Diversity Reading List

Abstract:

In this paper I introduce my work in ethics, inviting others to draw on my approach to address the ethical issues that concern them. I set up the Centre for Ethical Philosophy at Durham University in 2007 to plug a puzzling gap in philosophical work to help us help the world. In 1. I set out ethical philosophy. In 2. I consider some implications, for example, that to do good we must pay much more attention to the beings around us, less to ourselves. In 3. I consider the implications for how we should think about war and peace. In 4. I draw out some implications for good political practice. In 5. I consider objections and conclude.

Abstract:

Aristotle’s account of human needs is valuable because it describes the connections between logical, metaphysical, physical, human and ethical necessities. But Aristotle does not fully draw out the implications of the account of necessity for needs and virtue. The proper Aristotelian conclusion is that, far from being an inferior activity fit only for slaves, meeting needs is the first part of Aristotelian virtue.

Abstract:

In this article we argue that the concept of need is as vital for moral theory as it is for moral life. In II we analyse need and its normativity in public and private moral practice. In III we describe simple cases which exemplify the moral demandingness of needs, and argue that the significance of simple cases for moral theory is obscured by the emphasis in moral philosophy on unusual cases. In IV we argue that moral theories are inadequate if they cannot describe simple needs-meeting cases. We argue that the elimination or reduction of need to other concepts such as value, duty, virtue or care is unsatisfactory, in which case moral theories that make those concepts fundamental will have to be revised. In conclusion, we suggest that if moral theories cannot be revised to accommodate needs, they may have to be replaced with a fully needs-based theory.

Abstract:

In our philosophical tradition and our wider culture, we tend to think of persons as agents. This agential conception is flattering, but in this paper I will argue that it conceals a more complex truth about what persons are. In 1. I set the issues in context. In 2. I critically explore four features commonly presented as fundamental to personhood in versions of the agential conception: action, capability, choice and independence. In 3. I argue that each of these agential features presupposes a non-agential feature: agency presupposes patiency, capability presupposes incapability, choice presupposes necessity and independence presupposes dependency. In 4. I argue that such non-agential features, as well as being implicit within the agential conception, are as apt to be constitutive of personhood as agential features, and in 5. I conclude.

Abstract:

In this article I consider criticisms of the basic needs approach (BNA) made by capability theorists, and argue that BNA can meet them all. I conclude that BNA has been unfairlycriticised and too hastily displaced by the capability approach (CA). This raises a further question: whatshould be done? My hope is that defenders of BNA will be encouraged to revivetheir approach by these arguments, and that defenders of CA will be encouragedto reconsider and modify or withdraw their criticisms.

Abstract:

The ethics of war is a minefield. It is a morass of conceptual unclarity, contentious assumptions, impassioned arguments, unexploded myths, and the injured defenders of indistinct positions. My aim is to help to make the minefield (conceptually) safe, and to assist that most vulnerable party to the dispute, the pacifist. In this paper I explore the possibility that, farfrom being naive or outlandish, pacifism might follow from a widely-held and fundamental intuition about the moral status of persons [hereafter MSP]. In Section 1 I describe MSP, and suggest how we might draw implications from it about the ethics of war. In Section 2, I argue that a ‘presumption of war-ism’ has distorted debate in the ethics of war: to arrive at a balanced view, we need distinguish two sets of moral questions. First, can the development and maintenance of the means to make war be justified? Second, can the use of those means ever be justified? I sketch some strategies which might be developed in addressing the first question, concentrating on what MSP suggests might be wrong with setting up a war-machine, and with being or employing a soldier. In Section 3, I argue that even if considerations from Section 2 are insufficient to establish that we must dismantle our war-machines, facts about war which conflict with MSP do establish that we must never use them.

Abstract: I argue that lying is generally morally better than mere deliberate misleading because the latter involves the exploitation of a greater trust and more seriously abuses our willingness to fulfil epistemic and moral obligations to others. Whereas the liar relies on our figuring out and accepting only what is asserted, the mere deliberate misleader depends on our actively inferring meaning beyond what is said in the form of conversational implicatures as well. When others’ epistemic and moral obligations are determined by standard assumptions of communicative cooperation and no compelling moral reason justifies mere deliberate misleading instead, one had better lie.

Back Matter: This comprehensive text examines the history, significance, and philosophical dimensions of sport. Introduction to the Philosophy of Sport is organized to reflect the traditional division of philosophy into metaphysical, ethical, and sociopolitical issues, while incorporating specific concerns of today's athletic world, such as cheating, doping, and Title IX, where they are applicable. This approach provides students with a basic understanding of the philosophy of sport as a whole and better equips them to investigate specific issues. Introduction to the Philosophy of Sport is not only an outline of the discipline and a summary of much of its pioneering work, but also an invitation for students to join the conversation by connecting it to their own athletic experience.

