Why be a good Human Being? Natural Goodness,Reason, and the Authority of Human Nature

The central claim of Aristotelian naturalism is that moral goodness is a kind of species-specific natural goodness. Aristotelian naturalism has recently enjoyed a resurgence in the work of philosophers such as Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Thompson. However, any view that takes moral goodness to be a type of natural goodness faces a challenge: Granting that moral goodness is natural goodness for human beings, why should we care about being good human beings? Given that we are rational creatures who can ‘step back’ from our nature, why should we see human nature as authoritative for us? This is the authority-of-nature challenge. In this essay, I state this challenge clearly, identify its deep motivation, and distinguish it from other criticisms of Aristotelian naturalism. I also articulate what I consider the best response, which I term the practical reason response. This response, however, exposes Aristotelian naturalism to a new criticism – that it has abandoned the naturalist claim that moral goodness is species-specific natural goodness. Thus, I argue, Aristotelian naturalists appear to face a dilemma: Either they cannot answer the authority-of-nature challenge, or in meeting the challenge they must abandon naturalism. Aristotelian naturalists might overcome this dilemma, but doing so is harder than some Aristotelians have supposed. In the final sections of the paper, I examine the difficulties in overcoming the dilemma, and I suggest ways that Aristotelians might answer the authority-of-nature challenge while preserving naturalism.     

A Witness Breaks His Silence: The Meaning of a Therapist's Response to an Adolescent's Self-Destruction

I describe the case of a self-mutilating adolescent girl and my dilemma, as her therapist, about telling her parents about her self-abuse. I use two complementary, mutually enhancing relational theories of trauma—Ferenczi's (1933) and Davies and Frawley's (1994)—to help understand the minefield I was in. Davies and Frawley describe certain relational configurations that are typical of trauma victims. I believe that it is not only unavoidable but therapeutically vital for therapists to participate in these configurations so they can know the patient's experience in a personal way. It is also crucial that they be witnesses who provide recognition for the patient's pain and, in so doing, relieve the intolerable feeling of isolation that Ferenczi proposed was the most basic trauma. In addition, I discuss the observation that some people who have not been previously traumatized in any gross way manifest characteristics of trauma.     

ROCK BOTTOM: COHERENTISM'S SOFT SPOT

Often coherentism is taken to be the view that justification is solely a function of the coherence among a person's beliefs. I offer a counterexample to the idea that when so understood coherence is sufficient for justification. I then argue that the counterexample will still work if coherence is understood as coherence among a person's beliefs and experiences. I defend a form of nondoxastic foundationalism that takes sensations and philosophical intuitions as basic and sees nearly all other justification as depending on inference to the best explanation. I take up Wilfrid Sellars's Dilemma, which starts with the idea that the foundations must be either propositional in nature or not. The argument continues: if they are, they stand in need of justification; if they are not, they cannot confer justification. It concludes that there cannot be foundations that confer justification on other beliefs. I deny both horns of this dilemma, arguing that philosophical intuitions are propositional but do not stand in need of justification and that sensations are not propositional but can confer justification on perceptual beliefs.     

PRIVILEGED ACCESS REVISITED

Aaron Zimmerman has recently raised an interesting objection to an account of self-knowledge I have offered. The objection has the form of a dilemma: either it is possible for us to be entitled to beliefs which we do not form, or it is not. If it is, the conditions for introspective justification within the model I advocate are insufficient. If not, they are otiose. I challenge Zimmerman's defence of the first horn of the dilemma.     

Making it Implicit: Brandom on Rule Following

In Making it Explicit , Brandom aims to articulate an account of conceptual content that accommodates its normativity—a requirement on theories of content that Brandom traces to Wittgenstein's rule following considerations. It is widely held that the normativity requirement cannot be met, or at least not with ease, because theories of content face an intractable dilemma. Brandom proposes to evade the dilemma by adopting a middle road—one that uses normative vocabulary, but treats norms as implicit in practices. I argue that this proposal fails to evade the dilemma, as Brandom himself understands it. Despite his use of normative vocabulary, Brandom's theory fares no better than the reductionist theories he criticises. I consider some responses that Brandom might make to my charges, and finally conclude that his proposal founders on his own criteria.     

