Does ‘Ought’ Still Imply ‘Can’?

According to ??ought?? implies ??can?? (OIC), your obligation can never be to do what you cannot do. In a recent attack on OIC, Graham has argued that intuitions about justified intervention can help us determine whether the agent whose actions we use force to prevent would have acted permissibly or not. These intuitions, he suggests, cause trouble for the idea that you can be obligated to refrain from doing what you can refrain from doing. I offer a defense of OIC and explain how non-consequentialists can accommodate his intuitions about his cases     

When does ‘Can’ imply ‘Ought’?

ABSTRACT

The Assistance Principle is common currency to a wide range of moral theories. Roughly, this principle states: if you can fulfil important interests, at not too high a cost, then you have a moral duty to do so. I argue that, in determining whether the ‘not too high a cost’ clause of this principle is met, we must consider three distinct costs: ‘agent-relative costs’, ‘recipient-relative costs’ and ‘ideal-relative costs’.     

What is ‘mental action’?

There has been a resurgence of interest lately within the philosophy of mind and action in the category of mental action. Against this background, the present paper aims to question the very possibility, or at least the theoretical significance, of teasing apart mental and bodily acts. After raising some doubts over the viability of various possible ways of drawing the mental-act–bodily-act distinction, the paper draws some lessons from debates over embodied cognition which, arguably, further undermine the credibility of the distinction. The insignificance of the distinction is demonstrated in part by showing how the focus on “inner” acts hampers fruitful discussion of Galen Strawson’s skepticism of mental agency. Finally, the possibility is discussed that a distinction between covert and overt action should supplant the one between mental and bodily action.     

‘强攻’难敌‘智取’

在某单位的分房办公室里,一场唇枪舌战正激烈地展开。“交战”的一方是素有“善辨王”之称的职工罗良,另一方则是该单位的分房工作人员王珏。“86年原单位曾为我调过房,这是事实,但没有分过房。咱分房方案明明规定:1985年以来,原单位曾分过房,因转让、出售、子女结婚等原因造成的住房困难,此次分房不予解决。我虽把调过的房转让给我妹,但也不属於分房方案规定之列。因为我是调过房,而不是分过房。”罗良口齿伶俐,一串串“连珠炮”不停地开火:     

‘Mutual Obligation’ and ‘New Deal’: Illegitimate and Unjustified?

It is now commonplace for governments in Western countries to require the unemployed to work in exchange for their unemployment benefits. In this article I raise some serious doubts about the most promising and philosophically interesting defence of this argument, which relies on the ‘principle of reciprocity’. I argue that it is seriously unclear whether the obligations imposed on welfare claimants by ‘workfare’ schemes are legitimate and justified according to the principle of reciprocity. I do this by reconstructing the arguments for the obligations of the unemployed put forward in both the United Kingdom and Australia.     

Does ‘Ought’ Imply ‘Can’ from an Epistemic Point of View?

In this paper, I argue that the ??Ought Implies Can?? (OIC) principle, as it is employed in epistemology, particularly in the literature on epistemic norms, is open to counterexamples. I present a counterexample to OIC and discuss several objections to it. If this counterexample works, then it shows that it is possible that S ought to believe that p, even though S cannot believe that p. If this is correct, then OIC, considered from an epistemic point of view, is false, since it is supposed to hold for any S and any p.     

宗教启动会使人更加道德吗?

通过启动被试的宗教信仰状态, 进而探讨宗教对个体道德的影响作用, 这是近年来宗教心理学研究的热点问题, 但是围绕此问题的研究结论并不统一。有研究发现, 宗教启动可以增强个体的道德。但也有研究表明宗教启动会使个体更不道德。宗教启动对道德的影响是通过宗教信念的中介作用而实现的, 被试的信仰类型、性别、实验启动的方式及内容、以及被试的人格倾向则会因为影响中介信念的激活而调节宗教启动与道德的关系。未来研究需要进一步创新启动实验研究方法, 探索影响宗教与道德的关系的调节变量, 结合跨文化、跨学科的研究视角, 更深入地挖掘这一问题。     

Can ‘Big’ Questions be Begged?

