- Go with your gut!! -- Let your values be your guide -- The meaning of integrity -- Compassion counts -- Citizenship: doing your part -- Ethical decisions: character in action -- Learning from mistakes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Right Thing to DoJane RogersIn stark contrast to getting my graduate degree in bioethics in which I discovered that I am inclined to favor an ethics based on my religious beliefs, in nursing school I learned that I had to take my religion out of nursing care. As a bioethics student, I read in my textbook, Bioethics: A Systematic Approach, that “… just because an action is (...) rationally allowed does not mean that everyone agrees one ought to act in that way.” Yet often in nursing I found that we nurses knew what was best for our patients, even if they did not. At least, we believed that we did. This general paternalistic belief spread into every area of the care we gave except for one, and that was religion. [End Page 208]As student nurses, we learned to separate our religion from our care to focus on the patient’s religion or spiritual needs. Our patients should never know of our religious beliefs or even if we had a lack of them. We needed to be completely neutral on all religious issues and focus solely on the patient’s preference. If our patients needed spiritual care, we would find someone to provide it and we would incorporate it into the nursing plan of care. Providing care of the whole patient including their religious needs was the definition of a good nurse. Certainly I wanted to be a good nurse, so I swore I would always include the spiritual needs of my patients as part of my care, while never expressing my own.As fate would have it, as a new nurse I found myself overwhelmed running around just trying to give medications, admit and discharge patients, start IV’s, insert catheters, note doctor’s orders and get my charting done. My time was engaged in trying to calm confused and combative patients, running to grab an emesis basin for a patient to throw up in or answering the phone, so thinking about religion or spiritual care for my patients most of the time amounted to “God help me and my patients get through this shift.” My goal of being a good nurse was starting to look dismal as I realized I had no idea if I could find the time or means and ways to incorporate religion into the care I gave, or if it even mattered if I did.Fortuitously for me, most of my patients never mentioned religion, although at times they did leave some nonverbal clues. I could see a rosary laying on a bedside table or a bible or prayer book next to them in bed. While I would make sure their religious item was always within reach, I remained respectful yet distant in religious matters, never offering any spiritual care or assistance. I was quite accepting of my first Mormon patient wearing the garment under the traditional hospital gown. I was appalled when an unconscious Jehovah Witness patient was nearly given blood. When a minister or priest came to visit, I’d excuse myself quickly so that the work of their God could do what I could not or should not do. Occasionally I was asked by family members to call in a minister or a priest or chaplain and I did that with a great feeling of satisfaction as I was surely providing the spiritual care they requested.Eventually however I did start to indulge in highly spontaneous and random acts of religion. These were always done secretly. The patient or family must never know. Thinking it would help I once covertly gave a patient a special rosary I had with Lourdes water in it thinking it might heal him. I waited to see a miracle. It never came. Despite the absence of that miracle I was still hopeful that perhaps my prayers or another rosary could heal or at least help some of my patients. After all, as a nurse I witnessed lots of healings that astounded me. People I never thought would get better sometimes did anyway.Although I was cognizant that some healing was the direct result of superb medical intervention and excellent nursing care, there were always... (shrink)

This book for teachers and parents makes an important case for the need for developing moral behavior in young children. It offers effective tools for teaching children to weigh decisions in the face of potential consequences, examine rationales for their choices, study the effects of their choices on others.

An expansive look at how culture shapes our emotions—and how we can benefit, as individuals and a society, from less anger and more shame The world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good. In How to Do (...) Things with Emotions, Owen Flanagan explains that emotions are things we do, and he reminds us that those like anger and shame involve cultural norms and scripts. The ways we do these emotions offer no guarantee of emotionally or ethically balanced lives—but still we can control and change how such emotions are done. Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame, and he observes how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better. Through comparative insights from anthropology, psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy, Flanagan reveals an incredible range in the expression of anger and shame across societies. He establishes that certain types of anger—such as those that lead to revenge or passing hurt on to others—are more destructive than we imagine. Certain forms of shame, on the other hand, can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty. Flanagan proposes that we should embrace shame as a uniquely socializing emotion, one that can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot. How to Do Things with Emotions celebrates the plasticity of our emotional responses—and our freedom to recalibrate them in the pursuit of more fulfilling lives. (shrink)

