"Sets a standard for rigor, parsimony and theoretical elegance in cognitive modeling....Offers a coherent and predictive system for tackling both specific and general issues." --Science.

I begin with a note about moral goodness as a quality, disposition, or trait of a person or human being. This has at least two different senses, one wider and one narrower. Aristotle remarked that the Greek term we translate as justice sometimes meant simply virtue or goodness as applied to a person and sometimes meant only a certain virtue or kind of goodness. The same thing is true of our word “goodness.” Sometimes being a good person means having all (...) the virtues, or at least all the moral ones; then goodness equals the whole of virtue. But sometimes, being a good person has a narrower meaning, namely, being kind, generous, and so forth. Thus, my OED sometimes equates goodness with moral excellence as a whole and sometimes with a particular moral excellence, viz., kindness, beneficence, or benevolence; and the Bible, when it speaks of God as being good sometimes means that God has all the virtues and sometimes only that he is kind, mereiful, or benevolent. When Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good: None is good, save one, that is God,” he seems to be speaking of goodness in the inclusive sense, but when the writer of Exodus has God himself say that he is “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” God is using “goodness” in the narrower sense in which it means benevolence, for he goes on to make it clear that he is also just and severe. Similarly, “good will” may mean either “morally good will” in general, as it does in Kant, or it may mean only “benevolent will,” as it usually does; in “men of good will” it is perhaps ambiguous. (shrink)

Normative theories of obligation, moral and nonmoral value, and meta-ethical issues and theories are considered.

This essay, one of the last that Frankena wrote, provides a scrupulously detailed exploration of the various possible meanings of one of Sidgwick's most famous footnotes in the Methods Long intrigued by what Sidgwick had in mind when he said that he would explain how it came about that for moderns it is not tautologous to claim that one's own good is one's only reasonable ultimate end, Frankena uses this note as a point of departure for a penetrating review of (...) Sidgwick's insights and ambiguities on the differences between ancient and modern ethics. (shrink)

Taking reduction in the traditional deductive sense, the programmatic claim that most of genetics can be reduced by molecular genetics is defended as feasible and significant. Arguments by Ruse and Hull that either the relationship is replacement or at best a weaker form of reduction are shown to rest on a mixture of historical and logical confusions about the nature of the theories involved.

This paper argues for the importance of approaching medicine, as a theoretical science, through values. The normative concepts of benefit and harm are held to provide a framework for the analysis of medicine which reflects the obligations of the doctor-patient relationship, suffices to define the key concept of medical relevance, yields a general necessary condition for the basic concepts of medicine, explains the role of such nonnormative conceptions as discomfort, dysfunction, and incapacity, and avoids the mistakes of other normative approaches (...) which hold that unhealthy conditions are disvaluable or should be treated. Neutralist analyses are criticized, especially those approaching health through proper functioning. (shrink)

This paper analyzes in some detail what an ethics of love would be like if interpreted rigorously as an ethics of being rather than of doing. It delineates the metaethical structure of such an ethics and suggests the characteristics of love appropriate to the structure. The author then indicates some problems that arise for such an ethical theory.

It is well known that Sidgwick finished his examination of “the methods of ethics” in some difficulty. Just what that difficulty was and how he came to be in it, we shall see in due course. This paper is written in the conviction that what he was doing is worth looking at again in the context of contemporary discussion.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1961, given by William K. Frankena, an American philosopher.

I critically examine an argument, due to howard wettstein, purporting to show that sentences containing definite descriptions are semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive readings. Wettstein argues that many sentences containing nonidentifying descriptions--descriptions that apply to more than one object--cannot be given a Russellian analysis, and that the descriptions in these sentences should be understood as directly referential terms. But because Wettstein does not justify treating referential uses of nonidentifying descriptions differently than attributive uses of nonidentifying descriptions, his argument fails.

An expansion of 3 lectures presented by the author in 1978 at the University of Michigan.

