In this paper I propose to take certain notions which we constantly use in our judgments of right and wrong, good and bad, and to analyse them so far as I can and bring out their connexions with each other. The subject is, of course, rather a hackneyed one; but I cannot help thinking that there still remains a good deal which may profitably be said about it. I do not suppose for a moment that my analysis is adequate, and it may well be in part positively mistaken. But I am inclined to think that it may be useful as a beginning of a more adequate and more correct analysis.

The reappearance of Professor Alasdair MacIntyre's far-ranging and provocative article, ‘Hume on “is” and “ought”’, is the proximate cause of this short excursion to an old, well-scarred, and still fascinating battleground. Re-reading MacIntyre's brilliant offensive thrust led me to review the counter-attacks and diversionary movements that followed its first appearance. They in turn sent me back, inevitably and ultimately, to look again at the cause of this philosophic skirmishing: Section 1 of Part i of Book III of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, entitled ‘Moral Distinctions not deriv'd from Reason’. The battles of the past have been waged chiefly round the last paragraph of this Section (pp. 469–470 in Selby-Bigge's edition), but my primary concern here is going to be with those ‘reasonings’ that precede the celebrated ‘is-ought’ paragraph. Closer attention to the bulk of Book III, Part i, Section 1, to which ‘reasonings’ Hume says he ‘cannot forbear adding … an observation’ on ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and some selective attention as well to Books I and II of the Treatise, should help to scale down the exaggerated importance attached to the ‘is-ought’ passage. Unless this is done, one runs the risk of permitting a tailpiece to wag the body of the chapter, if not the whole Book ‘Of Morals’.

P. T. Mackenzie's article is remarkable and challenging in several ways. It is, for instance, noteworthy that he reaches the surely correct conclusion that personal identity cannot be analysed in terms of memory without so much as entertaining Bishop Butler's terse and decisive objection to any such analysis: ‘… one should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes’.

In his article ‘Healthy Scepticism’, James Franklin gives an admirable survey of thirteen kinds of attempts to refute what he calls ‘symmetry arguments for scepticism’, finding all of them inadequate. The symmetry argument that he proposes to test is given as follows:

Firstly, it is possible that what we perceive is entirely an illusion created by a deceitful demon. Second, there is no reason to prefer the realist hypothesis to this one (308).

One of the most widely accepted explanations for the peculiarity of the modern European is his addiction to the ideal of romantic love. Its invention is supposed to have so radically transformed ethics, imagination and daily life, that we can hardly imagine the mental world of the ancients or the Orient where such an ideal of love is unknown. In the classic source for this view, The Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis traces the modern ideal back to medieval tales of courtly love. But he sees the devotion to romantic love as a distinguishing mark of the modern individualistic consciousness, which began, he says, with a new interest in ‘the inner workings of the human heart’.

In One of the few thoughtful essays that have come out of the controversy about the Republic's political theory, Renford Bambrough draws attention to the basic philosophical issue underlying the controversy in the following manner:

Professor Charles S. Chihara has criticized the views on the subject of inconsistency which Wittgenstein put forward in his recently published 1939 lectures. Chihara notes that these views are not peculiar to the 1939 lectures, and in fact they are to be found in all Wittgenstein's later writings on mathematics (e.g. WWK pp. 173ff., PR p. 189, PG pp. 303ff., RFM pp. 100ff.). So these ideas about inconsistency appear not to be just a momentary aberration on Wittgenstein's part. One would therefore expect that he had some good reasons for holding them. But Chihara justly complains that the kind of strong argumentation one would hope for is not forthcoming in these lectures. Instead Wittgenstein's usual procedure is to try to defend his views by producing series of rather unconvincing examples.

There have been a number of attacks on the idea of human rights recently, both in the course of political and diplomatic encounters across the globe, as well as in the more systematic literature of political philosophy. These attacks do not always distinguish between the Lockean, negative and the more recent positive rights traditions. For example, at the 1993 summer conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria, many diplomats from different regions of the world raised such questions as 'When we speak of human rights, are these conditions that everyone everywhere ought to enjoy?’Is it perhaps the case that human rights are one thing for people in one part of the globe and another for those in another part?' These questions were raised in large part about the rights spelled out in the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights, including both (so called) negative and positive rights–e.g., the rights to freedom of expression and to public education, respectively.

There is probably no student of modern philosophy, and certainly no listener to the Third Programme, who has never received the warning that he must on no account deduce an “ought” from an “is.” This prohibition, it is claimed, is securely based in established and unchallengeable principles of logic. Professor Flew was speaking for many others when he said, in the course of a broadcast entitled “Problems of Perspectives”, “I think it is very important indeed to make as clear as we can and to underline with all possible emphasis that this is a point of inexorable logic”. And Professor Popper, to take but one other example, has expressed himself no less trenchantly: “Perhaps the simplest and most important point about ethics is purely logical, I mean the impossibility to derive nontautological ethical rules—imperatives, principles of policy, aims or however we may describe them—from statements of fact”—a view that is fully endorsed by Mr. Hare in his Language of Morals.

From the way we speak it appears that we think changes do not merely come about but are brought about. Can we really think this? Have we any idea of the bringing or being brought about of a change distinct from our idea of its coming about? In the first part of this paper I shall try to describe some of the forms of causal thinking which are reflected in our ordinary causal judgments. In the second, having criticized two current analyses of the notion of change, I shall argue that to think of a change as something which comes about is to think of it as a causal explanandum, and to think of a change as a coming about of something is to think of it as a causal explanans.