Gabriele De Anna

Science increasingly deals with human behavior: biology, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, evolutionary theory, and ethology all bring new insights into our actions and uncover new facts about our agency. However, what is the philosophical significance of their findings? The answer to this question varies according to one's background philosophical views. On the one hand, the dominant empiricist view contends that the sciences can in principle tell us everything there is to know about human agency. On the other hand, there are other non-empiricist views - such as Kantian or Aristotelian perspectives - which hold that although science can contribute to our understanding of agency, agency itself cannot be reduced to mere scientific facts. This collection of original essays brings together a number of experts from different philosophical fields (history of philosophy, philosophy of action, ethics, and philosophy of science) to discuss how recent scientific developments about human behavior may be interpreted by, and may be relevant for, non-empiricist conceptions of agency. Contributors share the project of reconciling the scientific and the manifest images of the world in order to reach a stereoscopic vision of reality, with the conviction that philosophy is an attempt to establish coherence among our beliefs, while taking, at least prima facie, all the aspects of our experience at face value.

How can the discoveries made in the biological sciences play a role in a discussion on the foundation of ethics? This book responds to this question by examining how evolutionism can explain and justify the existence of ethical normativity and the emergence of particular moral systems. Written by a team of philosophers and scientists, the essays collected in this volume deal with the limits of evolutionary explanations, the justifications of ethics, and methodological issues concerning evolutionary accounts of ethics, among other topics. They offer deep insights into the origin and purpose of human moral capacities and of moral systems.

“How should authority relate to common sense, in making the judgements that its functioning requires?” This essay tries to address this question. Firstly, it attempts at clarifying three key concepts which are deployed in the question: the concepts of authority, common sense, and judgement. Subsequently, it claims that the elucidation of those concepts suggests that we need to settle two preliminary issues, to begin with: a. given what authority is, what roles should formal logic and other sciences have in the rational procedures which authority uses to make its judgements? b. In what sense can a suitable notion of common sense be common? Finally, the essay suggests, as an answer to the initial question, the view that common sense is a common ground of experiences and beliefs that all human beings can share, and that authority, in order to maintain its role, can make judgements based on scientific theories which are inaccessible to people subject to that authority, only to the extent that those theories are consistent with common sense.

In this paper, the ontological, terminological, epistemological, and ethical aspects of omission are considered in a coherent and balanced framework, based on the idea that there are omissions which are actions and omissions which are non-actions. In particular, we suggest that the approach to causation which best deals with omission is Mackie's INUS conditional proposal. We argue that omissions are determined partly by the ontological conditional structure of reality, and partly by the interests, beliefs, and values of observers. The final upshot is that moral judgments involved in cases of omissions cannot be grounded on, but are the ground for judgments about what INUS conditions count as omissions.