‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ is, as we all recognize, the inscription over the gate of Dante's hell; but we perhaps forget what precedes that memorable line. Hell, the inscription says, was built by divine power, by the highest wisdom, and by primordial love. Those of us who remember Dante's vivid picture of Farinata in the perpetually burning tombs or Ulysses in the unending and yet unconsuming flames may be able to credit Dante's idea that Hell was constructed by divine power; and if we understand ‘wisdom’ in this context as denoting an intellectual virtue only (and not as connoting a mixed moral and intellectual one), then we might agree that only divine wisdom is capable of making something like Dante's hell.

Among fundamental, widely shared values, there are two which often come into conflict, creating a serious moral dilemma, viz., the value of individual well-being and the value of individual self-direction. These values issue in two fundamental moral principles, one which prescribes the protection of others from harm (the principle of beneficence), and one which proscribes interfering with a person's right to direct his own life and actions (the principle of liberty). When an individual is doing or choosing something which subjects him to harm or significant risk of harm, the question of paternalistic interference arises.

Since John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, there have been a number of attempts to say when such protective interference with adults is morally acceptable.

In [3] I argued for a particular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals. The arguments were based upon some linguistic considerations of the general character of what we mean when we say such and such. I urged that a semantics for subjunctive conditionals ought to provide a distinct representation of the subjunctive mood of a sentence, and should take seriously the fact that subjunctive conditionals admit distinctions of tense. The envisaged semantics took the subjunctive conditional to be about occasions, and the central problem discussed was, accordingly, how to represent what must count as the same occasion in spite of whatever changes were required to make the antecedent of the conditional true.

Robert Nozick has suggested that risky actions are a problem for a moral view based on rights. We ordinarily think that some actions are too dangerous to be permissible, taking into account both the harm risked and the degree of the risk. Other actions, although they run some risk of serious harm, are thought permissible. The problem is to draw this distinction in a principled way by looking to rights.

I think that Nozick's argument about risk can be answered but a different argument has convinced me that the rights view cannot handle risk in a satisfactory way. The inability is a function of the basic nature of the view.

My focus in this essay is on those singular causal explanations which purport to explain the occurrence of some particular event by means of a claim of the following general sort

Examples include sentences like (Ex. 1) The short circuit caused the fire’ and (Ex. 2) The impact of the hammer caused the shattering of the glass,’ Many philosophers hold that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between singular causal explanations and those sentences (call them singular causal sentences) which simply report causal connections. While singular causal sentences are said to typically relate events, and to be extensional, singular causal explanations are held to relate items which are sentential or fact-like in structure and to be non-extensional.1 Singular causal explanations are held on this view to always be explanations of why events or other objects belong to certain kinds or possess certain properties.

Half-truths lie notoriously at the heart of publicly indulged instances of rationalization and excuse-making. Politicians and administrators, for example, explain away failed policies or even overt malfeasance by snatching at some particle of truth, some ostensibly saving grace. A halftruth articulated – the nominal truth – covers what I shall henceforth refer to as a sleeping truth – a truth that can lie in both senses of the word. We let a sleeping truth lie undisturbed, without proper examination or scrutiny, and sometimes we let it lie (prevaricate) in the matter of helping underwrite a deception: the policy or malfeasance was not, after all, that bad. Even when we discern the sleeping truth, we let the halftruth stand, because the one proffering it is like us – fallibly human, pressed for time perhaps or an unfortunate victim of circumstance. Sometimes the effort of calling a spade a spade may be forgone simply because there is not enough morally at stake.

A person who sincerely denies that the sun will rise tomorrow or that some trees are green is either a lunatic or a fool. And yet, skeptical arguments seem to show that such statements are doubtful. In this sense skeptical arguments seem to imply that we are not more rational than a lunatic or a fool. This is - in a nutshell - ‘the problem of skepticism.‘

Much of the history of philosophy may be interpreted as a series of attempts to get rid of this problem by discovering ways of justifying statements that most people take to be true as a matter of course.