What is art? What constitutes great art? Why do we value art so much and why has it been such a conspicuous feature of all human societies? These questions have been discussed at length though without satisfactory resolution. This is not surprising. Such discussions are usually held without reference to the brain, through which all art is conceived, executed and appreciated. Art has a biological basis. It is a human activity and, like all human activities, including morality, law and religion, (...) depends upon, and obeys, the laws of the brain. To understand the biological foundations of art, we must enquire into the biological foundations of knowledge, for art constitutes a form of knowledge; indeed is knowledge. We are still far from knowing the neural basis of the laws that dictate artistic creativity, achievement and appreciation, but spectacular advances in our knowledge of the visual brain allow us to make a beginning in trying to formulate neural laws of art and aesthetics; in short, to study neuroaesthetics. In this essay, I try to discuss the art of three Titanic figures in Western culture — Dante, Michelangelo and Wagner — in neurological terms. I try to show that we can trace the origins of their art to a fundamental characteristic of the brain, namely its capacity to form concepts. This capacity is itself the by-product of an essential characteristic of the brain. That characteristic is abstraction, and is imposed upon the brain by one of its chief functions, namely the acquisition of knowledge. (shrink)

The book offers brief examination and analysis of fundamental moral terms constituting ethical theories while proposing clarifications of them. It consequently considers whether the three major ethical theories - Teleology, Deontology, and Utilitarianism - adequately explain human conduct and humans' propensity to seek happiness given these theories' notions of the latter. After brief exposition of recognized and less known problems with each of the theories' projects, the book offers new and improved definition of happiness which accommodates these theories' important claims (...) and notions of happiness while addressing some of the objections to defining happiness as living a good life or contemplation, duty, and experiencing pleasure. The book concludes with a defense of morality as a necessary component of human life and the idea that we must engage in the pursuit of happiness ethically. (shrink)

From the outside, Bayesian statistics may seem like a closed little corner of probability. Once a prior is specified you compute! From the inside the field is filled with problems, conceptual and otherwise. This paper surveys some of what remains to be done and gives examples of the work in progress via a Bayesian peek into Feller volume I.

First published in 1962, contains the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. It sets out Austin's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts for at least the last ten years of his life. Starting from an exhaustive examination of his already well- known distinction of performative utterances from statements, Austin here finally abandons that distinction, replacing it by a more general theory of 'illocutionary forces' of utterances which has important bearings on a wide (...) variety of philosophical problems. (shrink)

According to ‘purification interpretations’, the point of the epoché is to purify our ordinary experience of certain assumptions inherent in it. In this paper, I argue that purification interpretations are wrong. Ordinary experience is just fine as it is, and phenomenology has no intention of correcting or purifying it. To understand the epoché, we must keep the reflective nature of phenomenology firmly in mind. When we do phenomenology, we occupy two distinct roles, which come with very different responsibilities. As reflecting (...) phenomenologists, we must deactivate all our beliefs about the world. But the only point of this is to be able to describe the experiences we have as experiencing subjects, including all those beliefs about the world that may be part and parcel of those experiences. I end by suggesting that there is a useful analogy between phenomenological reflection and the familiar practice of quoting. (shrink)

Anthology of readings in moral philosophy.

In this paper I attempt to unpack the current public debate on racial transformation in South African sport, particularly with regard to the demographic make-up of its national cricket and rugby sides. I ask whether the alleged moral imperative to undertake such transformation is, in fact, a moral imperative at all. I discuss five possible such imperatives: the need to compensate non-white South Africans for the injustices in sport’s racist history, the imperative to return the make-up of our national sides (...) to what they would have been in the absence of that history, the requirement that national sides be representative of the country, the need to eliminate ongoing racial bias in selection, and the obligation to provide all South Africans, regardless of their race, the opportunity to compete as equals for places in the national side. I argue that the first three, drawn from talk of “rectifying the injustices of the past,” “achieving demographic proportionality between the sides and the country,” “representivity,” and “transformation” itself, are not compelling. The remaining two are of great moral import, but that the sorts of phrases just mentioned, and which are frequently used in the debate, have little to do with those genuine moral requirements. (shrink)

This essay attempts to address the crucial relation of feminist philosophy to minorities inside and outside of feminism. To do so it turns to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, focusing on their concept of “becoming minoritarian” and related concepts. Aided by close readings of two canonical but ultimately negative assessments of Deleuze and Guattari, Alice Jardine's “Woman in Limbo” and Rosi Braidotti's Patterns of Dissonance, the essay outlines and argues the merits of a “minoritarian” feminism.

