The doctrine of a ‘state of nature’ is at best a metaphor. Nevertheless it enables us to describe with vividness the distinction between those goods which might precede, and those which can only result from, the formation of society. I suspect that the goods which establish our well-being as rational creatures (over and above whatever goods might benefit us as animals) belong exclusively to the latter class, so that a rational creature is necessarily a zōon politikon.

Utilitarianism tells us that actions are morally right and good if and to the extent that they add to human happiness or diminish human unhappiness. And—or, perhaps, therefore—it also tells us that the best action a person can perform is that which of all the possible actions open to him is the one which makes the greatest positive difference to human happiness. Moreover, as everyone will also remember, utilitarianism further tries to tell us, perhaps intending it as a corollary of that first, main claim, that the motive for an action has nothing to do with its moral rightness or goodness. (This, of course, is just a philosopher's excessive and incorrect way of making the platitudinous point that one may do the wrong thing for the right reason and the right thing for the wrong reason.) But even if, as utilitarians, we accepted the dubious corollary, it would not follow, as many have thought, that utilitarians have no moral interest in motives. For unless, absurdly, a utilitarian believed either that there was never more than a fortuitous connection between on the one hand what we intended to do and on the other what we did and the consequences of what we did, or that, if there were such connections, we could not know of them, he must believe, as a moralist, that the best motive a person can have for performing an action is likely to be the desire to produce the happiest result. Indeed, utilitarians ought to be morally committed, it would seem, to trying to find out as much as they can about the consequences of our actions, e.g. what connections exist, if any, between how we raise children and what sort of adults they grow up to be.

In the following paper, I will be operating within the framework of moral concepts set out by R. M. Hare in his Language of Morals and Freedom and Reason. Using this framework, I shall attempt to show that (a) if we claim that certain attitudes we have toward animals are moral, then the application of the consequences of these principles leads us into a rather bizarre, if not outlandish, position, which few would accept as prima facie moral; and (b) if we adopt what can be accepted as a truly moral position with respect to animals, this will turn out to be indistinguishable in kind, if not in degree, from our morality with respect to humans.

Theaetetus, asked what knowledge is, replies that geometry and the other mathematical disciplines are knowledge, and so are crafts like cobbling. Socrates points out that it does not help him to be told how many kinds of knowledge there are when his problem is to know what knowledge itself is, what it means to call geometry or a craft knowledge in the first place—he insists on the generality of his question in the way he often does when his interlocutor, asked for a definition, cites instead cases of the concept to be defined (Plato, Theaetetus 146ce).

When a normative moral theory collides with our beliefs, we must change either our beliefs or our theory. It is not always clear which we should change; but it is clear that we must change something. I shall consider two collisions between utilitarianism and what we believe, or are supposed to believe. About the first collision, I am going to say that the belief is false and that therefore there is no call to change utilitarianism. About the second, I am going to say that if the belief is true, utilitarianism cannot be changed to accommodate it; I shall leave it open, though, whether the belief is true. The two collisions are related, though different. They both concern the utilitarian thesis about self-sacrifice.

Confidence or trust is obviously a sort of reliance or dependence. Confidence is related to fiducia, which in turn is related to fido and to the Greek peitho. The latter term implies persuasion or persuasiveness. If we follow, as we should, the nuances hidden in these terms, we may assume that confidence is a reliance stemming from persuasion or accompanied by it. Confidence may be related to a person, including oneself, and in this sense we speak of self-confidence; or it may be related to another person, either in the singular or in the plural, or even perhaps to the course of events at large, to history, to the cosmos, to God etc. It is in this sense that confidence is the opposite of or contradictory to fear. And Aristotle indeed placed the brave man between the two poles of fear and confidence. The man who exceeds in confidence is rash, and he who exceeds in fear and falls short in confidence is a coward.

The decade of criticism directed at The Political Philosophy of Hobbes has found the critics united in rejecting many of Warrender's conclusions, but it has not produced a generally accepted alternative interpretation. I shall argue in this paper that this has happened because the critics have not been searching enough in their criticism. Often they have taken over without discussion two crucial but highly questionable features of Warrender's book: first, his ignoring the definition of ‘obligation’ given in Leviathan; and, second, his presentation of logically independent conclusions about Hobbes's theory as if they were related. As a result of the first, Warrender's critics have sometimes followed him into error; and, as a result of the second, they have sometimes been led to dismiss correct conclusions in the belief that these were logically bound up with other conclusions that really were wrong. Too often they have thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater.

This paper examines some recent trends in feminist epistemology. It argues that theories that make a priori claims to the effect that the structure of our body of knowledge must encode a masculine bias are both philosophically problematic and politically counterproductive, and it recommends a feminist methodology free from such general theoretical claims as best suited for the promotion of productive feminist thought and action.

In L. Frank Baum's story, Ozma of Oz, which is a sequel to Baum's much more famous story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companion come upon a wound-down mechanical man bearing a label on which are printed the following words:

Smith and Tinker's

Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating

Perfect-Talking

MECHANICAL MAN

Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live

(Ozma of Oz, Chicago, 1907, p. 43)

As Dorothy and her companion are made to discover when they wind up this man (‘Tik-Tok’ is his name), he is indeed capable of doing all the things of which his label boasts—acting, speaking and even thinking. But as Tik-Tok himself insists, and no one in the story casts doubt on the matter, he is not alive.

My discussion of this theme falls into two parts. In the first part, starting from the assumption that we do in fact tend to respond favourably to the idea, vague though it may be, that “persons are to be respected, simply as persons”, I endeavour to clear my mind a little about our warrant for speaking in this way; and to do this is at the same time to clarify in some measure our understanding of what such language means. But of course, since it is the language of practical principle, or precept, there can be no full understanding of its meaning without a grasp of its “working value”, of its significance as a clue to the proper directing and assessing of conduct. The second, and briefer, part of the discussion, accordingly, which is reserved for a subsequent article, is devoted to the question of the practical import of the principle of respect, the sort of guidance that it may provide in the actual business of life.