Luck, Evidence and War

abstract   We seem to have conflicting intuitions regarding luck and war, and we seem to be faced with a dilemma. Either, we deny that a war can be made just or unjust as a result of luck, and we accept that we should not appeal to the outcome when claiming that the war was or was not justified. Or, alternatively, we allow that it is legitimate to base our judgements on the outcome, but as a result we must accept that luck can make a war just or unjust. Traditionally, these have been taken to be the two forks of the dilemma, but, in this paper, I argue that they are not the only options. Rather, we can appeal to the outcome of our actions without claiming that this is, in anyway, an appeal to moral luck. Rather, the outcome provides us with evidence.     

Intentional Objects

The idea of an intentional object, or an object of thought, gives rise to a dilemma for theories of intentionality. Either intentional objects are existing objects, in which case it is impossible, contrary to appearances, to think about something which does not exist. Or some intentional objects are non-existent real objects. But this requires an obscure and implausible metaphysics. I argue that the way out of this dilemma is to deny that being an intentional object is being an entity of any kind. 'Object' here does not mean thing or entity. Rather, to say that something is an intentional object is just to say that it is an object of thought (or other intentional state or act) for a subject. It is further argued that theories of intentionality should not dispense with the idea of an intentional object.     

(Inadvertently) Instructing Missionaries in (Public University) World Religions Courses: Examining a Pedagogical Dilemma,its Dimensions,and a Course Section Solution

In this article, I explore an ethical and pedagogical dilemma that I encounter each semester in my world religions courses: namely, that a great number of students enroll in the courses as part of their missionary training programs, and come to class understanding successful learning to mean gathering enough information about the world's religious “traditions” so as to effectively seduce people out of them. How should we teach world religions – in public university religious studies courses – with this student constituency? What are/ought to be our student learning goals? What can and should we expect to accomplish? How can we maximize student learning, while also maintaining our disciplinary integrity? In response to these questions, I propose a world religions course module, the goal of which is for students to examine – as objects of inquiry – the lenses through which they understand religion(s). With a recognition of their own lenses, I argue, missionary students become more aware of the biases and presumptions about others that they bring to the table, and they learn to see the ways in which these presumptions inform what they see and know about others, and also what they do not so easily see.     

Care and Abstract Principles

Since Carol Gilligan's analysis of the “Heinz dilemma,” many philosophers working on care have articulated critiques of abstraction and principles in ethics. Their objections to abstraction and principles have not always been systematically set out. In this paper, I try to clarify the debate. I begin by distinguishing several aspects of the care critique. I then consider the strengths of each from a Kantian perspective. I conclude that, although some of these objections point out potential misuses of abstraction and principle, and in doing so, suggest strategies and cautions for their correct and careful use in ethics, they do not present a successful challenge to abstraction or principles as such.     

A Moral Problem for Difficult Art

Works of art can be difficult in several ways. One important way is by making us face up to unsettling truths. Such works typically receive praise. I maintain, however, that sometimes they deserve moral censure. The crux of my argument is that, just as we have a right to know the truth in certain contexts, so too we have a right not to know it. Provided our ignorance does not harm or seriously endanger others, the decision about whether to know the truth ought to be left to us. Within this limit, therefore, difficult art is morally problematic if it intentionally targets those who have chosen not to know. To illustrate the problem, I discuss the literary writings of Søren Kierkegaard, which aim to deceive readers into seeing unpleasant truths about themselves that they seek to ignore.     

Physicalism as an attitude

It is widely noted that physicalism, taken as the doctrine that the world contains just what physics says it contains, faces a dilemma which, some like Tim Crane and D.H. Mellor have argued, shows that “physicalism is the wrong answer to an essentially trivial question”. I argue that both problematic horns of this dilemma drop out if one takes physicalism not to be a doctrine of the kind that might be true, false, or trivial, but instead an attitude or oath one takes to formulate one’s ontology solely according to the current posits of physics.     

