David Brink

Abstractabstract:This essay explores different conceptions of freedom in Kant, Green, and their critics. Kant introduces three kinds of freedom—negative freedom, positive freedom or autonomy, and transcendental freedom. Sidgwick objects that Kant's conception of positive freedom is unable to explain how someone might be free and responsible for the wrong choices. Though Green rejects transcendental freedom, he thinks Kant's conception of practical freedom can be defended by identifying it with the capacity to be determined by practical reason. Green identifies his own tripartite conception of freedom—juridical freedom, moral freedom, and real freedom. He thinks that these are stages in the perfection of freedom. Green's tripartite conception provides a principled reply to Berlin's doubts about positive freedom, explains Kant's claims that respect and esteem are fitting attitudes toward different aspects of freedom, and supports Schiller's criticisms of Kantian freedom and virtue. Green's conception of freedom defends the best elements of the Kantian perspective while addressing legitimate worries. In doing so, it unifies different aspects of freedom in a way that is grounded in moral personality or rational nature.

David Brink presents a study of T. H. Green's classic Prolegomena to Ethics and its role in his philosophical thought. Green is one of the two most important figures in the British idealist tradition, and his political writings and activities had a profound influence on the development of Liberal politics in Britain. The Prolegomena is his major philosophical work. It begins with his idealist attack on empiricist metaphysics and epistemology and develops a perfectionist ethical theory that aims to bring together the best elements in the ancient and modern traditions, and that provides the moral foundations for Green's own distinctive brand of liberalism. Brink aims to restore the Prolegomena to its rightful place in the history of philosophy by providing a prolegomenon to the Prolegomena - one that situates the work in its intellectual context, sympathetically but critically engages its main themes, and explains Green's enduring significance for the history of ethics and contemporary ethical theory. Brink examines Green's life and work, his idealist attack on empiricism, his conception of agency, his perfectionist ethics of self-realization, the connections he draws between perfectionism and the common good, his conception of the differences between perfectionism and utilitarianism, and the connections between his perfectionism and his defense of a new form of political liberalism. Because Green develops his own views out of an examination of other traditions in the history of ethics, a fair assessment of Green's own contributions must compare his claims with the traditions that he examines and sometimes criticizes. Brink's study examines Green's relation to Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Butler, Mill, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, and Sidgwick, and concludes by examining Green's legacy for ethical theory. Perfectionism and the Common Good will be of substantial interest to students and scholars of the history of ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy.

Mill's conception of justice involves honoring individual rights. Our most important rights are to basic liberties, rather than liberty per se, and to conditions essential for preserving equality of opportunity. He defends these liberal rights by appeal to their role in realizing our capacities for self‐governance, which are constitutive of our nature as progressive beings. Mill does not recognize nonderivative natural rights; he thinks rights have a utilitarian foundation. But he recognizes both direct and indirect forms of reconciling utility and rights. Though his indirect reconciliation is potentially problematic, his direct reconciliation is more promising.

I defend moral realism against various metaphysical and epistemological objections and develop a utilitarian specification of moral realism. ;Chapter 1. Moral realism is the claim that there are moral facts whose existence and nature are independent of our evidence for them. Moral realism derives appeal from the plausibility of realism about other disciplines and from the way we deliberate in moral matters. ;Chapter 2. Moral realism is not undermined by general epistemological objections. Realists can and should degend a coherentist epistemology. ;Chapter 3. Moral realism in not undermined by special epistemological objections. Neither the role of considered moral beliefs nor that of theories of the person in the justification of moral theories undermines moral realism. ;Chapter 4. Moral realism is not undermined by the existence of an is/ought gap. Even if there is an is/ought gap, consideration of analogous is/is gaps demonstrates that there can be moral facts and properties and that there can be evidential relations between moral and nonmoral beliefs. ;Chapter 5. Moral realism is neither metaphysically nor epistemologically queer. Moral facts and properties can be constituted by and so supervene upon facts and properties in other disciplines . Moral facts fulfill whatever explanatory obligation an a posteriori defense of moral realism imposes, and genuine moral disputes are resolvable in principle upon the basis of coherentist reasoning. ;Chapter 6. Although the defense of moral realism in chapters 1 through 5 requires no one moral theory, I develop a kind of utilitarian moral theory. This illustrates the kind of specific metaphysical and epistemological commitments which substatntive moral theories bring. Moreover, this utilitarian theory is plausible. The standard objections to utilitarianism fail to undermine this version of utilitarianism. This version of utilitarianism may not be uniquely reasonable, but it provides a plausible program for a realist view of ethics

Skorupski's collection of essays on Mill's philosophical thought is a valuable addition to Cambridge University Press's free series of companions to major figures in the history of philosophy. Volumes within the series contain specially commissioned essays by leading interpreters of figures within the history of philosophy that aim to provide a systematic account of that philosopher's commitments that is accessible to undergraduates and nonspecialists, serves as a useful interpretive guide to more advanced students and specialists, and explains the ongoing relevance of a figure's commitments to contemporary philosophical debates. It is not easy to achieve all three simultaneously. Skorupski's companion to Mill, however, does an admirable job of balancing the level of sophistication needed to satisfy specialists with the accessibility required by nonspecialists; nonspecialists will fmd the essays intellectually demanding, but not inaccessible, and specialists will usually find familiar issues put in new perspective. Whereas only a few of the essays explicitly forge connections between Mill's views and contemporary debates, all of them demonstrate an interpretive sensibility that is well informed by contemporary philosophical issues and positions.

Fifteen leading philosophers explore a set of themes from the pioneering work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin, in ancient philosophy but also in later periods and in systematic philosophy. The contributors discuss knowledge, rhetoric, freedom and practical reason, virtue and the good life, ethics and politics in Plato and Aristotle and beyond. The editors offer an introduction charting the scholarly contributions of Fine and Irwin and assessing their individual and joint impact, together with a complete bibliography of their writings.