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This paper argues that open-mindedness is a corrective virtue. It serves as a corrective to the epistemic vice of confirmation bias. Specifically, open-mindedness is the epistemically virtuous disposition to resist the negative effects of confirmation bias on our ability to reason well and to evaluate evidence and arguments. As part of the defense and presentation of our account, we explore four discussions of open-mindedness in the recent literature. All four approaches have strengths and shed light on aspects of the virtue of open-mindedness. Each mentions various symptoms of confirmation bias and some explore aspects of the corrective role of open-mindedness. However, ours is the first to explicitly identify open-mindedness as a corrective virtue to the specific epistemic vice of confirmation bias. We show how the corrective account also permits a response to the concern that open-mindedness might not actually count as a virtue.

Recently, Kit Fine's (1994) view that modal truths aretrue in virtue of,grounded in, orexplained byessentialist truths has been under attack. In what follows we offer two responses to the wave of criticism against his view. While the first response is pretty straightforward, the second is based on the distinction between, what we call,Reductive Finean EssentialismandNon-Reductive Finean Essentialism. Engaging the work of Bob Hale onNon-Reductive Finean Essentialism, we aim to show that the arguments against Fine's view are unconvincing, while we acknowledge the presence of a deep standoff between the two views.

An adequate moral theory must – or so many philosophers have argued – be compatible with the attitudes and practical requirements of deep friendship. Bernard Williams suggested that the decision procedure required by both deontology and consequentialism inserts a fetishising filter between the natural moral motivation of any normal person to prioritise friends and the decision to act on it. But this injects ‘one thought too many’ into the moral reaction mechanism. It is standardly assumed that virtue ethics is somehow immune to this objection. The present article explores this assumption and finds it wanting in various respects. Virtue ethics filters friendship throughphronesisand thus inserts an extra thought into the mechanism in question. To escape Williams's curse, the only way is to argue that the extra thought required by virtue ethics is not ‘one thought too many’. The article closes with an attempt to show that, contra deontology, the friendship motivation in virtue ethics is derived from the moral virtue, not the intellectual filter, and, contra consequentialism,phronesisdoes not require the maximisation of value. The presumed advantage of virtue ethics must lie in the content of its filter rather than the filter's non-existence.

Although one can find a robust philosophical tradition supporting asceticism in the West, from ancient Greece to at least early modernity, very little attention has been paid to what motivated this broad support. Instead, following criticism from figures such as Hume, Voltaire, Bentham, and Nietzsche, asceticism has been largely disregarded as either eccentric or uniquely religious. In this paper, I provide what I take to be the core moral argument that motivated many philosophical ascetics. In brief, acts of deliberate self-denial are practice in an important part of acting ethically and are thus practically rational as a means to acquiring virtue. And if this argument has been a core motivation for asceticism in the West then arguably philosophical ascetics have been on to something, especially given contemporary empirical research on self-control.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes fairly sharply between the practical deliberation of moral virtue and the epistemic reflection of theoretical or truth-focused enquiry. However, drawing on insights from Plato and Iris Murdoch, the present paper seeks a more robust epistemic foundation for virtuous deliberation as primarily grounded in clear or correct perception of the world and human association, character and conduct. While such perception may not be sufficient for moral virtue, it is here argued that it is necessary. Murdoch's view that literature may afford especially effective correction of moral misperception is also supported by appeal to literary examples.

Hume and Smith advance different answers to the question of whether sympathy can ever be the foundation of the moral order. They hold contradictory views of sympathy, called here ‘the Fellow-Feeling Paradox’. For Hume, fellow-feeling tends to reverberate in society, leading to the socialization of the individual and even mob (collective) psychology. Hence, sympathy cannot be the foundation of the moral order. In contrast, for Smith, fellow-feeling develops into critical judgment of the emotions/actions, leading to individual moral autonomy even self-command. Hence, sympathy can be the foundation of the moral order. This paper provides a resolution of the two answers.

The conscientious are morally conflicted when their moral dilemmas or incommensurabilities, real or apparent, have not been resolved. But such doublemindedness need not lead to ethical disintegration or moral insensitivity. For one may develop the moral virtue of doublemindedness, the settled power to deliberate and act well while morally conflicted. Such action will be accompanied by both moral loss (perhaps ‘dirty hands’) and ethical gain (salubrious agental stability). In explaining the virtue's moral psychology I show, among other things, its consistency with wholeheartedness and the unity of the virtues. To broaden its claim to recognition, I show the virtue's consistency with diverse models of practical reason. In conclusion, Michael Walzer's interpretation of Hamlet's attitude toward Gertrude exemplifies this virtue in a fragmentary but nonetheless praiseworthy form.

Christopher Johnson has put forward in this journal the view that ad hominem reasoning may be more generally reasonable than is allowed by writers such as myself, basing his view on virtue epistemology. I review his account, as well as the standard account, of ad hominem reasoning, and show how the standard account would handle the cases he sketches in defense of his own view. I then give four criticisms of his view generally: the problems of virtue conflict, vagueness, conflation of speech acts, and self-defeating counsel. I then discuss four reasons why the standard account is superior: it better fits legal reality, the account of other fallacies, psychological science, and political reality.

