Sophie Grace Chappell

I argue that one central resource for ethical thinking, seriously under-explored in contemporary anglophone philosophy, is moral phenomenology, the exploration of the texture and quality of moral experience. Perhaps a barrier that has prevented people from using this resource is that it’s hard to talk about experience. But such knowledge can be communicated, e.g. by poetry and drama. In having such experiences, either in real life or at second-hand through art, we can gain moral knowledge, rather as Mary the colour scientist can gain knowledge of colours; such knowledge is a real cognitive gain, but it is not knowledge of the propositional kind that philosophers have usually focused on.

I will discuss some familiar problems in the philosophy of religion which arise for theistic belief. I will argue that it may be most worthwhile to focus on a particular sort of theistic belief, capital-T ’Theism’, central to which is a particular conception both of God and of the believer’s relation to God. At the heart of ’Theism’ in this sense is the continuing experience of God, both individual and collective. Compared with the evidence for Theistic belief that is provided by this experiential contact with God, most of the usually considered arguments for and against God’s existence are secondary

An option range is a set of alternative actions available to an agent at a given time. I ask how a moral theory’s account of option ranges relates to its recommendations about deliberative procedure (DP) and criterion of rightness (CR). I apply this question to Act Consequentialism (AC), which tells us, at any time, to perform the action with the best consequences in our option range then. If anyone can employ this command as a DP, or assess (direct or indirect) compliance with it as a CR, someone must be able to tell which actions fit this description. Since the denseness of possibilia entails that any option range is indefinitely large, no one can do this. So no one can know that any option has ever emerged from any range as the best option in that range. However we come to know that a given option is right, we never come to know it in AC’s way. It is often observed that AC cannot give us a DP. AC cannot give us a CR either, unless we are omniscient. So Act Consequentialism is useless

Wowbagger has a problem: how to make an infinitely long life meaningful. His answer to this problem is studiedly perverse. Presumably, part of his reason for taking on the project he does is that everyone likes a challenge—and the project of insulting everyone in the universe, in alphabetical order, is really challenging even if you’re immortal. Still, his response to the question ‘How shall I make my life meaningful?’ seems to be not so much an attempt to answer it as to stick two fingers up at it. Can anyone find anything less perverse to say about that question? If the late and lamented Douglas Adams is to be believed, some beings can. The non-accidental immortals, the ‘serene bastards’ of Wowbagger’s envy, have no trouble coping with everlasting life. Adams does not tell us how they manage to cope; which is a pity, because many contemporary philosophers, notably Bernard Williams and Adrian Moore, see a conceptual problem here. They cannot conceive how anyone could cope with immortality, even in the rather minimal sense of ‘cope’ that Wowbagger manages. This paper argues that their arguments fail. An eternal life, I argue, can be meaningful, and under the right circumstances, will be more meaningful than any finite life could be, because free from a threat to meaningfulness that cannot be removed from any finite life. We therefore have reason to want eternal life lived under these circumstances

The paper outlines and explores a possible strategy for defending both the action/omission distinction (AOD) and the principle of double effect (PDE). The strategy is to argue that there are degrees of actionhood, and that we are in general less responsible for what has a lower degree of actionhood, because of that lower degree. Moreover, what we omit generally has a lower degree of actionhood than what we actively do, and what we do under known-but-not-intended descriptions generally has a lower degree of actionhood than what we do under known-and-intended descriptions. Therefore, we are in general less responsible for what we omit than for what we do—which is just what AOD says. And we are in general less responsible for what we do under known-but-not-intended descriptions than for what we do under known-and-intended descriptions—which is just what PDE says.