Muddy Waters Causation is one of those philosophical topics that drive you up the wall. As soon as you start to think about it you draw a complete blank. As Hume observes: “There are no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more obscure or uncertain, than those of power, force, […]
Moral Subjectivism Defeated Moral subjectivism claims that what we think of as moral values reduce to moral beliefs: things are wrong because we believe they are wrong. It is not that we have moral beliefs because of moral facts, which may be cited to justify the belief; rather, the so-called moral […]
Moral Minimalism I shall explore the prospects for a minimalist theory of normative ethics. By “minimalist” I mean a theory (analogous to minimalism in linguistics) that seeks to base normative ethics on the most exiguous of foundations, viz. a single moral principle, with other aspects of the ethical life consigned […]
Moral Excess God is said to be morally perfect. According to one interpretation, this means that God seeks to maximize the good—he is committed to making this the best of all possible worlds. Of course, that does not appear to be the case (pace Leibniz), thus producing the problem of evil. […]
Moral Distance We tend to think that our moral obligations fall off with distance: the closer someone is to us the greater is his moral claim on us, and the further away the less. Morality operates like gravity—it weakens with distance. True, morality is an expanding circle, but […]
Memory Illusions In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, a thoughtful and unassuming young woman, makes the following observations to a certain Miss Crawford: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do believe it is memory. There seems something more speakingly […]
Limits of Reality We speak of the limits of human knowledge or reason or our conceptual scheme, but we don’t tend to talk about the limits of reality. Knowledge is limited relative to reality—it is not as extensive as reality—but reality cannot fail to be as extensive as itself. But it may […]
Knowledge, Opinion, and Fantasy Plato wished to know the difference between knowledge and opinion. His idea, much elaborated over the centuries, is that something needs to be added to opinion to get knowledge. Knowledge is opinion plus something—truth, justification, reliability, etc. Certainly we can agree that knowledge is more than […]
Jane Austen’s Moral Universe Jane Austen is the most moral of writers, but what is her morality? What values does she espouse and promote? That is not an easy question, given the elusiveness of the authorial mind and the gap between life and art, but I propose to deal with […]
Is Psychology a Science? The question is only as precise as the word “science”, which isn’t very precise. But I don’t propose to quibble about that word (I incline to a wide application of it); instead I will compare psychology to some established sciences and note various gaps in […]