Language based criticisms of the intelligibility of the programme of neuropsychology have made use of the principle that words the meaning of which is established in the context of descriptions of aspects of whole persons cannot be used in that sense to ascribe properties to parts of human bodies. In particular neither human brains nor their parts think, are conscious, imagine, suffer and so on. Recently, Bennett and Hacker have presented the error as a mereological fallacy, because brains are parts of persons. However, while brains are parts of human bodies it is not clear that they are parts of persons. I restyle the argument in terms of fields of family resemblances, in such a way that it makes sense to describe the hippocampus as an organ for remembering, but does not support the claim that neuroscience is core psychology. Such fields are networks of meanings linked by two principles. (1) Taxonomies of relevant body parts are determined by the psychological role they play in everyday human life. (2) Many body parts are also identified by the role they play as tools in human activities including psychological tasks. Arguments are developed to show that objections to the idea that brains and their constituent organs are tools are misplaced. Hybrid psychologies are possible.

A man has sexual intercourse with his three-year-old niece. Teenagers standing beside a highway throw large rocks through the windshields of passing cars. A woman intentionally drives her car into a child on a bicycle. Cabdrivers cut off ambulances rushing to hospitals. Are these actions wrong? If we hesitate to say yes, that is only because the word ‘wrong’ is too mild to express our responses to such acts

The inspectability of after-images has been denied. A typical claim is Ilham Dilman's: ‘I cannot say my apprehension of the after-image I see has changed but not the after-image itself’, for, he says, appearance and reality are one as regards the after-image. His reason is that this is a logical consequence of the fact that other people have no possible basis for correcting what I say about the after-image I see.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein introduces the notion of a ‘family resemblance’ to deal with certain problems. Talking of games and what they seem to have in common, he points out that there are no common features (or no common feature) in virtue of which we call all games ‘games’. Instead there are, he claims, many different similarities and relationships; he says ‘we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’. (§ 66.) He then goes on to add: ‘I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way,—And I shall say: “games form a family”.’ (§ 67.) Wittgenstein also instances numbers as forming a ‘family’ in the same manner. This notion of a ‘family resemblance’ has come to be used by many philosophers to deal with a range of situations where there appears to be a difficulty in finding a single definite common property and yet there exists a desire to call some set of things by the same name. I myself have succumbed to this temptation. Perhaps the widest claim for the use of this device is that made by Mr Bambrough in an article entitled ‘Universals and Family Resemblances’ (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1960–61, pp. 207–222). This begins with the words ‘I believe that Wittgenstein solved what is known as “the problem of universals”’.

In his paper ‘Collective Responsibility’ (Philosophy, July 1968) Mr. D. E. Cooper argues for the thesis that collectives can be held responsible in a sense not reducible to the individual responsibility of the members of the collective. And he uses this conclusion to support views of individual responsibility and of blame and punishment which he wishes to assert independently. Is hall argue that although there is a sense in which the actions and responsibility of a collective cannot be analysed in terms of the actions and responsibilities of the individual persons who compose the collective, it is not moral responsibility which is involved. I shall then maintain that Cooper's account of collective responsibility does not support his account of individual responsibility; and that his account of individual responsibility is in any case false, if he means moral responsiblity.

I have no comment to make on the aesthetic merits of these verses. I have put them at the head of my discussion because they happen to introduce a cluster of concepts connected with forgiveness: pride, love, hate, God, friendship, goodwill, eternity, offence, condemnation, resentment, blame. We may think that some, but not all, of these have essential connections with the concept in which we are interested. And we may, of course, think that the list is incomplete. Other obvious candidates spring to mind: pity, for example, repentance, compassion, punishment and pardoning.

Naturalism, it has been said, is the distinctive development in philosophy over the last thirty years. There has been a naturalistic turn away from the a priori methods of traditional philosophy to a conception of philosophy as continuous with natural science. The doctrine has been extensively discussed and has won considerable following in the USA. This is, on the whole, not true of Britain and continental Europe, where the pragmatist tradition never took root, and the temptations of scientism in philosophy were less alluring.

Surprisingly, materialists and dualists often appeal to the same factors in their depiction of being an embodied, human person: sensations, agency, and causal underpinnings. I propose that this picture be expanded to include epistemic, structural, and affective components. I further propose that these elements, taken together, be construed as virtues. Being an embodied, human person consists in the exercise of six types of virtues: Sensory Virtues, the Virtue of Agency, Constitutional Virtues, Epistemic Virtues, Structural Virtues, and Affective Virtues. This project draws on recent contributions to virtue epistemology and to the philosophical analysis of self-respect.

Photographs, paintings, rigid sculptures: all these provide examples of static images. It is true that they change—photographs fade, paintings darken and sculptures crumble—but what change they undergo (unless very damaging) is irrelevant to their representational content. A static image is one that represents by virtue of properties which remain largely unchanged throughout its existence. Because of this defining feature, according to a long tradition in aesthetics, a static image can only represent an instantaneous moment, or to be more exact the state of affairs obtaining at that moment'. It cannot represent movement and the passage of time. This traditional view mirrors a much older one in metaphysics: that change is to be conceived of as a series of instantaneous states and hence that an interval of time is composed of extensionless moments. The metaphysical view has been involved in more controversy than its aesthetic counterpart. Aristotle identified it as one of the premises of Zeno's arrow paradox and Augustine employed it in his proof of the unreality of time.