Bernard Williams says that ‘the characteristic and basic expression of a moral disposition in deliberation is not a premise which refers to that disposition’. If this means that we can never properly self-ascribe virtues and deliberate from this, then Williams is wrong. To deny this possibility is to be committed to either of two positions, neither of which is all that attractive (and certainly not attractive to Williams). The first position demands that virtue cannot know itself; while the second rests on the pessimistic view that morality itself can demand of us our moral identity.

Not a day passes but we find ourselves indignant about something or other. When is our indignation justified, and when does it count asmoralindignation rather than a legitimate but non-moral gripe? You might think that we should turn to moral theories – to the varieties of utilitarian, Kantian, virtue theories, etc – to answer this question. I shall try to convince you that this is a mistake, that moral theory – as it is ordinarily presently conceived and studied – does not have a specific subject matter, a specific aim, scope or boundaries. You might think that the difference betweenechtmoral indignation and other forms of disapproval is their relative strength or the importance of their target; but moral indignation can be quite faint, directed to a relatively minor transgression and a strongly felt gripe may be directed to a serious but presumptively non-moral infraction. I shall try to persuade you that morality does not constitute an important and distinctive domain with a distinctive set of over-riding norms or a privileged mode of reasoning: morality is everywhere or nowhere in particular. Radical as this claim may sound, I am not a complete Luddite about the matter. Traditional moral theories nevertheless have important functions. But rather than being competing ‘winner takes all’ explanatory and normative theories, OldSpeak moral systems function heuristically. They offer a heterogeneous set of reminders, questions, advice, ideals, warnings, considerations for deliberation. While we try to integrate and systematize them, there is no single overarching organizational plan.

The claim that happiness and virtue ought to be proportionate to one another has often been expressed in the idea of a future world of divine justice, despite many moral difficulties with this idea. This paper argues that human efforts to enact such a proportionment are, ironically, justified by the same reasons that make the idea of divine justice seem so problematic. Moralists have often regarded our frailty and fallibility as reasons for abstaining from the judgment of others; and doubts about our deserving some proportionment of happiness or unhappiness often arise insofar as virtue and vice may be explained on a causal basis. This paper argues that our fallibility and our susceptibility to social influence render judgment and response indispensable, because – given these characteristics – our actions and responses decide the morality that we actually share with one another. In this situation, to ‘judge not’ is to abandon the field to those with no such scruples.

Aristotelian virtue ethics invests emotions and feelings with much moral significance. However, the moral and other conflicts that inevitably beset human life often give rise to states of emotional division and ambivalence with problematic implications for any understanding of virtue as complete psychic unity of character and conduct. For one thing, any admission that the virtuous are prey to conflicting passions and desires may seem to threaten the crucial virtue ethical distinction between the virtuous and the continent. One recent attempt to sustain this distinction – considered in this paper – maintains that the contrary-to-virtue emotions and desires of the virtuous (by contrast with those of the continent) must relinquish their motive power as reasons for action. Following some attention to the psychological status of feelings and emotions – in particular their complex relations with cognition and reason – this paper rejects this solution in favour of a more constructive view of emotional conflict.

This paper examines the relative voluntariness of three types of virtue: ‘epistemic’ virtues like open-mindedness; ‘motivational’ virtues like courage, and more robustly ‘moral’ virtues like justice. A somewhat novel conception of the voluntariness of belief is offered in terms of the limited, but quite real, voluntariness of certain epistemic virtues.

This paper looks at two accounts of Aristotle's views on the virtue of megalopsychia. The first, defended by Christopher Cordner, commits Aristotle to two claims about the virtuous person that might seem unpalatable to modern readers. The second account, defended by Roger Crisp, does not commit Aristotle to these claims. Some might count this as an advantage of Crisp's account. However, I argue that Cordner's account, not Crisp's, is actually the better interpretation of Aristotle. Nonetheless, this does not ultimately spell trouble for Aristotle, since, as I argue, the claims that Cordner's account commits Aristotle to are, on closer inspection, not really problematic.

Aristotle says that no human achievement has the stability of activities that express virtue. Ethical situationists consider this claim to be refutable by empirical evidence. If that is true, not only Aristotelianism, but folk psychology, contemporary virtue ethics and character education have all been seriously infirmed. The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) to offer a systematic classification of the existing objections against situationism under four main headings: ‘the methodological objection’, ‘the moral dilemma objection’, ‘the bullet-biting objection’ and ‘the anti-behaviouristic objection’; (2) to resuscitate a more powerful Aristotelian version of the ‘anti-behaviouristic objection’ than advanced by previous critics; and (3) to explore some of the implications of such resuscitation for our understanding of the salience of character and for future studies of its nature.

Is belief in God reasonable? Richard Dawkins is right to say that traditional arguments for the existence of God are flawed; but so is his own disproof of the existence of God, and there are gaps in neo-Darwinian explanations of the origin of language, of life, and of the universe. The rational response is neither theism nor atheism but agnosticism. Faith in a creed is no virtue, but mere belief in God may be reasonable even if false.

