Alan Thomas

Thomas Nagel has argued that we are theoretically committed to both ethical pluralism and liberal egalitarianism in a way that seems plausible but that the combination leads through time to a deep-seated incoherence within our own moral and political outlook.This paper critically examines Nagel’s arguments for this conclusion. The paradox is centrally generated by the dual role of the impartial perspective in Nagel’s argument. This dual role is analysed and rejected as based on a mistake about objectification, such that there is no conflict between the personal and impersonal point of view of the kind Nagel describes. His insightful account of the prospects for egalitarianism is, further, hindered by his account of the internal division of the self. A positive proposal is made for a feasible egalitarian ideal that overcomes such a dichotomy within the self in the context of civil society.

Peter Winch seems to have described the following kind of paradox. Two agents in a morally dilemmatic situation can agree on the values in that situation and their bearing on decision but come to different all things considered verdicts about what to do. Yet this kind of blameless disagreement is not a Protagorean relativism in which "right" reduces to "right for A" and "right for B". This paper tries to preserve the appearances while avoiding relativism, abandoning cognitivism about value or abandoning the "impartiality" of reasons. It is argued that Sen's notion of evaluator relativity in which outcomes differ in value according to whether one is the proposed author or viewer of the proposed action can be adapted to solve the problem. The sense in which values are perspectival is compatible with their objectivity as they systematically transform across viewpoints; Sen has correctly identified that the "author/viewer" parameter is perspectival in a different sense in which this kind of transformation test does not hold. However, a minimal realism about value suggests that Sen's insight is into the importance of an agency stance towards proposed outcomes. Practical reasons are perspectival in a more radical way than judgements of value, but still objective. Adapting his insight by explaining it as a claim about reasons not values solves the paradox while remaining cognitivist about values and impartialist about reasons.

This paper makes the non-monotonicity of a wide range of moral reasoning the basis of a case for particularism. Non-monotonicity threatens practical decision with an overwhelming informational complexity to which a form of ethical generalism seems the best response. It is argued that this impression is wholly misleading: the fact of non-monotonicity is best accommodated by the defence of four related theses in any theory of justification. First, the explanation of and defence of a default/challenge model of justification. Secondly, the development of a theory of epistemic status and an explanation of those unearned entitlements that accrue to such status. Thirdly, an explanation of the basis of epistemic virtues. Finally, an account must be given of the executive capacity of rational decision itself as a ‘contentless ability’. This overall set of views can accommodate a limited role for generalizations about categories of evidence, but not such as to rescue a principled generalism. In particular, the version of particularism defended here explains why one ought not to accept the principled holism that has proved to be a problem for Dancy’s form of particularism. Ethics certainly involves hedged principles. However, principles cannot be self-hedging: there cannot be a that’s it operator in a principle as Richard Holton has claimed that there can be. Practical reasoning is concluded by the categorical detachment of the action-as-conclusion itself.

John McDowell has recently changed his line of response to philosophical scepticism about the external world. He now claims to be in a position to use the strategy of transcendental argumentation in order to show the falsity of the sceptic’s misrepresentation of our ordinary epistemic standpoint. Since this transcendental argument begins from a weak and widely shared assumption shared with the sceptic herself the falsity of external world scepticism is now demonstrable even to her. Building on the account of perceptual intentionality defended in the Woodbridge lectures, McDowell argues that the idea of narrow perceptual content is unavailable to anyone, including the sceptic. This argument is assessed by drawing out an analogy with parallel responses to error theories in ethics

This paper assesses G. A. Cohen's critique of Rawlsian special incentives. Two arguments are identified and criticized: an argument that the difference principle does not justify incentives because of a limitation on an agent's prerogative to depart from a direct promotion of the interests of the worst off, and an argument that justice is limited in its scope. The first argument is evaluated and defended from the criticism that once Cohen has conceded some ethically grounded special incentives he cannot sustain his critique of special incentives. But it is finally rejected as a subtle form of an unreasonably demanding moral rigorism. The second argument is interpreted as the more plausible of Cohen's claims. It has, however, to be defended via two subsidiary theses: the claim that Rawls endorses a moral division of labour and that this in turn grounds a further commitment to moral dualism as opposed to moral monism. This argument is assessed and rejected. Neither the moral division of labour nor moral monism supports the claim that in applying the principles of justice to a basic structure one does not thereby apply them to the individuals constrained to act within that structure in the marketing of their labour. Nor is it plausible to identify local aspects of social relations where the principles of justice are suspended. Such principles are presupposed, for example in market relations or the family, but limitation in scope of direct application does not limit the scope of justification. That scope extends at least as far as individual decisions to market one's labour. The latter are made fair in the only possible way they could be made fair. Rawls's commitment to the revisionary socialism of James Meade illustrates this point. It is concluded that no version of Cohen's critique succeeds. However, Cohen's critique identifies the most plausible version of Rawls's egalitarianism