How to Do Things with Fictions considers how fictional works, ranging from Chaucer to Beckett, subject readers to a series of exercises meant to fortify their mental capacities. While it is often assumed that fictions must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit to us, certain texts defy this assumption by functioning as training-grounds for the capacities: in engaging with them we stand not to become more knowledgeable or more virtuous but more skilled, whether (...) at rational thinking, at maintaining necessary illusions, at achieving tranquillity of mind, or even at religious faith. Instead of offering us propositional knowledge, these texts yield know-how; rather than attempting to instruct by means of their content, they hone capacities by means of their form; far from seducing with the promise of instantaneous transformation, they recognize, with Aristotle, that change is a matter of sustained and patient practice. (shrink)

Any good theory of knowledge ascriptions should explain and predict our judgments about their felicity. I argue that any such explanation must take into account a distinction between three ways of using knowledge ascriptions: to suggest acceptance of the embedded proposition, to explain or predict a subject's behavior or attitudes, or to understand the relation of knowledge as such. The contextual effects on our judgments about felicity systematically differ between these three types of uses. Using such a distinction is, in (...) principle, open to both contextualist and pragmatic invariantist accounts of knowledge ascriptions. However, there are some implications pertaining to the use of the “method of cases” in the debate about knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

This article argues that two distinctive varieties of antifascism took shape in the 1930s and endured through the late 1970s. These two varieties—Popular Front antifascism and anti-imperial antifascism—were in dialogue but in opposition to one another, and both were transnational mobilizing ideologies. Investigating these two antifascist movements allows us to place Europe in the wider world and demonstrate how anti-imperial activists of color simultaneously “provincialized” Europe and situated it within a global framework. The effort also highlights the need to rethink (...) the history of the European Left through the framework of antifascism. (shrink)

Not understanding that doing nothing can be much more preferable to doing something potentially harmful. Recent developments in cognitive science have highlighted the power that stories, metaphors, and archetypes have on human thinking. In fact, to a large extent they are our thinking. Consider the archetypal image of the young adult male hero. He is brave, active, adventurous, innovative, knowledgeable, clever, confident, independent, in control, and not constrained by family, tradition, or public opinion. He is a character that appears in (...) myths, in histories of conquest and discovery—from Odysseus to the Medusa-slayer, the.. (shrink)

Recently, there has been much debate about the role and nature of political theories. Jeremy Waldron has argued that we misconstrue a theory’s purpose if we summarize it in terms of ‘What Plato Would Allow’, because a normative theory is a conceptual exploration and should not be reduced to a policy wish list. To make sense of such phrases beyond Waldron’s critique, this paper provides some conceptual tools to clarify the practical purpose of normative political theories. First, it draws on (...) Bernard Williams’ distinction between the enactive and structural models in political theory. Second, it seeks to reconstruct normative political theories as sets of speech acts having an illocutionary point that expresses the relation between theory and practice. Third, the paper outlines five types of illocutionary points (Intervention, Justification, Reconciliation, Critique, and Imagination of alternatives). The idea of an illocutionary point can make sense of the practical import of a theory in a multifaceted manner and without subscribing to a specific conception of practicality. (shrink)

Introduction: Doing the right thing -- Utilitarianism : Bentham and J.S. Mill -- Libertarianism -- John Locke -- Markets and morals -- Immanuel Kant -- John Rawls -- Affirmative action -- Aristotle -- Liberals and communitarians -- Conclusion: Reconnecting politics and morals.

John Austin's masterpiece, How to Do Things with Words, was not just a contribution to philosophy; it has proven to be a major contribution to linguistics, one of the founding documents o pragmatics, the investigation of how we use words to accomplish various ends in the social world. Strangely, not much attention has been paid by philosophers — or by psychologists and linguists — to how we use words in private, you might say, to think. As Wittgenstein once noted, ‘It (...) is very noteworthy that what goes on in thinking practically never interests us.’. (shrink)

This article first tries to show that there is an affinity between an embarrassing violation of autonomy in a significant example of Persian writing style nearly one thousand years ago, and Foucault’s desire in his inaugural speech in 1970. Then, after it explains arbitrary rule as the real of the Iranian society in contrast with the societies where capitalism is established, it uses the 2013 Iranian presidential election as an instance of how a truly emancipatory political act in the country (...) would involve an even more embarrassing situation, because the act is not anything but full identification with the arbitrary power being administered. Key words: the real, arbitrary rule, the capital, humiliation, emancipation. (shrink)

