Charting the Attributes of God: The Common Ground of Three Religions according to Ramon Llull (1232–1316)

The Open Letter written by 138 major representatives of Islam to the leaders of the Christian churches, on 13 October 2007, came as something of a surprise. Perhaps more surprisingly, in 1283, the Catalan theologian, Ramon Llull, wrote imaginatively of exactly such a letter in one of his novels, thus demonstrating that the interfaith question is not just a problem of our modern times, which became acute only on September 11. On the contrary, the churches have always been conscious of this interfaith context. Yet methods of tackling the problem have differed widely down the centuries and among Christian traditions. The solution proposed by Ramon Llull and analysed in this article starts from the common acceptance of the attributes of God in all three monotheistic religions. It deserves our attention not only as an interesting historical example but also as a way of avoiding some of our current problems and impasses.     

When Should we Regret?

In this paper, I develop and defend the ‘Justified Decision Perspective’ (JDP) in answer to the question of when we should regret the things we have done. I claim that one should not regret a past decision one has made so long as it was justified in relation to the kind of person one was at the time of acting. On this time-indexing account, judging a decision to be justified – at least for the purposes of assessing one’s regrets – is a matter of identifying the practical reasons that were epistemically available to the agent when she was deliberating about what to do. Accordingly, when responding to her regrets, an agent should not invoke (a) reasons that existed but were epistemically unavailable to her when she was deliberating; or (b) reasons that only came into existence after she acted. The JDP has important implications for prospective regret. In particular, it implies we should worry less about experiencing regret in the future than many of us do. Thus, my overall aim is to show that we often have reason to reject our regrets, which means that regret should play a less prominent and painful role in our lives than it does currently.     

The verdictive organization of desire

Deliberation often begins with the question ‘What do I want to do?’ rather than a question about what one ought to do. This paper takes that question at face value, as a question about which of one’s desires is strongest, which sometimes guides action. The paper aims to explain which properties of a desire make that desire strong, in the sense of ‘strength’ relevant to this deliberative question. The paper argues that one’s judgment about one wants most will sometimes play a verdictive role, partially determining what the agent most wants, and so making itself true.     

MORE ABOUT JUDGMENT AND REASON

Abstract: This paper is a response to Siegel 2004 . I take Siegel's remarks as a basis for clarifying, defending, and further developing my account of the role of judgment in a theory of rationality.     

Subject-centred reasons and bestowal love

Speaking roughly, there are two competing accounts of the basis of love. First, the appraisal view: love is based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved. Second, the bestowal view: love is not based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved, but love is based in the lover, who then bestows value onto the beloved. While both models deserve due attention, the bestowal model is of present concern. Despite numerous virtues, the bestowal model faces trenchant objections. In this paper, I outline and defend a version of bestowal love, according to which bestowal love is based in the lover’s motivating reasons, and which preserves the virtues while overcoming the difficulties facing bestowal love.     

Are Moral Reasons Morally Overriding?

In this paper, I argue that those moral theorists who wish to accommodate agent-centered options and supererogatory acts must accept both that the reason an agent has to promote her own interests is a nonmoral reason and that this nonmoral reason can prevent the moral reason she has to sacrifice those interests for the sake of doing more to promote the interests of others from generating a moral requirement to do so. These theorists must, then, deny that moral reasons morally override nonmoral reasons, such that even the weakest moral reason trumps the strongest nonmoral reason in the determination of an act’s moral status (e.g., morally permissible or impermissible). If this is right, then it seems that these theorists have their work cut out for them. It will not be enough for them to provide a criterion of rightness that accommodates agent-centered options and supererogatory acts, for, in doing so, they incur a debt. As I will show, in accommodating agent-centered options, they commit themselves to the view that moral reasons are not morally overriding, and so they owe us an account of how both moral reasons and nonmoral reasons come together to determine an act’s moral status.

Epistemic Justice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing

The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important form of oppression.     

Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy

This article defends the view that an adequate response to some central epistemological problems requires us to find a role for emotions and other affective states in epistemic evaluation and also to invoke virtuous traits of character in order to explain how these affective evaluations are regulated. The argument is based on the need for some epistemic evaluations to possess a kind of immediacy, if we are not to face a worrying regress. The closing sections support the claim that epistemic evaluation depends upon appropriate character traits though a discussion of what is involved in being observant .     

The influence of reasons on interpretations of probability forecasts

When providing a probability estimate for an event, experts often supply reasons that they expect will clarify and support that estimate. We investigated the possible unintended influence that these reasons might have on a listener's intuitive interpretation of the event's likelihood. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that people who read positive reasons for a doctor's probability estimate regarding a hypothetical surgery were more optimistic than those who read negative reasons for the identical estimate. Experiment 3 tested whether a doctor's failure forecast for a surgery would result in differing levels of pessimism when the potential risk was attributed to one complication that had a probability of 0.30 versus three complications that had a disjunctive probability of 0.30. Overall, the findings are consistent with the argument that a probability estimate, albeit numerically precise, can be flexibly interpreted at an intuitive level depending on the reasons that the forecaster provides as the basis for the estimate. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Internalism and the Origin of Rational Motivation

What makes a subject's motivationrational is its originating in her practicalreasoning. I explain the appeal of this thesisabout rational motivation, and explore itsrelation to recent discussions of internalismabout reasons for action. I do so in theservice of clarifying an important meta-ethicaldebate between Humean motivational skeptics andtheir Kantian opponents. This debate is oneover whether, as this skeptic contends andKantians deny, considerations about ourmotivational capacities, together withinternalism, restrict genuine reasons foraction to merely instrumental ones. I arguethat properly adjudicating this debate requiresidentifying one particular way in which thethesis about rational motivation has beendeveloped – namely, as a part of what I term``the traditional conception' of themotivational efficacy of practical reason. Onthis conception, rational motivation consistsin choosing some course of conduct out of one'scognitive appreciation of the way its relationto one's practicable good gives one reason todo so. And I side with Kantians against theHumean motivational skeptic in part on groundsthat Kant himself – though not all Kantians –would find congenial: namely, that we shouldaccept the traditional conception.