Worse than Death

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Olsthoorn
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Orthodox Interpretation ◽  
The Third ◽  
General Desire ◽  
In Virtue Of

This article challenges the orthodoxy that Hobbes’s laws of nature, considered as dictates of reason, ceaselessly oblige agents in virtue of the general desire for self-preservation. Hobbes is an internalist about reasons, who refuses reason independent motivational efficacy. The universal prescriptive force of natural law is instead grounded in some desire (or set of desires) which all rational agents share. On the Orthodox Interpretation, this is the desire for self-preservation, as death is considered the worst possible evil that can befall Hobbesian agents. I argue that this interpretation is untenable. A plethora of passages attests that at least one thing is worse than death: loss of eternal life. It is therefore rational, according to Hobbes, to choose to die if doing so is necessary to procure salvation. This article sketches a non-preservationist reading of the psychological underpinnings of Hobbes’s moral philosophy which can account for (but does not presuppose) the superior disvalue of damnation. Three psychological laws, I submit, structure Hobbesian deliberation and desire-formation. The third and perhaps most controversial law states that humans cannot help caring about their own welfare. My contention is that the inescapable desire for bonum sibi better explains the universal normativity of natural law than self-preservation does.

Classical Republicanism and the History of Ethics

Utilitas ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. B. Schneewind
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Social Cooperation ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Law Theory

The ‘modern’ natural law philosophers of the seventeenth century believed that conflict was an unavoidable concomitant of human intercourse, rooted in our nature. They understood the normative laws of nature as serving the purpose of setting the limits within which conflict is compatible with lasting social cooperation, thus showing, in effect, how warfare can be turned into competition. The natural lawyers were interested primarily in legal and political problems, not in ethics. But in order to provide reasoned approaches to immediate practical issues, they had to move to a level of abstract theorizing at which philosophical claims about morality were unavoidable. Natural law theory with its understanding of the central underlying problem of human sociability dominated seventeenth-century practical philosophy, and the solutions its various proponents offered generated many of the central concerns of what we know as moral philosophy.

Causation, Explanation, and the Metaphysics of Aspect

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradford Skow
Keyword(s):  
Background Condition ◽  
Structural Explanation ◽  
Levels Of Explanation ◽  
Lexical Aspect ◽  
The Third ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
The Difference ◽  
In Virtue Of

This book aims to answer the following questions: what is the difference between a cause and a background condition? What is it to manifest a disposition? Can dispositions be extrinsic? What is the most basic kind of causation? And, what might a structural explanation be? Each chapter takes up a subset of these questions; the chapters are written to be readable independently. The answers defended rely on three ideas. Two of those ideas use a distinction from the study of lexical aspect, namely the distinction between stative verbs and non-stative verbs. The first idea is that events go with non-stative verbs, in the sense that “If S, then an event occurred in virtue of the fact that S” is true when the main verb in the clause going in for “S” is non-stative. The second is that acting, doing something, goes with non-stative verbs, in the sense that “In Ving X did something” is true iff V is a non-stative verb. The third idea is about levels of explanation: “(A because B) because C” does not entail “A because C.”

Kantian Perspectives on Private Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-84
Author(s):  
Arthur Ripstein
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Naive Theory ◽  
Private Rights ◽  
Kantian View ◽  
Moral Structure ◽  
The Right ◽  
In Virtue Of

This chapter articulates the Kantian approach to private law. It begins by explaining the aims and ambitions of Kantian legal philosophy more generally and, in particular, introducing the Kantian idea that a particular form of thought is appropriate to a particular domain of inquiry or conduct. The chapter situates the Kantian view within a broad natural law tradition. For the part of that tradition that Immanuel Kant develops, the moral structure of natural law is animated by a conception of personal interaction that is so familiar as to be almost invisible. Despite its centrality to both morality and law, in the absence of legal institutions, this natural law is inadequate to its own principles. It requires legal institutions to render it fully determinate in its application consistent with everyone’s independence. It also requires public institutions of adjudication. The chapter further looks at Kant’s “division” of private rights, distinguishing first between the innate right that everyone has simply in virtue of being human and acquired rights that require an affirmative act to establish them. It then goes through the Kantian division of the titles of private right, situating them in relation to the distinction between persons and things. Finally, the chapter articulates the Kantian account of what might be called the naïve theory of remedies—that is, that the remedy is an imperfect continuation of the right that was violated.

scholarly journals Between Kantian Rationalism and Moral Mysticism: The Search for the Grounding of Morality in the Philosophy of A. Jokubaitis

Politologija ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-94
Author(s):  
Aistė Noreikaitė
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Third ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Moral Subject ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
Implicit Normativity

