This book argues that the question posed by virtue theories, namely, “what kind of person should I be?” provides a more promising approach to moral questions than do either deontological or consequentialist moral theories where the concern is with what actions are morally required or permissible. It does so both by arguing that there are firmer theoretical foundations for virtue theories, and by persuasively suggesting the superiority of virtue theories over deontological and consquentialist theories on the question of explaining morally (...) bad behavior. Virtue theories can give a richer account by appealing to the kinds of dispositions that make certain bad choices appear attractive. This richer account also exposes a further advantage of virtue theories: they provide the best kinds of motivations for agents to become better persons. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the standard epistemological requirements of impartiality on the part of the knower, and passivity on the part of the thing under investigation, exclude from the purview of epistemology a very important kind of knowledge, namely: knowledge of persons. Feminist philosophers have focused on problems in explaining knowledge of other persons, but the same considerations require a reorientation in the way we think of knowledge of oneself. Because of the subjectivity of the knower and reflexive nature of (...) the investigation involving self-knowledge, one's inquiry is affected in a way that challenges the accuracy of what is learned. The chapter's response is to treat the procedural methods used to obtain knowledge of oneself as continuous with the methods of acquiring knowledge of other persons via knowing their moral and cognitive characters. It highlights the intersection between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper I examine John Greco’s agent reliabilism, in particular, his requirement of subjective justification. I argue that his requirement is too weak as it stands to disqualify as knowledge claims some true beliefs arrived at by reliable processes and that it is vulnerable to the “value problem” objection. I develop a more robust account of subjective justification that both avoids the objection that agents require beliefs about their dispositions in order to be subjectively justified and explains why knowledge (...) is more valuable than true belief. (shrink)

L'hypocrisie implique un souci de la réputation morale qui conduit à des contradictions entre les actions et les raisons d'agir qui sont ouvertement déclarées,ou entre les raisons d'agir réelles et celles qui sont ouvertement déclarées. On opposera ici les actions hypocrites aux actions velléitaires, et les personnes hypocrites aux personnes velléitaires. Les rapports entre l'intégrité et l'hypocrisie seront esquissés : ce qui distingue la personne intègre et l'hypocrite, ce sont leurs attitudes respectives à l'endroit de leurs raisons d'agir; cela ouvre (...) une voie pour la compréhension de ce qu'il y a de mauvais dans l'hypocrisie. Les supercheries de l'hypocrite font obstacle à sa tentative de se construire pour lui-même une personnalité dans le cadre de laquelle ses identifications autoconstitutives puissent lui fournir des raisons d'agir. II compromet ainsi son propre bien. Et il sape, au surplus, la fin collective de la moralité en faussant les données sur lesquelles les autres basent leurs jugements moraux. (shrink)

L'hypocrisie implique un souci de la réputation morale qui conduit à des contradictions entre les actions et les raisons d'agir qui sont ouvertement déclarées,ou entre les raisons d'agir réelles et celles qui sont ouvertement déclarées. On opposera ici les actions hypocrites aux actions velléitaires, et les personnes hypocrites aux personnes velléitaires. Les rapports entre l'intégrité et l'hypocrisie seront esquissés : ce qui distingue la personne intègre et l'hypocrite, ce sont leurs attitudes respectives à l'endroit de leurs raisons d'agir; cela ouvre (...) une voie pour la compréhension de ce qu'il y a de mauvais dans l'hypocrisie. Les supercheries de l'hypocrite font obstacle à sa tentative de se construire pour lui-même une personnalité dans le cadre de laquelle ses identifications autoconstitutives puissent lui fournir des raisons d'agir. II compromet ainsi son propre bien. Et il sape, au surplus, la fin collective de la moralité en faussant les données sur lesquelles les autres basent leurs jugements moraux. (shrink)

Agents can be insincere in many different ways. They can utter claims they take to be false, or they can utter true claims with an intention to deceive their audiences. While both liars and virtual liars are committed truth-seekers, they are poor truth-sharers. Agents can also deceive about their reasons for holding the true beliefs that they hold: cheaters and plagiarists deceive about the justifications of their true beliefs, and they intentionally exploit our normative practices of evaluating cognitive agents. Agents (...) can also be insincere about their commitment to truth-seeking enterprises. They may pose as serious truth-seekers and earnest truth-sharers, but they are what Frankfurt identifies as bullshitters: they do not care whether what they say is true. In this paper, I examine these different ways of deceiving others, and I assess Frankfurt’s charge that bullshit is worse than lies. (shrink)