My contention is that virtue ethics offers an important critique of traditional philosophical conceptions of moral status as well as an alternative view of important moral issues held to depend on moral status. I argue that the scope of entities that deserve consideration depends on our conception of the demands of virtues like justice; which entities deserve consideration emerges from a moral view of a world shaped by that conception. The deepest disputes about moral status depend on conflicting conceptions of justice. I advocate a conception of the virtue of justice that can account for the cases that pose problems for the legalistic views of moral status and discuss what ideal moral debate looks like on this view.

Virtue ethics (VE for short) is currently so widely embraced that different versions of the theory can now be distinguished. Some of these are mapped out in Statman's useful introduction to his collection. There are enough of these versions to constitute a family, and consequently what they share is a family resemblance rather than agreement to a defining set of necessary and sufficient conditions. What I propose to do, therefore, is to criticise one of the main versions of VE. Rosalind Hursthouse is the main proponent of the version which I will criticise. I choose her as a spokesperson, not because her version of VE is especially weak. On the contrary, it is because she is one of the leading protagonists of VE, and because her writings provide a lucid, powerful and elegant exposition of VE that her version of the theory is an appropriate object of scrutiny.

Frank Jackson in Perception uses the ‘in virtue of’ relation to ground the distinction between direct and indirect perception. He argues that it follows that our perception of physical objects is mediated by perceiving their facing surfaces, and so is indirect. I argue that this is false. Seeing a part of an object is in itself a seeing of the object; there is no indirectness involved. Hence, the ‘in virtue of’ relation is an inadequate basis for the direct-indirect distinction. I also argue that claims that we don't, ‘strictly speaking’, see objects, are also false.

Invisible Hand accounts of the operations of the competitive market are often thought to have two implications for morality as it confronts economic life. First, explanantions of agents economic activities eschew constitutive appeal to moral notions; and second, such moralism is pernicious insofar as it tends to undermine the operations of a socially valuable social process. This is the Mandevillean Conceit. The Conceit rests on an avarice-only reading of the profit-motive that is mistaken. The avarice-only reading is not the only way of characterising the profit-motive, and there are some positive grounds for thinking the benefits of profit pursuit are better attributed to the “lucrephile”, and not the avarice-only “lucrepath”.

Bertrand Russell famously disparaged Thomas Aquinas as having ‘little of the true philosophic spirit’, because ‘he does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.’ Like many of Russell's pronouncements, this is breathtakingly supercilious and unfair. Still, even an enthusiastic admirer of Aquinas may worry that there is something in it, that there is something wrong with religious ‘commitments’ in philosophy. I examine Russell's objection by comparing standards of permissibility in epistemology with standards of permissibility in ethics, where these issues are better understood. I conclude that the epistemic standard behind Russell's criticism is no less contentious in epistemology than, say, direct utilitarianism is in ethics.

Surprisingly, materialists and dualists often appeal to the same factors in their depiction of being an embodied, human person: sensations, agency, and causal underpinnings. I propose that this picture be expanded to include epistemic, structural, and affective components. I further propose that these elements, taken together, be construed as virtues. Being an embodied, human person consists in the exercise of six types of virtues: Sensory Virtues, the Virtue of Agency, Constitutional Virtues, Epistemic Virtues, Structural Virtues, and Affective Virtues. This project draws on recent contributions to virtue epistemology and to the philosophical analysis of self-respect.

This paper considers on what basis justice may require that people be treated as equals. It begins with an examination of the argument that people are to be treated as equals because they are equals, and suggests reasons for thinking that such an argument is unlikely to succeed. The remainder of the paper considers, and tries to make plausible, the argument that justice requires people be treated as equals because they are individuals. Thus the paper offers some support for the view that the proper foundation of egalitarianism is individualism.

The altruistic emotions of pity and compassion are discussed in the context of Aristotle's treatment of the former in the Rhetoric, and Nussbaum's reconstruction of that treatment in a recent account of the latter. Aristotle's account of pity does not represent it as a virtue, the context of the Rhetoric rather rendering his account one of a peculiarly self-centred emotion. Nussbaum's reconstruction builds on the cognitive ingredients of Aristotle's account, and attempts to place the emotion of compassion more squarely in the moral sphere. It is argued that Nussbaum's reconstruction nevertheless falls short of capturing the altruism which is central to the virtue of compassion, and which therefore explains its role as a ‘basic social emotion’.

Aristotle's ethical theory is often alleged to be inherently morally conservative — not only in the sense that it reflects the mores of a particular parochial form of society, but also in the sense that it lacks the resources to critically reflect upon the presuppositions of that form of society. Aristotle's ethical theory is thus charged with leaving no room for something upon which “we moderns” have learned to place a preeminent value: namely, the need to subject any merely inherited scheme of values to a process of rational criticism. This paper identifies two of the more compelling versions of this charge and, with respect to each, demonstrates that the charge turns on a misreading of Aristotle's text. The first misreading is shown to derive from a failure to appreciate Aristotle's distinction between virtue of character and practical wisdom. The second misreading is shown to derive from a failure to appreciate the differences between Aristotle's dialectical method and “The Method of Common Sense”. The discussion of these two misreadings occupies the first two sections of the paper. The third and final section tries to show that, far from being insensitive to the need for rational criticism, Aristotle, in fact, assigns to such criticism a fully adequate place in his ethical theory.

