Adam Ferguson has received little of the renewed attention that contemporary philosophers have given to the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, most notably David Hume, Thomas Reid and Adam Smith. There are good reasons for this difference. Yet, the conception of moral philosophy at work in Ferguson's writings can nevertheless be called upon to throw important critical light on the current enthusiasm for philosophical ethics and applied philosophy. Eighteenth century ‘moral science’ took its significance from a context that modern philosophers who seek to be practically ‘relevant’ need, but lack.

Most definitions of radical emergentism characterize it epistemologically. This leads to misunderstandings and makes it hard to assess the doctrine's metaphysical worth. This paper puts forward purely metaphysical characterizations of emergentism and property emergence. It explores the nature of the necessitation relation between base and emergent and argues that emergentism entails a Humean account of causation and related relations. Then it presents arguments against emergentism, both as a wider metaphysic and as an account of consciousness. These maintain that emergentism makes implausible claims about how the world works. The paper also stresses the doctrine's contemporary relevance: most current property dualists endorse views effectively identical to classical emergentism less its historical commitment to novel emergent forces.

The subject of this paper is a particular kind of fear. The danger to which it is a response is the possibility that the evaluative dimension of life from which we derive the values by which we live is arbitrary. If it were arbitrary, nothing we value would be valuable. There are strong reasons both for and against this kind of fear. I am concerned with understanding these reasons and judging their strengths and weaknesses.

The latest attempt by a determined, well-resourced lobby to introduce a law to permit assisted suicide/euthanasia in the UK was announced 15 May 2013 in the House of Lords. There are many dangerous facets to their arguments, not least of which is the rôle they cast for doctors in this debate.

Rush Rhees' remarks on the topic display a depth that is lacking in the current debate in the public square, which needs to be lifted from its current low level.

I try to show inter alia why the question of who is ‘qualified to speak’ in this deep moral dilemma is important (doctors are not special moral agents); why resistance is vital against a law, which must be general, permitting assisted suicide/euthanasia (‘hard cases’ make notoriously bad law which can have catastrophic consequences); how one group of (non-disabled) people judging another group of (disabled) people as candidates for elimination, is based on the false notion that a disabled life is ‘not worth living’; that so many of the deep moral questions raised by assisted suicide/euthanasia are not even considered in the contemporary impoverished public debate.

An interpretation and critical re-construction is offered of David Hume's argument on cultural relativism in the essay ‘A Dialogue’ (1751). For any issue of moral disagreement, Hume contends, either one side can be shown right and the other wrong, or imprecision in moral principles leaves room for more than one reasonable view, or the disagreement concerns a morally indifferent aesthetic matter, or it is caused by ‘artificial’ moral sentiments. In each case, relativism is the wrong view. Following an analysis of each disagreement type, and the crucial notion of ‘artificial’ views, it is concluded that Hume's anti-relativist argument is sound.