New discoveries about materials and solar energy raise the possibility of a long-tenn shift of mining, refining, and manufacturing from Earth’s surface to locations outside Earth’s ecosphere, allowing Earth to begin to relax back toward its natural state. A little-discussed ambivalence toward the potential of space exploration exists among environmentalists. One camp sees it as a human adventure that may allow a bold initiative to improve Earth; another camp shies away from “heavy technology” and thus distrusts efforts as massive as (...) space exploration or utilization. Due to impending resource depletion on Earth, we may have only until the mid-twenty-first century to pursue the promising potential of space exploration to alleviate environmental problems of Earth. Subsequently, there may be too litde industlial base to support vigorous exploration and exploitation of resources in space. (shrink)

In this paper I tee off from a footnote in prichard's article, "is moral philosophy based on a mistake?" in it he contrasts living under the aegis of moral obligation and moral goodness with living under the aegis of virtue. Using prichard's terms I try to say what an ethics of virtue as versus one of duty and moral goodness would be like. Then I try to see what prichard's case against the former and for the latter would be like, (...) And to indicate my own sympathies in the matter. (shrink)

There has been much impatience with what R. S. Peters calls “the endless talk about the aims of education,” but this talk continues to go on, and we are invited to add to it on this happy occasion. Indeed, those who deny that education has ends or that educators must have aims seem always to end up talking about much the same thing in a slightly different idiom. At any rate, I am quite ready, at least on this occasion, to (...) assume that there are values or goals which it is the business of education to promote, whether they are external, imposed, and far-off, or internal, autonomous, and nearby. I shall also assume that the values or goals which education is to promote consist of certain abilities, dispositions, habits, or traits. To have a single term for them I shall call them ‘dispositions’, taking this word, not in the narrower ordinary ‘sunny disposition’ sense, but in the wider one common among philosophers. So far as I am aware, there is really only one view that might reject the concept of dispositions in this sense, namely existentialism, and, as we shall see, even it seems to advocate our developing certain dispositions or, if you prefer, choosing certain postures. (shrink)

Kantian ethics is both very much alive and very much under attack in recent moral philosophy, and so I propose to review some of the discussion, though I must say in advance that my review will have to be incomplete and oversimplified in various ways.

Some centuries ago most moral philosophy was written by theologians, almost none of it by professional philosophers in our sense, and one of the questions most debated was whether morality could or could not be founded on “an independent bottom”, that is, on a basis other than that provided by revealed religion. This was a many-sided question and would be interesting to discuss in the sense or senses in which it was then taken. In a way, I assumed an affirmative (...) answer to part of it when I began with a definition of morality that makes no reference to the will of God as a ground for its normative judgments. Now I wish to say something more about it in terms rather different from those used by the theologians. I must do so because of what transpired in the previous lectures. In the first I began by assuming a material or nonformalist definition of morality as stated in Clauses 1 and 2, argued that such a definition does not entail either a teleological or a poietic view of morality, and put in a plug for a nonpoietic view such as was held by at least some Mainliners. In the second I contended that the Main Line in moral philosophy is essentially correct - that the Oughts or normative judgments of morality are not hypothetical or otherwise agent-referential, even if they are not institutional, thus confirming a nonpoietic theory of morality. What this points to on my present question is the position I should like to hold: that morality is bottomed on autonomous substantive normative judgments that are moral and noninstrumental, that is, that it rests on nonordinary and non-institutional normative judgments made from the moral point of view, or on moral grounds as defined by Clause 2. (shrink)

