Alan H. Goldman

This books examines the fundamental values and principles of conduct in the professions, focusing specifically on four areas: law, politics, medicine and business. One central question unifies its inquiry into the different professions: should the principles for judging the actions of professionals be the same as those used to judge private individuals, or do these professions require special moral principles to guide their conduct. The author considers arguments deriving from the underlying institutional goals of each profession in turn.

In a well known collection of essays, Martha Nussbaum has argued that novels are indispensable in teaching and learning ethics in the right way.1 A large part of such learning consists in developing the capacity to perceive and respond to complex, nuanced situations having numerous morally relevant features deriving from particular relationships and past commitments that combine these context sensitive features in unique and unpredictable ways. Careful attention to detailed, intricate stories with finely sketched characters develops such capacity far better than does reading analytical philosophy papers. Only such narratives capture the particularity and complexity of morally charged contexts with their myriad of ..

As a preliminary to the justification of equal opportunity, we require a few words on the concept. An opportunity is a chance to attain some goal or obtain some benefit. More precisely, it is the lack of some obstacle or obstacles to the attainment of some goal(s) or benefit(s). Opportunities are equal in some specified or understood sense when persons face roughly the same obstacles or obstacles of roughly the same difficulty of some specified or understood sort. In different contexts we might have different sorts of benefits or obstacles in mind. But in the current social context, and in the context of this discussion, we refer to educational and occupational opportunities, chances to attain the benefits of higher education and of socially and economically desirable positions, benefits assumed to be desired by many or most individuals, other things being equal. And we generally divide obstacles into two broad classes: those imposed by the social system or by other persons in the society, for example, the hardships of life in the lower economic classes or barriers from prejudices based on race, sex, or ethnic background; and those imposed by natural disabilities, for example, low intelligence or lack of talents.The initial question is whether a moral society is obligated to create equality in opportunities in the senses just defined. I shall assume here initially that there is some such obligation on the part of society or the state, although I shall specify its nature and limits more precisely below. With the exception of certain libertarians, almost everyone, liberal and conservative alike, agrees in this assumption.

While objective values need not be intrinsically motivating, need not actually motivate us, they would determine what we ought to pursue and protect. They would provide reasons for actions. Objective values would come in degrees, and more objective value would provide stronger reasons. It follows that, if objective value exists, we ought to maximize it in the world. But virtually no one acts with that goal in mind. Furthermore, objective value would exist independently of our subjective valuings. But we have no way of measuring amounts of such values independently of the ways we value objects. While a subjectivist can account for mistaken values, a fully impersonal viewpoint, from which objective values would appear, seems instead to cause all values to disappear. Nor does the moral point of view, which requires more impartiality than agents usually exhibit, reveal fully objective values. The paper closes with an examination of the most widely endorsed candidates for states having positive and negative objective values: pleasures and pains. It concludes again that, once we adjust for worthiness of the object and desert of the subject for such states, there is no way to measure their supposed objective value.

Criteria for a successful theory of punishment include first, that it specify a reasonable limit to punishments in particular cases, and second, that it allow benefits to outweigh costs in a penal institution.It is argued that traditional utilitarian and retributive theories fail to satisfy both criteria, and that they cannot be coherently combined so as to do so. Retributivism specifies a reasonable limit in its demand that punishment equal crime, but this limit fails to allow benefits to outweigh costs of punishing. Utilitarians demand the latter but cannot guarantee the former. Combinations continue to violate one requirement or the other.

This paper defends strong internalism about reasons, the view that reasons must relate to pre-existing motivational states, from several kinds of counterexamples, supposed desire independent reasons, that have been proposed. A central distinction drawn is that between there being a reason and an agent's having a reason. For an agent to have an F reason, she must be F-minded. Reasons, as what motivate us, are states of affairs and not themselves desires or motivational states, but they must connect to existing motivational states. It has been claimed that rationality itself requires us to recognize certain reasons independent of our desires, that we acquire new desires by learning what is valuable, by acquiring desire-independent reasons to pursue certain values. It is claimed also that prudential and moral reasons are desire independent. By offering an account of rationality as coherence, by appealing to broader concerns as opposed to specific desires, and by appealing to the distinction noted above, the paper exposes weaknesses in recent arguments for desire independent reasons by Millgram, Smith, Korsgaard, and Searle. the reasons they propose can be interpreted as internal (not desire independent) or dismissed as nonexistent.

Peter Kivy and Noël Carroll advocate a narrow view of aesthetic experience according to which it consists mainly in attention to formal properties. Excluded are cognitive and moral properties. I defend the broader view that includes the latter properties. I argue first that cognition and moral assessment can be inseparable in experience from grasp of form and expressiveness. Second, Kivy and Carroll must extend the notion of form itself beyond ordinary usage to accommodate acknowledged aesthetic experience. Third, the broad view has a more impressive historical lineage than the narrow view. Fourth, aesthetic experience is appreciation of aesthetic value, and the latter is more plausibly analyzed in a broad way

The idea that a just political system must ignore or nullify socially caused initial advantages in competing for positions and other social benefits is as old as political philosophy itself. Plato called for social mobility among his classes so that all could gravitate toward the classes for which their temperaments naturally suited them. The idea that the system must take positive steps to correct for these differences among individuals is likewise as old as the concept of public education, the supposed great equalizer. But the claim that society must correct also for natural differences among individuals – differences in intelligence, talents, beauty, and physical prowess – is far more recent, having been articulated most forcefully by Rawls. The reasoning underlying this further step toward a more radical notion of equal opportunity appeals to the fact that natural differences are equally arbitrary from a moral point of view as a basis for differential rewards as are socially caused differences. A person no more deserves to be born smart than rich. Why then should the former but not the latter be allowed to influence future benefits and rewards? A negative answer, however, creates a tension within a liberal theory of justice between the demand to nullify natural differences, or to use them to the benefit of those least well endowed, and the demand to respect distinct individuals that supposedly grounds such a theory.