Jonathan Dancy

Should We Pass the Buck

My topic is the relation between the right and the good. I introduce it by relating some aspects of the debate between various British intuitionists in the first half of the present century. In Principia Ethica (1903) G. E. Moore claimed that to be right is to be productive of the greatest good. He wrote ‘This use of “right”, as denoting what is good as a means, whether or not it be also good as an end, is indeed the use to which I shall confine the word’ (p. 18). By the time he wrote his Ethics (1912, e.g. p. 6) he seems to have weakened his position, and offers conduciveness to the good not as a definition of ‘right’ but as an account of the one and only property that makes acts right. Even if it be the only right-making property, conduciveness to the good will not be identical with the right-ness that it makes.

Are There Organic Unities

In this article I consider Moore’s theory of organic unities, those ‘wholes’ whose value may be either more or less than the sum of the values of their parts. I start from a familiar claim, holism in the theory of reasons: A feature that is a reason in one case may be no reason at all, or even an opposite reason, in another. For present purposes I will call ‘particularism’ the application of this claim to ethics, so the particularist holds that a feature that is a moral reason in one case need not be so in another. One would think that holists should view Moore as a friend in an unfriendly world. His conception of organic unities seems to be pretty well just what they have been suggesting in the theory of reasons. But this is an illusion, as we will see. Even Moore’s claim that the value of the whole is not necessarily identical with the sum of the values of the parts is no help, because it implicitly allows that the parts cannot change their value as they move from whole to whole. At least, it allows this for intrinsic value. Moore would allow that what he calls ‘extrinsic value’, by which he only means instrumental value, can of course vary according to circumstances. But he insists that a part retains its intrinsic value as it moves from whole to whole. So his theory of organic unities combines two claims: (1) Parts retain their intrinsic value regardless of variations in the context. (2) Parts may contribute either more or less value than they themselves have there. The argument for claim 1 consists not in

Berkeley : an introduction

Introduction 1. The Background 2. Realism and Representative Realism 3. Abstraction 4. God 5. Real Things 6. Perception and Knowledge 7. Science 8. The Language of God 9. Spirits 10. Conclusions Further Reading

Caring about Justice

In the post-Gilligan debate about the differences, if any, between the ways in which people of different genders see the moral world in which they live, I detect two assumptions. These can be found in Gilligans early work, and have infected the thought of others. The first, perhaps surprisingly, is Kohlbergs Kantian account of one moral perspective, the one more easily or more naturally operated by men and which has come to be called the justice perspective. (What I mean by calling this Kantian will emerge shortly.) This is the perspective whose claims Gilligan initially found suspect, not because she thought it a distorted account of the way in which male subjects operated, but because she disputed its claims to be the only account or the best or dominant one. Throughout the ensuing debate Kohlbergs account has been left in place, and challenged not for correctness but only for uniqueness.

Intuition and Emotion

I start with a brief look at what the classic British intuitionists (Ewing, Broad, Ross) had to say about the relation between judgment and emotion. I then look at some more recent work in the intuitionist tradition and try to develop a conception of moral emotion as a form of practical seeming, suggesting that some moral intuitions are exactly that sort of emotion. My general theme is that the standard contrast between intuition and emotion is a mistake and that intuitionism can happily accommodate the results of recent work in empirical moral psychology.

II–Jonathan Dancy

My first four sections concentrate on the second section of Professor Scanlons contribution (hereafter IP ), where he lays out his conception of moral principles and of the role they play in theory and practice. I will raise questions on the following issues: 1. Scanlons initial introduction of the notion of a principle. 2. His rejection of the standard view that principles are concerned with the forbidding, permitting and requiring of actions. 3. His rejection of pro tanto conceptions of principles in favour of a conception of them as conclusive. 4. The resulting account of what it is for a principle to face and survive exceptions. Scanlons discussion of these matters here both appeals to and is in some respects more detailed than the relevant section of his recent What We Owe to Each Other (hereafter WWO ). The topic is interesting both for the role played by principles in Scanlons present discussion of intention and permissibility, and more generally because of his account of wrongness: an act is wrong iff it is ruled out by principles that nobody could reasonably reject. The remainder of my contribution is concerned with the ostensible focus of IP , namely the relevance (if any) of agent-intentions to the permissibility of what is done.

Externalism for Internalists

am no exception to this rule, and in this paper I try to lay out what I think the basic structure of a theory of justification of belief should be in a way sensitive to the issues debated between internalists and externalists. At the same time I attempt to relate what I have to say to ethics. It has been common for proponents of both sides of the epistemological argument to make appeal to the appearance of a view like theirs in ethics, in ways of which I do not wholly approve.1

Action in Moral Metaphysics

In this essay I will be trying to show that the linguistic philosophy of the 1960s still has something to teach us, despite changes in the concerns of moral philosophers. One can hear my title in two ways. In one way, it alludes to the great upsurge in the attention paid to metaphysical considerations in recent moral theory. In this sense, there has been a lot of action, or at least activity, in moral metaphysics. But what I really mean to allude to is the place of action in the metaphysical scheme of things, and here I want to suggest that we don’t need a metaphysics of action at all. Actions, I am going to suggest, should not be considered as independent elements in our metaphysics. There should be less of action in our moral metaphysics, not more.

Ryle and Strawson on Category Mistakes

In the volume of essays on Gilbert Ryle published in 1970 by George Pitcher and Oscar Wood, there is a paper by Peter Strawson on categories. In my contribution to this new volume on Ryle, I go through some now well-recognised difficulties with Ryle’s own treatment of categories, and in particular of category mistakes. I then consider some general problems that beset the efforts of others to do better, before turning to Strawson’s suggestions, which as far as I can discover have never been discussed in print. These suggestions have obvious merits, but I end by arguing that they are less than fully successful.