In the first systematic study of the philosophy of Thomas Nagel, Alan Thomas discusses Nagel's contrast between the "subjective" and the "objective" points of view throughout the various areas of his wide ranging philosophy. Nagel's original and distinctive contrast between the subjective view and our aspiration to a "view from nowhere" within metaphysics structures the chapters of the book. A "new Humean" in epistemology, Nagel takes philosophical scepticism to be both irrefutable and yet to indicate a profound truth about our capacity for self-transcendence. The contrast between subjective and objective views is then considered in the case of the mind, where consciousness proves to be the central aspect of mind that contemporary theorising fails to acknowledge adequately. The second half of the book analyses Nagel's work on moral and political philosophy where he has been most deeply influential. Topics covered include the contrast between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons and values, Nagel's distinctive version of a hybrid ethical theory, his discussion of life's meaningfulness and finally his sceptical arguments about whether a liberal society can reconcile the conflicting moral demands of self and other

It is argued that only the embedding of Rawlsian political liberalism within a republican framework secures the content of his view against Cohen's critique of Rawlsian special incentives. That content is fully specified in the form of a property-owning democracy; only this background set of institutions (or one functionally equivalent to it) will secure the stability of Rawls's egalitarian principles. A liberal-republicanism, rather than political liberalism alone, offers deeper grounding for our commitment to a property-owning democracy as a privileged political economy for the expression of our egalitarian ideals.

Political realism criticises the putative abstraction, foundationalism and neglect of the agonistic dimension of political practice in the work of John Rawls. This paper argues that had Rawls not fully specified the implementation of his theory of justice in one particular form of political economy then he would be vulnerable to a realist critique. But he did present such an implementation: a property-owning democracy. An appreciation of Rawls s specificationist method undercuts the realist critique of his conception of justice as fairness.

This paper interprets Bernard Williams's claim that all practical reasons must meet the internal reasons constraint. It is argued that this constraint is independent of any substantive Humean claims about reasons and its rationale is a content scepticism about the capacity of pure reason to supply reasons for action. The final sections attempt a positive reconciliation of the internal reasons account with the motivation for external reasons, namely, securing practical objecitivy in the form of a commitment to impartiality. Impartiality is given a contractualist interpretation in the limited sense that socialised agents have a central disposition to hold those reasons that are defensible to reasonable interlocutors, but this is not a substantive constraint on their content. Such a commitment plays a structural role in motivation illustrated by the analogy of the internalisation of a relativised a priori principle. Theorists of moral motivation such as Nagel and Scheffler have uncovered the importance of such structural motivations, but they are best treated as an architectonic feature of a socialised agent's motivational set, not as a principle or motive akin to other principles or motives within that set. This gives us critical leverage on the motivational sets of individuals that goes beyond launching "optimistic internal reasons" statements at them, but it does not violate Williams's constraints on the idea of a practical reason in general

A putative problem for the moral particularist is that he or she fails to capture the normative relevance of certain considerations that they carry on their face, or the intuitive irrelevance of other considerations. It is argued in response that mastery of certain topic-specific truisms about a subject matter is what it is for a reasonable interlocutor to be engaged in a moral discussion, but the relevance of these truisms has nothing to do with the particularist/generalist dispute. Given that practical reasoning is plausibly a form of abductive reasoning, and is therefore non-monotonic, any arbitrary addition of information can change the degree of support evidence offers for a conclusion. Given this arbitrariness, it is no objection to the particularist if he or she represents the ‘normative landscape as flat’ in a way that does not display the ‘obvious’ relevance of certain considerations. The normative landscape is flat and our best account of practical reasoning represents it precisely as such. Appealing to a distinction between practical reasoning and moral reasoning does not help to resurrect this pseudoproblem for particularism. Key Words: abductive inference • default reasons • moral particularism • practical reasoning.

