Piers Rawling

McNaughton and Rawling present a view on which practical reasons are facts, such as the fact that the rubbish bin is full. This is a non-normative fact, but it is a reason for you to do something, namely take the rubbish out. They see rationality as a matter of consistency. And they see duty as neither purely a matter of rationality nor of practical reason: on the one hand, the rational sociopath is immoral; but, on the other, morality does not require that we always act on the weightiest moral reasons. McNaughton and Rawling criticize various forms of internalism, including Williams’s, and they tentatively propose a view of duty that is neither purely subjective in Prichard’s sense, nor purely objective.

In recent years the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons has been taken by many to play a key role in distinguishing deontology from consequentialism. It is central to all universalist consequentialist theories that value is determined impersonally; the real value of any state of affairs does not depend on the point of view of the agent. No reference, therefore, to the agent or to his or her position in the world need enter into a consequentialist understanding of what makes an action right or wrong or morally permissible. Consequentialism thus provides an agent-neutral account of both the right and the good.

Any adequate account of the distinction between consequentialist and deontological moral systems must take account of the central place given to constraints in the latter. Constraints place limits on what each of us may do in the pursuit of any goal, including the maximisation of the good. There is some debate, however, both over how constraints are to be characterised, and over the rationale for their inclusion in a moral system. Some authors view constraints as agent-relative: a constraint supplies an agent with an agent-relative reason to refrain from acting in the prohibited manner. A reason is agent-relative if it contains an ineliminable back-reference to the agent. On this characterisation, it is natural to suppose that constraints arise because of an agent’s concern with her own agency. There is perhaps, however, an alternative to this agent-focussed rationale: constraints, although characterised in terms of agent-relative reasons, might be best explained and defended via considerations of the potential victim of wrongdoing—yielding a victim- or patient-focussed rationale. Or, perhaps, constraints are not only best defended by a victim-focussed rationale; they are also best characterised by reference to the potential victim. In what follows, we advocate an agent-relative characterisation of, and an agent-focussed rationale for, constraints. We begin by developing a rigorous account of agent-focussed agent-relativity, before turning to consider patient-based approaches.

Rationality has long been a central topic in philosophy, crossing standard divisions and categories. It continues to attract much attention in published research and teaching by philosophers as well as scholars in other disciplines, including economics, psychology, and law. The Oxford Handbook of Rationality is an indispensable reference to the current state of play in this vital and interdisciplinary area of study. Twenty-two newly commissioned chapters by a roster of distinguished philosophers provide an overview of the prominent views on rationality, with each author also developing a unique and distinctive argument.

According to Newton, the goals of natural philosophy comprise quantitative generalizations and causal knowledge, the latter being paramount. Quantitative generalizations are sometimes explanatory, in psychology as elsewhere . However, in psychology, they are not explanatory when the human subject is considered qua bearer of psychological states , but only when she is considered qua physical system. In the former case quantitative generalizations are, rather, to be causally explained. In this sense, psychology may be closer to the Newtonian methodological mark than contemporary physics

Scanlon suggests a buck-passing account of goodness. To say that something is good is not to give a reason to, say, favour it; rather it is to say that there are such reasons. When it comes to wrongness, however, Scanlon rejects a buck-passing account: to say that j ing is wrong is, on his view, to give a sufficient moral reason not to j. Philip Stratton-Lake 2003 argues that Scanlon can evade a redundancy objection against his (Scanlon’s) view of wrongness by adopting a buck-passing account of wrongness. We argue that this manoeuvre does not succeed. Scanlon’s notion of wrongness rests on the idea of a reasonably rejectable principle. As Stratton-Lake points out, Scanlon offers two accounts, one in terms of permission, the other in terms of proscription. The permission account is tricky to formulate. Scanlon’s account (quoted in Stratton-Lake 2003: 71) might suggest any of the following four formulations (where the principles in question are principles ‘governing how one may act’ (Scanlon..

The context-free weak ordering principle is viewed by many as a cornerstone of rational choice theory. McClennen, for example, claims that this principle is one of a pair on which '[t]he theory of rational choice and preference, as it has been developed in the past few decades by economists and decision theorists, rests', and Sen characterizes a version of context freedom as ‘a very basic requirement of rational choice’. But this principle is certainly not uncontroversial: there are examples of principle is certainly not apper irrational

significant role for accomplishment thereby admits a ‘Trojan Horse’ (267).1 To abandon hedonism in favour of a conception of well-being that incorporates achievement is to take the first step down a slippery slope toward the collapse of the other two pillars of utilitarian morality: welfarism and consequentialism. We shall argue that Crisp’s arguments do not support these conclusions. We begin with welfarism. Crisp defines it thus: ‘Well-being is the only value. Everything good must be good for some being or beings’ (264). The first part of this definition is potentially misleading, since it makes it sound as if welfarism adopts a monistic account of value, in which well-being is the only good thing. But well-being, as Crisp notes, when discussing hedonism, is best understood as consisting in a balance of good things over bad in one’s life. So understood, welfarism is silent on the issue of what things are good; it places a structural restriction on what kinds of things can be good: they must be things that are good for beings. It is a separate task to supply the content to fit this structure by determining what things are good, and welfarists differ in their answers: hedonists traditionally assert that pleasure alone is good; others add further items such as knowledge and virtue. Why is the thought that a person’s well-being depends importantly on what they accomplish a threat to welfarism? An accomplishment is judged both by its outcome or product and by the manner of the performance itself. But an activity or outcome is only an achievement if it is worthwhile, and whether it is worthwhile will depend on whether it exhibits what Crisp asserts to be ‘non-welfarist values’ (266), such as beauty, grace, importance, or style - excellences which welfarism, in Crisp’s view, cannot accommodate because they cannot be ‘cashed out in welfarist terms’, or ‘reduced to the value of well-being’ (266). Here Crisp rests his case, but it is worth trying to get clearer about the difficulties in order to see if the welfarist can meet them..

The two envelopes problem has generated a significant number of publications (I have benefitted from reading many of them, only some of which I cite; see the epilogue for a historical note). Part of my purpose here is to provide a review of previous results (with somewhat simpler demonstrations). In addition, I hope to clear up what I see as some misconceptions concerning the problem. Within a countably additive probability framework, the problem illustrates a breakdown of dominance with respect to infinite partitions in circumstances of infinite expected utility. Within a probability framework that is only finitely additive, there are failures of dominance with respect to infinite partitions in circumstances of bounded utility with finitely many consequences (see the epilogue)