Traditionally, logicians construed fallacies as mistakes in inference, as things that looked like good (i.e., deductively valid) arguments but were not. Two fallacies stood out like a sore thumb on this view of fallacies: the fallacy of many questions (because it does not even look like a good argument, or any kind of argument) and the fallacy of petitio principii (because it looks like and is a good argument). The latter is the concern of this paper. One possible response is to say that the tradition is right about the concept of fallacy but wrong about its extension: petitio principii is not a fallacy. If the only proper ways to criticize an argument are to say that it is invalid or that it is unsound, and petitio principii is not criticisable on either of these counts, then calling it a fallacy is tantamount to saying we should prefer invalid or unsound arguments Robinson (Analysis, 31(4): 114 ,1971). I will present a third way to logically criticize arguments and show that fallacious instances of petitio principii are so criticisable while other instances of petitio principii are non-fallacious; hence, this fallacy is not a reductio of the Standard Treatment. It is not my intention in this paper to come out on the side of any of the competing theories—the Standard Treatment, the dialectical theories, and the epistemic theories—as general theories of fallacy. I show only that petitio principii can be handled by something closely resembling the Standard Treatment in so far as that, on entirely logistical principles, there can be made a distinction such that circular arguments form at best a degenerate kind of argument. Circular arguments look like good arguments but are not, not because they are deductively invalid (which they are not) but because they do not deserve to be called arguments at all.     

Is ‘human action’ A category?

It seems to have been taken for granted that we all know what a human action is. However in attempting to draw from what philosophers have said about actions the necessary clues as to their distinguishing features, one finds little to discourage the idea that there is no way of distinguishing one category of occurrences, human actions, from the complex of different sorts of things which happen. From this I am tempted to conclude that there is no category of human action. But before drawing such a conclusion an ancient but terrible question must be faced: What sorts of things happen in the world ? This ancient question is faced but not answered. It is brought up because the failure to find a satisfactory answer to the question, Is human action a category? is a failure even to find a satisfactory assumption about what kind of reference the term ‘human action’ is supposed to have.     

What Is ‘Real’ in Probabilism?

This paper defends two related claims about belief: first, the claim that, unlike numerical degrees of belief, comparative beliefs are primitive and psychologically real; and, second, the claim that the fundamental norm of Probabilism is not that numerical degrees of belief should satisfy the probability axioms, but rather that comparative beliefs should satisfy certain constraints.     

人对动物有道德义务吗?

自从10年以前彼得·辛格的《动物解放》一书出版以来,在英国人的书籍中便对动物的道德处境的问题展开了激烈的讨论,在这期间,这个问题也在我们国家引起了较大的重视。从历史上看,这种关心无疑是对于自然的新意识的结果,而这种对于自然的新意识又是由于那些不能再忽视的生态问题产生的。可是按照事情的性质,我们这里所谈的与两个不同的问题有关。适当同自然环境打交道的问题是个我们共同的切身利益的问题,不是一种“生态     

Was Merleau-Ponty a ‘transcendental’ phenomenologist?

Whether or not Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology should be considered a form of ‘transcendental’ philosophy is open to debate. Although the Phenomenology of Perception presents his position as a transcendental one, many of its features—such as its exploitation of empirical science—might lead to doubt that it can be. This paper considers whether Merleau-Ponty meets what I call the ‘transcendentalist challenge’ of defining and grounding claims of a distinctive transcendental kind. It begins by highlighting three features—the absolute ego, the pure phenomenal field, and the reduction—that Husserl had used to justify claims of a specifically transcendental kind within a phenomenological framework. It then examines how Merleau-Ponty modifies each of these features to focus on the lived body and a factically conditioned phenomenal field, while remaining ambivalent about the reduction. Finally, it assesses whether Merleau-Ponty’s modified position can still legitimately be considered transcendental. I argue that—despite his own rhetoric—this modified position shapes the modality of Merleau-Ponty’s claims in such a way that his phenomenology cannot meet the transcendentalist challenge and therefore should not be considered ‘transcendental.’     

Do ‘Contextualist Cases’ Support Contextualism?

This paper addresses the argument from ‘contextualist cases’—such as for instance DeRose’s Bank cases—to attributor contextualism. It is argued that these cases do not make a decisive case against invariantism and that the debate between contextualists and invariantists will have to be settled on broader theoretical grounds.     

‘NEET’ believers? An analysis of ‘belief’ on an urban housing estate

This article explores the impact that the experience of deep-seated social exclusion amongst unemployed white young men on a large urban housing estate in Birmingham, UK has on the ways in which they talk about identity, meaning and ‘belief’. Arising from detailed ethnographic fieldwork, the article forwards an analysis of current debates about youth social exclusion and the deployment of the acronym ‘NEET’ with reference to these young men and others like them across the UK. Drawing upon conversations between the author and young men during fieldwork, the article seeks to bridge the gap between social-science-based examinations of youth social exclusion and theological analyses of youth spiritualities to critically interrogate current debates about the nature of ‘belief’ and ‘belonging’. In particular, the article raises a key critical question: is the word ‘belief’ ‘fit for purpose’ when considering the experience of socially excluded young men on urban housing estates?