Linda Zagzebski

This essay presents a moral argument for the rationality of theistic belief. If all I have to go on morally are my own moral intuitions and reasoning and those of others, I am rationally led to skepticism, both about the possibility of moral knowledge and about my moral effectiveness. This skepticism is extensive, amounting to moral despair. But such despair cannot be rational. It follows that the assumption of the argument must be false and I must be able to rely on more than my own human powers and those of others in attempting to live a moral life. The Christian God has such a function. Hence, if it is rational to attempt a moral life, it is rational to believe in the Christian God.

In this paper I examine the sixth century ’Rule of St. Benedict’, and argue that the authority structure of Benedictine communities as described in that document satisfies well-known principles of authority defended by Joseph Raz. This should lead us to doubt the common assumption that premodern models of authority violate the modern ideal of the autonomy of the self. I suggest that what distinguishes modern liberal authority from Benedictine authority is not the principles that justify it, but rather the first-order beliefs for the sake of which authority is sought by the individual, and the degree of trust between the authority and the subject

In Finite and Infinite Goods, Robert Adams brings back a strongly Platonistic form of the metaphysics of value. I applaud most of the theory’s main features: the primacy of the good; the idea that the excellent is more central than the desirable, the derivative status of well-being, the transcendence of the good, the idea that excellence is resemblance to God, the importance of such non-moral goods as beauty, the particularity of persons and their ways of imitating God, and the use of direct reference theory in understanding how “good” functions semantically. All of these features I wholeheartedly endorse and use in different ways in my own theory. Throughout his book Adams is generous to competing points of view, and his thoroughness and attention to detail make his presentation persuasive without the defensive quality of so much philosophical polemic. With this book, Christian neoplatonism has emerged in a sophisticated contemporary form.

Persons are thought to have a special kind of value, often called "dignity," which, according to Kant, makes them both infinitely valuable and irreplaceably valuable. The author aims to identify what makes a person a person in a way that can explain both aspects of dignity. She considers five definitions of "person": (1) an individual substance of a rational nature (Boethius), (2) a self-conscious being (Locke), (3) a being with the capacity to act for ends (Kant), (4) a being with the capacity to act for another (Kant), and (5) an incommunicably unique subject (Wojtyla). She argues that none is capable of grounding both aspects of dignity since they are incompatible kinds of value; it is impossible for the same thing to ground both. Human persons are infinitely valuable in virtue of shareable qualities of their nature, whereas they are irreplaceably valuable because of a nonqualitative feature of their personhood

The category of the admirable has received little attention in the history of philosophy, even among virtue ethicists. I don't think we can understand the admirable without investigating the emotion of admiration. I have argued that admiration is an emotion in which the object is ‘seen as admirable’, and which motivates us to emulate the admired person in the relevant respect. Our judgements of admirability can be distorted by the malfunction of our disposition to admiration. We all know many ways in which admiration misfires when people admire someone who is not admirable. In this paper I focus on a different kind of mistake, one in which there is resistance to moving from admiring to emulating someone admirable. I think that Aristotle's zēlos is in between admiration and envy, and it points us to a predictable line of deviation from admiration to the path of envy, spite and ressentiment. I think these are mistakes to which people in the modern age are particularly prone.

If God knows everything he must know the future, and if he knows the future he must know the future acts of his creatures. But then his creatures must act as he knows they will act. How then can they be free? This dilemma has a long history in Christian philosophy and is now as hotly disputed as ever. The medieval scholastics were virtually unanimous in claiming both that God is omniscient and that humans have free will, though they disagreed in their accounts of how the two are compatible. With the Reformation the debate became even more lively since there were Protestant philosophers who denied both claims, and many philosophers ever since have either thought it impossible to reconcile them or have thought it possible only because they weaken one or the other