This anthology contains several of Thomas E. Hill’s essays on the contributions various basic Kantian themes can be seen to make to the topics of human welfare and moral worth. The essays have been written over the last decade, and all but two have been previously published in academic journals and anthologies. This volume complements one published in 2000 entitled, Respect, Pluralism, and Justice: Kantian Perspectives, and it is part of Hill’s “ongoing project to develop a moral theory in the (...) Kantian tradition that is as plausible as possible”. The essays reveal Hill’s Kantian sympathies and sensibilities, without being apologies for Kantian ethics: what Hill takes to be untenable Kantian claims are identified and explicitly rejected. What Hill takes to be unreasonable interpretations of Kantian points suffer a similar fate. The anthology has a very useful introduction by Hill, which provides a brief synopsis of each essay as well as the organizing principles behind the selections and their ordering. Those readers who do not think of themselves as Kant scholars will not be out of their depths. (shrink)

This anthology contains several of Thomas E. Hill’s essays on the contributions various basic Kantian themes can be seen to make to the topics of human welfare and moral worth. The essays have been written over the last decade, and all but two have been previously published in academic journals and anthologies. This volume complements one published in 2000 entitled, Respect, Pluralism, and Justice: Kantian Perspectives, and it is part of Hill’s “ongoing project to develop a moral theory in the (...) Kantian tradition that is as plausible as possible”. The essays reveal Hill’s Kantian sympathies and sensibilities, without being apologies for Kantian ethics: what Hill takes to be untenable Kantian claims are identified and explicitly rejected. What Hill takes to be unreasonable interpretations of Kantian points suffer a similar fate. The anthology has a very useful introduction by Hill, which provides a brief synopsis of each essay as well as the organizing principles behind the selections and their ordering. Those readers who do not think of themselves as Kant scholars will not be out of their depths. (shrink)

Dans son ouvrage, McKinnon a pour but de démontrer que l’éthique de la vertu est une alternative valable et plus prometteuse que ses pendants traditionnels que sont l’éthique du devoir et les différents types d’utilitarismes. Elle reconnaît toutefois que l’éthique de la vertu à cette étape de son développement a besoin d’être peaufinée. Premièrement, il semblerait que la connexion entre ce qui est bon pour les humains et ce que c’est que d’être un bon être humain soit manquante et (...) que donc, au point de vue théorique, le fondement soit manquant. Deuxièmement, il semblerait que les différentes versions proposées de l’éthique de la vertu ne définissent pas assez clairement ce que sont la vertu et le vice et ne posent pas de façon distincte les liens existants entre ceux-ci et le caractère. McKinnon réussira dans son ouvrage à pallier ces deux manques. (shrink)

Ethical thought is articulated around normative concepts. Standard examples of normative concepts are good, reason, right, ought, and obligatory. Theorists often treat the normative as an undifferentiated domain. Even so, it is common to distinguish between two kinds of normative concepts: evaluative or axiological concepts, such as good, and deontic concepts, such as ought. This encyclopedia entry discusses the many differences between the two kinds of concepts.

Time passes; sometimes swiftly, sometimes interminably, but always it passes. We see the world change as events emerge from the shroud of the future, clandestinely slinking into the past almost immediately as though they are reluctant to meet our gaze: children are born, old friends and relatives die, governments once full of youthful enthusiasm wane. If the Earth were sentient, it might feel itself being torn apart as tectonic plates diverge, and chuckle as it outlived species upon species of transient (...) parasites. How could anyone possibly deny that time passes? (shrink)

One difficulty in understanding recent debates is that not only have many terms been used to refer to weakness of will – “akrasia” and “incontinence” have often been used as synonyms of “weakness of will” – but quite different phenomena have been discussed in the literature. This is why the present entry starts with taxonomic considerations. The second section turns to the question of whether it is possible to freely and intentionally act against one’s better judgment.

