Terence Cuneo

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid

Introduction 1. Reid in context Alexander Broadie 2. Thomas Reid and the culture of science Paul Wood 3. Reid on common sense Nicholas Wolterstorff 4. Reids theory of perception James Van Cleve 5. Reids reply to the skeptic John Greco 6. Nativism and the nature of thought in Reids account of our knowledge of the external world Lorne Falkenstein 7. Reid and the social operations of mind C. A. J. Coady 8. Reid on memory and the identity of persons Rene van Woudenberg 9. Reids theory of freedom and responsibility William L. Rowe 10. Reids moral philosophy Terence Cuneo 11. Reids philosophy of art Peter Kivy 12. Reids philosophy of religion Dale Tuggy 13. Reids influence in Britain, Germany, France and America Benjamin Redekop.

Speech and morality : on the metaethical implications of speaking

Preface 1. Clarkes Insight 2. A Normative Theory of Speech 3. The Moral Dimensions of Speech 4. Against the Mixed View: Part I 5. Against the Mixed View: Part II 6. Three Antirealist Views 7. Epistemic Implications Bibliography Index

Understanding liberal democracy : essays in political philosophy

PART ONE: PUBLIC REASON LIBERALISM PART TWO: RE-THINKING LIBERAL DEMOCRACY PART THREE: PERSPECTIVES ON RIGHTS PART FOUR: LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION

Reconciling Realism with Humeanism

It is widely accepted by philosophers that a broadly Humean account of moral motivation is correct. Roughly put, the Humean account of moral motivation says that an agent is motivated to act in some fashion that she believes is right, just, virtuous, etc., only if that agent desires to act in that fashion—where the desire in question is distinct from, and not entirely generated by, any belief that that agent has. A growing number of moral realists, however, have rejected this Humean account of moral motivation. Many of these philosophers defend a moral psychology according to which motivational states are fundamentally cognitive states. According to these philosophers, an agent’s believing that acting in some fashion is morally right, just, virtuous, etc., can itself motivate that agent to act appropriately, or can at least give rise to desires in that agent to act appropriately. The central purpose of this essay is to consider some of the more prominent reasons why realists have rejected the Humean theory of motivation. I shall argue that these reasons are not persuasive, and that there is nothing about being a moral realist that should make us suspicious of Humeanism. Let me immediately add a caveat to this, however: my central purpose here is not to show that anti-Humean—or as I shall hereafter call them, ‘Rationalist’—views of moral motivation are false. In fact, I think some are rather plausible. Nor, might I add, is my purpose to offer grounds for believing that the Humean theory of motivation is true. Rather, my central aim is the more modest one of providing reasons for thinking that the moral realist is free to combine her moral ontology with a Humean theory of motivation. However modest the aim of this essay might be, it is also, I think, important. For if the realist really is free to combine her theory with the Humean theory of motivation, then it cannot be complained that moral realism is suspect because it is incompatible with this widely accepted view. This, I claim, is the central purpose of this essay. But the essay also has an auxiliary aim. I want to suggest that, when understood aright, questions of motivational psychology do not really have an important bearing upon the moral realist/antirealist debate. The common assumption to the contrary, I propose, is mistaken.

Are Moral Qualities Response-dependent?

Some fifteen years ago, John McDowell suggested that moral realists ought to exploit the analogy between moral qualities and secondary qualities. Rather than think of moral qualities as brutely there without any internal relation to some exercise of human sensibility, McDowell proposed that moral realists should claim that moral qualities are dispositions of a sort-dispositions to elicit merited responses in appropriate agents. 1 In the intervening years, McDowells suggestion has been widely discussed and criticized. 2 My aim in this essay is to consider afresh the claim that moral qualities are secondary qualities-or as I shall call them, response-dependent qualities.3 I will argue that some of the more prominent objections to this position are inconclusive, but that there are other good reasons for rejecting it. If the overall argument of this essay is correct, then we shall have further grounds for thinking that the moral realist ought to defend what I will call a primary account of moral qualities.

