Mark T. Nelson

Absolutism—the idea that some kinds of acts are absolutely wrong and must never be done—plays an important role in medical ethics. Nicholas Denyer has defended it from some influential consequentialist critics who have alleged that absolutism is committed to “agent-relative constraints” and therefore intolerably complex and messy. Denyer ingeniously argues that, if there are problems with agent-relative constraints, then they are problems for consequentialism, since it contains agent-relative constraints, too. I show that, despite its ingenuity, Denyer’s argument does not succeed. The defense of absolutism must move to other grounds.

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called the 'is/ought fallacy (IOF)'. Some philosophers conclude that the IOF is not a logical problem but an epistemological one, meaning that even if inferences like this one are logically valid, they cannot be used epistemologically to warrant anyone's real‐life moral beliefs. Arguments do not warrant their conclusions unless the premises of those arguments are themselves warranted, and in the real world, they say, no one would ever be warranted in believing premise. Charles Pigden argues for the illegitimacy of the move from is to ought, saying that we should understand David Hume as pointing to the conservativeness of logic. According to Pigden, logic is conservative in that “the conclusions of a valid inference are contained within the premises. You do not get out what you have not put in”.

“Only a God can save us.” So says Martin Heidegger in his pessimistic assessment of merely human philosophy’s ability to change the world. The thought is not unique to Heidegger: another thinker who arrived at a similar conclusion was Heidegger’s contemporary and sometime admirer, Carl Schmitt, in his idea of “political theology.” I take up Schmitt’s version of the idea and use it to examine the New Atheism, a relatively recent polemical critique of religion by an informal coalition of English-speaking scientists, philosophers, and writers. Taking Sam Har­ris’s book The End of Faith (2005) as my test case, I ask whether the New Atheism can instructively be read as a Schmittian “political theology”, not least because of its strongly anti-liberal implications for toleration of religious belief and practice. I close by posing the question of what sort of theory would deserve to be called an atheistic political theology and whether such a theory exists, or could exist.

What if human joy went on endlessly? Suppose, for example, that each human generation were followed by another, or that the Western religions are right when they teach that each human being lives eternally after death. If any such possibility is true in the actual world, then an agent might sometimes be so situated that more than one course of action would produce an infinite amount of utility. Deciding whether to have a child born this year rather than next is a situation wherein an agent may face several alternatives whose effects could well ramify endlessly on such suppositions, for the child born this year would be a different person—one who preferred different things, performed different actions, and had different descendants—from a child born next year. It has recently been suggested that traditional utilitarianism stumbles on such cases of infinite utility. Specifically, utilitarianism seems to require, for its application, that all experience of pleasure and pain cease at some time in the future or asymptotically approach zero.2 If neither of these conditions holds, then the utility produced by each of two alternative actions may turn out to be infinite, and utilitarianism thus loses its ability to discriminate morally between them.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's recent defense of moral skepticism raises the debate to a new level, but I argue that it is unsatisfactory because of problems with its assumption of global skepticism, with its use of the Skeptical Hypothesis Argument, and with its use of the idea of contrast classes and the correlative distinction between "everyday" justification and "philosophical" justification. I draw on Chisholm's treatment of the Problem of the Criterion to show that my claim that I know that, e.g., baby-torture is wrong, is no more question-begging than Sinnott-Armstrong's denial that I know this.

Bertrand Russell famously disparaged Thomas Aquinas as having ‘little of the true philosophic spirit’, because ‘he does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.’ Like many of Russell's pronouncements, this is breathtakingly supercilious and unfair. Still, even an enthusiastic admirer of Aquinas may worry that there is something in it, that there is something wrong with religious ‘commitments’ in philosophy. I examine Russell's objection by comparing standards of permissibility in epistemology with standards of permissibility in ethics, where these issues are better understood. I conclude that the epistemic standard behind Russell's criticism is no less contentious in epistemology than, say, direct utilitarianism is in ethics.

This article is not intended to state what I positively believe to be true, but to make a suggestion which I think it well-worth working out. The suggestion is not altogether unfamiliar, but it has certain implications that seem to have been so far overlooked, or at any rate have never been developed. I do not think that it is the duty of a philosopher to confine himself in his publications to working out theories of the truth of which he is convinced.… It is a part of a philosopher's work, as it is of a scientist's, to try out tentative hypotheses and examine their advantages and disadvantages

This paper is an attempt to bring some order to a classic debate over the mind/body problem. I formulate the dualist, identity, and eliminativist positions and then examine the disagreement between eliminativists and their critics. I show how the apparent impasse between eliminativists and non-eliminativists can be helpfully interpreted in the light of the higher-order debate over methodological versus substantive commitments in philosophy. I argue that non-eliminativist positions can be defended using Roderick Chisholm's defense of what he calls "particularism" in the problem of the criterion.

What do Ross’s The Right and the Good; Chisholm’s Theory of Knowledge; Kripke’s Naming and Necessity; and Audi’s The Architecture of Reason have in common? They all advance important philosophical positions, but not so much via analytic arguments as via formal schemas, distinctions, examples, and analogies. They use such formal schemas, etc, to describe the world so as to make some aspect of it manifest. That is, they simply try to ‘tell it like it is’. This ‘method of descriptive manifestation’ is less commonly recognized than it should be given its divergence from the self-image of analytic philosophy.

Is it possible to have moral knowledge? ‘Moral justification skeptics’ hold it is not, because moral beliefs cannot have the sort of epistemic justification necessary for knowledge. This skeptical stance can be summed up in a single, neat argument, which includes the premise that ‘Inductive arguments from non-moral premises to moral conclusions are not possible.’ Other premises in the argument may rejected, but only at some cost. It would be noteworthy, therefore, if ‘inductive inferentialism’ about morals were shown to be at least possible. Some philosophers may suppose that inductive moral arguments from non-moral premises cannot get off the ground, but I show that a perfectly legitimate inductive moral argument exists. This argument has non-moral premises and a moral conclusion, its premises are related to its conclusion in the right way, and it avoids some of the problems of other, better-known arguments from ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’.

Philosophical naturalism is a cluster of views and impulses typically taken to include atheism, physicalism, radical empiricism or naturalized epistemology, and some sort of relativism, subjectivism or nihilism about morality. I argue that a problem arises when the naturalist offers the argument from evil for atheism. Since the argument from evil is a moral argument, it cannot be effectively deployed by anyone who holds the denatured ethical theories that the naturalist typically holds. In the context of these naturalistic ethical theories, the argument from evil typically fails to provide good reason for either the naturalist or the theist to disbelieve in the God of theism. This does not prove that naturalism is false, or that the argument from evil is unsound, but rather that certain naturalists’ use of the argument has been misguided

The Clarke/Rowe version of the Cosmological Argument is sound only if the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is true, but many philosophers, including Rowe, think that there is not adequate evidence for the principle of sufficient reason. I argue that there may be indirect evidence for PSR on the grounds that if we do not accept it, we lose our best justification for an important principle of metaethics, namely, the Principle of Universalizability. To show this, I argue that all the other justifications of the Principle of Universalizability on offer, including Richard Hare's, are inadequate

According to the cosmological argument, there must be a self-existent being, because, if every being were a dependent being, we would lack an explanation of the fact that there are any dependent beings at all, rather than nothing. This argument faces an important, but little-noticed objection: If self-existent beings may exist, why may not also self-explanatory facts also exist? And if self-explanatory facts may exist, why may not the fact that there are any dependent beings be a self-explanatory fact? And if that fact is self-explanatory, why make recourse to self-existent beings? This line of questioning is surprisingly hard to answer, but I find resources for an answer in Bertrand Russell's logical atomism.