Michael Smith

Ethical theories mostly focus on what constitutes right action, with competing theories offering their favoured answers: Do what maximises happiness; Do that which God would approve of; Refrain from actions which violate principles for the regulation of behaviour that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement; and so on. They typically have much less to say about how one should implement their favoured answer. The question of implementation is the focus of this chapter. Various answers that deontologists might offer to this question are considered and found wanting, and a diagnosis of the source of their difficulties is suggested.

On one influential view, a person acts autonomously, doing what she genuinely values, if she acts on a desire that is her own, which is (on this account) a matter of it being appropriately ratified at a higher level. This view faces two problems. It doesn’t generalize, as it should, to an account of when a belief is an agent’s own and does not let one distinguish between desires (and beliefs) happening to be one’s own and their being the ones a person would need to have to be autonomous. The paper develops an alternative unified account of what it is for desires and beliefs to be one’s one and argues that an account of acting autonomously should pay attention not to which desires and beliefs are one’s own but to whether they are ones the agent has reason to have and to act on.

During a career spanning over thirty years Philip Pettit has made seminal contributions in moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of mind and action, and metaphysics. The corpus of work Pettit has contributed and stimulated is all the more remarkable because of the way in which Pettit and his circle adapt lessons learned when thinking about problems in one area of philosophy to problems in a completely different area. Common Minds presents specially written papers by some of the most eminent philosophers alive today, grappling with some of the themes derived from the larger programme that Pettit has inspired. It concludes with a substantial piece by Pettit himself, in which he gives an overview of his work, draws out the connections between its key themes, and provides a rich commentary on the preceding essays.

where, according to Schiffer, the concept of an F is pleonastic just in case the concept itself licenses entailments of the form: S ⇒ ∃xFx. These are what he calls "somethingfrom-nothing" entailments and the various practices in which such entailments are made are what he calls "hypostatisizing practices" (p.57). The concept of a proposition is pleonastic, according to this definition, because it licenses the move from a claim like 'Fido is a dog,' a claim containing only the singular term 'Fido' referring to Fido, to the claim 'It is true that Fido is a dog,' which is a claim that contains the singular term 'that Fido is a dog' referring to the proposition that Fido is a dog. (iv) Propositions are pleonastic entities, as anything that falls under a pleonastic concept is, by definition, a pleonastic entity. And (v) The nature of propositions, as pleonastic entities, is fully determined by the hypostatizing practices that are constitutive of the concept of a proposition together with those necessary a priori truths that are applicable to things of any kind. Schiffer's idea is thus that propositions are entities, but that they are entities of a particularly insubstantial kind, as they have no hidden nature waiting to be discovered by..

According to strict motivational internalism (SMI), it is conceptually necessary that if an agent judges that she morally ought to Ф in circumstances C, then she is motivated to Ф in circumstances C. In a 2003 paper, Adina Roskies argues that, given what we know about patients with ventromedial frontal lobe damage, strict motivational internalism is implausible. Smith agrees with Roskies that SMI posits a connection between moral judgment and motivation that is too strong to be credible. However, in this essay, Smith contends that a weaker version of motivational internalism is plausible; namely, one according to which it is conceptually necessary that if an agent judges that she morally ought to Ф in circumstances C, then either she is motivated to Ф in C or she is practically irrational.

Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality is, I think, best understood as an attempt to undermine our allegiance to these two purported constitutive claims about action. If we must think that psychological states figure in the explanation of action then, according to Dancy, we should suppose that those psychological states are beliefs rather than desire-belief pairs. Dancy thus prefers pure cognitivism to Humeanism. But in fact he thinks that we have no business accepting any form of psychologism in the first place; no business accepting a theory that explains an agent’s actions by reference to that agent’s psychological states. For though it is indeed a truism that actions are explained by reasons, Dancy argues that psychological states are only rarely, if ever, reasons. He thus prefers the unadorned normative story, a story which contents itself with explaining actions by laying out the considerations in the light of which the agent acted as he did, to any form of psychologism. I will consider Dancy’s arguments for these claims in turn.

According to the standard story of action, a story that can be traced back at least to David Hume , actions are those bodily movements that are caused and rationalized by a pair of mental states: a desire for some end, where ends can be thought of as ways the world could be, and a belief that something the agent can just do, namely, move her body in the way to be explained, has some suitable chance of making the world the relevant way. Bodily movements that occur otherwise aren't actions, they are mere happenings

The main objection to non‐cognitivism explored in the philosophical literature to date has been semantic in nature. How can normative claims lack truth conditions when they have so many features in common with claims that have truth conditions? The main aim of this paper is to shift attention away from this dominant line of objection onto a range of other problems that non‐cognitivists face. Specifically, I argue that, contrary to the non‐cognitivists, normative claims do express beliefs, even by their own lights; that the truth of Normative Judgement Internalism does not support non‐cognitivism; that arguing for non‐cognitivism on the basis of the Open Question Argument, as non‐cognitivists do, leads them to embrace a contradiction; and, finally, that non‐cognitivists do not provide us with plausible candidates for the desires and aversions that, as they see things, get expressed in normative claims.

Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Douglas and Kristeva to provide an alternative phenomenological and culturally informed account of the complex links between pervasive social categories and their emotional embodiment and expression in phobic individuals.

Smith begins by noting the isomorphism between the rational transition to a psychological state from others and the derivation of a concluding proposition from premises in the deductive theoretical realm, and he argues that this isomorphism led Hume to think that the rationality of the psychological transition is to be explained by the deductive validity of the derivation. Generalizing, Smith argues, Hume concluded that the concept of a reason—that is, the concept of a consideration that justifies—must be prior to and explain the concept of rationality. The fact that there is no such isomorphism in the practical and inductive realms is therefore, Smith suggests, what led Hume to his inductive and practical skepticism. Pace Hume, however, Smith argues that we need not agree that the concept of a reason is prior to the concept of rationality: we have an independent idea of the coherence of a set of psychological states and this is sufficient to provide us with an account of what it is for beliefs and desires to be justified. But it remains an open question whether the Kantians are right that practical coherence can be extended as far as yielding justified desires to do as morality bids.

It has become commonplace to interpret 'Easter Island' in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others' edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as 'given' (fixed) and exemplary, wrongly suggesting that meanings and morals, like islands, are there to be 'discovered' ready-formed. Gadamer's hermeneutics suggests an alternative understanding which expresses something of the ethical ambiguities involved in giving meaning to the environmental history of Easter Island.

The question of environmental responsibility is addressed through comparisons between Hannah Arendt’s and Ulrich Beck’s accounts of the emergent and globally threatening risks associated with acting into nature. Both theorists have been extraordinarily influential in their respective fields but their insights, pointing toward the politicization of nature through human intervention, are rarely brought into conjunction. Important differences stem from Beck’s treatment of risks as systemic and unavoidable side effects of late modernity. Arendt, however, retains a more restrictive anthropogenic view of political action which, while recognizing its unpredictable consequences for human (and nonhuman) others, includes a direct link between individually initiated acts and the taking of ethical responsibility. This latter account best explains the ethical motivations behind much environmental activism.

Concerns for the more-than-human world are consistently marginalized by dominant forms of philosophical and political humanism, characterized here by their unquestioning acceptance of human sovereignty over the world. A genuinely ecological political philosophy needs post-humanist concepts to begin articulating alternative notions of “ecological communities” as ethical and political, and not just biological realities. Drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of community, epharmosis, a largely defunct term of art in early plant ecology, can be reappropriated to signify the creative ethical/political/ecological interrelations that together constitute ecological communities.

In On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that facts about reasons for action are grounded in facts about values and against the view that they are grounded in facts about the desires that subjects would have after fully informed and rational deliberation. I describe and evaluate Parfit's arguments for this value-based conception of reasons for action and find them wanting. I also assess his response to Sidgwick's suggestion that there is a Dualism of Practical Reason. Parfit seems not to notice that his preferred value-based conception of reasons for action augurs strongly in favour of a view like Sidgwick's. 1.

Environmental ethics should be understood as a radical project that challenges the limits of contemporary ethical and political expression, a limit historically defined by the concept of the citizen. This dominant model of public being, frequently justified in terms of a formal or procedural rationally, facilitates an exclusionary ethos that fails to properly represent our concerns for the non-human world. It tends to regard emotionally mediated concerns for others as a source of irrational and subjective distortions in an otherwise rationally ordered ethicopolitical community. In doing so it underestimates the important role played by 'structures of feeling', those culturally variable patterns of emotionally mediated responses, that provide the (shifting) grounds for all ethical experience, motivation, communication and interpretation. An alternative model of political expression more suitable to an environmental ethic, the denizen, is suggested

‘Food sovereignty’ plays an increasingly important political role as a focus for grassroots agri-food organisations, such as La Via Campesina, in their attempts to contest the social injustices, health impacts and ecological damage resulting from the increasing global dominance of corporate/industrial agriculture. While not seeking to detract from the successes of such movements, there remain ethical, political and ecological concerns about just how the ‘sovereignty’ in food sovereignty is to be interpreted and what, if any, its relation to previous histories, definitions and applications of political sovereignty might be. Sovereignty's role, for example, in settler colonialism and environmental destruction is rarely addressed in the food sovereignty literature, with advocates focusing instead on its definitional malleability and contemporary political utility. Yet critical appropriations of Schmitt's infamous definition of sovereignty help to specify its colonial, anti-political and anti-ecological modus operandi, and make clear certain dangers inherent in uncritically adopting the term.

Environmentalists often recount tales of recent extinctions in the form of an allegory of human moral failings. But such allegories install an instrumental relation to the past’s inhabitants, using them to carry moralistic messages. Taking the passenger pigeon as a case in point, I argue for a different, ethical relation to the past’s inhabitants that conserves something of the wonder and “strangeness of the Other.” What Walter Benjamin refers to as the “redemptive moment” sparks a recognition of the Other that allows us to engage in heartfelt mourning for them, rather than falling into the repetitive self-absorption characteristic of Freudian melancholy. This redemptive moment changes forever our relations to the world around us.