Simon Blackburn

From political scandals at the highest levels to inflated repair bills at the local garage, we are seemingly surrounded with unethical behavior, so why should we behave any differently? Why should we go through life anchored down by rules no one else seems to follow? Writing with wit and elegance, Simon Blackburn tackles such questions in this lively look at ethics, highlighting the complications and doubts and troubling issues that spring from the very simple question of how we ought to live. Blackburn dissects many common reasons why we are skeptical about ethics. Drawing on all-too-familiar examples from history, politics, religion and everyday personal experience, he shows how cynicism and self-consciousness can paralyze us into considering ethics a hopeless pursuit. But ethics is neither futile nor irrelevant, he assures us, but an intimate part of the nitty gritty issues of living--of birth, death, happiness, desire, freedom, pleasure, justice. Indeed, from moral dilemmas about abortion and euthanasia, to our obsession with personal rights, to our longing for a sense of meaning in life, our everyday struggles are rife with ethical issues, whether we notice it or not. Blackburn distills the arguments of Hume, Kant and Aristotle down to their essences, to underscore the timeless relevance of our voice of conscience, the pitfalls of complacency, and our concerns about truth, knowledge and human progress. Blackburn's rare combination of depth, rigor and sparkling prose, and his distinguished ranking among contemporary philosophers, mark Being Good as an important statement on our current disenchantment with ethics. It challenges us to take a more thoughtful reading of our ethical climate and to ponder more carefully our own standards of behavior.

Dreier’s sympathy with expressivism is welcome, and yet he comes upon an ‘uncomfortable surprise’, in a circularity or regress that he detects in my attempt to place ethical commitments in a natural world. The circularity is that the expressivist analysis of what is going on, when we invoke norms, identifies particular states of mind: valuings, or acceptance of norms, or complexes of attitude. But states of mind are themselves normatively tainted. Hence: ‘the kernel of expressivist analysis invokes normative concepts’.

Reasons have recently occupied the centre of the theory of value. Some writers, such as Tim Scanlonthink that they are not only central, but exhaust the topic, since everything important that we want to say about the good or the valuable, or the obligatory and the required, can be phrased in terms of reason. An action is good to perform if the reasons in favour of performing it are stronger than those in favour of doing anything else or doing nothing. An action is the right thing to do, or ought to be performed, if the reasons for doing it are so strong that it would be unreasonable to do anything else. In this kind of way, reasons can occupy the whole territory of ethics. Furthermore, if people who choose badly are choosing against reason, then this might seem to be a special and grave defect. It would locate the kind of fault they are indulging. It would give us, the people of reason, a special lever with which to dislodge their vices. For reason seems to have a peculiar compulsion about it. It is sometimes tempting to be bad, but surely not tempting to be irrational or unreasonable. Being able to corral knaves and villains in a compound reserved for those who trespass against reason and rationality may therefore represent definite progress. Reasons have another feature that attracts many contemporary theorists. They are just there, anyway. They exist whether or not agents take any notice of them. They do not only exist in the light of mere desires or mere inclinations. They are ‘external’ not ‘internal’. They bear on us, even when through ignorance or wickedness we take no notice of them. They thus very conspicuously shine the lights of objectivity, and independence, and even necessity. By basking in this light, ethics is rescued from the slough of sentiment and preference, and regains the dignity denied to it by theorists such as Hobbes or Hume, Gibbard or myself. Whole books have therefore been written stressing the external nature of reasons. These lines of thought contain less than meets the eye, however, if talk of reason just turns out to be another idiom for talking about the good and the right..

Professor geach's article criticized our earlier "analysis" paper on pages 48-50 of "on denoting." he took us to have offered an account of russell's earlier use of the expression "denoting phrase" which he regarded as inadequate. But we had not done so: we were interested solely in the denoting phrases which are perplexing russell on those pages, And we repeat our view that the problem which russell had found arises as much for frege's theory of reference as for russell's own earlier theory. The extension of "denoting phrase" as used in "principles of mathematics" is irrelevant, As was geach's subsequent discussion of the problem we tried to identify