Sophie Grace Chappell

There have only been three articles in mainstream philosophy journals going back at least to the 1970s on generosity. This paper hopes to draw attention to this neglected virtue. By building on what work has already been done, and trying to advance that discussion along several different dimensions, it hopes that others will take a closer look at this important and surprisingly complex virtue. More specifically, it formulates three important necessary conditions for what is involved in possessing the virtue of generosity, and considers other contenders as well. The necessary conditions have to do with whether what is given must be of value to the giver, whether the giver's primary motivation has to be altruistic, and whether the act of giving has to be supererogatory.

I argue that one central resource for ethical thinking, seriously under-explored in contemporary anglophone philosophy, is moral phenomenology, the exploration of the texture and quality of moral experience. Perhaps a barrier that has prevented people from using this resource is that it’s hard to talk about experience. But such knowledge can be communicated, e.g. by poetry and drama. In having such experiences, either in real life or at second-hand through art, we can gain moral knowledge, rather as Mary the colour scientist can gain knowledge of colours; such knowledge is a real cognitive gain, but it is not knowledge of the propositional kind that philosophers have usually focused on.

Developing a British perspective on the abortion debate, I take up some ideas from Patrick Lee’s fine paper, and pursue, in particular, the idea of individual humans as goods in themselves. I argue that this notion helps us to avoid the familiar mistake of making moral value impersonal. It also shows us the way out of consequentialism. Since the most philosophically viable notion of the person, the individual human, is (as Lee argues) a notion of an individual substance that is there from conception, the move has a third effect, which is to rule out abortion.

Epiphanies is a philosophical exploration of epiphanies, peak experiences, 'wow moments', or ecstasies as they are sometimes called. What are epiphanies, and why do so many people so frequently experience them? Are they just transient phenomena in our brains, or are they the revelations of objective value that they very often seem to be? What do they tell us about the world, and about ourselves? How, if at all, do epiphanies fit in with our moral systems and our theories of how to live? And how do epiphanic experiences fit in with the rest of our lives? These are Sophie Grace Chappell's questions in this ground-breaking new study of an area of inquiry that has always been right under our noses, but remains surprisingly under-explored in contemporary philosophy.

I begin with a summary statement of what I call “the Manifesto”, which is a succinct expression of an entire, and extremely influential, ideology of philosophical ethics: the one that I call “systematic moral theory”, and have been writing against for a decade now. My paper is about why Iris Murdoch rejects the Manifesto; and why anyone should. Murdoch quotes with approval Paul Valéry’s “A difficulty is a light; an insuperable difficulty is a sun.” It sounds paradoxical to suggest that philosophy is about confronting impossible questions; the whole point of the Manifesto is to resolve questions, not leave them hanging. But I show how in a number of ways it is right to think of ethics as concerned with questions that can’t be made to go away. Ethical philosophy is much more difficult than the Manifesto’s get-it-over-with conception of the subject makes it out to be. But also, much more interesting.