Minimalist and quasi-realist approaches to problematic discourses such as the causal, moral and modal are compared and contrasted. The problem of unasserted contexts demonstrates that while quasi-realism can meet the challenge of reconstructing a logic of "commitment" to cover both "projected" and "detected" discourses, it can only do so at an unacceptable cost. The theory must globally revise logic, in spite of its implicit commitment to a substantial notion of truth for "detected" discourses. Thus, quasi-realism fails to meet its own standards for theory acceptance. By contrast, minimalism does not face the problem of unasserted contexts, can give a global account of the truth predicate and can explain the univocality of the logical connectives. This demonstrates the dialectical superiority of the minimalist's approach.

In this paper I will develop the argument that a cognitivist and virtue ethical approach to moral reasons is the only approach that can sustain a non-alienated relation to one’s character and ethical commitments. [Thomas, 2005] As a corollary of this claim, I will argue that moral reasons must be understood as reasonably partial. A view of this kind can, nevertheless, recognise the existence of general and positive obligations to humanity. Doing so does not undermine the view by leading to a highly demanding view of morality. Indeed, it offers a defence against the view that an analogy between obligations of immediate rescue to particular individuals and general and positive obligations to humanity leads to the conclusion that morality is highly demanding. The plan of this paper is as follows. The first section sets out the main elements of a cognitivist and virtue ethical approach to moral reasons. The second applies it to the test case of an argument that claims that one way in which one seeks to lead a non-alienated ethical life, a life of integrity, is incompatible with the requirements of consequentialism given certain very general facts about the moral state of the world. [Ashford, 2000] My..

G. A. Cohen 's critique of Rawlsian special incentives has been criticised as internally inconsistent on the grounds that Cohen concedes the existence of incentives that are legitimate because they are grounded on agent-centred prerogatives. This, Cohen 's critics argue, invites a slippery slope argument: there is no principled line between those incentives Cohen permits and those he condemns. This paper attempts a partial defence of Cohen : a prerogative can be granted but then its operation internally qualified. A better off person has a prerogative that grounds incentive payment, but that person should be sensitive to the degree of difference between her resources and those of the representative worst off person. This gives a better off person under a distribution a discretion that is then internally qualified by a commitment to an egalitarian ethos. The paper concludes that on balance this is not, in fact, a reasonable view of a prerogative: granting it and then qualifying it in this way undermines the unfettered discretion that should attach to a prerogative. However, Cohen has certainly identified an ambiguity in how we conceive of prerogatives

This paper foregrounds one argument in Rawls’s work that is crucial to his case for one, determinate, form of political economy: a property-owning democracy. Section one traces the evolution of this idea from the seminal work of Cambridge economist James Meade; section two demonstrates how a commitment to a property-owning democracy flows from Rawls’s own principles; section three focuses on Rawls’s striking critique of orthodox welfare state capitalism. This all sets the stage for an argument, presented in section four, from the complexity of economic interactions to the strategy of making markets fair in the only feasible way that they can be made fair, namely, by “patterning” their effects. Section five concludes by asking whether any scheme of this general type is a realistic form of utopianism for a society such as ours.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the concept of remorse from the perspective of moral philosophy. This perspective may be less familiar than other approaches in this anthology, such as those of forensic psychiatry or law. In what ways does moral philosophy claim to be able to illuminate the nature of the concept of remorse? First, by presenting an account of this concept and its structure within a more general account of the nature of moral thought. Second, by drawing on the resources of the philosophy of mind. This latter discipline may seem even more mysterious than moral philosophy. Moral philosophy is continuous with the reflections serious people have always conducted on the sources of those actions we feel bound to perform, the nature of values and obligations, and the nature of moral ideals. It differs from ordinary moral thought only in drawing on a range of canonical historical texts bearing..

The political liberalism of Rawls and Larmore is presented as uniquely able to solve the problems of modern political theory. In the face of a plurality of reasonable comprehensive conceptions of the good, a legitimate liberal state can legislate solely on the basis of a modular conception of justice affirmed from within each reasonable conception. However, it is argued that this view, while restrictive, has to permit the promotion of its own pre-conditions. This demanding duty of civic restraint requires citizens who have been educated for citizen virtue in the context of associational life in civil society. This challenge to expand liberalism to cover its own preconditions at the level of a moral background culture, has usually been levelled by one kind of republican/communitarian (Charles Taylor) or so-called "ethical liberals". It can be met by the adoption of a liberal republicanism that operates within the constraints of Rawls' political liberalism but nevertheless explains and justifies why such a view must treat traditional republican themes such as active citizenship and the importance of associational life. The solution lies in treating these values as option values, in a sense that is explained.