Justice is a constant and perpetual will to give every man his due. The principles of law are these: to live virtuously, not to harm others, to give his due to everyone. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of divine and human things, the science of the just and the unjust. Law is the art of goodness and justice. By virtue of this [lawyers] may be called priests, for we cherish justice and profess knowledge or goodness and equity, separating right from wrong and legal from the illegal. (Ulpian in the Digest of the Roman book of law Corpus Juris, ca 200AD)

Daniel Putman thinks I am right to hold that for Aristotle a concern to appear before one's peers in a certain way is internal to virtue. He takes me to suppose that things are otherwise under a ‘modern concept of virtue’, and says that I am wrong about this. Putman rightly distinguishes between a desire to look good before one's peers which is a substitute for virtue, and a desire to look good to them because, acting virtuously, ‘we genuinely deserve to be viewed that way’. (He acknowledges that I recognize such a distinction in Aristotle.) Once this distinction is made, Putman thinks, we can appreciate that modern ethical understanding is as much dependent on ‘the communitarian foundation of character’ as is Aristotelian virtue. The only thing, says Putman, which gulls us into thinking otherwise is the sociological fact that Aristotle's political community was homogenous, while ours is heterogenous, so that more often virtuous people today will have to act in a way which goes against what many around them think.

The difference between virtues and skills has a long history in ethics. This history is confused, frustrating and, I will argue, generally harmful to human flourishing in the West. It engendered a form of elitism which for centuries systematically excluded certain groups of people from being models of human virtue. I will argue in this paper that the central problem is a conflation of the skillvirtue distinction with differences in lifestyles. Originating in the class structure of the Athenian polis, this confusion continues today and is a major drawback of current virtue theory. Aristotle distinguishes techne or craft-knowledge from phronesis (1140a-1140b25).1 Techne is concerned with production. The end is given and the problem is how to produce it. Phronesis or practical wisdom deliberates about ends themselves with human flourishing as the goal. Crafts or skills can be used in a virtuous or vicious way and their use is contingent on the degree of phronesis the agent brings to the act. Thus excellent bricklaying can be done for ends which are destructive to human flourishing (concentration camp) or conducive to it (university building). Excellence in bricklaying is to be very good in a skill; excellence in practical wisdom is human excellence or virtue. Aristotle concludes, 'Clearly, then, phronesis is a virtue, not (a form of) craft knowledge.' (1140b25). This basic distinction is echoed by modern virtue theorists. Wallace puts it this way. Skills concerned with production may or may not be worth having for an individual.2 For example, excellence in debating requires a certain skill; debating can be done more or less well. But it may not be a skill everyone wants or needs. On the other hand, we do not call a trait a virtue unless we think it is worth having as a human being. Wallace argues that the best explanation for this difference is that virtues (such as courage) are human excellences whereas skills (like debating) are not. As Wallace notes, both skills and virtues may require difficult and complex learning. 1 All quotations from Aristotle are taken from Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin (Indianapolis, In: Hackett, 1985). 2 J. Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 43-44.

Philosophical discourse about value often begins with an exploration of our experience of value in its various manifestations. Attention to the phenomenology of value experience may certainly enrich our understanding of the values inhabiting our Lebenswelt. However, an exclusive concern with the phenomenology of values might also mislead one into precipitate conclusions about the nature of value itself. One important point here is that the way one articulates one's argumentation about the ontology of values should be different from-and its outcomes should not be determined by-the way one narrates the pre-reflective experience of values. The appreciation of this point may help us resolve what appears problematic in Professor Kupperman's discussion of Axiological Realism.' A first problem arises with Kupperman's conception of axiological realism. The best we are offered as a definition of his position is that 'if one accepts axiological realism, a judgment that X has high value counts as correct if and only if X really (in an opinion-independent way) has high value'.2 Kupperman's phrasing of this 'adverbial definition' indicates what axiological realism entails about judgments of high value; it does not reveal, though, in virtue of what this entailment holds.

Here are some kinds of reasons for taking an action to have been morally right.(1) It was done out of a good intention or a pure good will on the part of the agent, or was owed to a virtue of hers.(2) It issued from the agent's moral perception or intuition with respect to a situation, not from the application of a general principle or from calculation of the consequences of possible actions.(3) Although it would give rise to distress or worse, the action was one of integrity, autonomy, or self-concern, perhaps in accord with the agent's aversion to killing by her own hand, or true to her life-hope to achieve a success on her own.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle remarks that 'we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good'1 (1103b27-28; cf. 1095a5-6, 1105b2-5, 1179a35-b4.). In fact, however, the NE contains much discussion of what virtue is, but only a few actual recommendations about moral improvement. Moreover, these recommendations are not very good. I shall argue that Aristotle's three explicit recommendations in II 9 conflict not only with each other and with central components of Aristotle's ethical theory, but also with the facts of moral development.

