Is unethical conduct necessarily irrational? Answering this question requires giving an account of practical reason, of practical good, and of the source or point of wrongdoing. By the time most contemporary philosophers have done the first two, they have lost sight of the third, chalking up bad action to rashness, weakness of will, or ignorance. In this book, Candace Vogler does all three, taking as her guides scholars who contemplated why some people perform evil deeds. In doing so, she sets (...) out to at once engage and redirect contemporary debates about ethics, practical reason, and normativity. -/- Staged as a limited defense of a standard view of practical reason (an ancestor of contemporary instrumentalist views), Vogler's essay develops Aquinas's remark about three ways an action might be desirable into an exhaustive system for categorizing reasons for acting. Drawing on Elizabeth Anscombe's pioneering work on intention, Vogler argues that one sort (means/end or calculative reasons for acting) sets the terms for all sound work on practical rationality. -/- She takes up Aquinas's work on evil throughout, arguing that he provides us with a systematic theory of immorality that takes seriously the goods at issue in wrongdoing and the reasons for unethical conduct. Vogler argues that, shorn of its theological context, this theory leaves us with no systematic, uncontroversial way of arguing that wrongdoing is necessarily contrary to reason. (shrink)

At the center of contemporary neo-Aristotelian naturalism is the thought that we can account for a great deal of ethics by thinking about what is needful in human life generally. When we think about practices like promising, virtues like justice or courage, and institutions that serve to produce, maintain, and help to reproduce well-ordered social life we can make some headway we consider the sense in which our topic makes some forms of human good possible and even, in some cases, (...) actualizes the very good made possible thereby. G.E.M. Anscombe introduced this kind of thinking about ethics, which Philippa Foot named ‘Aristotelian Necessity'. In this essay, I take a hard Look at Anscombe’s work on the topic, and then consider her later insistence that crucial aspects of ethics could not be understood in these terms. (shrink)

There are different ways of understanding the place of virtue in ethics. I will be interested in certain of the most ambitious, those neo-Aristotelian views that take it that right action is action from and for the sake of virtue, that right practical reasoning is virtuous practical reasoning, that the virtues are corrective,[i] and that, as Philippa Foot put it, "not every man who has a virtue has something that is a virtue in him."[ii] Virtues regulate individual action and response (...) (tending to produce right choice, right action, appropriate emotions or passions, and tending to be constituted in part by developed sensitivities to ethical salience).[iii] These excellences benefit their bearers (in some sense) and benefit others (in several senses). And virtue makes the human adult good qua human being. (shrink)

Although most work in contemporary Anglophone philosophical action theory understands Elizabeth Anscombe’s monograph on Intention as the work that inaugurates the field, action theory often operates by setting out to understand intentional action by investigating the psychological antecedents of intention action. Now, Anscombe has no quarrel with moral psychology. Intention is a work of moral psychology, but it is a kind of moral psychology in which we attend to the act of deliberately making something the case in order to understand (...) having a mind to make something the case. The more usual approach takes things the other way around. Anscombe attempted to ward off such approaches in Intention. If the arguments of §19 are any good, for example, they ought to tell against the mind-first approach in contemporary Anglophone ethics and action theory. If the arguments of §20 work, then they ought to dispel any sense that Anscombe is prone to behaviorism. Together, the arguments in §§19 and 20 are meant to clear the ground necessary for work on practical knowledge. In this essay, I give a reading of these difficult, crucial sections of Anscombe’s monograph in order to explore her arguments. (shrink)

First published in 2001, this book sets out to shed light on traditional controversies in Mill scholarship, underscore the significance of the contribution Mill made to associationist psychology, argue he is not entirely successful in explaining why art matters, and that this failure is linked to a deep tension in his mature work — rooted in his unwillingness to shake off the moral psychology he was raised on. The book examines various episodes and tensions in Mill’s life and work and (...) how they relate to and informed his philosophy — while also giving a critical account of it. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy. (shrink)

According to Aristotle, every action is aimed at some good. Neo-Aristotelians argue that all intentional actions are pursued “under the guise of the good.” Contemporary critics find this thesis either perplexing or obviously false. In this essay, I survey a recent attempt to defend the guise of the good thesis, urge that the critic will reject the defense, and sketch a novel direction for defense of the thesis based on the thought that practical reason’s orientation to the future is fundamentally (...) different from a modern predictive stance. Practical reason is directed to what is supposed to happen next, whether or not things go as they are supposed to go. (shrink)

Robert Audi’s The Good in the Right undertakes the magisterial work of reviving the intuitionism of W.D. Ross, rescuing Ross from the overlapping shadows of Henry Sidgwick, G. E. Moore, and, to a lesser extent, H. A. Prichard, marrying Ross to Kant, and so working to produce "a full-scale moral philosophy providing both an account of moral principles and judgments—a metaethical account—and a set of basic moral standards" that might be employed in moral reasoning. The book is magnificent in ambition (...) and impressive in detail. (shrink)

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.Are the smartest people also the wisest? Not necessarily. While traditional intellectual reasoning and procedural knowledge have helped build the communities we live in, there is a growing scientific understanding that we need emotionally balanced and better-fitting prosocial frameworks for coping with the uncertainties and complexities of life and addressing new challenges of the modern world. We are now poised on the edge of a new science of wisdom.The concept of wisdom, long (...) considered the “pinnacle of insight into the human condition”, has been that of an intangible, subjective, culturally specific entity—an unscientific... (shrink)

In this paper, the author takes the perspective of the patient who is very ill and facing death and examines the traditional ethical question of whether forgoing medical treatment, including artificial hydration and nutrition, is equivalent to suicide. She approaches this question by way of a discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and via a critical look at David Hume. At the end, she turns to Elizabeth Anscombe for the light that this twentieth-century philosopher sheds on the question.

Recent research in the humanities and social sciences suggests that individuals who understand themselves as belonging to something greater than the self--a family, community, or religious or spiritual group--often feel happier, have a deeper sense of purpose or meaning in their lives, and have overall better life outcomes than those who do not. Some positive and personality psychologists have labeled this location of the self within a broader perspective "self-transcendence." This book presents and integrates new, interdisciplinary research into virtue, happiness, (...) and the meaning of life by re-orienting these discussions around the concept of self-transcendence. The essays are organized around three broad themes connected to self-transcendence. First, they investigate how self-transcendence helps us to understand aspects of the moral life as it is studied within psychology, including the development of wisdom, the practice of moral praise, and psychological well-being. Second, they explore how self-transcendence is linked to virtue in different religious and spiritual traditions including Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Finally, they ask how self-transcendence can help us theorize about Aristotelean and Thomist conceptions of virtue, like hope and piety, and how this helps us to re-conceptualize happiness and meaning in life. (shrink)

According to Aristotle, every action is aimed at some good. Neo-Aristotelians argue that all intentional actions are pursued “under the guise of the good.” Contemporary critics find this thesis either perplexing or obviously false. In this essay, I survey a recent attempt to defend the guise of the good thesis, urge that the critic will reject the defense, and sketch a novel direction for defense of the thesis based on the thought that practical reason’s orientation to the future is fundamentally (...) different from a modern predictive stance. Practical reason is directed to what is supposed to happen next, whether or not things go as they are supposed to go. (shrink)