Not by reasons alone

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-130).My thesis is a sustained argument that the practical reason is not a suitable master concept in ethics, let alone the only ethical notion we need. In Chapter One, I defend the idea that desires have irreducible and pervasive normative significance. More particularly, I defend reasons internalism - the claim that desires are a necessary condition on practical reasons - by developing a new version of this thesis. In this version, desires serve to veto practical reasons, which are in turn grounded in objective values. I argue that this compatibilist picture provides an account of self-interested reasons which is intuitively superior to its purely objectivist rivals. In Chapter Two, I argue that evaluative notions are distinct from prescriptive notions, which reasons talk is meant to encode. According to my account, it is partly constitutive of wickedness (an evaluative notion) that the wicked person lacks moral reasons - understood as the basis for potentially apt prescriptions - to mend his ways. For some people, I suggest, are deaf to moral instructions in something close to a literal sense. I argue on this basis that the distinction between evaluative and prescriptive 'oughts,' and the attendant possibility of iterating them, vindicates internalism about moral reasons too. A solution to Chisholm's paradox is a welcome fringe benefit. In Chapter Three, I begin to develop an alternative to prevailing reasons-based conceptions of ethics, by focusing on social relationships, such as friendship. I argue that agents can behave decently by being guided by implicitly normative concepts like friendship, which contain codes of conduct like "Friends help each other out," and "You don't snitch on your friends." Such 'do's and don'ts' and the corresponding concepts enable agents to behave well instinctively, even when they believe they have no reason to do so. I argue further that recognizing who someone is - i.e., the social relationship in which they stand to you - can be action-guiding and even mandating. I argue that this kind of social awareness is a viable alternative to positing intuitive responsiveness to reasons, and defend the idea that it underwrites a form of practical necessity worthy of the name.by Kate Manne.Ph.D

Interpersonal Moral Conflicts

A moral dilemma is often characterized as a situation in which an agent ought to do each of two acts, but he cannot do both. This characterization is too narrow, however, because it erroneously suggests that dilemmas are limited to situations in which only one agent is involved. It is just as plausible, though, to suppose that there might be multi-person moral dilemmas, of which the two-person case may be taken as typical. In my discussion of multi-person moral dilemmas I shall focus on the two-person case and I shall call such situations "interpersonal moral conflicts." To the best of my knowledge, Ruth B. Marcus is the first to distinguish explicitly between single-agent and multi-person dilemmas. What I shall argue here is that the importance of this distinction has been overlooked. Indeed, I shall claim that the problems that single-agent dilemmas generate for moral theories are different from and more serious than the difficulties created by interpersonal conflicts

Relationships among various ontologies and accounts of modality

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1983.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIESBibliography: leaves 193-203.by Andrew D. Christie, Jr.Ph.D

The Anchor, Volume 87.07: October 25, 1974

The Anchor began in 1887 and was first issued weekly in 1914. Covering national and campus news alike, Hope College’s student-run newspaper has grown over the years to encompass over two-dozen editors, reporters, and staff. For much of The Anchor\u27s history, the latest issue was distributed across campus each Wednesday throughout the academic school year (with few exceptions). As of Fall 2019 The Anchor has moved to monthly print issues and a more frequently updated website. Occasionally, the volume and/or issue numbering is irregular

Notes for remarks by Ivan L. Head to the Canadian Student Pugwash National Conference on "Resolving Global Problems into the 21st Century : How Can Science Help?"

French version available in IDRC Digital Library: Notes pour une allocution prononcée par Ivan L. Head lors de la Conférence nationale du Pugwash étudiant du Canada sur la solution des problèmes globaux à l’aube du 21e siècle : "La science peut-elle aider?