Although it is common to associate the thought of A. Jokubaitis with political philosophy, this article argues that his texts also allow us to talk about a specific moral philosophy of A. Jokubaitis. At the center of it we find an attempt to articulate and discuss the grounding ideas of morality. The article argues that the first two ideas – an idea of unconditional character of morality and an idea of ontological grounding – are related to Kant’s influence on A. Jokubaitis philosophy. These two ideas allow us to explain morality as an autonomous part of reality, which is different from the empirical one but nonetheless real. This part of reality is grounded in the first-person perspective of a moral subject and can be characterized by implicit normativity and unconditionality. The first-person perspective structures a radically different relation to our reality, which allows us to be agents, not simply spectators. Such an interpretation of Kant allows to associate A. Jokubaitis with his contemporary Kantians, such as Ch. Korsgaard, B. Herman, O. O’Neill, and A. Reath. However, the third idea, the one of a person, which becomes more visible in his book Politinis idiotas, transcends the Kantian conception of practical reason and encourages to perceive morality and its grounding in a much wider context. The concept of a person allows A. Jokubaitis to distance himself from Kantian rationalism and integrate social and mystical aspects of morality, which he has always found important.

scholarly journals Contemporary moral philosophy in the context of the social transformation

2002 ◽  
pp. 193-202
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Dobrijevic
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Practical Relevance ◽  
Moral Thinking ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Selective Bibliography

The article contains an explanation of the topic to be dealt with by the author within the work on the project 'Applying Modern Philosophical-Political Paradigms on Processes of Social Transformation in Serbia/FRJ'' of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory. In the first part of the paper the basic conception of the work as well as theoretical and practical relevance of the proposed topic are presented. In the second part, author emphasis the weight of the 'two-level theory' of moral thinking, which was elaborated by Richard Mervyn Hare, utilitarian philosopher. In the third part, the plan and the content of the forthcoming work are outlined. Basic and selective bibliography which author will be rely on in the elaboration of the proposed topic is given at the end of this article.

Natural law

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Social Perspective ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Do So ◽  
Scholastic Tradition

This chapter explores the concept of natural law, turning first to the Protestant milieu. Alterity—what would in the seventeenth century come to be theorized, and problematized, as “sociability”—is the dominant mood of the humanist and Protestant handling of natural law. It is there even in Thomas Hobbes, whose natural law coincides with moral philosophy and concerns the sphere of one's actions in respect of others. However, the Catholic scholastic tradition presents a very different framing of natural law, one that centers on individual agency and regulates the behavior of individual agents in their aspect as beings of a particular kind. While authors in this tradition grapple equally with the question of animal behavior in relation to law, they do not do so from the social perspective that characterizes Protestant humanist Aristotelians and jurists.

Normativity II

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-151
Author(s):  
John Brunero
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Third ◽  
Rational Requirements ◽  
External Reasons

This chapter turns to the question of whether means–ends coherence is normative in the sense that we always ought, or more weakly, have reason to comply with it. The chapter considers the view, inspired by Prichard’s critique of “moral philosophy,” that rationality provides its own reasons, and so we need not search for “external” reasons to comply with rational requirements. It argues that the request for such reasons is a legitimate request, and it’s hard to see what those reasons might be. It then turns to Strong Normativity—the thesis that we always ought to be means–ends coherent—and present three arguments against it. The first concerns cases of advantageous incoherence, the second concerns transmission to necessary means, and the third concerns transmission to sufficient means.

Second positions

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-328
Author(s):  
Ian Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Head Movement ◽  
Position Effects ◽  
The Third ◽  
Discourse Interpretation ◽  
Edge Features ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Formal Features

This paper is based on three central analytical ideas. First, following Roberts (2010), I assume that narrow-syntactic head-movement is a reflex of the Agree relation where the Goal is defective in relation to the Probe, in the sense that the Goal’s features are a subset of those of the Probe. Second, following Chomsky (2008), I assume that phase heads drive all narrow-syntactic operations in virtue of their uninterpretable formal features and their Edge Features (EF). Third, owing to the nature of head-movement as a purely Agree-based operation, head-movement to a phase head PH cannot satisfy PH’s EF. The third assumption has the important consequence that second-position (P2) effects arise where C’s uninterpretable formal features attract the verb or clitic under Agree/head-movement, and so C’s EF must attract some XP to its edge, subject to a discourse interpretation. The paper applies these ideas to the analysis of various cases of second-position effects across languages, mainly Romance and Germanic.

Carmichael, Gershom (1672–1729)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Moore ◽  
Michael Silverthorne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
The University

Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729).

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