Christine Battersby rethinks questions of embodiment, essence, sameness and difference, self and "other", patriarchy and power. Using analyses of Kant, Adorno, Irigaray, Butler, Kierkegaard and Deleuze, she challenges those who argue that a feminist metaphysics is a a contradiction in terms. This book explores place for a metaphysics of fluidity in the current debates concerning postmodernism, feminism and identity politics.

From nearly the author's first experience entering the underwater city of Rapture in BioShock, she is treated to a taste of Andrew Ryan's propaganda. Andrew Ryan regularly says that citizens of Rapture need to avoid all contact with the surface world because it's filled with parasites who seek to destroy Rapture. Even though what Ryan says about the outside world is true, he's lying because he believes it to be false. According to Harry Frankfurt, bullshit is when the speaker doesn't (...) particularly care whether what she says is true or false. The analysis in this chapter suggests that propaganda is more closely connected to bullshitting than lying. The author says that if propaganda is more closely associated with bullshit than lies, then this also means that one should be particularly worried by governments (or individuals with power, such as Andrew Ryan) that engage in lots of propaganda. (shrink)

Emotions often misfire. We sometimes fear innocuous things, such as spiders or mice, and we do so even if we firmly believe that they are innocuous. This is true of all of us, and not only of phobics, who can be considered to suffer from extreme manifestations of a common tendency. We also feel too little or even sometimes no fear at all with respect to very fearsome things, and we do so even if we believe that they are fearsome. (...) Indeed, instead of shunning fearsome things, we might be attracted to them. Emotions that seem more thought-involving, such as shame, guilt or jealousy, can also misfire. You can be ashamed of your big ears even though we can agree that there is nothing shameful in having big ears, and even though you judge that having big ears does not warrant shame. And of course, it is also possible to experience too little or even no shame at all with respect to something that is really shameful. Many of these cases involve a conflict between one’s emotion and one’s evaluative judgement. Emotions that are thus conflicting with judgement can be called ‘recalcitrant emotions’. The question I am interested in is whether or not recalcitrant emotions amount to emotional illusions, that is, whether or not these cases are sufficiently similar to perceptual illusions to justify the claim that they fall under the same general heading. The answer to this depends on what emotions are. For instance, the view that emotions are evaluative judgments makes it difficult to make room for the claim that emotional errors are perceptual illusions. Fearing an innocuous spider would simply amount to making the error of judging that the spider is fearsome while it is in fact innocuous. This might involve an illusion of some sort, but it certainly does not amount to anything like a perceptual illusion. In this chapter, I argue that recalcitrant emotions are a kind of perceptual illusion.. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard presents a compelling new view of our moral relationships to the other animals. She offers challenging answers to such questions as: Are people superior to animals, and does it matter morally if we are? Is it all right for us to eat animals, experiment on them, make them work for us, and keep them as pets?

When Carol Gilligan (1982) first introduced the ethic of care she did so from the discipline of psychology using empirical data that questioned Kohlberg's (1981) negative assumptions about the mora...

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

Uncovering the theoretical and creative interconnections between posthumanism and philosophies of immanence, this volume explores the influence of the philosophy of immanence on posthuman theory; the varied reworkings of immanence for the nonhuman turn; and the new pathways for critical thinking created by the combination of these monumental discourses. With the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari serving as a vibrant node of immanence, this volume maps a multiplicity of pathways from Deleuze, Guattari and their theoretical allies - including (...) Spinoza and Nietzsche - to posthuman thought. As positions that insist, respectively, on the equal yet distinct powers of mind and body (immanence) and the urgent need to dismantle human privilege and exceptionality (posthumanism), each chapter reveals concepts for rethinking established notions of being, thought, experience, and life. The authors here take examples from a range of different media, including literature and contemporary cinema, featuring films such as Enthiran/The Robot (India, 2010) and CHAPPiE (USA/Mexico, 2015), and new developments in technology and theory. In doing so, they investigate Deleuzian and Guattarian posthumanism from a variety of political and ethical frameworks and perspectives, from afro-pessimism to feminist thought, disability studies, biopolitics, and social justice. Countering the dualisms of Cartesian philosophy and flattening the hierarchies imposed by Humanism, From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism launches vital interrogations of established knowledge and sparks the critical reflection necessary for life in the posthuman era. (shrink)