Fraud is a pervasive and challenging problem that costs society large amounts of money. By no means all fraud is committed by ‘professional criminals’: much is done by ordinary people who indulge in small-scale opportunistic deception. In this paper, we set out to investigate when people behave dishonestly, for example by committing fraud, in an online context. We conducted three studies to investigate how the rejection of one’s efforts, operationalized in different ways, affected the amount of cheating and information falsification. (...) Study 1 demonstrated that people behave more dishonestly when rejected. Studies 2 and 3 were conducted in order to disentangle the confounding factors of the nature of the rejection and the financial rewards that are usually associated with dishonest behavior. It was demonstrated that rejection in general, rather than the nature of a rejection, caused people to behave more dishonestly. When a rejection was based on subjective grounds, dishonest behavior increased with approximately 10%, but this difference was not statistically significant. We subsequently measured whether dishonesty was driven by the financial loss associated with rejection, or emotional factors such as a desire for revenge. We found that rejected participants were just as dishonest when their cheating did not led to financial gain. However, they felt stronger emotions when there was no money involved. This seems to suggest that upon rejection, emotional involvement, especially a reduction in happiness, drives dishonest behavior more strongly than a rational cost-benefit analysis. These results indicate that rejection causes people to behave more dishonestly, specifically in online settings. Firms wishing to deter customers and employees from committing fraud may therefore benefit from transparency and clear policy guidelines, discouraging people to submit claims that are likely to be rejected. (shrink)

What is a thing? It is an apparently simple question to which few philosophers or social scientists have devoted any serious attention. This chapter attempts to explain this neglect, and then to develop a way of thinking about the question by distinguishing things, and the concept ‘thing’, from objects and entities with which they are often conflated. This more refined and adequate conception of the thing is then deployed in order to help answer two related questions: ‘Why (...) do things matter? What are the grounds of our attachment to them, and of our obligations towards them?’ It is argued that an endemic failure within philosophy and social science to reflect on what constitutes the thinghood of things makes it harder than it need be to answer questions concerning their value and why they matter to us. (shrink)

This is one of a number of talks given on 23 May 2008 in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, on the occasion of Quentin Skinner's retirement from the Regius Professorship of Modern History. No attempt has been made to disguise the origins of this piece, or its festal tone, and any statistics quoted reflect the position as of 1 May 2008.

This work is a detailed analytical study of different forms of silent doing. It explores a range of topics related to silence, including the theory of silent doing and its relationship to other forms of action and communication, silence and aesthetics, the ethics and politics of silence, and the religious dimensions of silence. The book, as an original contribution to analytical philosophy, should be of interest to philosophers and students. ".

Midway through How to Do Things With Words, J.L. Austin’s announces a “fresh start” in his efforts to characterize the ways in which speech is action, and introduces a new conceptual framework from the one he has been using up to that point. Against a common reading that portrays this move as simply abandoning the framework so far developed, Marina Sbisà contends that the text takes the argumentative form of a proof by contradiction, such that the initial framework plays an (...) instrumental role as part of a proof in favour of the subsequent one. Despite agreeing with Sbisà’s broad instrumentalist approach, we argue that her regimentation of Austin’s narrative into a proof by contradiction ultimately fails - both as a proof and as an interpretation of Austin. Instead, we suggest that a better way of interpreting the peculiar structure of How to Do Things With Words is as a pedagogical exercise whose point is to bring a concealed alternative into view in a manner that also explains its initial concealment, and that this approach provides richer resources for supporting Sbisà’s own conventionalist understanding of illocution than that afforded by reading the text as a proof by contradiction. (shrink)

This article attempts to understand and develop the morality of everyday activities in organizations. Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, practical wisdom, is utilized to describe the morality of the everyday work activities at two call centres of an Australian insurance company. The ethnographic data suggests that ethical judgements at the lower level of the organization are practical rather than theoretical; emergent rather than static; ambiguous rather than clear-cut; and particular rather than universal. Ethical codes are of limited value here and it (...) is argued that by developing phronesis members of the organization can improve their capacity to deal with this ethical complexity. (shrink)

Scientific methods may be viewed as procedures for converging to the true answer to a given empirical question. Typically, such methods converge to the truth only if certain empirical presuppositions are satisfied, which raises the question whether the presuppositions are satisfied. Another scientific method can be applied to this empirical question, and so forth, occasioning an empirical regress. So there is an obvious question about the point of such a regress. This paper explains how to assess the methodological worth of (...) a methodological regress by solving for the strongest sense of single-method performance that can be achieved given that such a regress exists. Several types of regresses are. (shrink)

Two strikingly similar critiques of epistemological foundationalism are examined: J. L. Austin's critique of A. J. Ayer in the former's "Sense and Sensibilia," and part of Candrakīrti's critique of Dignāga in the first chapter of the "Prasannapadā." With respect to Austin, it is argued that his writings on epistemology in fact relate quite closely to his better-known philosophy of speech acts, and that the appeal to ordinary language is part of a transcendental argument against the possibility of radical skepticism. It (...) is then argued that Candrakīrti makes some very similar moves, and that his argument against Dignāga makes still clearer the sense in which both Austin and Candrakīrti can be characterized as making transcendental arguments. In particular, if a condition of the possibility of meaningful discourse is the making of certain kinds of assents, then the epistemologist's demand for the justification of those assents is unreasonable. (shrink)