Brueckner and Fischer on the evil of death

According to the Deprivation Approach, the evil of death is to be explained by the fact that death deprives us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had lived longer. But the Deprivation Approach confronts a problem first discussed by Lucretius. Late birth seems to deprive us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had been born earlier. Yet no one is troubled by late birth. So it’s hard to see why we should be troubled by its temporal mirror image, early death. In a 1986 paper, Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer appealed to a version of Derek Parfit’s “Bias toward the Future”; they claimed that early death deprives us of future goods that we care about, while late birth deprives us of past goods that we don’t care about. In this paper I show that the Brueckner–Fischer principle is open to several possible interpretations, but that it does not solve the Lucretius problem no matter how we understand it.     

Actual and Counterfactual Attitudes: Reply to Brueckner and Fischer

In a recent article, I criticized Anthony L. Brueckner and John Martin Fischer’s influential argument—appealing to the rationality of our asymmetric attitudes towards past and future pleasures—against the Lucretian claim that death and prenatal non-existence are relevantly similar. Brueckner and Fischer have replied, however, that my critique involves an unjustified shift in temporal perspectives. In this paper, I respond to this charge and also argue that even if it were correct, it would fail to defend Brueckner and Fischer’s proposal against my critique.     

The Evil of Death: A Reply to Yi

In previous work we have presented a reply to the Lucretian Symmetry, which has it that it is rational to have symmetric attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. Our reply relies on Parfit-style thought-experiments. Here we reply to a critique of our approach by Huiyuhl Yi, which appears in this journal: Brueckner and Fischer on the evil of death. We argue that this critique fails to attend to the specific nature of the thought-experiments (and our associated argument). More specifically, the thought-experiments seek to elicit attitudes about (say) past pleasures per se, and not insofar as such pleasures are connected to more pleasures in the future or a greater total amount of pleasures in one’s life overall.     

邪恶的两张面孔:根本的邪恶和平庸的邪恶——汉娜·阿伦特对极权主义制度下的邪恶现象的批判

汉娜.阿伦特对极权主义制度下的邪恶现象有两种表述方式,即“根本的邪恶”和“平庸的邪恶”。前者的根本特征表现为破坏了人类发展和和进步的概念,致力于把人变成多余的人的事业,以及消灭了人的法律人格、道德人格以及作为个体的人;后者的特征体现为无思想和肤浅性。阿伦特为思考极权主义专制制度下邪恶现象产生的根源以及个人应该担负何种道德责任提供了一种全新的视角,从而为建立一种以思想为核心的个人责任伦理提供了理论上的可能。     

Hear No Evil,See No Evil,Think No Evil: Ethics and the Appeal to Experience

This essay distinguishes three types of appeals to experience in ethics, identifies problems with appealing to experience, and argues that appeals to experience must be open to critical assessment, if experientially-based arguments are to be useful. Unless competing and potentially irreconcilable experiences can be assessed and adjudicated, experientially-based arguments will be problematic. The paper recommends thinking of the appeal to experience as a kind of story telling to be evaluated as other stories are.     

康德与根本恶

康德在18世纪80年代把自由意志视为一种善的意志,认为自由的同时又是恶的意志是不存在的。后来康德在《单纯理性限度内的宗教》中拒绝了这种看法,认为人身上有一种内在于自己Willkür的对恶的普遍倾向,即根本恶。这种根本恶从动机二元论角度也可以表述为人在采纳道德法则和幸福作为准则的动机时颠倒了它们之间的道德次序,禀赋在动机二元论中体现为道德法则和幸福,而倾向是对这两个动机之间的等级关系的表达。所有特殊的恶的准则都有一个最高的准则即Gesinnung,这个概念使根本恶成为既是与生俱有的,又是自由选择的结果,从而使根本恶可以被归责。     

Evil and the god of indifference

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - The evidential problem of evil involves a rarely discussed challenge, namely the challenge of defending theism against the hypothesis of a morally...     

Aesthetics and the Problem of Evil

Much of Western speculative metaphysics has subscribed to what has been called “explanatory rationalism,” which holds that there is a reason for everything that is and for the way everything is. Theodicies, or metaphysical attempts to solve the problem of evil, have relied on a special application of this principle of explanatory rationalism, namely, the principle of plenitude, which holds that the evil in the world is a necessary ingredient in the world's overall perfection or degree of reality. This essay argues that the principle of plenitude is aesthetically motivated, and that only in art and perhaps in revealed religion can the demands of explanatory rationalism be satisfied.     

Langtry on God,the Best and Evil

Bruce Langtry's ‘God, the Best and Evil’ is a fine contribution to the literature. Here, I review the contents of the book, and then provide some critical remarks that, as fas as I know, have not been made elsewhere. In particular, I argue that his criticism of my formulations of logical arguments from evil (in my Arguing about Gods) is unsuccessful.     

Review Essay on the Roots of Evil

I consider two essays by Joel Feinberg: his treatment of the moral obligation to obey the law, and his exploration of the evils of the Holocaust.     

Love and the Problem of Evil

The focus of this paper is the virtual certainty that much of what we must prize in loving any human person would not have existed in a world that did not contain much of the evil that has occurred in the history of the actual world. It is argued that the appropriate response to this fact must be some form of ambivalence, but that lovers have reason to prefer an ambivalence that contextualizes regretted evils in the framework of what we welcome in human life.