Arguably the differences between guilt and shame have been exaggerated in the literature, especially with respect to the relationship of each to morality. Some fresh examples of shame are presented. While these point in the same direction, they also indicate a puzzling dualism within the structure of shame which threatens to bring shame and the 'morality system' closer again, albeit for a sub-class of cases. The dualism is explored, partly by way of a discussion of embarrassment. The conclusion drawn is (...) that while the dualism remains puzzling, it does not re-establish a connection betweeb shame and morality. An explanation is then offered of survivor guilt which does not compromise its distinctiveness (that is, without resorting to the hypothesis that the survivor has harmed someone by surviving) but which - in contrast to the discussion of shame - affirms the relationship between survivor guilt and the morality system. (shrink)

The concept of epistemic injustice is the latest philosophical tool with which to try to theorise what goes wrong when mental health service users are not listened to by clinicians, and what goes right when they are. Is the tool adequate to the task? It is argued that, to be applicable at all, the concept needs some adjustment so that being disbelieved as a result of prejudice is one of a family of alternative necessary conditions for its application, rather than (...) a necessary condition all on its own. It is then argued that even once adjusted in this way, the concept does not fit well in the area where the biggest efforts have been made to apply it so far, namely the highly sensitive case of adult patients suffering from delusions. Indeed it does not serve the interests of service users struggling for recognition to try to apply it in this context, because there is so much more to being listened to than simply being believed. However, the concept is found to apply smoothly in many cases where the service users are children, for example, in relation to children’s testimony on the efficacy of treatment. It is suggested that further research would demonstrate the usefulness of the concept in adult cases of a similar kind. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

[Michael Smith] The requirements of instrumental rationality are often thought to be normative conditions on choice or intention, but this is a mistake. Instrumental rationality is best understood as a requirement of coherence on an agent's non-instrumental desires and means-end beliefs. Since only a subset of an agent's means-end beliefs concern possible actions, the connection with intention is thus more oblique. This requirement of coherence can be satisfied either locally or more globally, it may be only one among a number (...) of such requirements on an agent's total set of desires and beliefs, and it has no special connection with reasoning. An appreciation of these facts leads to a better understanding of both the nature and the significance of instrumental rationality. /// [Edward Harcourt] I argue that the incoherence Smith claims to identify in agents who desire that q, believe that p is a necessary means to q, but fail to desire that p is illusory, since it rests on the false assumption that every property I know to be possessed by an object of my desire is an object of my desire. Though the failure of Smith's account of the irrationality of this pattern of attitudes leaves it open that the pattern is indeed irrational, I argue that there are instances of it that are not irrational where the desires are desires for what the agent knows to be impossible for him. This conclusion casts doubt on the overall strategy-that of making a Humean theory of action explanation do duty as a theory of instrumental rationality-which implies that the norms of instrumental rationality apply to desires simply as such. I then try to criticise the strategy in such a way as to leave the Humean theory of action explanation unaffected. (shrink)

The paper concerns two familiar lines of inquiry. One, stemming from a neo-Aristotelian naturalism associated with Foot and others, asks whether we can derive human excellences from what humans need in order to be some way. The second asks whether virtue is a kind of health, and vice a kind of illness. The first is often seen as a failure to the extent that the list of characteristics derived by this approach does not include familiar moral virtues. However, it is (...) argued that the concept of human excellence is many-layered, so the fact that the approach may not succeed for moral virtues does not show that it is no good for anything. Moreover, the kinds of psychological characteristic derived by a liberalized version of Foot’s approach may also help to give non-trivial answers to the second, Platonic, line of inquiry. (shrink)

The paper develops an attack on quasi-realism in ethics, according to which expressivism about ethical discourse—understood as the thesis that the states that discourse expresses are non-representational—is consistent with some of the discourse's familiar surface features, thus ‘saving the ethical appearances’. A dilemma is posed for the quasi-realist. Either ethical discourse appears, thanks to those surface features, to express representational states, or else there is no such thing as its appearing to express such states. If the former then, by expressivism, (...) the appearance presented by ethical discourse is false, so the ethical appearances are not saved. If the latter, it is unintelligible why an appeal to projection should be needed to explain how the surface features come to express non-representational states if no explanation is needed—as evidently none is—to explain how they come to express representational states. The conclusion of this argument is then argued to converge with some other considerations which show that there is no gap between ethical discourse's possessing the surface features in question and its expressing representational states. (shrink)

