The Standard Objection to the Standard Account

Philosophical Studies - What is the relation between a clay statue andthe lump of clay from which it is made? According to the defender of the standardaccount, the statue and the lump are...     

Fitting Attitude Analyses of Value and the Partiality Challenge

According to ‘Fitting Attitude’ (FA) analyses of value, for an object to be valuable is for that object to have properties—other than its being valuable—that make it a fitting object of certain responses. In short, if an object is positively valuable it is fitting to favour it; if an object is negatively valuable it is fitting to disfavour it. There are several variants of FA analyses. Some hold that for an object to be valuable is for it to be such that it ought to be favoured; others hold that value is analyzable in terms of reasons or requirements to favour. All these variants of the FA analysis are subject to a partiality challenge: there are circumstances in which some agents have reasons to favour or disfavour some object—due to the personal relations in which they stand to the object—without this having any bearing on the value of the object. A. C. Ewing was one of the first philosophers to draw attention to the partiality challenge for FA analyses. In this paper I explain the challenge and consider Ewing's responses, one of which is preferable to the other, but none of which is entirely satisfactory. I go on to develop an alternative Brentano-inspired response that Ewing could have offered and that may well be preferable to the responses Ewing actually did offer.

The Competition Account of Achievement‐Value

A great achievement makes one's life go better independently of its results, but what makes an achievement great? A simple answer is—its difficulty. I defend this view against recent, pressing objections by interpreting difficulty in terms of competitiveness. Difficulty is determined not by how hard the agent worked for the end but by how hard others would need to do in order to compete. Successfully reaching a goal is a valuable achievement because it is difficult, and it is difficult because it is competitive. Hence, both virtuosic performances and lucky successes can be valuable achievements.     

An Agent-Centered Account of Rightness: The Importance of a Good Attitude

This paper provides a sketch of an agent-centered way of understanding and answering the question, “What’s wrong with that?” On this view, what lies at the bottom of judgments of wrongness is a bad attitude; when someone does something wrong, she does something that expresses a bad, or inappropriate, attitude (where inappropriateness is understood, tentatively, as a failure to recognize the separateness of others). In order to motivate this account, a general Kantian agent-centered ethics is discussed, as well as Michael Slote’s agent-based ethics, in light of analysis of the grounding role of attitudes in the evaluation of two core cases. In light of these discussions, it is argued that there are advantages to preserving the grounding of the appropriateness of attitudes in facts about their objects (as opposed to Slote’s sentimentalism), while cutting such an agent-centered ethics away from a Kantian grounding.     

"第一届齐鲁文化国际学术研讨会"综述

2003年11月29日,来自韩国、澳大利亚、匈牙利、越南等国家及中国大陆的专家学者群贤毕聚泉城济南,参加由山东师范大学“齐鲁文化研究中心”主办的第一届齐鲁文化国际学术研讨会。有朋自远方来,不亦乐乎!在其后的4天会议过程中,专家学者们议论风发,畅所欲言,“和而不同”,在友好、热烈的气氛中拓宽拓深了齐鲁文化研究,可谓区域文化学术大聚会。     

The Explanatory Power of the Soul

Liberalism and naturalism are the reigning orthodoxies of most faculties today, while dualism is overwhelmingly rejected. The overarching claim defended in this paper is that liberals should consider dualism more seriously than what currently seems to be the case. This claim will be defended in two stages. First, I will argue that dualism provides better resources with which to defend foundational liberal commitments to human equality and human agency than those naturalism offers. Secondly, I will argue that dualism is plausible enough to be seriously considered by liberals granted that this view is friendlier to liberal commitments than naturalism is.     

Against the New Evidentialists

Evidentialists and Pragmatists about reasons for belief have long been in dialectical stalemate. However, recent times have seen a new wave of Evidentialists who claim to provide arguments for their view which should be persuasive even to someone initially inclined toward Pragmatism. This paper reveals a central flaw in this New Evidentialist project: their arguments rely on overly demanding necessary conditions for a consideration to count as a genuine reason. In particular, their conditions rule out the possibility of pragmatic reasons for action. Since the existence of genuine pragmatic reasons for action is common ground between the Evidentialist and the Pragmatist, this problem for the New Evidentialist arguments is fatal. The upshot is that the deadlock between these two positions is restored: neither side can claim to be in possession of an argument that could convince the other. As it happens, I myself favor Pragmatism about reasons for belief, and although I don't claim to be able to convince a committed Evidentialist, I do make a prima facie case for Pragmatism by describing particular scenarios in which it seems to be true. I then go on to develop my own preferred version of the view: Robust Pragmatism, according to which a consideration never constitutes a reason for believing a proposition purely in virtue of being evidence for it.     

现代新儒学对唯科学主义之应对及其伦理态度

五四以来的启蒙思潮将科学理性作为启蒙的目标之一。然而,唯科学主义将科学的意义无限扩大,根本否定以儒学为核心的传统文化的价值,毁伤了中国文化之根。为此,三代现代新儒家在调和儒学与科学关系的探索中,既开启了传统儒学价值体系的现代转折,又在道统上薪火相传。他们于民族危机中坚守着文化本位,于唯科学主义的浪潮中坚守着道德本位,既有着一致的伦理态度,又随着研究的不断深入,展现出不同的思想风貌。     

Murdering an Accident Victim: A New Objection to the Bare-Difference Argument

Many philosophers, psychologists, and medical practitioners believe that killing is no worse than letting die on the basis of James Rachels's Bare-Difference Argument. I show that his argument is unsound. In particular, a premise of the argument is that his examples are as similar as is consistent with one being a case of killing and the other being a case of letting die. However, the subject who lets die has both the ability to kill and the ability to let die while the subject who kills lacks the ability to let die. Modifying the latter example so that the killer has both abilities yields a pair of cases with morally different acts. The hypothesis that killing is worse than letting die is the best explanation of this difference.     

The Remarkable Explanatory Power of Neurobiology

Abstract

NEUROBIOLOGY FOR CLINICAL SOCIAL WORK: THEORY AND PRACTICE, by Jeffrey S. Applegate and Janet R. Shapiro. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005, $29.95, 248 pp. Reviewed by Linda A. Chernus, MSW, LISW, BCD