Joel J. Kupperman

The Indispensability of Character

Gilbert Harman has argued that it does not make sense to ascribe character traits to people. The notion of morally virtuous character becomes particularly suspect. How plausible this is depends on how broad character traits would have to be. Views of character as entirely invariant behavioural tendencies offer a soft target. This paper explores a view that is a less easy target: character traits as specific to kinds of situation, and as involving probabilities or real possibilities. Such ascriptions are not undermined by Harmans arguments, and it remains plausible that the agents character often is indispensable in explanation of behaviour. Character is indispensable also as processes of control that impose reliability where it really matters.

The unity of the self

Part 1 Content: partial character and the language of thought narrow content and narrow interpretation. Part 2 Qualia: curse of the Qualia transcendentalism and its discontents. Part 3 Identity and consciousness: metapsychological relativism and the self what is it like to be a homunculus?. Part 4 Rationality and responsibility self deception and responsibility for the self moral responsibility rationality, responsibility, and pathological indifference. Part 5 Moral theory: rawls and ideal reflective equilibria utilitarianism, realism, and rights.

Tradition and Community in the Formation of Character and Self

Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making.” … There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. John Keats (1970, pp. 249–50), from a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in Kentucky, 1819 This chapter will explore the role of tradition and community in the process in which a human being becomes “personally itself.” The argument will be (1) that tradition and community are constitutive as well as causal factors, so that they will contribute to elements of the soul or self that is formed, (2) that how they do this has a great deal to do with the excellence of the result, and (3) that Confucius gives an exceptionally good account of this in the stages corresponding to advanced education. Our exploration will begin with the early stages and the development in childhood of the foundation of self. Then we will examine the development in teenage and early adult years, and how someone becomes a really good person. Finally, we need to pay some attention to general issues concerning the unity of the self and also creativity. To become personally oneself is an exceptionally important activity and, if done well, can be a creative achievement; we will need to examine the role of tradition and community in creativity generally.

An anti‐essentialist view of the emotions

Abstract Emotions normally include elements of feeling, motivation, and also intentionality; but the argument of this essay is that there can be emotion without feeling, emotion without corresponding motivation, and emotion without an intentional relation to an object such that the emotion is (among other things) a belief about or construal of it. Many recent writers have claimed that some form of intentionality is essential to emotion, and then have created lines of defence for this thesis. Thus, what look like troublesome cases of emotions can be regarded as having a global intentionality or as being “mood‐like”. Alternatively surges of non‐intentional joy or ecstasy can be regarded as merely feelings rather than as emotions, and what people experience in response to absolute music can be treated similarly. A clear view of how we normally talk about moods, emotions, and feelings however undermines these defences; and in particular we can understand the role of emotions in relation to absolute music once...

Why Ethical Philosophy Needs to Be Comparative

Principles can seem as entrenched in moral experience as Kant thinks space, time, and the categories are in human experience of the world. However not all cultures have such a view. Classical Indian and Chinese philosophies treat modification of the self as central to ethics. Decisions in particular cases and underlying principles are much less discussed. Ethics needs comparative philosophy in order not to be narrow in its concerns. A broader view can give weight to how people sometimes can change who they are, in order to lead better lives.

How Values Congeal into Facts

The paper plays against the philosophical stereotype that facts are bits of reality, ‘furniture of the universe’, and that values in contrast are either mysterious bits of reality or responses to facts. It follows Strawson in regarding facts as interpretative constructs. Values also are interpretative constructs, characterized by a normal (but not universal) connection with motivations. So is there a deep difference? There is a sense of ‘facts’, marked by phrases such as ‘Stick to the facts’, in which the interpretative element embedded in a ‘fact’ is uncontentious and would be invisible to most people. The interpretative element in values, in contrast, usually is very noticeable. But values in which this element comes to be uncontentious and taken for granted congeal into facts.

Investigations of the Self

There is room for philosophical essays that review, explore, and connect without argumentatively developing a thesis. This is such an essay. In what follows I shall not state or argue for any definite conclusions regarding the self. My goal instead will be to map philosophical territory and to point out problems and, by implication, possible directions for future work. There is a special justification for this in relation to the self. The nature of the self, and of our acquaintance with it, has been a major topic within Asian philosophy, especially Indian philosophy. In the last few years there has been a great revival of interest in the topic within Western philosophy, and important work has been published that challenges the empiricist consensus. Views of such philosophers as Butler, Reid, and McTaggart have been revived. This creates a clear opening for work that relates Asian and Western views of the self. Asian philosophy always has been relevant, of course; but current Western philosophical work on the self especially lends itself to relation and comparison.

A Messy Derivation of the Categorical Imperative

Here are two widespread responses to Kants categorical imperative. On one hand, one might note the absence of detailed rational derivation. On the other hand, even someone who maintains some skepticism is likely to have a sense that (nevertheless) there is something to Kants central ideas. The recommended solution is analysis of elements of the categorical imperative. Their appeal turns out to have different sources. One aspect of the first formulation rests on the logic of normative utterances. But others can be justified only in terms of their contributions to desirable functionings of a moral order.

Value . . . And What Follows

How can we know what is worth seeking or avoiding in life? Is there anything to know? If so, is it in some sense personal? This fresh and engaging work by noted philosopher Joel Kupperman addresses these questions as it examines the epistemology of value. Kupperman looks first at how judgments of values manifest themselves, whether there can be evidence for them, and whether a realistic account is appropriate. Focusing on emotional states, he rejects the notion that there is one primary value, arguing instead for a pluralistic understanding of value. He contends that value is strongly contextual; the value of a particular set of experiences in ones life can depend heavily on how they fit in with or provide contrast to other elements. Kupperman argues both for a realistic account of value-some things really do have a value about which we can have reasonable confidence-and for skepticism about how much we can actually know about value. The study moves on to explore the relations between judgments of value, and moral or social policy decisions of how we should behave. Acknowledging strong objections to the attempt by any group to impose its vision of a good life in a pluralistic society, Kupperman nevertheless argues that proper attention to value leads to perfectionism in social policy. Emphasizing the importance of detail in ethics, he focuses on variations among cases, and examines the weight cultural values can have in the social policy of a liberal society. Going further than previous works in determining what counts as evidence for a judgment of value, this book fills a substantial gap in the literature of ethical philosophy. Tackling difficult issues in an accessible manner, it will interest philosophers and students of ethics, epistemology, and social theory.

Learning from Asian philosophy: Chinese versus Western ethics

Abstract Over the years I have pursued an interest in classical Asian philosophies that began when, as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I was one of three students in a seminar on Chinese philosophy offered by the great Confucian scholar H. G. Creel. It seemed to me, and has continued to seem to me, that much Asian philosophy raised important questions and provided useful insights that were largely missing from the Western philosophy that was central to my professional training. My interest in Asian philosophy, in short, has been largely in terms of what I could take from it and bring to problems in contemporary philosophy—chiefly ethical philosophy. There is much in classical Asian philosophy that can be used in the way that most teachers of philosophy in Britain and America use, say, Descartes or John Locke: as reminders of problems or lines of thought that we might have forgotten about or ignored, and as suggestive philosophical activity that we can continue, revise, or debate in our own ...