The paper focuses on Richard Moran's account (in Authority and Estrangement) of the distinction between attitudes that meet, and alternatively fail to meet, his transparency criterion for what he calls rational health, and compare this with the psychoanalytic distinction between contained and uncontained states of mind. On the face of it, Moran's distinction appears to be a useful theoretical deepening of the psychoanalytic distinction. On closer examination, however, it appears that (a) rational health is a more demanding standard than containment, (...) so the rationally unhealthy contains much that is mentally (quite) healthy; and (b) more seriously, some states that meet the “transparency” condition are manifestly mentally unhealthy. So transparency needs to be supplemented by an independently understood notion of containment to approach a realistic norm of mental health/ill health. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against an influential view of Frege's writings on indexical and other context-sensitive expressions, and in favour of an alternative. The centrepiece of the influential view, due to (among others) Evans and McDowell, is that according to Frege, context-sensitiveword-meaning plus context combine to express senses which are essentially first person, essentially present tense and so on, depending on the context-sensitive expression in question. Frege's treatment of indexicals thus fits smoothly with his Intuitive Criterion of difference of (...) sense. On my view, by contrast, Frege stuck by the view which he held in his unpublished 1897 ‘Logic’, namely that the senses expressed by the combination of context-sensitive word-meaning and context could just as well be expressed by means of non-context-sensitive expressions: being first person, present tense and so on are properties, in Frege's view, only of language, not of thought. Given the irreducibility of indexicals – a phenomenon noticed by Castañeda, Perry and others – Frege's treatment of indexicals thus turns out to be inconsistent with the Intuitive Criterion. I argue that Frege was not aware of the inconsistency because he was not aware of the irreducibility of indexicals. This oversight was possible because the source of Frege's interest in indexicals, as inother context-sensitive expressions, differed from that of contemporary theorists. Whereas contemporary theorists are most often interested in indexicals (and in Frege's treatment of them) because they are interested in the indexical versions of Frege's Puzzle and their relation to psychological explanation, Frege himself was interested in them because they pose a prima facie threat to his general conception of thoughts. The only indexical expression Frege's view of which the above account does not cover is ‘I’ insofar as it is associated with ‘special and primitive’ senses, but Frege did not introduce such senses with a view to explaining theirreducibility of ‘I’ his real reason for introducing them remains obscure. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic writing rarely features on university ethics curricula, so the idea that psychoanalysis has a place in the history of ethics may be a surprise. The aim of the paper is to show that it should not be. The strategy is to sketch in outline an enduring line of inquiry in the history of ethics, namely the Platonic-Aristotelian investigation of the relationship between human nature, human excellence and the human good, and to suggest that psychoanalysis exemplifies it too. But since (...) the suggestion, once made, seems not only true but obviously true, the paper spends some time exploring why the place of psychoanalysis in the history of ethics has so often been overlooked, before developing the outline more fully and offering detailed reasons as to why psychoanalysis fits it. One consequence is that Freudian and ‘relational’ variants of psychoanalysis continue the Platonic-Aristotelian line of inquiry in interestingly different ways. (shrink)

0 Consider ‘I’ as used by a given speaker and some ordinary proper name of that speaker: are these two coreferential singular terms which differ in Fregean sense? If they could be shown to be so, we might be able to explain the logical and epistemological peculiarities of ‘I’ by appeal to its special sense and yet feel no temptation to think of its reference as anything more exotic than a human being.

Psychoanalytic writing rarely features on university ethics curricula, so the idea that psychoanalysis has a place in the history of ethics may be a surprise. The aim of the paper is to show that it should not be. The strategy is to sketch in outline an enduring line of inquiry in the history of ethics, namely the Platonic-Aristotelian investigation of the relationship between human nature, human excellence and the human good, and to suggest that psychoanalysis exemplifies it too. But since (...) the suggestion, once made, seems not only true but obviously true, the paper spends some time exploring why the place of psychoanalysis in the history of ethics has so often been overlooked, before developing the outline more fully and offering detailed reasons as to why psychoanalysis fits it. One consequence is that Freudian and ‘relational’ variants of psychoanalysis continue the Platonic-Aristotelian line of inquiry in interestingly different ways. (shrink)

