Facts about our ecological crisis are incontrovertible: we must take action

Humans cannot continue to violate the fundamental laws of nature or science with impunity, say 94 signatories including Dr Alison Green and Molly Scott Cato MEP. Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria Jem Bendell joined others in calling for a wider debate about sustainability, featured in The Guardian. We the undersigned represent diverse academic disciplines, and the views expressed here are those of the signatories and not their organisations. While our academic perspectives and expertise may differ, we are united on one point: we will not tolerate the failure of this or any other government to take robust and emergency action in respect of the worsening ecological crisis. The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible, and it is unconscionable to us that our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of an unprecedented disaster of our own making

Why Shouldn't I Lie? Ten Preliminaries

I introduce the reader to the character and complexity of lying, in terms of how the lie should be defined as a particular type of intentionally deceptive utterance, whether or not the deceiver succeeded in that aim, and examine how we might usefully avoid prejudging the justifiability of the lying utterance when compared to alternative forms of intentional deception and the overall outcome sought

Does moral motivation violate the standard belief-desire theory of rational action?

In chapter I, I bring out the three relations to which a theory of moral motivation may be said to stand to a standard model of rational action. I also stipulate what is to count as a moral matter. In chapter II, I develop the standard with recourse to the belief-desire complex (II i). I guard against conflating two distinct uses of reason, motivating and justifying (II ii). I bring out the sense in which the standard may be attributed to Hume (II iii). I advance the instrumental conception of reason as the moral outlook that naturally allies itself with the standard (II iv). In chapter III, I examine Nagel's attempt in The Possibility of Altruism to secure a non-Humean rational basis to ethics. I bring out an ambiguity in the notion of motivated desire (III ii) and examine the validity of Nagel's critical thesis (III iii). 1 reconstruct his positive proposal (III iv). In chapter IV, I examine McDowell's conception of the virtuous agent with respect to its non-Humean credentials. In chapter V, I reconstruct Dancy's anti-Humean cognitivist proposal as it surfaces in his Moral Reasons. I acknowledge his internalist intuition (Vi 1); review forms of moral misdemeanor (V i 2); criticise Dancy's attempt to convict the hybrid theories of Nagel and McDowell of incoherence (V i 3); and distinguish Dancy's pure desire from the other recognisable options by recruiting a distinction between independently existing and independently intelligible desires. I examine Dancy's two- representation motivational alternative and his reply to the problem of accidie (V ii). In the final chapter, VI, I summarise the thesis and suggest an anti-Humean amendment to Dancy's pure theory by defending a teleological conception of causation