Christopher Gowans

The purpose of this paper is to establish that, For an important class of moral judgments, The claim that there are moral dilemmas is false. The judgments are the judgments an agent committed to morality makes as the conclusion of deliberation about what, All things considered, He or she morally ought to do in some situation. The argument is that these judgments are prescriptive, In the sense of implying an intention to act, And that it is implausible to think there are dilemmas involving such prescriptive judgments. Some of the import of this argument is shown in the fact that it supports a common objection to moral dilemmas, That they are incompatible with the principles of "agglomeration" and "'ought' implies can'." for these principles are plausible from a prescriptivist standpoint. At the end of the paper, It is suggested that there is another class of moral judgments, Nonprescriptive in their use, Concerning which there remains a substantial issue about moral dilemmas.

Medical analogies are commonly invoked in both Indian Buddhist dharma and Hellenistic philosophy. In the Pāli Canon, nirvana (or, in Pāli,nibbāna) is depicted as a form of health, and the Buddha is portrayed as a doctor who helps us attain it. Much later in the tradition, Śāntideva described the Buddha’s teaching as ‘the sole medicine for the ailments of the world, the mine of all success and happiness.’ Cicero expressed the view of many Hellenistic philosophers when he said that philosophy is ‘a medical science for the mind.’ He thought we should ‘hand ourselves over to philosophy, and let ourselves be healed.’ ‘For as long as these ills [of the mind] remain,’ he wrote, ‘we cannot attain to happiness.’ There are many different forms of medical analogy in these two traditions, but the most general form may be stated as follows: just as medicine cures bodily diseases and brings about physical health, so Buddhist dharma or Hellenistic philosophy cures mental diseases and brings about psychological health—where psychological health is understood as the highest form of happiness or well-being. Insofar as Buddhist dharma involves philosophy, as it does, both renditions of the analogy may be said to declare that philosophy cures mental diseases and brings about psychological health. This feature of the analogy—philosophy as analogous to medical treatment—has attracted considerable attention.