[Michael Smith] The requirements of instrumental rationality are often thought to be normative conditions on choice or intention, but this is a mistake. Instrumental rationality is best understood as a requirement of coherence on an agent's non-instrumental desires and means-end beliefs. Since only a subset of an agent's means-end beliefs concern possible actions, the connection with intention is thus more oblique. This requirement of coherence can be satisfied either locally or more globally, it may be only one among a number (...) of such requirements on an agent's total set of desires and beliefs, and it has no special connection with reasoning. An appreciation of these facts leads to a better understanding of both the nature and the significance of instrumental rationality. /// [Edward Harcourt] I argue that the incoherence Smith claims to identify in agents who desire that q, believe that p is a necessary means to q, but fail to desire that p is illusory, since it rests on the false assumption that every property I know to be possessed by an object of my desire is an object of my desire. Though the failure of Smith's account of the irrationality of this pattern of attitudes leaves it open that the pattern is indeed irrational, I argue that there are instances of it that are not irrational where the desires are desires for what the agent knows to be impossible for him. This conclusion casts doubt on the overall strategy-that of making a Humean theory of action explanation do duty as a theory of instrumental rationality-which implies that the norms of instrumental rationality apply to desires simply as such. I then try to criticise the strategy in such a way as to leave the Humean theory of action explanation unaffected. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic writing rarely features on university ethics curricula, so the idea that psychoanalysis has a place in the history of ethics may be a surprise. The aim of the paper is to show that it should not be. The strategy is to sketch in outline an enduring line of inquiry in the history of ethics, namely the Platonic-Aristotelian investigation of the relationship between human nature, human excellence and the human good, and to suggest that psychoanalysis exemplifies it too. But since (...) the suggestion, once made, seems not only true but obviously true, the paper spends some time exploring why the place of psychoanalysis in the history of ethics has so often been overlooked, before developing the outline more fully and offering detailed reasons as to why psychoanalysis fits it. One consequence is that Freudian and ‘relational’ variants of psychoanalysis continue the Platonic-Aristotelian line of inquiry in interestingly different ways. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDemandingness objections to consequentialism often claim that consequentialism underestimates the moral significance of the stranger/special other distinction, mistakenly extending to strangers demands it is proper for special others to make on us, and concluding that strangers may properly demand anything of us if it increases aggregate goodness. This argument relies on false assumptions about our relations with special others. Boundaries between ourselves and special others are both a common and a good-making feature of our relations with them. Hence, demandingness objections (...) that rely on the argument in question fail. But the same observations about our relations with special others show that there are many demands special others may not properly make, and since we cannot be more guilty of unjustified partiality in insisting on boundaries between ourselves and strangers than on boundaries between ourselves and special others, there are – as demandingness objections maintain – some demands strangers may not properly make on us. (shrink)

In the background of this paper lies the idea that the developmental thinking characteristic of psychoanalysis and, more broadly, psychodynamic psychotherapy is all of a piece with a philosophical tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle, which focuses on the connections between human nature, human excellence and the good life for human beings. That is, psychoanalysis is to be understood in part as belonging to a Platonic-Aristotelian tradition in moral philosophy, or to what has become known—unfortunately - as 'virtue ethics'.The (...) aim of the paper is to explore one way in which this idea might be spelled out in detail. First, I... (shrink)

Attachment and Character presents new essays by philosophers and psychologists exploring the illumination that attachment theory can offer for philosophers working in moral psychology or in 'virtue ethics' - in the triangle of relationships between the concepts of human nature, human excellence, and the best life for human beings.

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

Crisp is right to detect a clash between Dancy's leading formulation of holism about reasons and the phenomenon of invariance. Replying to Crisp on behalf of the particularist, I suggest a better formulation of holism modelled on a standard treatment in the philosophy of language of context-sensitive expressions. Key Words: context-sensitivity • Crisp • Dancy • holism • invariance • particularism.

The world of mental health has become used to the notion of co-production as a good thing. While the paper is not a critical analysis of co-production, the authors make the case that while it is a good thing, it is not the only good thing; and it is neither sufficient, nor necessary for good things to happen in mental health services. Alternative concepts of progressive innovation in this field are introduced. Real world case studies (most of them previously unpublished) (...) are then worked through to test which concept(s) – co-production, or the alternatives, or neither – are the better fit, bearing in mind the complex relationships to be negotiated, not just between service users and mental health professionals, but between service users and members of other professions, and of the general public. Finally, the question is raised as to whether there is anything (such as the flattening of hierarchies or stigma reduction) which all these innovations – co-production and the alternatives – have in common. (shrink)