This volume provides a systematic overview and comprehensive assessment of Bernard Williams' contribution to moral philosophy, a field in which Williams was one of the most influential of contemporary philosophers. The seven essays, which were specially commissioned for this volume, examine his work on moral objectivity, the nature of practical reason, moral emotion, the critique of the 'morality system', Williams' assessment of the ethical thought of the ancient world, and his later adoption of Nietzsche's method of 'genealogy'. Collectively, the essays not only engage with Williams' work, but also develop independent philosophical arguments in connection with those topics that have, over the last thirty years, particularly reflected Williams' influence.

This paper evaluates Amartya Sen’s criticisms of Rawls’s theory of justice, in particular his critique of the ideal versus nonideal distinction in Rawls, and corrects what I take to be various misconceptions that underpin this critique. I will then move on to the more general issue of how we are to understand the role of the ideal versus nonideal distinction (and how we ought not to understand it) before going on to consider one focused application of Sen’s ideas. I will look at the choice between property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism, drawing on the important work of Ingrid Robeyns specifically on “gender justice”, in order to argue that Sen’s methodological claims will – if heeded – send us all off on the wrong track

The central concern of McKeever & Ridge’s paper is with whether or not the moral particularist can formulate a defensible distinction between default and non-default reasons. [McKeever & Ridge 2004] But that issue is only of concern to the particularist, they argue, because it allows him or her to avoid a deeper problem, an unacceptable “flattening of the normative landscape”. The particularist ought, McKeever & Ridge claim, to view this corollary of his or her position as a serious embarrassment. Unpacking the metaphor somewhat, the putative problem is that certain moral reasons seem, at their face value, directly to exhibit their relevance to moral decision and others, equally clearly, do not. Examples of the former class are, for example, the fact that an action 2 would inflict pain seems directly to indicate that this is a reason against carrying out the action. McKeever & Ridge cite as an example of an implausible candidate for direct moral relevance the fact that a person’s shoelace is a certain colour. [Little 2000, p. 291] They explain direct relevance as dependent on the content of a moral reason. It is the triviality of the content of this reason, namely, the fact that the colour of a person’s shoelaces is a certain way that makes it seem utterly implausible as a moral reason. McKeever & Ridge further argue that, “there surely is an important difference between considerations of shoelace colour and considerations of pain, pleasure, promising and the like.” [McKeever & Ridge 2004 p.2] They approvingly cite Lance & Little’s observation that an aspect of moral wisdom is that a morally wise person understands “that there is a deep difference in moral status between infliction of pain and shoelace colour”. [Lance & Little, forthcoming].

Nagel' s pessimistic conclusion that current welfare state arrangements approximate to the most pragmatically effective way of reconciling the demands of morality and of an egalitarian liberalism, while not removing a deep seated incoherence between these view, can be resisted. The objective/subjective dichotomy, in this case applied via the agent-neutral/agent-relative distinction, is identified as his problematic assumption: understood in Hegelian terms as the "placing" of different categories of reason, even a minimal realism makes it difficult to understand how embedding agent-relativity alongside the agent-neutral can be understood as adding to the relevant values, just by moving from a more particular to a less particular conception of the world. This transition also cannot be seen as giving us insight into the intrinsicality of certain values, as that would be to renege on the idea that the subjective point of view is still a point of view on value and one that is expanded, not renounced. It is argued that the standard objection that contractualism is fatally circular is even more plausible in the case of its use as a theory of political legitimacy and Nagel's use of it is quite open about this circularity. Criticising Nagel's philosophical anthropology allows one to develop his positive arguments for egalitarianism; the development of civic virtue, from a perspective in which "the personal" acknowledges the demands of others in one's political community, leads to a political egalitarianism located in a distinct political morality independent of a moralised politics.

Taurek cases focus a choice between two views of permissible action, Can Save One and Must Save Many . It is argued that Taurek cases do illustrate the rationale for Can Save One , but existing views do not highlight the fact that this is because they are examples of claims grounded on non-comparative justice. To act to save the many solely because they form a group is to discriminate against the one for an irrelevant reason. That is a canonical form of non-comparative injustice. The error lies in taking a contingency of some presentations of some Taurek cases, namely, that they involve distribution, to introduce the claims of comparative as opposed to non-comparative justice. But cases of non-comparative justice can, contingently, also involve distribution. In order to settle which form of justice applies it is necessary to examine the nature of the distribution involved and the nature of “classes” to which individuals can be assigned