‘Virtue ethics’ is prominent, if not pre-eminent, in contemporary moral philosophy. The philosophical model for most of those urging a ‘virtues approach’ to ethics is of course Aristotle. Some features, at least, of the motivation to this renewed concern with Aristotelian ethical thought are fairly clear. Notoriously, Kant held that the only thing good without qualification is the good will; and he then made it difficult to grasp what made the will good when he denied that it could be its preoccupation with or attention to anything in the world. The idea of the good will then seems to be an idea of something which transcends the world, and therefore to be no easier to make sense of, or to believe in, than Plato′s form of the good is usually thought to be. The first obvious attraction of Aristotle′s ethics, then—at least to those of an empiricist or worldly cast of mind—is that it promises an understanding of the ethical which locates that robustly within the world. Aristotle′s virtues are real this-worldly existences. They are, moreover, qualities whose place in our lives seems to be explained readily, and attractively, in Aristotelian terms. Moral virtue is essentially connected with eudaimonia, a concept variously construed as happiness, as living well, or even as flourishing. Morality is important because of the contribution it makes to the living of a fully human life. And a ‘fully human’ life is characterizable in what modernity calls ‘humanist’, or sometimes ‘naturalistic’, terms: it requires no invocation of transcendence or other-worldliness.

motives they express' (299). It is also said to involve 'thoughtless spontaneity' (300), which in turn leads to 'blind, spontaneous action' (305) that is unacquainted with how regret affects human life. Innocence supposedly 'trusts in its vision of the world as good and pure'; it '. . . seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience' (305). All these characteristics of innocence are said to be incompatible with the one necessary condition that Wolgast gives of virtue. Virtue involves '. . . a rich acquaintance with the world and an understanding of the way guilt and regret affect our lives' (304). This entails '. . . experience with error and the recognition of wrongdoing, one's own among others . . .' (305). I shall not challenge her claim that there is a necessary entailment here. In the example that follows there are no grounds for questioning whether virtue involves a self-understanding that comes only from hands on experience in hazardous matters. Though, it is worth noting, the degree to which that entails actual wrongdoing is less than clear.

There is a long-standing tradition in Western thought that sees religion as a bolster for morality. In its vaguest version, the idea is that religious belief provides a kind of social cement, fostering an ‘ethos’ in which traditional moral values are respected.1 Religious observances are thus often prized by the ethical conservative, who fears secularization as subversive of the moral and social fabric. Religion, at the very least, serves to keep people in line: as Descartes put it, ‘since in this life the rewards offered to vice are often greater than the rewards of virtue, few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an after life’.2

Suppose your friends had to ascribe a single vice to you in large measure, along with any virtues that could be coherently combined with that salient vice. Suppose further that the vice had to be either cowardice or impatience. Which would you choose?I believe almost everyone would choose impatience without hesitation. There are sound moral as well as purely self-regarding reasons for despising cowardice, and to that extent our preference would be reasonable. If we say that a man who is a coward is also compassionate, we know that his compassion cannot be relied upon in any circumstances where it must contend with fear, and if he has a sense of justice, that will be useless if oppression has to be resisted. We cannot even expect him to pursue his own good whenever he perceives that to be hazardous, and so even the self-regarding virtues are corrupted by his dominating vice. On the other hand, a pronounced impatience may seem to be compossible with abundant virtue. Those who are just but cannot patiently endure tyranny are perhaps the most formidable threat to tyranny, and people who boldly go out to seize their own good often fare rather better than those who patiently await its arrival.

‘Marital faithfulness’ refers to faithful love for a spouse or lover to whom one is committed, rather than the narrower idea of sexual fidelity. The distinction is clearly marked in traditional wedding vows. A commitment to love faithfully is central: ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part… and thereto I plight [pledge] thee my troth [faithfulness]’. Sexual fidelity is promised in a subordinate clause, symbolizing its supportive role in promoting love's constancy: ‘and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her/him.’

In 'Minds, Machines and G6del', 1961, J. R. Lucas1 proposed that Godel's theorem made possible a refutation of mechanism-the thesis that mind is wholly comprehensible as a consistent, rule-governed machine. A sympathetic reading of Lucas's argument might run something as follows: 'If I am a machine then it will be possible in principle to give a specification of the consistent formal system, L, that represents me. If this formal system were handed to me, I would be able to prove a G6del sentence, G, which L could not generate-that is, L could not model my proving G. But since I have proved G, L is inadequate as a model of my cognitive process.' So goes the argument. It has drawn a considerable amount of comment, most of it negative. Nevertheless, we believe that Lucas was on to something that his commentators have missed. We would like to explore the debate further. We will focus our discussion on the rejoinder of Hofstadter2 in The Mind's I. In contrast with much of the literature, Hofstadter's argument has the virtue of being brief and to the point.