Another look at divine hiddenness

In his fine book The Wisdom to Doubt, J. L. Schellenberg builds a case for religious scepticism by advancing a version of the Hiddenness Argument. This argument rests on the claim that God could not love, in an admirable way, those who seek God while also remaining hidden from them. In this article, I distinguish two arguments for this claim. Neither argument succeeds, I contend, as each rests on an unsatisfactory understanding of the nature of admirable love, whether human or divine. In a passage appealed to frequently by homilists but rarely by philosophers, the author of the Gospel of Matthew attributes the following words to Jesus: Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me’. ‘Then the just will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come

Signs of Value: Reid on the Evidential Role of Feelings in Moral Judgement

Imagine the following scenario: you walk into a crowded party of associates and friends in a large reception room. As you make your way toward a more quiet area, you’re pulled aside by a colleague and introduced to one of his associates. You engage in some light conversation. After several minutes, however, you find yourself feeling very uneasy about this fellow for reasons that are not at all clear to you – it might be his tone of voice, his excessive smoothness in conversation, the sort of distracted attention he gives you or his mildly dismissive remarks about the work of someone you do not know. In any event, you find yourself forming the judgement that this man is untrustworthy. You politely excuse yourself, convinced that your uneasiness and subsequent moral judgement are not unfounded. Or consider a somewhat different, non-moral case: you are steadily working on writing an essay and are rereading a draft of it. You find yourself vaguely dissatisfied with the way a point was put, or the way a paragraph flows, or the cogency of an interpretation without having a clear sense of what is wrong with the point, the paragraph, or the interpretation. Upon having this feeling of dissatisfaction, you form the judgement that something is not quite right with the way you have stated the point, written the paragraph or couched the interpretation, and resolve to rewrite the relevant section. There are some interesting differences between these two cases, but what they have in common is the following feature: feelings play a special sort of role in generating the value judgements in question. It is consequent upon your feeling uneasy about the acquaintance at the party that you form the judgement that he is not to be trusted. Likewise, it is consequent upon feeling dissatisfied with what you have written that you form the judgement that something is not quite right with how you have written your essay. In both cases, feelings of various kinds function as experiential inputs, and value judgement is the output. If we assume that in cases such as these, feelings reliably indicate value, then they also function as British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14(1) 2006: 69 – 91

The Myth of Moral Fictionalism

Naturalists wonder whether there is a place in the world for moral facts. Some believe not, advocating either a view according to which moral discourse is massively in error or one in which it fails to express moral propositions altogether. Other naturalists believe there is a place for moral facts, but only if they are identical with (or perhaps constituted by) natural facts. According to these philosophers, moral discourse embodies no fundamental error and is straightforwardly assertoric. For some time, many philosophers believed that these positions exhausted the options for naturalists. Recently, however, a new position has emerged as an alternative. This position, dubbed moral fictionalism by its advocates, maintains that moral thought and discourse either are or should become modes of pretense, wherein we pretend that there are moral facts.

INTUITIONISM'S BURDEN: THOMAS REID ON THE PROBLEM OF MORAL MOTIVATION

Hume bequeathed to rational intuitionists a problem concerning moral judgment and the will – a problem of sufficient severity that it is still cited as one of the major reasons why intuitionism is untenable.1 Stated in general terms, the problem concerns how an intuitionist moral theory can account for the intimate connection between moral judgment and moral motivation. One reason that this is still considered to be a problem for intuitionists is that it is widely assumed that the early intuitionists made little progress towards solving it. In this essay, I wish to challenge this assumption by examining one of the more subtle intuitionist responses to Hume, viz., that offered by Thomas Reid. For reasons that remain unclear to me, Reids response to Hume on this issue has been almost entirely neglected. I shall argue that it is nonetheless one that merits our attention, for at least two reasons. In the first place, Reids response to Humes challenge to rational intuitionism bears a close affinity to the t...

Reid on the first principles of morals

What role do the first principles of morals play in Reids moral theory? Reid has an official line regarding their role, which identifies these principles as foundational propositions that evidentially ground other moral propositions. I claim that, by Reids own lights, this line of thought is mistaken. There is, however, another line of thought in Reid, one which identifies the first principles of morals as constitutive of moral thought. I explore this interpretation, arguing that it is a fruitful way of understanding much of what Reid wants to say about the role of moral first principles and drawing some connections between it and recent work on moral nonnaturalism.