In this book I try to defend a traditional kind of dualism in regard to ethical theory. The idea is that Conscience and Self-love offer distinct but rational and reasonable objectives in our decision-making. When they conflict, pure reason does not resolve the issue. With this picture in mind, I argue that a kind of Platonistic realism in regard to morality is (still) intellectually permissible – has not yet been defeated. That is to say, it is permissible to hold that (...) we ought to do what is morally right simply because it is morally right. We ought to do this even when Self-love is strongly opposed. (shrink)

This stimulating and wide-ranging book mounts a profound enquiry into some of the most pressing questions of our age, by examining the relationship between biological science and Christianity. The history of biological discovery is explored from the point of view of a leading philosopher and ethicist. What effect should modern biological theory and practice have on Christian understanding of ethics? How much of that theory and practice should Christians endorse? Can Christians, for example, agree that biological changes are not governed (...) by transcendent values, or that there are no clear or essential boundaries between species? To what extent can 'Nature' set our standards? Professor Clark takes a reasoned look at biological theory since Darwin and argues that an orthodox Christian philosophy is better able to accommodate the truth of such theory than is the sort of progressive, meliorist interpretation of Christian doctrine which is usually offered as the properly 'modern' option. (shrink)

Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life is a study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. My concern is with the morals that Gould draws, with the ?new picture of life? that, he says, the reinterpreted Burgess animals compel. I conclude that his case is not established. (1) There may have been reasons to do with ?fitness? why most of the Burgess animals left no descendants, even if we cannot guess exactly what they were. (2) We do not (...) know that our past is dotted with the kind of mass extinctions that are needed for the random evolution that he proposes. (3) Even if what happened does rest on random variation and largely random selection, it does not follow that there are no standing forms that will be constantly re?instantiated. If Rational Life, in particular, is not special, then we have no right to think the world we experience bears any remote resemblance to a putative real world. (4) Even if there are no such forms, the fact that nothing in the state of things required us to exist is no good reason to say that No one requires us to. What Gould says does count against a simple progressivism, but not against an older and more orthodox theology. It also has implications for the Search for Extra?Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). (shrink)

Ethics seeks answers to questions about the moral status of human actions and human lives. What should I do, and what should I not do? What sort of life should I lead? Actions and lives are temporal things. Actions are performed at certain times, are informed by past events and have consequences for the future. Lives have temporal extension, and are experienced from a sequence of temporal perspectives. Thus, one would think that answers to ethical questions should take account some (...) of their temporal features. Yet there has never been a systematic study of the relations between time and ethics. In 2001 a conference was held at the University of Otago in New Zealand on the theme of Time and Ethics to explore issues that emerge at the intersection between these two fields of study. This volume contains revised versions of some of the papers presented at that conference. The essays are collected into three parts, each with its own unifying theme. Part I focuses on parallels between reasoning about time and reasoning about ethics, and shows various ways in which thinking about each of these fields can inform what we should say about the other. Part II looks at the ethical significance of temporal location. Actions, reasons, preferences, consequences, events, pains, persons and (arguably) the possession of a truth-value by a truth bearer, all have temporal location, and this fact turns out to have considerable ethical significance - or so the essays in this section argue. The essays in part III examine issues that arise out of the consideration that persons are both temporal and ethical beings. For instance, given that we typically continue to hold people responsible for their actions at times other than the times at which those actions are performed, we need an account of personal identity over time that can support this moral practice. (shrink)

Sam Harris’ new book The Moral Landscape is the latest in a series of attempts to provide a new science of morality. This essay argues that such a project is unlikely to succeed, using Harris’ text as an example of the major philosophical problems that would be faced by any such theory. In particular, I argue that those trying to construct a scientific ethics need pay far more attention to the tradition of moral philosophy, rather than assuming the debate is (...) simply between a scientific ethics and a supernatural ethics provided by religion. (shrink)

Parfit argues that naturalistic theories that seek to understand normative concepts either as simply descriptive of certain natural facts about our desires or as expressive of our desires commit us to a bleak normative nihilism whereby nothing matters. I here defend such naturalism, in particular its expressivist variety, against this charge. It is true that such views commit us to there being no reasons as Parfit understands them. But for Parfit to suppose that equivalent to there being no reasons leaves (...) him begging the question where the relative credibility of these rival understandings is just what is at issue. 1. (shrink)

The argument between retributivists and consequentialists about what morally justifies the punishment of offenders is incoherent. If we were to discover that all of the contending justifications were mistaken, there is no realistic prospect that this would lead us to abandon legal punishment. Justification of words, beliefs and deeds, can only be intelligible on the assumption that if one's justification were found to be invalid and there were no alternative justification, one would be prepared to stop saying, believing or doing (...) what one has attempted to justify. Therefore, the moral standing or basis of our practices of punishing offenders can not rest on a justification of it. (shrink)

As Dworkin puts it: moral scepticism is a moral view. This is in contrast to the more popular idea that the real challenge for moral realism is external scepticism, scepticism which arises because of non-moral considerations about the metaphysics of morality. I, too, do not concur with Dworkin’s strongest conclusions about the viability of external scepticism. But, I think his criticism of error scepticism offers a much needed corrective to more traditional metaethical projects. My aim in this paper is to (...) split the difference between Dworkin’s view and more traditional views, concluding that Dworkin’s work in Justice for Hedgehogs contributes to metaethics for everyone. (shrink)

When it comes to evaluating reductive hypotheses in metaphysics, supervenience arguments are the tools of the trade. Jaegwon Kim and Frank Jackson have argued, respectively, that strong and global supervenience are sufficient for reduction, and others have argued that supervenience theses stand in need of the kind of explanation that reductive hypotheses are particularly suited to provide. Simon Blackburn’s arguments about what he claims are the specifically problematic features of the supervenience of the moral on the natural have also been (...) influential. But most discussions of these arguments have proceeded under the strong and restrictive assumptions of the S5 modal logic. In this paper we aim to remedy that defect, by illustrating in an accessible way what happens to these arguments under relaxed assumptions and why. The occasion is recent work by Ralph Wedgwood, who seeks to defend non-reductive accounts of moral and mental properties together with strong supervenience, but to evade both the arguments of Kim and Jackson and the explanatory challenge by accepting only the weaker, B, modal logic. In addition to drawing general lessons about what happens to supervenience arguments under relaxed assumptions, our goal is therefore to shed some light on both the virtues and costs of Wedgwood’s proposal. (shrink)

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord puts before us an interesting and original line of thought. Here is its main structure: (a) Naturalist semantics would bring important benefits to ethics. But (b) it has very high costs. Fortunately, (c) we can secure such benefits without the costs, by substituting, for the natural kinds of naturalist semantics, a set of moral kinds determined not by scientific but by moral theory. I find myself stumped by the preliminaries at (a), however, which need further support, or so (...) I will argue in section I. Section II will assume that the concerns of section I can be met, and will discuss the rest of the argument independently of that. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to defend moral intuitionism, in its new formulations, against the criticism that there is something objectionably non-natural about its conception of moral properties. The force of this complaint depends crucially on what it means to be a non-natural property. I consider a number of ways of drawing the natural/non-natural distinction and argue that, once the notion of 'non-natural property' is sufficiently clarified, it fails to figure in a compelling argument against moral intuitionism.