There are many problems of universals, at least the four distinguished by Jenny Teichmann. Consider her second one. ‘How can we form a general term when we are faced with easily distinguishable, widely differing examples?’ The term ‘blue’, for example, covers a wide range of—well, whatdoesit cover a wide range of? A wide range of the colour blue? This is nonsense. What it covers is a wide range ofblues—shades of blue. But we do not form a general term when faced with orreferringtotheseitems. Wedistinguishthem: cerulean, ultramarine, cyan, cobalt, navy blue and so on. ‘Blue’ is not thenameof any of theseshadesof blue. It does not ‘cover’ anything except thecolour, of which it is the name. ‘Blue’ is the name of the colour blue. There are no widely differing, easily distinguishable examples ofthat. The colour blue cannot differ widely or easily be distinguished from the colour blue. Leibniz's law prevents it. It is shades of blue (blues, a blue, this blue, that blue) which differ and are easily distinguishable. The moment we try to say, ‘But this differs from that’, the question will be, ‘This and thatwhat?’ If the answer is, ‘This colour (the colour blue)’ and ‘That colour (the colour blue)’, then a mistake has been made. For there is no differing and distinguishing in this case. (But cf. ‘This colour blue’ and ‘This blue colour’.) Teichmann's problem cannot even be stated. If we say that what differ are this blue and that blue, which is the right thing to say, then we have two count nouns which mean ‘shade of blue’. There is no general term for these different shades. There is no answer to the question, ‘What isthename of all these differing shades?’ Certainly they are all blues, but each has its own name, and it is not ‘blue’. Teichmann's question cannot arise here either. The question, ‘What do blues have in common in virtue of which they are blue?’ is either elliptical or bad logical grammar. Which it is depends on the construal, or misconstrual, of ‘are blue’. The question should be either, ‘…in virtue of which they areblues’ in the plural—theyare not identical with the colour blue—or ‘…in virtue of which they areshadesof blue.’ The plural agreement must come somewhere.

Those of us who were made to study Pride and Prejudice at school know that Darcy represents pride and Elizabeth represents prejudice. Those of us who have actually read the book know that the situation is a good deal more complicated than that. The motivation for a significant part of the action is Elizabeth's pride, a point that is made quite clearly and is recognized by Elizabeth herself in what sounds like a thoroughly rehearsed speech:‘How despicably have I acted!’ she cried.—‘I, who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.—Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself’ (pp. 236–7) (All page references are to the Penguin edition of the novel.)

In Book II, Chapter 1 of the Physics Aristotle attempts to distinguish natural objects from artifacts. He begins by stating that a natural object ‘has in itself a source of change and staying unchanged, whether in respect of place, or growth and decay, or alteration’. But this is not sufficient to distinguish natural objects from artifacts. As he points out later, a wooden bed, for example, can rot or burn, and this is surely a change whose source is, in part, internal to the bed. To make his distinction, Aristotle writes that in a natural object the internal ‘source of change and remaining unchanged’ belongs to it ‘primarily and of itself, that is, not by virtue of concurrence’. The bed rots because it happens to be made of wood: the change is due to its material, not due to its essence, namely that it is a bed. A natural object, however, changes because of its essence, that is, because it is the natural object that it is.

In ‘Virtue and Character’ A. D. M. Walker claims that kindness and justice are incompatible in certain important ways and that a person can be kind or just without possessing the other virtue. Walker argues that virtues must lead to ‘effective and intelligent action’ and that a virtue ceases to exist if ‘it leads to violation of the minimal requirements of any other virtue’. On this view kindness and justice function independently to produce effective action. Kindness requires a direct caring for the individual in particular circumstances, while justice involves a commitment to impartiality that abstracts from an individual's situation. Walker argues that, as long as the minimal requirements of other virtues are met, one can be kind without weighing considerations of justice. He cites with approval kind behaviour which human beings learn as young children. Such behaviour may be a deeply engrained personality trait, and the individual passing through different situations in life may have no need to consider questions of justice. ‘He will merely need to be able to recognize and respond to certain types of considerations as overriding the values promoted by kindness’.

