David Brink

This essay explores the adequacy of Sidgwick’s contrast between the egocentrism of ancient ethics and the impartiality of modern ethics by evaluating the resources of eudaimonists, especially Aristotle and the Stoics, to defend a cosmopolitan conception of the common good. Adapting ideas from Broad, we might contrast the _scope_ and _weight_ of ethical concern, distinguishing ethical conceptions that are parochial with respect to both scope and weight, conceptions that are cosmopolitan with respect to both scope and weight, and mixed conceptions that combine universal scope and variable weight. Aristotle’s conception of the common good appears doubly parochial. By contrast, the Stoic conception of the common good is purely cosmopolitan. But the Stoics have trouble providing a eudaimonist defense of their cosmopolitanism. However, Aristotelian eudaimonism has resources to justify a mixed conception. Mixed cosmopolitanism may be cosmopolitanism enough.

As discussed by John Locke, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid, prudence involves a special concern for the agent’s own personal good that she does not have for others. This should be a concern for the agent’s overall good that is temporally neutral and involves an equal concern for all parts of her life. In this way, prudence involves a combination of _agent relativity_ and _temporal neutrality_. This asymmetrical treatment of matters of interpersonal and intertemporal distribution might seem arbitrary. Henry Sidgwick raised this worry, and Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit have endorsed it as reflecting the instability of prudence and related doctrines such as egoism and the self-interest theory. However, Sidgwick thought that the worry was unanswerable only for skeptics about personal identity, such as David Hume. Sidgwick thought that one could defend prudence by appeal to realism about personal identity and a compensation principle. This is one way in which special concern and prudence presuppose personal identity. However, as Jennifer Whiting has argued, special concern displayed in positive affective regard for one’s future and personal planning and investment is arguably partly constitutive of personal identity, at least on a plausible psychological reductionist conception of personal identity. After explaining both conceptions of the relation between special concern and personal identity, the chapter concludes by exploring what might seem to be the paradoxical character of conjoining them, suggesting that there may be no explanatory priority between the concepts of special concern and personal identity.

Attempted wrongdoing is wrong and deserves censure and sanction, provided the agent was responsible for her attempt. One conception of attempts, incorporated in the criminal law, treats them as bivalent. The important question is at what point in an agent’s planning, preparation, and execution of an offense the attempt is completed. However, bivalence fails to recognize partially complete attempts and is unable to give a satisfying account of the criminal law defense of abandonment. This essay explores an alternative conception of attempts as historical and scalar. On this view, attempts involve the implementation of temporally extended decision trees that pass through many nodes and terminate in a last act. This view rejects bivalence, because at many points within the decision tree there is only a partially complete attempt, and it provides a more satisfying account of abandonment, precisely because it can recognize attempts that are partially complete.

This essay explores a conception of responsibility at work in moral and criminal responsibility. This conception draws on work in the compatibilist tradition that focuses on the choices of agents who are reasons-responsive and work in criminal jurisprudence that understands responsibility in terms of the choices of agents who have capacities for practical reason and whose situation affords them the fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This conception brings together the dimensions of normative competence and situational control, and normative competence is factored into cognitive and volitional capacities, which are treated as equally important to normative competence and responsibility. Normative competence and situational control can and should be understood as expressing a common concern that blame and punishment presuppose that the agent had a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This fair opportunity is the umbrella concept in the presented understanding of responsibility, one that explains its distinctive architecture.

David Brink presents a study of T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), a classic of British idealism. Green develops a perfectionist ethical theory that brings together the best elements in the ancient and modern traditions and that provides the moral foundations for Green's own influential brand of liberalism. Brink's book situates the Prolegomena in its intellectual context, examines its main themes, and explains Green's enduring significance for the history of ethics and contemporary ethical theory.

This essay explores different conceptions of freedom in Kant, Green, and their critics. Kant introduces three kinds of freedom—negative freedom, positive freedom or autonomy, and transcendental freedom. Sidgwick objects that Kant's conception of positive freedom is unable to explain how someone might be free and responsible for the wrong choices. Though Green rejects transcendental freedom, he thinks Kant's conception of practical freedom can be defended by identifying it with the capacity to be determined by practical reason. Green identifies his own tripartite conception of freedom—juridical freedom, moral freedom, and real freedom. He thinks that these are stages in the perfection of freedom. Green's tripartite conception provides a principled reply to Berlin's doubts about positive freedom, explains Kant's claims that respect and esteem are fitting attitudes toward different aspects of freedom, and supports Schiller's criticisms of Kantian freedom and virtue. Green's conception of freedom defends the best elements of the Kantian perspective while addressing legitimate worries. In doing so, it unifies different aspects of freedom in a way that is grounded in moral personality or rational nature.

Mill's conception of justice involves honoring individual rights. Our most important rights are to basic liberties, rather than liberty per se, and to conditions essential for preserving equality of opportunity. He defends these liberal rights by appeal to their role in realizing our capacities for self‐governance, which are constitutive of our nature as progressive beings. Mill does not recognize nonderivative natural rights; he thinks rights have a utilitarian foundation. But he recognizes both direct and indirect forms of reconciling utility and rights. Though his indirect reconciliation is potentially problematic, his direct reconciliation is more promising.

