Michael Tooley

The Nature of Laws

This paper is concerned with the question of the truth conditions of nomological statements. My fundamental thesis is that it is possible to set out an acceptable, noncircular account of the truth conditions of laws and nomological statements if and only if relations among universals that is, among properties and relations, construed realistically are taken as the truth-makers for such statements. My discussion will be restricted to strictly universal, nonstatistical laws. The reason for this limitation is not that I feel there is anything dubious about the concept of a statistical law, nor that I feel that basic laws cannot be statistical. The reason is methodological. The case of strictly universal, nonstatistical laws would seem to be the simplest case. If the problem of the truth conditions of laws can be solved for this simple subcase, one can then investigate whether the solution can be extended to the more complex cases. I believe that the solution I propose here does have that property, though I shall not pursue that question here.1

Causation: Reductionism Versus Realism

Any adequate approach to causation must provide accounts of causal laws, and of causal relations between states of affairs, or events, and, in each case, one is confronted with the choice between reductionism and realism. With respect to causal laws, the relevant issue concerns the relation between causal laws and the totality of events. According to reductionism, causal laws are supervenient upon the total history of the world. According to realism, they are not. With respect to causal relations, the central issue is whether causal relations between events are reducible to other states of affairs, including the non-causal properties of, and relations between, events. The reductionist holds that they are; the realist that they are not. These choices between reductionist and non-reductionist approaches to causal laws and causal relations are surely among the most fundamental in the philosophy of causation. But in spite of that fact, they have received very little discussion. For, although there have been exceptions, the history of the philosophy of causation since the time of Hume has been largely the history of attempts to offer reductionist accounts of causal laws and of causal relations, and most philosophers have been content simply to assume that a reductionist approach to causation must be correct. In this paper, I shall argue that reductionist accounts of causation are exposed to decisive objections, and that the time has come to explore realist alternatives.

In Defense of Abortion and Infanticide

This essay deals with the question of the morality of abortion and infanticide. The fundamental ethical objection traditionally advanced against these practices rests on the contention that human fetuses and infants have a right to life. It is this claim which will be the focus of attention here. The basic issue to be discussed, then, is what properties a thing must possess in order to have a right to life. My approach will be to set out and defend a basic moral principle specifying a condition an organism must satisfy if it is to have a right to life. It will be seen that this condition is not satisfied by human fetuses and infants, and thus that they do not have a right to life. So unless there are other objections to abortion and infanticide which are sound, one is forced to conclude that these practices are morally acceptable ones.1 In contrast, it may turn out that our treatment of adult members of some other species is morally indefensible. For it is quite possible that some nonhuman animals do possess properties that endow them with a right to life.

THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL

The problem that suffering and other evils pose for the rationality of belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect person has been the focus of intense discussion for a long time. The main thing that I want to do here is to consider whether recent discussions have significantly advanced our understanding of the underlying issues. I believe that they have, and I shall try to indicate the ways in which that is so. The structure of my discussion is as follows. The first two sections constitute the main part of the paper. In the first section, I shall consider how the argument from evil might best be formulated. Among the topics that I shall discuss are, first, the distinction between abstract and concrete formulations of the argument from evil; secondly, the distinction between incompatibility and evidential formulations; thirdly, the distinction between subjective and objective formulations; and fourthly, the relevance to the argument from evil of traditional arguments in support of the existence of God. One of my conclusions in the first section is that the argument from evil is best viewed as consisting of a core argument which is relatively straightforward-with the exception of one crucial premise-plus a subsidiary argument designed to support the premise in question. The second section will therefore be devoted to an examination of that subsidiary argument. In the third section, I shall consider different types of responses to the argument from evil. One useful classification, I suggest, is in terms of whether the goal is that of a total refutation of the argument,

Backward causation and the Stalnaker‐Lewis approach to counterfactuals

Whether backward causation is logically possible is a deeply controversial matter, and one on which, in the present paper, I shall take no stand. The question to be considered is what relation, if any, there is between the logical possibility of backward causation and a Stalnaker-Lewis-style account of the truth conditions of counterfactuals, and the thesis that I shall be defending is that, if backward causation is logically possible, then a Stalnaker-Lewis-style account of the truth conditions of counterfactuals cannot be sound. 1. Counterfactuals and similarity relations over possible worlds

The Moral Status of the Cloning of Humans

This essay is concerned with two questions. First, is the cloning of humans beings morally acceptable, or not? Second, if it is acceptable, are there any significant benefits that might result from it?

John Hick and the Concept of Eschatological Verification

Many philosophers have claimed that theological statements, if taken as referring to something transcending the world of human experience, are devoid of factual content. They may be meaningful in other ways, but they cannot function to describe anything, to say anything true or false. The two most famous defences of this view are Ayers in chapter vi of Language, Truth, and Logic , and Flews in his essay ‘Theology and Falsification’. 1

Laws of Nature.

Acknowledgements 1. Centrality 2. Humean analyses 3. Humean supervenience 4. A realist perspective 5. Causation 6. The limits of inquiry Appendix A: nomic platonism Appendix B: defending (SC) References Index.

Response to the Comments on Time, Tense, and Causation by Storrs McCall, Nathan Oaklander, and Quentin Smith

Let me begin with the gentlest of my three critics — Professor Storrs McCall. With regard to some very fundamental issues in the philosophy of time, his views are in some ways, as we shall see below, close to my own. At the same time, there are some very important differences. Thus, on the one hand, I hold a view of time that, as Storrs McCall points out, is quite similar in some respects to the view advanced by C. D. Broad in his book, Scientific Thought (1923, pp. 53–84) — since it involves, first of all, the idea that while the past and the present are now real, the future is not, and secondly, the idea that the world grows over time by the accretion of new facts or states of affairs. Storrs McCall, by contrast, has put forward a rather different view of time in his very interesting and important book, A Model of the Universe (1994). On that view, the world, rather than growing by the accretion of new facts, shrinks, so to speak, by the deletion of facts. But McCall is not putting forward what might be called a “flipped-over” Broad-type view — to the effect that while the future and the present are real, the past is not. (It is risky, in the philosophy of time, to claim that no one has ever held a certain view. But in the case of the flipped-over Broad-type view, a list of advocates does not, at least, readily spring to mind.) McCall’s view is rather that what gets deleted with the passage of time is simply the future possibilities that are not actualized — possibilities that McCall views in a fashion similar to the way that David Lewis views other possible worlds — namely, as things that are no less concrete than past facts or present facts.

Abortion and Infanticide.

This book has two main concerns. The first is to isolate the fundamental issues that must be resolved if one is able to formulate a defensible position on the question of the morality of abortion. The second is to determine the most plausible stand on those issues. The issues are intellectually difficult and many of them have been more or less ignored in public debate on abortion. Tooley argues, however, that plausible answers can be advanced, and that they support a liberal position on the morality of abortion.