Is Aristotle's Account of Incontinence Inconsistent?

Included among the many topics on which Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics is an account of incontinence or akrasia. Many controversies have arisen among interpreters of Aristotle on this issue, and a few of these disputes will be discussed in this paper. In the first part of this paper I shall indicate the usual way of reading Aristotle's account of incontinence, which I shall call the natural interpretation. In the second section I shall raise some apparent difficulties with the natural interpretation by pointing out three passages in the Nicomachean Ethics which seem to be inconsistent with it. Finally, in the concluding three sections of this paper I shall argue that the three passages allegedly inconsistent with the natural interpretation can be shown to be consistent with the general line of argument that the natural interpretation takes Aristotle to be following. In showing how these passages can be reconciled with the usual way of reading Aristotle's account of akrasia, a much clearer and more complete picture of what his view is emerges. In addition, this reading makes Aristotle's account of incontinence more philosophically acceptable – though it is not without its problems — than it is normally supposed to be

William Lad Sessions’ Honor for Us (Continuum Publishing Group, 2010).

This volume consists of an introductory essay by the editors and thirteen single-authored articles, including one by each of the editors. The title, Practical Conflicts, may lead one expect that the focus will be on conflicting moral obligations, as is the case in other well-known anthologies [for example, Christopher Gowans (ed.), Moral Dilemmas (Oxford University Press, 1987), and H.E. Mason (ed.), Moral Dilemmas and Moral Theory (Oxford University Press, 1996)]. But the scope of these papers is broader. Only one of the contributions, Christine Korsgaard's "The Myth of Egoism," has been previously published

Moral Absolutism and the Problem of Hard Cases

In The Theory of Morality Alan Donagan discusses two problems recently raised for anti-consequentialist moral theories. He calls these "cases of necessity" anti "the problem of dirty hands." What is common to each is that anti-consequentialist theories seem to posit requirements the fulfillment of which sometimes results in disastrous consequences. Donagan argues that the anti-consequentialist theory which underlies the Hebrew-Christian moral tradition can avoid these problems. It is argued that Donagan's defense is inadequate. At the end of the paper what the anti-consequentialist must do to deal with these problems is discussed

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

Review of: P.S. Greenspan’s Practical Guilt (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Reviews the book `Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms,' by P.S. Greenspan

Review of Ethical Idealism, by Nicholas Rescher. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

The purpose of this book is to examine "the nature and function of ideals" (p. 1). Its central thesis is that ideals are important because of their capacity to guide thought and action in beneficial directions, and that ideals "play a positive and productive role in human affairs" even when they are unrealistic or unachievable (p. 1)

Genetic Intervention and the Parent-Child Relationship

There is a long history of opposition to allowing parents to use biotechnology in order to select the traits of their children. Jurgen Habermas’s book, The Future of Human Nature, is an important addition to this literature. Habermas, like C.S. Lewis and Paul Ramsey before him, is concerned that children’s futures are fixed by parental choices and that genetic selection or modification treats children as objects rather than persons. This essay aims to show both why these objections resonate with many and why they nevertheless fail to provide good reasons to prohibit deliberate selection in general, and genetic enhancement in particular

The Argument from Psychological Egoism to Ethical Egoism

Psychological egoism is the view that each person is so constituted that he always seeks his own advantage or best interest. This thesis makes the factual claim that human nature is such that no person can perform an act unless he believes that it is in his best interest. According to psychological egoism there are two sorts of acts that a person cannot perform: ones that he believes to be contrary to his best interests and ones about which he has no beliefs (with respect to how they relate to his interests). Ethical egoism is the view that a person's only obligation is to promote his own best interest.1 While psychological egoism purports to tell us how people do in fact behave, ethical egoism tells us how people ought to behave. It is sometimes claimed that psychological egoism, if true, lends support to ethical egoism. Specifically, it is supposed that the truth of ethical egoism follows from two premises: one asserting the truth of psychological egoism, and the other stating the principle that 'ought' implies 'can'. One can see that the argument has some intuitive appeal. The first premise says that it is impossible for a person to do anything but seek his own good. And the second premise says that we are never required to do the impossible. So it would seem that we can infer the truth of ethical egoism from these premises. The validity of this argument is rarely challenged. The usual criticism is that the argument is unsound because psychological egoism is false.2 So even if the conclusion follows from the premises, we need not be committed to ethical egoism. But even if this defeats the argument, it would still be interesting to know if the conclusion really does follow from the premises. If additional premises are required to make the argument valid, premises as dubious as psychological egoism itself, then the argument is even weaker than it is normally supposed to be

Allocating Scarce Medical Resources by Worth: Shaw’s Critique in The Doctor’s Dilemma

When the demand for a medical resource exceeds the supply, we have a problem of scarcity. There are many instantiations of this issue. The time of health care providers during an emergency, organs for transplantation, a bed in an intensive care unit, and a slot in a research protocol can all be scarce resources. Interest in this issue has been renewed because of recent concerns about a pandemic and shortages of vaccines. In each of these cases there is a problem of distributive justice. If the resource is lifesaving, then the question is especially poignant: Who shall be saved when not all can be

Moral Dilemmas and Consistency in Ethics

Recently it has been argued that there are genuine moral dilemmas and that any theory which does not account for this fact is an unrealistic one. This represents a challenge to an assumption that most moral theorists have held: an adequate ethical theory must not allow for genuine moral quandaries. John Stuart Mill, for example, in the last paragraph of the second chapter of Utilitarianism, seems to be committed to such an assumption. Many others have also assented to this view. The consensus among those who hold this view seems to be that if a theory allows for moral dilemmas then there is some sense in which it is incoherent or inconsistent. Yet, oddly enough, the sense in which such a view would be incoherent is rarely, if ever, spelled out. Put another way, there seem to be no arguments for the belief that genuine moral dilemmas must be ruled out. W. D. Ross does suggest that if the same action were both morally required and forbidden, then "this would be to put an end to all ethical judgment."3 But how this would put an end to all ethical judgment, Ross does not explain. Once one sees that few, if any, arguments have been advanced to support the commonly held assumption, one realizes that the recent challenges must be taken seriously. Thus the main questions to which this paper is addressed are these: Must an adequate ethical theory allow for genuine moral dilemmas? Or must an adequate theory rule out such cases in order to avoid incoherence? I shall approach these questions by first spelling out two different senses in which our ethical reasoning might be thought to be inconsistent if there are genuine moral dilemmas. Discussing these two senses of inconsistency will cast light on the original questions. The conclusion that I shall eventually argue for is that we have good grounds for supposing that an adequate moral theory must rule out genuine dilemmas