I’m grateful to the commentators for their thoughtful and thought-provoking replies. Psychiatric service-users often feel disempowered relative to a profession (psychiatry) and so sometimes enlist the aid of another profession (philosophy) to redress the balance. All well and good, but it is vital in this context not to set one’s critical faculties on one side. Although Dr Kious1 thinks that is just what I have done, what I was trying to do was to call a halt to the uncritical use (...) of a piece of philosophy, the concept of testimonial injustice. It is a fine tool in many contexts, it is the newest tool in the …. (shrink)

The relationship among morality, reflection, and ideology is extremely intricate, with many avenues open for investigation. In this intriguing collection, an eminent group of scholars, including Bernard Williams, address the question of how far our moral beliefs and practices can survive the reflective understanding we have of them. From the work of a particular historical figure to the discussion of moral metaphysics, psychology, and political theory, the contributors approach the question from a variety of different fascinating angles.

I am grateful to Steven Groarke for his thoughtful and thought-provoking comments. I think there are some real disagreements between us, but also some misunderstandings, so if I can clear up even the latter, that will be something.In my paper, I focused on the 'dual roles claim,' the claim that some concepts central to at least certain versions of psychoanalysis classify people in respect both of their degree of mental health and of their degree of psychological maturity. I argued that (...) no concept can be expected to play both roles, and that the real point of these particular psychoanalytic concepts is first and foremost to do neither, but rather to draw ethical distinctions. Groarke in his reply is concerned with... (shrink)

As Lamarque agrees, to read philosophy is to read for truth, so if literary fiction non-accidentally conveys philosophical claims, Lamarque's anti-cognitivist position on it must be flawed. Deploying Iris Murdoch's notion of the ‘work’ an author does in a text, I try to expand what should be understood by an argument in this context, and thus address Lamarque's argument that literary fiction cannot non-accidentally convey philosophical claims because it typically contains no arguments. The main literary example is George Eliot's Felix (...) Holt ; special reference is made to the idea of an author's complicity with the reader. (shrink)

This chapter examines three main themes: the unconscious; dreams, jokes, and the nature of psychoanalytic explanation; and the relation between psychoanalysis and Wittgenstein's method in philosophy. Of the extraordinary roll call of Viennese cultural celebrities who were Wittgenstein's rough contemporaries, some were certainly far closer to Wittgenstein than Freud was. But though there is no evidence that Freud and Wittgenstein ever met, there were a number of indirect personal connections between them. Eugen Fischer's view, which takes the analogy between philosophy (...) and psychological therapy very seriously, makes for an instructive contrast. Wittgenstein has had a significant influence on philosophical commentary on psychoanalysis, and some influence on the development of psychoanalysis itself. One of the abiding criticisms of Freud has been that his work is not properly scientific, whether in the form of the claim that it is bad science, or that its claims are unfalsifiable and so not science at all. (shrink)

This chapter discusses Edward Harcourt’s recent criticism of Cora Diamond’s account of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, and the view she associates with Wittgenstein that ethics has no specific subject matter. I argue that Harcourt has misconstrued Diamond’s account, and that his own proposal for what a Wittgensteinian moral philosophy would be like is not consistent with what Wittgenstein says about morality. In particular, Wittgenstein’s suggestion in his later philosophy that goodness is not a quality or property of actions (...) in addition to their other properties lends further support to Diamond’s account of ethics as devoid of subject matter that could be identified in terms of distinctively moral concepts. Through my discussion of this issue I hope to clarify and reinforce the challenge that Diamond’s account poses for traditional moral philosophy which sees as its goal the development of an abstract theory of moral goodness the purpose of which is to account for all instances of goodness in an ethical sense. (shrink)

In ‘Epistemic injustice, children and mental Illness,’1 Edward Harcourt uses Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice 2 to make sense of claims, from mental health service users, that clinicians do not listen to them. Being listened to matters. It is a sign of respect as a person and associated with better clinical outcomes. TI involves suffering an unfair credibility deficit because of prejudice, so seems like a promising way of understanding service users’ complaints. Harcourt quickly concludes, however, (...) that it is inadequate. Since many service users are not wholly rational, the credibility deficits they suffer could be fair, and thus cannot constitute TI. Undaunted, Harcourt tries to reimagine TI so it can help. He observes that many children are also unfairly discredited by clinicians. Perhaps they are victims of TI, too, in a way that could help resurrect the concept? It may at first seem not: although providers who work with children often discredit them, this may result from mere ignorance, not prejudice. We should not let clinicians off the hook so easily, however, since they work with children, and should know their real capacities. Since they still discredit children, they must be prejudiced. And even further kinds of TI could be perpetrated by clinicians. Fricker assumes that …. (shrink)