Effort and Moral Worth

One of the factors that contributes to an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness — his or her moral worth — is effort. On the one hand, agents who act effortlessly seem to have high moral worth. On the other hand, agents who act effortfully seem to have high moral worth as well. I explore and explain this pair of intuitions and the contour of our views about associated cases.     

Iterated Belief Change and the Recovery Axiom

The axiom of recovery, while capturing a central intuition regarding belief change, has been the source of much controversy. We argue briefly against putative counterexamples to the axiom—while agreeing that some of their insight deserves to be preserved—and present additional recovery-like axioms in a framework that uses epistemic states, which encode preferences, as the object of revisions. This makes iterated revision possible and renders explicit the connection between iterated belief change and the axiom of recovery. We provide a representation theorem that connects the semantic conditions we impose on iterated revision and our additional syntactical properties. We show interesting similarities between our framework and that of Darwiche–Pearl (Artificial Intelligence 89:1–29 1997). In particular, we show that intuitions underlying the controversial (C2) postulate are captured by the recovery axiom and our recovery-like postulates (the latter can be seen as weakenings of (C2)). We present postulates for contraction, in the same spirit as the Darwiche–Pearl postulates for revision, and provide a theorem that connects our syntactic postulates with a set of semantic conditions. Lastly, we show a connection between the contraction postulates and a generalisation of the recovery axiom. Portions of this paper were originally presented at ECAI 2002.     

Moral Accountancy and Moral Worth

People do good or bad things, and get or do not get good or bad credit for their actions, depending (in part) on knowledge of their actions. I attempt to unfold some of the interconnections between these matters, and between them and the achievement of moral worth. The main conclusion is that the heights of moral worth seem to appear in the oddest places.     

Moral Worth and Moral Knowledge

To have moral worth an action not only needs to conform to the correct normative theory (whatever it is); it also needs to be motivated in the right way. I argue that morally worthy actions are motivated by the rightness of the action; they are motivated by an agent's concern for doing what's right and her knowledge that her action is morally right. Call this the Rightness Condition. On the Rightness Condition moral motivation involves both a conative and a cognitive element—in particular, it involves moral knowledge. I argue that the Rightness Condition is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth. I also argue that the Rightness Condition gives us an attractive account of actions performed under imperfect epistemic circumstances: by agents who rely on moral testimony or by those who, like Huckleberry Finn, have false moral convictions.     

Empirical Adequacy and Virtue Ethics

Situationists contend that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. However, it is my contention that there is much confusion over what “empirical adequacy” or “empirical inadequacy” actually means in this context. My aim in this paper is to clarify the meanings of empirical adequacy in order to see to what extent virtue ethics might fail to meet this standard. I argue that the situationists frequently misconstrue the empirical commitments of virtue ethics. More importantly, depending on what we mean by empirical adequacy, either virtue ethics has no need to be empirically adequate or where it does have such a need, the psychological evidence fails to show that it is empirically inadequate. An additional contribution the paper intends to make is to provide a more detailed discussion of the explanatory nature of virtue ethics.     

Impermissibility and Kantian Moral Worth

Samuel Kerstein argues that an asymmetry between moral worth and maxims prevents Kant from accepting a category of acts that are impermissible, but have moral worth. Kerstein contends that an act performed from the motive of duty should be considered as a candidate for moral worth, even if the action’s maxim turns out to be impermissible, since moral worth depends on the correct moral motivation of an act, rather than on the moral rightness of an act. I argue that Kant cannot consistently maintain that there are morally forbidden, though good, acts since one of the conditions of acting from the moral law should be that one has a true belief about what the moral law requires. My project, then, rejects the possibility of morally impermissible, worthy acts for Kant, and qualifies the conditions for moral worth Kerstein gives with an epistemological constraint on moral worth.     

Modal Dispositionalism and the (T) Axiom

Philosophia - Yates has recently argued that modal dispositionalism invalidates the (T) axiom. Both Yates and Allen have advanced responses to the objection: Yates’s response proposes...     

论基础公理与反基础公理

"循环并不可恶"。本文在此基础上讨论基础公理和反基础公理。首先指出基础公理原本就是一条有争议的公理;第二,说明基础公理的局限性;第三,详细论述反基础公理家族中的三个成员,并给出它们两两不相容的一个证明;第四,分析反基础公理导致集合论域在V=WF上不断扩张的方法,并指出这种扩张的方法与数系扩张的方法相同;最后结论:良基集合理论(ZFC)与非良基集合理论(ZFC~-+AFA(或者ZFC和ZFC~-+FAFA或者ZFC和ZFC~-+SAFA))之间的关系类似于欧几里得几何学与非欧几何学之间的关系。     

不可超越的无穷：关于直谓性和后继公理的关系

本文首先将新弗雷格主义的发展划分为三个阶段：（1）弗雷格算术（由二阶逻辑和休谟原则构成的理论）的一致性和对于二阶皮亚诺算术公理的可推出性的证明,（2）对休谟原则和二阶逻辑的哲学辩护与反驳,（3）对休谟原则和二阶逻辑进行限制,并证明其一致性和可推出性。然后着重介绍：（1）直谓二阶逻辑和公理V的一致性,（2）直谓二阶逻辑和休谟原则不能推出皮亚诺算术的后继公理。这说明一致性和可推出性在弗雷格系统的直谓片段中不可兼得。最后在直观上做出简单的分析。     

Varieties of Reasoning: Assessing Adequacy

Helmut Reich's theory of relational and contextual reasoning is a courageous initiative for the resolution of cognitive conflicts between apparently incompatible or incommensurable views. Built upon Piagetian logico‐mathematical reasoning, cognitive complexity theory, and dialectical and analogical reasoning, it includes the development of a both/and logic inclusive of binary either/or logic. Reich provides philosophic, theoretical, and even initial empirical support for the development of this form of reasoning along with a heuristic for its application. A valuable step beyond the limits of binary, static, and formal reasoning, it takes relationship, context, and perspectival variations seriously in an explicitly reflective and iterative system. We can and do address conflicts not resolvable by conventional appeals to logic or evidence, including those at epistemic boundaries or produced by belief‐commitment differences. Although this form of reasoning has real promise, including stepping beyond complementarity in the religion‐science dialogue, it seems better directed to causally explanatory theories than to other forms of rendering meaning. Finally, its coextension requirement may render it problematic where functionally coherent explananda cannot be identified or are themselves produced or constituted by a belief system.     

Kantianism, Moral Worth and Human Welfare

Book reviewed in this article:
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives