This book contains the collected papers of Alan Donagan on topics in the philosophy of religion. Donagan was respected as a leading figure in American moral philosophy. His untimely death in 1991 prevented him from collecting his philosophical reflections on religion, particularly Christianity, and its relation to ethics and other concerns. This collection, therefore, constitutes the fullest expression of Donagan's thought on Christianity and ethics, in which it is possible to discern the outlines of a coherent, overarching theory. Editor Anthony (...) Perovich has supplied a useful introduction, which brings Donagan's work into focus and brings out the unifying themes in the essays. (shrink)
A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991. Volume 2 addresses issues in the philosophy of action and moral theory. With papers on Kant, von Wright, Sellars, and Chisholm, this volume also covers a range of questions (...) in applied ethics--from the morality of Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ethical questions in medicine and law. (shrink)
Joseph Boyle raises important questions about the place of the double-effect exception in absolutist moral theories. His own absolutist theory (held by many, but not all, Catholic moralists), which derives from the principles that fundamental human goods may not be intentionally violated, cannot dispense with such exceptions, although he rightly rejects some widely held views about what they are. By contrast, Kantian absolutist theory, which derives from the principle that lawful freedom must not be violated, has a corollary – that (...) it is a duty, where possible, to coerce those who try to violate lawful freedom – which makes superfluous many of the double-effect exceptions Boyle allows. Other implications of the two theories are contrasted. Inter alia , it is argued that, in Boyle's theory, that a violation of a fundamental human good can be viewed as a cost proportionate to a benefit obtained, cannot yield a double-effect exception to the prohibition of intentionally violating that good, because paying a cost cannot be unintentional. Keywords: cost-benefit analysis, double effect, intention, side effect CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)
CHAPTER RATIONAL ANIMALS AND THEIR ACTIONS A. The Socratic tradition in the theory of human action The philosophical theory of human action begins with ...
The fundamental causal concept in Chisholm's theory of agency is that of causally contributing to, a generic concept covering both event-causal contributors (members of sets of nonredundant jointly sufficient conditions) and agent-causal contributors (not members of sets of jointly sufficient conditions). Chisholm's elucidation of agent-causation is explored and defended against objections. It is then argued that Chisholm's ontology, in particular in its treatment of the concept of an evert, generates difficulties for his theory of agency oi which two are explored: (...) (i) that it is hard to reconcile with Chisholm's own apparent analysis of the distinction between intentional and unintentional actions; and (ii) that it entails that every causal contributing has an infinite set of causal contributors, which is in conflict with the principle that any set of nonredundant conditions that are jointly sufficient for the occurrence of an event are so by the nature of things, and not by virtue of some further event. (shrink)
All this is tightly reasoned, the argument is packed, but the language is clear."—Christian Century "The man value of this book seems to me to be that it ...
