Jonathan Dancy

This new introduction to the main themes of Berkeley's philosophy assumes no previous knowlege of philosophy and will be accessible to first-year students and to the interested general reader. It also offers and defends its own interpretation of Berkeley' position. Jonathan Dancy argues that we understand Berkeley's idealism best if we take seriously his claim that realism (the view that material things have an existence independent of the mind) derives from a mistaken use of abstraction. Stress is laid on Berkelye's determination to use idealism to bring his God as close to us as possible. Instances of this are his claims that the world we live in is a collection of ideas in God's mind, and that natural events are divine utterances which science is the attempts to interpret. Dancy also discusses Berkelye's attack on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and his views on perception and knowledge. There is an account of his theory of the mind and of the nature of human action, and a final chapter contrasts the interpretation offered here with others. Students who have read this book will be well equipped to understand and assess the frequent references to Berkeley in current literature.

Lecture 13 discusses the problem of freedom. Can there be a free event? Strawson supposes this is not logically impossible even though the truth of ‘every event is caused’ is analytic. The notion of causal impossibility is a pseudo-notion. There is only the logical impossibility that a causal law should be true despite a contrary instance. Strawson proposes that the sense of moral responsibility is the reflective consciousness of the experience of obligation, guilt, and remorse, coupled with the awareness in ourselves of motives whose conflict issues in experiences of obligation, guilt, and remorse.

Lecture 12 addresses the nature of moral judgements. Actual experience of the specifically moral emotions is the source of all our moral categories. Strawson discusses the ideal of a fully developed moral sensibility, the analogy between ‘water tends to run downhill’ and ‘Promise-keeping tends to be right’. Strawson discusses the idea that ideal moral judgements are analogous to the statements of pure/applied science. It is argued that general moral judgements are not expressions of emotion, but can be analysed in terms of an ideal type of feeling. They all admit of exceptions.

Lecture 11 addresses the question of how we come to have the ideas expressed by ‘good’, ‘right’, and so on. They are defined in terms of the fundamental moral experiences of guilt, approval, and disapproval. Strawson distinguishes between real and verbal knowledge: real knowledge requires experience of obligation, guilt, approval, disapproval. General moral knowledge is based on experience; but there are always exceptions to moral generalisations, except to the rule that what I feel morally obliged to do is right. General moral propositions should be of the form: ‘acts of this type tend as such to be right/wrong’. Strawson discusses Broad on the materially right and the formally right. Objections to moral intuitionism are presented: (1) the absence of introspective evidence, (2) fallibility argument, (3) connection between moral concepts, (4) motivation argument, (5) subjective duty argument, (6) necessary connexion, (7) exceptions and tendencies to be right.

Lecture 9 addresses the selfish will vs the loving will: can morality be grounded in this conflict? Strawson discusses a number of topics: the unselfish will as unified and consistent; Kant on respect for law contrasted with Caritas as a form of desire; the antithesis between Caritas and selfish desires; the experience of obligation; love as a motive contrasted with Kantian respect for the law; reason and principle as twin pillars of morality; and the sense of obligation, which is the product of conflict between Caritas and egocentric desires, as the fundamental fact of morality.

Lecture 10 asks: do our actual moral convictions match the account of the origin of moral thought developed in the previous lectures? Strawson addresses concepts of the disinterested motive; the duties of one’s station; veracity; and the origin of conflicts of duty. Can there be a duty to oneself? Strawson argues not. Duties are addressed to humanity at large – making the ends of others one’s own ends. Similar questions arise about the good: do our convictions about value match the account? We see things as good because we feel we ought to pursue them. Strawson proposes that this solves the problem about the relation between value and duty. He distinguishes two senses of ‘good’: (1), a fundamental sense, in which the good is what we ought to strive for; (2) what I would feel obliged to strive for in a certain kind of situation. Other uses of ‘good’ as in, for example, ‘good action’ may be distinguished. Strawson ends by discussing Broad’s distinction between the materially right, the formally right, and the subjectively right.

Lecture 5 discusses the question: what is a motive? Motivation is a combination of belief and desire. A moral theory must say more about motivation. Start from the familiar antitheses good/bad and right/wrong. The desire to do the right, the rightness-desire, can occur with incompatible desires. If goodness is to be the ultimate ethical concept, it must include the idea of obligation as part of its meaning: if justice is good, we ought to be just. So both approaches require that the desire to do what one ought is part of ethical motivation.

Lecture 6 starts with a summary of results so far. Prominent among these is that the idea of ‘ought’ is present in the idea of the good as in that of the right. And there are two radically opposed types of motivation involved in ethics. The duty-motive (the desire to do what is right) and the goodness-motive (the desire to do what is good). Strawson discusses Kant on the desire to do what is right as such: if one’s motive is just that this is one’s duty, what sort of desire is that? Two questions arise: (1) How do we know what duty commands? (2) How is duty possible as a motive? Kant’s answer to (1) is that duty commands it if our reason for doing it is such that we could desire it to be a universal law of action for everyone. Respect for law is introduced as a new form of desire.

Lecture 4 discusses reasons as motives, and as always containing desires/emotions. What has morality to say about motives? The rightness of an act must be able to ‘enter into’ the agent’s motive for doing it. And the agent must conceive of ethical goodness as belonging only to things that are possible ends of voluntary actions. So, both goodness-theories and rightness-theories must make some assumptions about motives/desires. Strawson asks: what are the minimal assumptions about motives that are required of any ethical theory?

Can action be the conclusion of practical reasoning? This chapter shows how to answer yes to this question, but does so largely by replacing the question with a better question that has fewer dubious presuppositions. It shows how to understand theoretical reasoning in an entirely analogous way. It then turns to beat off the main principled objections to this account. The first of these is that only belief can be the conclusion of reasoning; the second is that reasoning can take us only to intention, and never to the action intended.

This paper builds on an earlier paper, ‘In Defence of Thick Concepts’, in which it was denied that instantiations of a thick concept invoke a single attitudinal response, and always the same one. The no-priority view is that neither property nor attitude is conceptually prior; they interpenetrate each other, because the property is that of being such as to merit the response, and the attitude is to the object as meriting that response. This present paper suggests that the no-priority view will not generalise so as to cover all cases. This present paper also express doubts about the earlier appeal to Aristotelian domains. Finally, Williams's distinction between world-guided and action-guiding in examined, and it is suggested that instances of thick concepts have an intrinsic practical relevance which needs no further explanation.

Some critics argue that while Kant’s view has trouble making sense of the notion of a moral reason, W. D. Ross’s view does not. In “The Importance of Moral Rules and Principles,” Tom Hill argues that for Kantians, particular facts are reasons because they are especially salient features that figure in a fuller possible rationale for or against an action. However, unless more is said about what makes some fact an especially salient feature of one’s circumstances, one will lose the distinction between roles played by reasons and roles played by other aspects of the “fuller rationale.” This chapter argues that even if more can be said about this matter, Ross’s theory remains inferior to standard readings of Kant. After explaining the troubles for Ross’s view, which concern his account of the relation between prima facie duties and duty proper, the chapter proceeds to consider how one might improve upon Ross.