George Sher

[TofC cont.] Social ideals: Justice, A utilitarian theory of justice / J.S. Mill, Egalitarianism with changed motivation / G. Cohen; Equality, Multidimensional equality / M. Walzer, Equality of capacity / A. Sen; Liberty, rights, property, and self-ownership, A defense of the primacy of liberty rights / L. Lomasky, Atomism and the primacy of rights / C. Taylor -- Social institutions: Education, Educating about familial values / W. Galston, For vouchers and parental choice / M. Friedman; Family, In defense of filial obligations / C.H. Sommers; Punishment, A utilitarian theory of punishment / J. Bentham. In [this book, the editors] provide students [with] a wide variety of readings covering the problems of political and social philosophy. Such topics as political obligation, democracy, rights, and justice are represented, in addition to less widely discussed subjects as the family. Both common approaches and those which are less familiar are presented, as well as recent developments in the topic area. -Back cover.

The idea that some poor persons "deserve" to be helped while others do not has long been influential in the USA. In the nineteenth century, "paupers" were relegated to poorhouse and subjected to onerous conditions for relief, while the blind, the deaf-mute, and others were helped in much less humiliating ways. A similar distinction underlay the categories of the comprehensive social Security Act of 1935; and its continuation has motivated various attempts to revise the welfare system by redrawing its boundaries and making work a condition of aid. Most recently, the distinction has resurfaced in discussions of subsidized medical care.

In his influential “Naming and Necessity,” Saul Kripke has deployed a new sort of analytical apparatus in support of the classical Cartesian argument that minds and bodies must be distinct because they can be imagined separately. In the initial section of this paper, I shall first paraphrase Kripke's version of that argument, and then suggest a way in which even one who accepts all of its philosophical presuppositions may avoid its conclusion. In the second section, I shall defend this suggestion against some of the possible objections to it.Recent materialists have not been overly impressed by the Cartesian claim that minds and bodies can be imagined or conceived separately from each other. Their usual reply is that this is only to be expected, given the contingent nature of the identify involved. Kripke, however, has argued persuasively that such a reply is unacceptable because it overlooks a crucial fact about the terms in which the identity theory is couched.

It seems plausible to suppose that (a) the vocabulary of action is distinct from and irreducible to that of mere movement, And (b) the causal laws of the natural sciences are couched solely in terms of the latter vocabulary. From these two suppositions, The falsehood of determinism has sometimes been said to follow. I argue that whether this does follow depends on our conception of causal explanation; on the interpretation of this concept that seems to me the most interesting, The falsehood of determinism follows only given the supplementary premise that there are no correlations between the relevant movement-Descriptions and action-Descriptions. But those who propose the two-Vocabularies argument have not shown the impossibility of establishing these correlations, And so have not proven determinism false

To be responsible for their acts, agents must both perform those acts voluntarily and in some sense know what they are doing. Of these requirements, the voluntariness condition has been much discussed, but the epistemic condition has received far less attention. In Who Knew? George Sher seeks to rectify that imbalance. The book is divided in two halves, the first of which criticizes a popular but inadequate way of understanding the epistemic condition, while the second seeks to develop a more adequate alternative. It is often assumed that agents are responsible only for what they are aware of doing or bringing about--that their responsibility extends only as far as the searchlight of their consciousness. The book criticizes this "searchlight view" on two main grounds: first, that it is inconsistent with our attributions of responsibility to a broad range of agents who should but do not realize that they are acting wrongly or foolishly, and, second, that the view is not independently defensible. The book's positive view construes the crucial relation between an agent and his failure to recognize the wrongness or foolishness of what he is doing in causal terms: the agent is responsible when, and because, his failure to respond to his reasons for believing that he is acting wrongly or foolishly has its origins in the same constitutive psychology that generally does render him reason-responsive.

Many people, including many contemporary philosophers, believe that the state has no business trying to improve people's characters, elevating their tastes, or preventing them from living degraded lives. They believe that governments should remain absolutely neutral when it comes to the consideration of competing conceptions of the good. One fundamental aim of George Sher's book is to show that this view is indefensible. A second complementary aim is to articulate a conception of the good that is worthy of promotion by the state. The first part of the book analyses attempts to ground the neutrality thesis in the value of autonomy, respect for autonomy, the dangers of a non-neutral state, and scepticism about the good. The second part defends an objective conception of the good which remains sensitive to some of the considerations that make subjectivism attractive.

A number of philosophers from Hume on have claimed that it does not make sense to blame people for acting badly unless their bad acts were rooted in their characters. In this paper, I distinguish a stronger and a weaker version of this claim. The claim is false, I argue, if it is taken to mean that agents can only be blamed for bad acts when those acts are manifestations of character paws. However, what is both true and important is the weaker claim that an act is not blameworthy unless it is rooted in some enduring aspect or aspects of the agent's character that may or may not be flaws, and that, if flaws, may or may not be bad in the same way that the act itself is.

Phillip Montague’s point of departure is a simple but illuminating way of conceptualizing the fact that creates the need for punishment—namely, that each society contains some people who will wrongfully kill or injure others unless held in check by a system of penalties. This fact, Montague argues, in effect confronts each society with a forced choice: either allow potential criminals to inflict harm on others, or else prevent them from doing so by maintaining a system of punishment that will harm some of them. When such forced choices arise, Montague maintains, the proper way to resolve them is to impose the burden on whoever is at fault for creating the choice. It is this principle that underlies the common intuition that individual and collective agents may harm others in self-defense or to protect the innocent. Because each society’s potential criminals are to blame for creating its forced choice, the principle also justifies the creation of systems of punishment.