In a famous passage in her book, Intention,l Professor G. E. M. Anscombe argues that we can only render intelligible the idea of someone wanting a thing if we know under what aspect the person sees the thing as desirable. The wanted thing must be characterized by the wanter as desirable in some respect. '[What] is required for our concept of "wanting" ', she says, 'is that a man should see what he wants under the aspect of some good' (p. 74). And furthermore, 'the good (perhaps falsely) conceived by the agent to characterize the thing must really be one of the many forms of good' (p. 76). Thus, while the object of desire need only be conceived as good by the wanter, and need not be really good, this can only be because the object does not have the desirable character the wanter believes it to have, not because the character supposed to be desirable is not really so. Desire cannot but be for one of the real forms of good. Professor Anscombe was not, of course, the first to claim an intimate connection between desire and the good. The Socrates of Plato (in the Lesser Hippias, Gorgias, Meno, and Alcibiades I) regularly enunciates or elicits from others the view that men desire only the good and consequently act only for its sake. (Thus they only do evil when they mistake it for the good; thus virtue is knowledge.) And, in a famous passage, Aristotle tells us: 'Every action and choice aims at some good; the good therefore has been well defined as that at which all things aim' (Eth. Nic. Bk. I, Ch. i). Happiness is the final and self-sufficient good, therefore, because all things are done at least partly for the sake of happiness, and happiness is not desired for anything beyond itself (Eth. Nic. Bk. I, Chs. 4, 7). According to Hobbes, 'good' is simply the word we apply to the objects of our desires; thus he makes 'Desire is for the good' analytically true. (This is perhaps the purest kind of naturalism.) John Stuart Mill, seeming to avoid naturalism, tells us (Utilitarianism, Ch. 3) that the only way you can establish that something is desirable or good is by showing that it is in fact desired, though this is (so he says) a kind of 'proof' which falls short of deductive proof. Thus he claims to have established, in the only way possible, that happiness is a good, by showing that it is in fact desired, and that it is the good by showing that it and nothing else is desired for its own sake. What, then, is the relationship between desiring or wanting and the

The distinction between private immorality and public indecency plays a significant and perhaps a crucial role in H. L. A. Hart's argument in Law, Liberty, and Morality.1 This distinction, and the uses to which he puts it, have, however, been largely overshadowed in the 'debate' between Professor Hart and Lord Devlin which has centred around such 'great' questions as whether a shared morality is necessary for a society. I shall argue that Hart's position, in so far as it is based on that distinction, is quite untenable, and that even if it were to be a possible position, it would none the less be incompatible with the sort of 'libertarian' view of society expressed by John Stuart Mill, whose 'spirit', at least, Hart believes himself to be defending. The position that Hart sets out to defend is that society has no right to prohibit any action simply on the ground that it is immoral; the only actions with which society may interfere are those which are likely to cause harm. For instance, no matter how morally abhorrent many, perhaps most, members of society believe homosexual actions to be, homosexuality should not be held subject to regulation by society in the absence of clear and compelling evidence that such actions are harmful. But there are cases which even the libertarian would intuitively think of as subject to regulation, even though they are not obviously 'harmful'. In particular, there are the cases which are usually considered under the heading of 'public indecency', such as public nudity, fornication, or sodomy. On the surface, the prohibition of actions of this type would appear to be enforcing the convictions of society that they are morally wrong. Thus, Lord Devlin says: 'Why then do we object to the public exhibition of a false morality and call it indecency? If we thought that unrestricted indulgence in the sexual passions was as good a way of life as any other for those who liked it, we should find nothing indecent in the practice of it either in public or in private. It would become no more indecent than kissing in public. Decency as an objective depends on the belief in continence as a virtue which requires sexual activity to be kept within prescribed bounds.'2

In recent years, much uncertainty and outright scepticism surrounds the notion of character. In the arts—painting, the novel, drama, film—the notion of character has receded into the background. The loss of character is especially conspicuous in those artistic forms in which it traditionally occupied centre-stage: drama, the novel, films. The withdrawal of character from the arts has in fact become a topic of debate in the theory and criticism of the arts. In the arts themselves, the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of attaining character is a common subject. Since ordinary sentiments are readily reflected in the fine arts, it is natural to suspect that character is not held in high regard in everyday life. Even if we take a dim view of the suggestion that the arts mirror ordinary sentiments with little distortion, a decline in the importance of character is evident in other humane disciplines: history is a striking example. Indeed, if we attend to our major social institutions—the family, the courts, the bureaucracy—it would be difficult to point to any in which the question of character is more than a peripheral concern. Indeed, it appears that the appraisal of character is of central concern in modern society only when the individual is in some way beyond the pale: in institutions of punishment, rehabilitation, mental health.

The young Karl Popper inaugurated a jazz age.1 Soon after World War I he was troubled by the claims of his Marxist, Freudian and Adlerian acquaintances 'that their respective theories were irrefutable'.2 What was troubling about these claims to irrefutability was 'their combination of implausibility with apparent imperviousness to criticism'.3 He found a way out of the difficulty by coming to see irrefutability as a defect: 'Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice', as he was later to put it.4 'And this dictum is . . . the seed from which Popper's entire philosophy of science has grown'.5 But this seminal dictum arose from 'one of the most common of all ways of misusing language: the homely failing of equivocating on the meaning of a word'.6 An elementary error opened the way for post-Popperian frivolity in the philosophy of science. D. C. Stove, to whom the foregoing account is due, argues convincingly for the conclusion that 'T is consistent with every observation statement' and 'T is known with certainty to be true' are logically independent of each other. He also argues that Popper was led to affirm his seminal proposition through taking 'irrefutable' to have in the same context both its standard meaning ('known with certainty to be true') and a deviant meaning ('consistent with every observation statement'). The point may be put as follows. Popper's use of 'irrefutability' with an unusual meaning, viz. 'consistency with every observation statement', is all that rescues his claim that irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory from plain silliness.7 But the claim, thus rescued, is not news unless people have sometimes thought that irrefutability was a virtue. And the claim that they have thought this is sustainable only if 'irrefutability' is understood not in the unusual sense often favoured by Popper but in the ordinary sense. Thus only an equivocation on 'irre