LYING TO THE NAZI AT THE DOOR

Moral philosophers and theologians have long debated the classic moral dilemma of lying to an intruder in order to save a refugee. This dilemma presents an especially difficult challenge to those who reject consequentialist reasoning. Many contemporary defenders of Thomas Aquinas have argued that lying is never permissible under any circumstances, but none has offered a satisfactory answer to the question of what one ought to do when facing such a dilemma. I argue that there can be no morally satisfying answer to this question, because every possible action will involve some degree of sin, even if lying is the least sinful action. This should not lead us to redefine what it means to tell a lie, nor to say that lying to the intruder is a good or right action; rather, it should lead us to acknowledge the tragic dimension of life in a fallen world.     

The Dangers of Pragmatic Virtue

Many people want to hold that some theoretical virtues—simplicity, elegance, familiarity or others—are only pragmatic virtues. That is, these features do not give us any more reason to think a theory is true, or close to true, but they justify choosing one theoretical option over another because they are desirable for some other, practical purpose. Using pragmatic virtues in theory choice apparently brings with it a dilemma: if we are deciding what to accept on the basis of considerations that are not truth-conducive, it looks like we should either refrain from believing what we accept, and adopt some sort of instrumentalist attitude to the theories we cherish; or alternatively, we stand charged with engaging in theoretical irrationality in our belief formation. This paper discusses the appropriate response to this dilemma.     

Scientific styles,plain truth,and truthfulness

Ian Hacking loosely defines a “style of scientific thinking” as a “way to find things out about the world” characterised by five hallmark features of a number of scientific template styles. Most prominently, these are autonomy and “self-authentication”: a scientific style of thinking, according to Hacking, is not good because it helps us find out the truth in some domain, it itself defines the criteria for truth-telling in its domain. I argue that Renaissance medicine, Mediaeval “demonology”, and magical thinking pass muster as scientific according to Hacking’s criteria. However, application of these thought styles to the entities they introduce generates statements that logically imply a set of “ordinary” statements – or what Bernard Williams calls “plain truths” – which, contra the claims of autonomy and self-authentication, allows styles to be assessed from a style-independent perspective. Using Williams’ notion of plain truth, I show that Renaissance medicine, demonology, and magical thinking, in reality issue in many plain falsehoods. This confronts us with what I call Hacking’s dilemma: either define stricter necessary conditions on being a style of scientific thinking, or concede that some styles albeit scientific are not as good at finding things out about the world as others. I make three suggestions to deal with the dilemma.     

Mental Illness, Motivation and Moral Commitment

I present a dilemma which depressive behavioural pathology poses for both Humean and non-Humean theories of motivation and value. Although the dilemma shows that neither theory can be considered adequate in its standard form, I argue that if the Humean theory is modified so as to embrace a richer notion of satisfaction than it currently does, it can solve the problem which depression poses for it, and thus the dilemma can be avoided. Embracing a richer notion of satisfaction not only solves this problem, it also extends the scope of the Humean theory in a potentially dramatic way, by extending the explanatory reach of moral psychology to issues often thought to fall outside its scope, namely, issues in moral psychopathology.     

Towards a constitutive account of implicit narrativity

The standard reply to the critique that narrative theories of the self are either chauvinistic or trivial is to “go implicit”. Implicit narratives, it is argued, are necessary for diachronically structured self-experience (barring triviality), but do not require that such narratives should be wholly articulable life stories (barring chauvinism). In this paper I argue that the standard approach, which puts forward a phenomenological conception of implicit narratives, is ultimately unable to get out of the clutches of the dilemma. In its place, I offer an alternative approach that does avoid the dilemma, by construing implicit narrativity as an enabling condition for experiences, rather than as something that is itself present in experience. According to this constitutive account, the coherence and intelligibility of our experiences is due to the fact that they are anchored in a larger, diachronic context. This context, I argue, takes a fundamentally embodied and narrative dimension.     