It may have nothing to do with Women's Lib, but it is interesting to note that most of the women philosophers of today are at least partly moral philosophers, and that of those who are, all or almost all are critical of what I shall call the Main Line taken by morality and moral philosophy in “modern” times. This is particularly true of Anscombe and Foot in the papers that are the occasion for this discussion. They both hold that “modern (...) moral philosophy” and modern morality itself rest on a mistake, one which is more or less opposite to the one Prichard held modern and even ancient moral philosophy to rest on, a mistake on which Prichard's own morality and moral philosophy were based. I hope, however, that I will not be regarded as a male chauvinist if I now try to assess some parts of their line or lines of thought. It is not that I am opposed to the unsubjection of women; I believe firmly that women should be at least as liberated as men should be. It is just that I am not sure ordinary Oughts should be liberated, too. That is what I want to think about here. As Foot puts it, “My present intention is to pursue the matter rather than close down the debate.” I accept the idea that we should consider changes in the way we talk about what is morally good or bad, but I have doubts about changing it in the way she and Anscombe seem to be suggesting. I have always been consciously or unconsciously a mainliner, and wish now to see if I can give a reason for the faith that has been in me. (shrink)

Today, as so often in the past, there is much ado about morality. Theologians, psychologists, social scientists, journalists, novelists, students, drop-outs, women's libbers, and people on the street are all asking pointed questions about it. Some are for de-moralizing society and the individual, asking either whether an individual should try to be moral or to assume a morality if he has it not, and if so why; or even whether our society should have a morality at all or has any (...) right to have one - asking in short, whether we should not “kick” the moral habit we have cultivated for so long. For those who reply that we should, there is the further question what is to take the place of morality, and the answers range from love, through religion, sincerity, authenticity, and doing one's own thing, to selfishness, an enlarged system of law and order, or just nothing at all. Those who think we should keep morality, on the other hand, often argue for a “new morality,” looking for a new moral wine and even for new bottles to put it in. Non-moralism and new-moralism are in the air, along with more than the usual intimations of immorality, and it is with them, and only indirectly with the immorality, that I am now concerned. (shrink)

IN “What Morality is Not”, Philosophy, XXXII, Mr. Alasdair Maclntyre argues against the view, now common, “that universal–izability is of the essence of moral valuation”. On page 331 he uses an argument which is an adaptation and extension of Moore's naturalistic fallacy argument, and which is generalizable. As Moore's argument, if cogent, holds against all definitions of “good”, “right”, etc., so Maclntyre's argument, if good, holds against all definitions of “moral” and “morality”. For this reason I shall examine his argument, (...) as I once examined Moore's.1 I wish to do this partly because I should like to go on looking for definitions or elucidations of words like “moral” such as are contained in the uni–versalizability view, and partly in order to air some general questions which are raised by what Maclntyre says. (shrink)

Morality has been getting a great deal of looking at in recent years by philosophers, theologians, psychologists, social scientists, journalists, and novelists, as well as by people, especially students, women, and young people, on the street. Much of this investigation has been aimed at redesigning morality or developing a ‘new morality’, and some of it at doing away with morality entirely and replacing it with something else, with the something elses ranging all the way from love, through religion, sincerity, authenticity, (...) and doing one's own thing, to selfishness. New-moralism and amoralism seem to be widespread, the first often being seen as an antidote to the second. At any rate, many are convinced that morality, at least modern morality, Christian or non-Christian, has been based on a mistake, or on a number of mistakes, though there are different views about what these are. Among others, moral philosophers have also been looking at morality, especially in the form of an inquiry into its definition, meaning, or nature, and into its logic, categories, and justification, but usually with some aloofness from the fray, thinking of themselves rather as elucidating morality than as revising or replacing it, leaving the driving to others, or taking for granted that morality is essentially sound as it stands, though sometimes defending it or at least studying the logic of the question ‘Why should I be moral?’. (shrink)

In Morality and Art Mrs Foot characterizes the formalist position about morality as holding ‘that a man can choose for himself, so long as he meets the formal requirements of generality and consistency, what his ultimate moral principles are to be’, and says, quite rightly in my opinion, that it is indefensible, ‘implying as it does that we might recognize as a moral system some entirely pointless set of prohibitions or taboos, or activities such as clapping one's hands, not even (...) thought as harmful, aggressive, treacherous, cowardly by the community in which the prohibitions exist’. Then she adds:A moral system seems necessarily to be one aimed at removing particular dangers and securing certain benefits, and it would follow that some things do and some do not count as objections to a line of conduct from a moral point of view. (shrink)