While it is generally accepted that we need to use our intelligence (to reason) in order to get what we want, it is thought to be a cardinal error to imagine that by reasoning we can discover what we ought to want. Reason can in no way constrain the choice of ends, it can only constrain the choice of means once an end has been (non-rationally) adopted. In Plato's philosophy we find a view strongly opposed to this (Humean) attitude towards reason. It is widely held, however, that to arrive at a position which is plainly opposed to (Humean) common sense, Plato must have grossly confused reasoning about means with reasoning about ends. Evidence of this confusion is found in Plato's use of analogies between statecraft and navigation, and between virtue and skill. But the diagnosis of confusion rests on a misunderstanding of how Plato wanted to use the word translated 'skill', i.e. 'techni', and this misunderstanding is shared even by those who see Plato as rejecting the virtue/skill analogy. As a result of this misunderstanding, commentators of both persuasions have failed to see that Plato has his hands on an important principle by which reason can be thought legitimately to constrain our choice of ends. In his article, 'Plato's Political Analogies', Renford Bambrough1 spells out with admirable clarity and precision the wider implications of accepting or rejecting Plato's analogies when understood in terms of the notion of instrumental skill. Since this article was published, Bambrough has taken a far more objectivist stance on the general issues raised,2 and would no longer endorse all the arguments he used there to spell out the wider implications of Plato's analogies. (An example will be cited in note 36.) The original formulation of his attack remains, nevertheless, profoundly attractive to many people, and Bambrough, whatever else he may have changed his attitude towards, does not seem to have reconsidered the interpretation of Plato's notion of techni on which the original attack was based.3

Professor McGoldrick submits a plea for the supererogatory, in reply to my defence of the traditional tripartite classification of actions as obligatory, permissible, or wrong.' There are two arguments in her paper with which I should like to take issue. First, she attacks my argument for the view that, if the pursuit of an ideal is morally praiseworthy, then the development of the requisite virtue(s) is morally obligatory, on the grounds that it involves apetitioprincipii. Second, she argues that since we must (morally) have self-respect, 'heroic or saintly virtues ... cannot be demanded, of ourselves or others, as an imperative of duty without abrogating the intrinsic worth of the individual upon whom the imperative is laid'.2 I think it is possible for me to maintain my position against these two attacks.

Moral theories which, like those of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, give a central place to the virtues, tend to assume that as traits of character the virtues are mutually compatible so that it is possible for one and the same person to possess them all. This assumption—let us call it the compatibility thesis—does not deny the existence of painful moral dilemmas: it allows that the virtues may conflict in particular situations when considerations associated with different virtues favour incompatible courses of action, but holds that these conflicts occur only at the level of individual actions. Thus while it may not always be possible to do both what would be just and what would be kind or to act both loyally and honestly, it is possible to be both a kind and a just person and to have both the virtue of loyalty and the virtue of honesty.

In Chapter 4 of his Providence and Evil (Cambridge University Press, I977) Professor Peter Geach defends the ascription of goodness to God against the objection from the existence of animal pain. Geach acknowledges that all animals are divinely created and under divine superintendence; that their sufferings are real and often excruciating; that these exemplify torments befalling the innocent; and that God, unlike 'an army commander or big business executive', is fully conversant with the detailed results of 'the main line of policy' he has adopted in his creative design. Nevertheless, according to Geach, God cannot be accused of cruelty, and indeed no amount of animal pain could tarnish God's goodness in the slightest. Geach accepts that sympathy with the sufferings of lower animals can be a virtue in human beings-but only to the degree that we 'share the nature' of those animals whose sufferings we compassionate. Thus the sufferings of 'a shark or octopus or herring' are quite improper objects of our compassion. And since, unlike men, God has no ingredient of the animal in his nature, 'only anthropomorphic imagination allows us to accuse God of cruelty' for tolerating animal pain as part of his glorious creation. Geach's choice of terminology is significant. The name he gives to the virtue which we cannot predicate of God is 'sympathy', conspicuously avoiding the terms 'compassion' (my word above) and 'pity'. Geach's motives are perfectly transparent. 'Sympathy' connotes some participation in the feelings of those whose predicament we might conceivably share, and perhaps therefore it would be 'folly or affectation' for men to try to sympathize with the travail of an octopus. Perhaps not. But clearly a man might appropriately have pity for the agony of such a creature, inclining him to do what he could to alleviate its suffering. And only a pedantic allegiance to etymology could deter us from saying that one often can and ought to have compassion for great pain suffered by animals whose nature is radically different from one's own. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines 'compassion' simply as 'pity inclining one to be helpful or merciful'. Thus the objection to theism from the existence of animal pain does not depend on the assumption that a perfectly good Creator would have 'sympathy' in the sense of 'fellow feeling' with the sufferings of animals. It depends merely on the ethical premise that the capacity of animals to