PSYCHOTHERAPY AS PHASE-SPECIFIC INTERACTION

I am writing this paper to help myself, and hopefully some readers, to a better understanding of why some analysands in certain phases of the analysis develop the idea that they are homosexuals or that their analyst is homosexual. My basic thought is that even if these ideas have their individual roots and differ from case to case, they are also dependent on certain phenomena that are included in the analytic encounter and specified by different gender constellations constituting the analytic couple. I will present two examples from my own practice. From these two vignettes, I will draw some conclusions which are supported by my general psychoanalytic experience. The first example concerns male analysands. I have often seen male patients develop the fantasy that they “in reality” are homosexual. This fantasy is so common that it is a rule in my experience. I see it as a product of the fact that the psychoanalytic constellation consists, as in my case, of two men. The second example concerns female analysands. In a few cases with female analysands, I have seen the fantasy emerge that I, the analyst, am homosexual—a fantasy not seen in my male cases. Another difference is that I can't see this as a rule like the fantasy of the male analysands. In both the male and the female cases, I see the homosexual fantasies as a protection against discovery of the mother-transference to me. However, the fantasies have found different expressions depending on the specific gender constellation of the analytic couple: man and man and woman and man, respectively.     

Comprehension in "hyperlexic" readers

Mentally retarded children who can read aloud written words better than one would expect from their Mental Age are often called hyperlexic. The reading comprehension thought to be impaired in such children was investigated in four experiments. Mentally retarded advanced decoders, including autistic and nonautistic children, were compared with younger nonretarded children matched for Mental Age and Reading Age. Experiment 1 established that mildly mentally retarded readers could match sentences to pictures as well as could be expected from their verbal ability. This was the same whether they read the sentences or heard them. Experiment 2 demonstrated that only the more able retarded subjects, but not the less able ones, used sentence context in a normal way in order to pronounce homographs. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that these same more able children could extract meaning at both sentence and story level, and their performance was indistinguishable from that of normal controls. Hence, it is doubtful whether these advanced decoders should be called hyperlexic. In contrast, the readers of relatively low verbal ability performed much worse than their normal controls. Although they could be induced under certain conditions to read sentence-by-sentence rather than word-by-word, they did not do so spontaneously. Furthermore, they did not make use of already existing general knowledge in order to answer questions about the stories they had read. The ability to comprehend in terms of large units of meaning seems to be specifically impaired in these low verbal ability fluent readers. We suggest that it is this impairment that marks true hyperlexia. Since there were no differences between autistic and nonautistic readers on any of our tasks, we conclude that hyperlexia is not an autism-specific phenomenon.     

INTRODUCING VARIABLE-RATE RULE-UTILITARIANISM

The basic idea of rule-utilitarianism is that right action should be defined in terms of what would be required by rules which would maximize either actual or expected utility if those rules gained general acceptance, or perhaps general compliance. Rule-utilitarians face a dilemma. They must characterize 'general acceptance' either as 100% acceptance, or as something less. On the first horn of the dilemma, rule-utilitarianism is vulnerable to the charge of utopianism; on the second, it is open to the charge of arbitrariness and lack of philosophical depth. I press this objection, and develop and defend an alternative version of rule-utilitarianism which can evade the dilemma. I call this new version 'variable-rate rule-utilitarianism'.     

Butter Knives and Screwdrivers: An Intentionalist Defense of Radical Constructivism

Robert Stecker has posed a dilemma for the constructivist theory of interpretation: either interpretations consist of statements with truth values or they do not. Stecker argues that either way, they cannot change the meaning of an artwork. In this article, I argue contra Stecker that if interpretations consist of meaning declarations rather than statements, they can change the meanings of the objects toward which they are directed, where whether they so consist is largely a function of the interpreter's intentions. Hence, the second horn of Stecker's dilemma is defeated.