Analytic Philosophy最新文献

Deep self views of moral responsibility suggest that an agent fully satisfies the freedom condition for responsibility if and only if her actions or omissions issue from, and so express, her deep self. This analysis generates both false negatives and false positives regarding people's responsibility, and counterexamples proliferate. I defend a novel version of the deep self view by offering a necessary condition for accountability while retaining the core of deep self views. Indeed, an agent may be blameworthy for her wrongdoing without it issuing from, and so expressing, her deep self. And yet, I argue that she must have a deep self for which she is responsible. This is achieved by paying closer attention to history than standard views have. Focusing on history then reveals a less discussed problem for standard views: the ahistorical features of them make them less equipped to explain cases of blameworthiness that is undermined.

In this symposium piece, I reply to the diverse and wide-ranging set of objections to my book (The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False) set forth by MacFarlane, Green, Wasserman, and Bigg & Miller.

Emotion and virtue (2020) defends positions about virtue on two adjacent expanses of philosophical terrain. One is a matter of moral psychology, while the other concerns the theory of virtue. My primary thesis identifies a central role for emotion in the psychological constitution of exemplars of virtue. In this symposium, four outstanding commentators take turns examining some of the theses defended in the book. Roger Crisp and Julia Driver both seek to rehabilitate ‘black box’ theories of virtue, which marginalise the role of emotion. Black box theories are my opponents in moral psychology. Marco Rossi focuses on a core component of my defence, arguing that my distillation of existing theories of emotion is more controversial than I suppose. Finally, Justin D’Arms diagnoses a tension between two Aristotelian ideas he finds at work in my defence. While he is attracted to both ideas, he thinks the tension between them is problematic for my fundamental claim about the role of emotion in virtue. It is a real privilege to have been offered such a rich set of comments to engage.

This paper is a review of Emotion and Virtue, by Gopal Sreenivasan. Besides providing an overview of the book, it is suggested that the view of the virtues which gives less weight to the emotions remains plausible, as does the thesis of the unity of virtue.

I here examine some of the main contentions of Todd's “The Open Future”. I argue first that a future contingent need not contain locutions such as “will” or cognates and that once this is recognized a trilemma emerges for Todd, putting pressure on him to relinquish one of the book's main aims. Then after noting (Section II) Todd's response to a puzzle A.N. prior had raised for betting on an open-future style view, I turn (Sections IIIa and IIIb) to his discussion of whether his approach is committed to demanding that ordinary speakers reform their talk about the future. I conclude (Section IV) that the objective of the replacement strategy that Todd recommends could be achieved with less violence to ordinary linguistic practices with the help of a view on which “will” and cognates are polysemous.

This essay provides a critical discussion of Gopal Sreenivasan's integral account of virtue in his book Emotion and Virtue. This discussion focuses on his account of the paradigm virtue of compassion, arguing that the view does not have most of the advantages Sreenivasan suggests it has when compared to competing models of virtue.

Contemporary action theory is generally concerned with giving theories of action ontology. In this paper, we make the novel proposal that the standard view in action theory—the Causal Theory of Action—should be recast as a “model,” akin to the models constructed and investigated by scientists. Such models often consist in fictional, hypothetical, or idealized structures, which are used to represent a target system indirectly via some resemblance relation. We argue that recasting the Causal Theory as a model can not only accomplish the goals of causal theorists, but also give the theory greater flexibility in responding to common objections.

In his remarkable new book, Emotion and Virtue, Sreenivasan defends the view that, in the case of many virtues, in order for an exemplar of each of these virtues to be a reliable judge of what that virtue requires in specific circumstances, she must possess a particular, morally rectified, emotional trait. In this article, I raise two challenges to “the argument from salience” that Sreenivasan offers in favor of this view. First, I argue that, although Sreenivasan wishes to remain neutral about different philosophical theories of emotions, the success of his argument depends, in fact, on the outcome of the debate about the nature of emotions. Second, I challenge the central claim of Sreenivasan's argument from salience, namely, that the possession of a morally rectified emotional trait, cleverness, and supplementary moral knowledge is sufficient to explain an agent's ability to reliably judge what a given virtue requires in specific circumstances.

I discuss a tension between two broadly Aristotelian ideas about the role of emotions in virtue and consider its implications for the original and attractive theory of virtuous judgment that Gopal Sreenivasan develops in Emotion and Virtue. One is the idea that a virtuous person has fitting emotions. The other idea is that the virtuous person has emotions that point her toward performing a virtuous action. I explain the tension between these ideas, and how it arises with respect to both of Sreenivasan's central examples of virtue: compassion and courage.I suggest that this tension generates some interesting and systemic respects in which a virtuous agent's virtuous emotional responses hamper her attempts to judge what is the virtuous thing to do. This makes me less sanguine than I take Sreenivasan to be about the contributions of emotion to the virtuous agent's reliability in passing his “Central Test of Virtue.”