Adam Morton

(1945 - 2020)

There is a blinkering effect to decency. Morally sensitive people have constrained imagination. In particular - this chapter argues - decency limits one’s capacity to empathize with those who perform atrocious acts. It also creates obstacles to understanding some very ordinary, relatively harmless, actions. The argument begins with an account of the explanatory force of empathy and goes on to describe how our normal underestimation of the variety of ways that we can imagine motivation minimizes the ease with which we can make continuities between benign and evil acts. This is probably good for everyday cooperation, but bad for the kind of understanding we need in crisis situations.

Not for the first time, certain stakes came to the boil again in the 1950s surrounding what became referred to as the ‘Lukács question’, namely the position of Georg Lukács under the shadow of Stalinism. What follows is an interview by Patrick Tort with Henri Lefebvre on the ‘Lukács question’, arising from an earlier lecture delivered by the latter in Hungary in 1955. The interview is important for the light it sheds on the power of truth in relation to the Party, issues of proletarian science, class consciousness, and literary and aesthetic politics. Most crucially, the interview touches on the concept of the ‘socialisation of society’, or dialectical totality, in which elements are incorporated as internally related to the structure of a whole. In contesting Stalinism as a discursive complex and for its defence of Lukács, the interview is a crucial material contribution to Marxist theory.

__Philosophy in Practice_ is a completely new kind of introductory philosophy textbook, focusing on philosophy as an activity, rather than as a doctrine._ Thoroughly revised edition of a popular introductory philosophy textbook. Contains new discussions of philosophy of religion, freedom, _The Matrix,_ and the epistemology of the internet. Offers a wealth of pedagogical features to guide students through the text, including discussion plans at the beginning of each section, questions, chapter summaries, annotated guides to further reading, and a glossary. Classic passages from the history of philosophy are used throughout, and each part ends with a one-page historical summary. Includes an on-line teacher's guide with teaching suggestions, tests, and essay topics at: _www.blackwellpublishing.com/pip_.

The author presents a number of strategies for making decisions based on desires or values which are incompatible or which conflict with one another in various ways. Cases discussed include conflicts of first and second order desires, conflicts between desires for present and for future ends, problems deriving from anticipated changes of desire, risk-taking problems, and coordination problems. One central claim of the book is that the same dilemma-managing strategies can be applied to all of these. The book also argues that many of the characteristics of moral dilemmas appear in non-moral decision-making. The relations between these strategies and utility-maximizing decision rules are subtle, and are explored throughout the book. To some extent the strategies apply to cases which are too complicated for utility-maximization to apply. Some of them also apply to the early stages of decision-making where utility-maximization does not enter, for example, in selecting a list of options for serious consideration. In some tidy cases, though, the strategies give different recommendations. This book is meant to have both a theoretical and a practical appeal, deriving from our need for ways of making decisions that do not force us to find trade-offs between goods or values which are hard to compare. The strategies presented in the book are meant to be usable in situations which seem to force decision-makers to balance very different quantities, and the discussion of them is meant as a contribution to debates about incomparable values, moral dilemmas and rational decision.

Family life and one's career are incomparable values for him/her. The whole topic of incomparability of desires is veiled in confusion and controversy. Some people deny that there are any incomparable desires. This chapter explains meaning of incomparability, discusses incomparability as a fact of life that many of the desires are incomparable, and also examines why incomparability makes an enormous difference to decision‐making what patterns of incomparability the desires exhibit. The first dimension of incomparability is depth: how much thought and how many comparisons with other wants the inability to choose will survive. Another dimension is generality, whether the incomparability concerns just individual wants or also the values that usually underlie them. The significance of some patterns of incomparability becomes clearer if one add another ingredient to the brew: the influence of beliefs on desires. The chapter considers an example to illustrate this influence.

This paper makes a connection between some developments in game theory and issues about everyday psychological knowledge. I argue that there are two‐person situations in which agents will do badly if they use a particular simple theory of rationality to predict one another's actions. If we assume that our everyday techniques for anticipating one another's actions will get better results than this, it follows that these techniques do not consist in applying a theory like this one. One alternative is that when we anticipate actions we supplement whatever theories we have with a capacity to imagine the other person's motivation. I sketch a way of modelling this capacity.1.

_The Importance of Being Understood _is an innovative and thought-provoking exploration of the links between the way we think about each other's mental states and the fundamentally cooperative nature of everyday life. Adam Morton begins with a consideration of 'folk psychology', the tendency to attribute emotions, desires, beliefs and thoughts to human minds. He takes the view that it is precisely this tendency that enables us to understand, predict and explain the actions of others, which in turn helps us to decide on our own course of action. This relection suggests, claims Morton, that certain types of cooperative activity are dependent on everyday psychological understanding conversely, that we act in such a way as to make our actions easily intelligible to others so that we can benefit from being understood. This idea of 'beneficial circularities' is at the core of Morton's investigation of the interdependencies between folk psychology and social behaviour: we understand each other because we have learned to make ourselves intelligible. Using examples of cooperative activities such as car driving and playing tennis, Adam Morton analyses the concepts of belief and simulation, the idea of explanation by motive, and the causal force of psychological explanation. In addition to argument and analysis, Morton also includes more speculative explorations of topics such as moral progress and presents a new point of view on how and why cultures differ. _The Importance of Being Understood _forges new links between ethics and the philosophy of mind and will be of interest to anyone in either field, as well as developmental psychologists.