This volume collects David Lyons' well-known essays on Mill's moral theory and includes an introduction which relates the essays to prior and subsequent philosophical developments. Like the author's Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (Oxford, 1965), the essays apply analytical methods to issues in normative ethics. The first essay defends a refined version of the beneficiary theory of rights against H.L.A. Hart's important criticisms. The central set of essays develops new interpretations of Mill's moral theory with the aim of determining how far rights can be incorporated in a utilitarian framework. They Mill's analysis of moral concepts promises to accommodate the argumentative force of rights, and also provide a significant new reading of Mill's theory of liberty. The last essay argues that the promise of Mill's theory of justice cannot be fulfilled. Utilitarianism is unable to account for crucial features of moral rights, or even for the moral force of legal rights whose existence might be justified on utilitarian grounds

Perfectionism is an underexplored tradition, perhaps because of doubts about the grounds, content, and implications of perfectionist ideals. Aristotle, J.S. Mill, and T.H. Green are normative perfectionists, grounding perfectionist ideals in a normative conception of human nature involving personality or agency. This essay explores the prospects of normative perfectionism by examining Kant’s criticisms of the perfectionist tradition. First, Kant claims that the perfectionist can generate only hypothetical, not categorical, imperatives. But insofar as the normative perfectionist appeals to the normative category of personality or agency, rather than a biological category of humanity, it can represent perfectionist demands as categorical imperatives. Second, Kant accepts a moral asymmetry in which we aim at our own perfection but at the happiness, rather than the perfection, of others. However, the importance of autonomy in normative perfection explains why the perfectionist should recognize a self/other asymmetry. Indeed, when we see how the normative perfectionist can answer Kant’s criticisms while respecting Kant’s own claims about the connection between rational nature and moral requirements, we can see the basis for a normative perfectionist interpretation of Kant’s own ethical theory. Insofar as Kantians and normative perfectionists both base ethical demands on an appeal to rational nature, they face a common worry that the appeal to rational nature is empty or incomplete. Normative perfectionists have more and less concessive responses to this worry, providing perfectionist explanations of various apparently non-perfectionist goods. Even if we end up being pluralists about the good, perfectionist elements play an important role. Finally, because the normative perfectionist, like the Kantian, grounds its ideals and requirements in a conception of persons as rational agents, it provides a promising account of the rational authority of perfectionist demands. This comparison of normative perfectionist and Kantian essentials gives us reason to take the normative perfectionist tradition seriously.

Many commentators agree that the trend to try juveniles as adults fails to recognize that there should be an asymmetry in our treatment of juvenile and adult crime such that all else being equal juvenile crime deserves less punishment than does adult crime. This essay explores different rationales for this asymmetry. A political rationale claims that the disenfranchisement of juveniles compromises the state’s democratic authority to punish juveniles in the same way it is permitted to punish adults. A developmental rationale claims that juveniles deserve to be punished less than adults because their immaturity makes them less responsible and, hence, less culpable for their wrongdoing. Gideon Yaffe’s new book The Age of Culpability expresses skepticism about the developmental rationale and defends a version of the political rationale. By contrast, this essay finds important limits to the political rationale and defends a qualified version of the developmental rationale. In the process, it argues against treating the asymmetry between juvenile and adult crime as a categorical one.

Skorupski's collection of essays on Mill's philosophical thought is a valuable addition to Cambridge University Press's free series of companions to major figures in the history of philosophy. Volumes within the series contain specially commissioned essays by leading interpreters of figures within the history of philosophy that aim to provide a systematic account of that philosopher's commitments that is accessible to undergraduates and nonspecialists, serves as a useful interpretive guide to more advanced students and specialists, and explains the ongoing relevance of a figure's commitments to contemporary philosophical debates. It is not easy to achieve all three simultaneously. Skorupski's companion to Mill, however, does an admirable job of balancing the level of sophistication needed to satisfy specialists with the accessibility required by nonspecialists; nonspecialists will fmd the essays intellectually demanding, but not inaccessible, and specialists will usually find familiar issues put in new perspective. Whereas only a few of the essays explicitly forge connections between Mill's views and contemporary debates, all of them demonstrate an interpretive sensibility that is well informed by contemporary philosophical issues and positions.

Fifteen leading philosophers explore a set of themes from the pioneering work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin, in ancient philosophy but also in later periods and in systematic philosophy. The contributors discuss knowledge, rhetoric, freedom and practical reason, virtue and the good life, ethics and politics in Plato and Aristotle and beyond. The editors offer an introduction charting the scholarly contributions of Fine and Irwin and assessing their individual and joint impact, together with a complete bibliography of their writings.

Culpability is not a unitary concept within the criminal law, and it is important to distinguish different culpability concepts and the work they do. Narrow culpability is an ingredient in wrongdoing itself, describing the agent’s elemental mens rea. Broad culpability is the responsibility condition that makes wrongdoing blameworthy and without which wrongdoing is excused. Inclusive culpability is the combination of wrongdoing and responsibility or broad culpability that functions as the retributivist desert basis for punishment. Each of these kinds of culpability plays an important role in a unified retributive framework for the criminal law. Moreover, the distinction between narrow and broad culpability has significance for understanding and assessing the distinction between attributability and accountability and the nature and permissibility of strict liability crimes.