John J. Tilley

In discussions of practical reason we often encounter the view that a fact is a reason for an agent to act only if the fact is capable of moving the agent to act. This view figures centrally in many philosophical controversies, and while taken for granted by some, it is vigorously disputed by others. In this essay I show that if the disputed position is correctly interpreted, it is well armored against stock objections and implied by a premise that is not only plausible, but generally accepted by the position's critics

The question "Why should I be moral?," taken as a request for reasons to be moral, strikes many philosophers as silly, confused, or otherwise out of line. Hence we find many attempts to dismiss it as spurious. This paper addresses four such attempts and shows that they fail. It does so partly by discussing various errors about reasons for action, errors that lie at the root of the view that "Why should I be moral?" is ill-conceived. Such errors include the mistake of confusing different uses of "moral reason for A to ø" and the mistake of treating as axiomatic, as in need of no argument, the view that moral considerations furnish every agent with practical reasons. Among the philosophers discussed are John Hospers, Philippa Foot, Stephen Toulmin, H. A. Prichard, and William Frankena.

In a recent issue of this journal, C. L. Sheng claims to havesolved andexplained the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) by studying it ‘from a moral point of view’ - i.e., by assuming that each player feels sympathy for the other. Sheng does not fully clarify this claim, but there is textual evidence that his point is this: PD's arise only for agents who feel little or no sympathy for each other; they cannot arise in the presence of a high degree of reciprocal sympathy. A high degree of such sympathysolves the PD in that it prevents PD's from arising, and a low degree of itexplains the PD in that it provides an essential condition for the occurrence of that game. This thesis is false, as some examples show. These examples are important; they prevent us from underestimating the problem posed by the PD.

John Clarke of Hull, one of the eighteenth century's staunchest proponents of psychological egoism, defended that theory in his Foundation of Morality in Theory and Practice. He did so mainly by opposing the objections to egoism in the first two editions of Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into Virtue. But Clarke also produced a challenging, direct argument for egoism which, regrettably, has received virtually no scholarly attention. In this paper I give it some of the attention it merits. In addition to reconstructing it and addressing interpretive issues about it, I show that it withstands a tempting objection. I also show that although Clarke's argument ultimately fails, to study it is instructive. It illuminates, for example, Hutcheson's likely intentions in a passage relevant to egoism.

The key problem for normative (or moral) cultural relativism arises as soon as we try to formulate it. It resists formulations that are (1) clear, precise, and intelligible; (2) plausible enough to warrant serious attention; and (3) faithful to the aims of leading cultural relativists, one such aim being to produce an important alternative to moral universalism. Meeting one or two of these conditions is easy; meeting all three is not. I discuss twenty-four candidates for the label "cultural relativism," showing that not one meets all three conditions. In the end I conclude that cultural relativists have produced nothing that threatens universalism.

One of the most oft-cited parts of Francis Hutcheson’s Illustrations upon the Moral Sense (1728) is his discussion of “exciting reasons.” In this paper I address the question: What is the function of that discussion? In particular, what is its relation to Hutcheson’s attempt to show that the rationalists’ normative thesis ultimately implies, contrary to their moral epistemology, that moral ideas spring from a sense? Despite first appearances, Hutcheson’s discussion of exciting reasons is not part of that attempt. Mainly, it is part of Hutcheson’s comeback to Gilbert Burnet’s objections to Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725).

The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) exhibits a tragedy in this sense: if the players are fully informed and rational, they are condemned to a jointly dispreferred outcome. In this essay I address the following question: What feature of the PD's payoff structure is necessary and sufficient to produce the tragedy? In answering it I use the notion of a trembling-hand equilibrium. In the final section I discuss an implication of my argument, an implication which bears on the persistence of the problem posed by the PD.

In a well-known footnote in Book 3 of his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume calls William Wollaston's moral theory a "whimsical system" and purports to destroy it with a few brief objections. The first of those objections, although fatally flawed, has hitherto gone unrefuted. To my knowledge, its chief error has escaped attention. In this paper I expose that error; I also show that it has relevance beyond the present subject. It can occur with regard to any moral theory which, like Wollaston's, locates the wrongness of an act in a property that can reside in non-actions no less than in actions.

According to agent relativism, each person's moral requirements are relative to her desires or interests. That is, whether a person morally ought to ø depends on what interests or desires she has. Some philosophers charge that the main argument for agent relativism trades on an ambiguity in the term "reason," "reason for action,'' or the like. This paper shows that although the argument for agent relativism may indeed harbor an ambiguity, the ambiguity is no Achilles’ heel. To remove it is not to discredit the argument, but to uncover the strongest form of it, the form that makes agent relativism tenacious.

This paper challenges Francis Hutcheson's and John Clarke of Hull's alleged demonstrations that William Wollaston's moral theory is inconsistent. It also present a form of the inconsistency objection that fares better than theirs, namely, that of Thomas Bott (1688-1754). Ultimately, the paper shows that Wollaston's moral standard is not what some have thought it to be; that consequently, his philosophy withstands the best-known efforts to expose it as inconsistent; and further, that one of the least-known British moralists is more important than hitherto thought, in that he uncovers the inconsistency Clarke and Hutcheson try in vain to elicit.