Publisher's Note: The Blackwell Guide to Medical Ethics is a guide to the complex literature written on the increasingly dense topic of ethics in relation to the new technologies of medicine. Examines the key ethical issues and debates which have resulted from the rapid advances in biomedical technology Brings together the leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, medicine, theology and law, to discuss these issues Tackles such topics as ending life, patient choice, selling body parts, resourcing and confidentiality Organized with a coherent structure that differentiates between the decisions of individuals and those of social policy

Abstract: Some claims about poems are uncontroversial: that a poem is composed in dactylic hexameter, as in Homer's epics, or in iambic pentameter, as in Shakespeare's sonnets, or in no particular traditional meter, as in most of e. e. cummings's work; that it rhymes following an abab pattern or that it does not; that it is very long, very short, or any length in between; that it employs sophisticated diction, archaic language, or common everyday words; that its similes and metaphors are novelor clich ?e. Such claims may easily be ascertained by those able to count syllables, those able to distinguish the stressed syllables from the unstressed dones, and those familiar with the varieties of poetic meter; by those able to tell whether two or more words sound alike; by those able to distinguish different text lengths; by those able to recognize when words are of the garden-variety kind. Except for familiarity with the kinds of poetic meter, 'those' are most of us. We may call these 'base,' 'lower level,' or 'structural' properties. At another level of description, poems may be tightly knit, unified, balanced, heavy and somber, light and jolly, and so on. The attributions in this case are still descriptive, but an evaluative judgment may be embedded in them, or it may be typically taken to be embedded, or intended to be embedded, in them. That is, a positive or negative valence may sometimes accompany the judgment that a poem is unified and balanced: one may find it good or bad in virtue of those characteristics (though one may also find it good or bad regardless of those characteristics). Further, justifications of why a poem is unified, balanced, and so on are made by reference to the qualities specified at the first level of description: it is unified because all the parts fit well together in some manner. We may call these 'aesthetic attributions'; as Jerrold Levinson puts it, here we have 'an overall impression afforded, an impression that cannot simply be identified with the structural properties that underpin it.' At a third level still, and in part in virtue of facts at the previous two levels, poems may be beautiful, terrific, or horrendously bad: here we have wholly evaluative attributions, or aesthetic judgments properly so-called. Note how there isan inverse proportion in informative value be-tween base properties and aesthetic judgments: base properties are informative about a work ('is in iambic pentameter') but not aesthetically evaluative and thus not aesthetically informative; aesthetic evaluations ('is beautiful') are aesthetically informative, but tell us nothing about the specific characteristics of a work. Aesthetic attributions fall in the middle also in that they may retain some of the informative value of either extreme: they may be somewhat structurally informative and some what aesthetically informative ('unified'). If it is true that these three levels are at once distinguishable and intrinsically related, some questions one may ask are: How are they related? How is our perception of a set of words arranged in a certain cadence and with breaks visually or aurally marked related to our perceiving in the mor attributing to them a certain set of aestheticqualities? How do we go from characteristics such as 'has lines of eighteen syllables, where a marked syllable is followed by two unmarked ones throughout' to 'is tightly knit' to 'is beautiful'? In other words, how do we move from purely descriptive attributes to aesthetic and evaluative ones? Anyone may count syllables, and most of us can more or less tell when a syllable is stressed relative to another that precedes or follows it. We may likewise be able to judge whether a metaphor is unusual or not simply by recalling whether we have heard anything like it in the past, or how unlike each other the terms of comparison are. That assessment may be accompanied by approval or disapproval; in itself it need not express either ('That's a novel metaphor: it is awful' is a perfectly sensible statement). Finally, when we move to 'beautiful' and 'moving,' we are making a judgment of taste: our approval is embedded in those terms. My concern in what follows is with the move from lower-level perceptual qualities to the attribution of aesthetic qualities. I am not concerned with how we go from there to an overall aesthetic evaluation. In my proposal, I question the much discussed wisdom handed down to us by Frank Sibley. I am referring to Sibley's famous claim, defended in 'Aesthetic Concepts' and related articles, that we are never, in any art form, warranted in making the (logical) jump from the description of non aesthetic properties to the ascription of aesthetic ones. In his words, Sibley claimed that 'there are no non aesthetic features which serve in any circumstances as logically sufficient conditions for applying aesthetic terms.' We cannot, for instance, go from 'employ[s] bright colors' to 'is lively and vigorous,' the way we can go from 'unmarried male' to 'bachelor' or from 'enclosed figure with four equal sides and four right angles' to 'square.' Surely we cannot, but why should anyone have thought otherwise? Aesthetic qualities are qualities, not concepts. As an attribute, 'graceful' more closely resembles 'hot' than it does 'square.' There is no reason to expect a one-to-one relationship between base properties and aesthetic attributions, but there is good reason to expect that a range of properties is clearly associated with a range of attributions, just as a range of temperatures is associated with feeling cold. Sibley also claimed that no particular base property or set thereof is necessary for any given aesthetic concept to apply. This is because things may have the same aesthetic quality for different reasons: 'one thing is graceful because of these features, another because of those, and so on almost endlessly.' I do not question whether Sibley's claims are defensible when it comes to vases, paintings, sculptures, or sonatas; indeed, his view is compelling as a general rule. However, it seems to me that some varieties of poetry provide, not an exception to Sibley's rule - I am not claiming logical entailments here, nor do I think any- one could - but evidence for what may be called a 'defeasible guarantee.' In at least some kinds of formal poetry, there is a sense in which a description in nonaesthetic terms sometimes ought to suffice, in virtue of what we may call 'psychoaesthetic' associations between the perception of formal features and felt aesthetic qualities, for the attribution of an aesthetic quality. Accordingly, my first goal in what follows is to show in what way I think it is sufficient and to provide some examples in support of that connection. I hope that from this it emerges that Sibley was wrong to hold that unless their relationship is a logicoconceptual one, no base properties ever suffice to warrant the ascription of an aesthetic quality.