Geoffrey Scarre

Can there be a good death

While some deaths are worse than others, there is no such thing as a ‘good death’ since the plausible desiderata of a ‘good death’ form an inconsistent set. Because death is of the greatest existential consequence to us, a ‘good’ death must be a self-aware death in which we grasp the import of what is happening to us; however, such realization is incompatible with our achieving the tranquillity of mind which is another requirement for the ‘good’ death. Nevertheless, the welcome recognition in recent years by medical personnel, palliative care workers and hospice staff that dying is an existential predicament as well as a physiological condition has enabled more people to avoid a ‘soulless death in intensive care’, even if it pays insufficient regard to the personal virtues that we need if we are to mitigate the worst evils of dying.

Speaking of the dead

Abstract Many people think that the reputations of the dead should be treated with respect, though this position is hard to defend if dead people are not only unconscious of what is said about them but also non-existent. In this paper, I examine first some unsuccessful arguments for holding that the dead are wronged by slander or denigration and ask what kind of civilised values are at issue when we speak about dead people. Subsequently I propose an alternative account which identifies the ante-mortem person as the real subject of posthumous slander. One important implication of this view is that moral status does not decline with time, so that failing to respect a dead persons good name is equally wrong whether she is long-dead or only recently deceased.

Epicurus as a Forerunner of Utilitarianism

How original was the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham? In John Stuart Mills opinion, not very original at all. Bentham maintained that pleasure and pain should provide our chief criteria of the moral quality of actions, because they are important above all other things in making our lives go well or ill. But two thousand years before Bentham defended the doctrine of utility that ‘all things are good or evil, by virtue solely of the pain or pleasure which they produce†, a gentle and cultivated man had taught in a garden at Athens that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain were the most fitting objectives in the life of the wise man. The name of this sage, who endeavoured to provide in his own career an exemplar of his doctrine, was Epicurus of Samos. On Mills reading of history, utilitarianism and Epicureanism were in essential respects the same.

Witchcraft and Magic

A belief in the reality of witchcraft and magic is not a component of the average modern Westerner’s view of the world. For most of us, the idea that human beings can harness occult forces to serve their good or ill purposes is as defunct as the notion of a flat earth, and as unlikely to be resuscitated. When misfortune strikes us, we do not search our neighbourhood for the old woman who has bewitched us; nor do we believe that knowledge or love or power can be ours if we employ the correct rites, charms or incantations. The witch and the magician are absent from the stage of real life, and have been relegated firmly to the realm of fantastic fiction.

Political reconciliation, forgiveness and grace.

This essay argues that the overuse of the idiom of forgiveness has distorted our understanding of the nature and requirements of political reconciliation, and proposes its supplementation by a notion of grace. This is a mode of response to wrongs that is less hedged around by conventions and conditions, and grace complements forgiveness in contexts in which the latter is inappropriate; it is also more serviceable for maintaining inter-community harmony in the long term. Following a detailed analysis of grace in the political environment, the paper concludes by tracing a concept of grace in the Sermon on the Mount.

Utilitarianism and Self-Respect

Modern utilitarianism has largely abandoned the view that human well-being consists solely in pleasurable sensations. Too much was wanting in that view for it to withstand the critique of a more refined philosophical psychology than was available to Bentham and Mill. The objections are by now familiar and need no detailed rehearsal. The older view failed to characterize adequately the structure of human satisfactions, forgetting that we can care about things that will happen after we are dead, that we generally prefer to be told a distasteful truth to a comforting lie, and that we wish to be actors in our own lives (with all the struggle and strife which that implies) and not merely passive recipients of pleasures from external sources. The extent to which a life is a flourishing one cannot be determined by summing the pleasures and pains, and calculating the balance. Nor, indeed, can it be determined by summing anything else. A life that is happy or eudaimon in the Aristotelian sense is an organic unity in which the significance of its parts rests on their contribution to the meaning of the whole. Nur im Zusammenhange eines Lebens hat ein Erlebnis Bedeutung. Utilitarianism needs to find a way of incorporating an organic view of human satisfaction.

Proof and implication in mill's philosophy of logic

Following a brief preface, the second section of this paper discusses Mills early reflections on the problem of how deductive inference can be illuminating. In the third section it is suggested that in his Logic Mill misconstrued the feature that the premises of a logically valid argument contain the conclusion as the ground of a charge that deductive proof is question-begging. The fourth section discusses the nature of the traditional petitio objection to syllogism, and the fifth shows that Mill had a theory capable of answering it. The final section cites the confusion described in section 3 to explain why Mill nevertheless continued to think that syllogistic proofs beg the question.

‘The compages, the bonds and rivets of the race’ : W. E. Gladstone on the keeping of books.

ABSTRACT For the great Victorian Liberal statesman and Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone, books were the ‘voices of the dead’ and ‘a main instrument of communication with the vast human procession of the other world’. Gladstones 1890 article ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’ combines a celebration of the value and civilizing influence of books with practical suggestions for the organization of an academic library. Unlike such contemporaries as Sir Thomas Phillipps and the Earls of Crawford, Gladstone was a book-lover rather than a bibliomane, who bought books for their contents rather than their rarity or beauty. The residential library of St. Deiniols, North Wales (now renamed Gladstones Library), which he established towards the end of his life primarily to serve the needs of Anglican clergymen, follows the spirit of his 1890 paper and adopts many of its practical suggestions. Like Antonio Panizzi of the British Museum, his friend of many years, Gladstone was particularly concerned with the problem of how libraries could accommodate the ever-increasing number of books without becoming mere book warehouses. Gladstones solution was to shelve books according to their ‘sociability’, so that less sociable items could be relegated to mobile shelving or other maximum-density storage areas. Libraries, for Gladstone, should be not only well-organized and efficiently run repositories of research material but friendly and welcoming centres of scholarship and meeting places for readers. In a well-run library, scholars should be able to enjoy the society of books and of one another. Gladstones Library continues to this day to realize the high ideals set by its founder, providing to researchers the opportunity for scholarly collaboration which Gladstone though essential in the evening of the age of the solitary scholar.

Forgiveness and Identification

Philosophical discussion of forgiveness has mainly focused on cases in which victims and offenders are known to each other. But it commonly happens that a victim brings an offender under a definite description (e.g. ‘the boy who kicked his football through my window’) but does not know to which individual this applies. I explore some of the conceptual and moral issues raised by the phenomenon of forgiveness in circumstances in which identification is incomplete, tentative or even mistaken. Among the conclusions reached are that correct and precise identification of the offending individual is not essential for forgiveness to take place; that an offender can, under certain strict conditions, be said to be forgiven by proxy where the victim has misidentified the offender and ‘forgiven’ the wrong person; and that proxy forgiveness of this sort is not subject to the objections commonly levelled against ‘proxy’ or ‘third-party forgiveness.’

The Ageing of People and of Things

This chapter explores some of the similarities and differences between the ageing of people and of other things, in particular the artefacts that we create to serve our ends. When we describe people as ‘ageing’, we usually mean that they have arrived at a senior stage of life, often with the added implication that their health or capacities are declining. Many artefacts, too, possess something analogous to a life cycle, and the terms in which we describe their ageing typically refer to their gradual loss of functionality. Yet, the value retained by old people and old things is significantly affected by the fact that the former but not the latter are ends in themselves; therefore, only objects can wholly lose their worth and become disposable. Where old artefacts continue to be valued, or acquire the honourable status of ‘antiques’, this is commonly on account of the intimate reminders they provide us of now-deceased people.