The article protests against the usage of ethical codes by business organisations. It asserts that professionals are in a different situation to that of employees; and that with the latter ethical codes are used by management to ensure compliance and are devoid of ethical content. Ethical codes it is argued are part of management's control system in a time of flatter organisational structures with a far wider span of control. It is also asserted that the ambitions of some to utilise (...) ethical codes so that the business organisation is able to engender societal change is dangerous and likely, if successful, to return us to an age which we could not seriously desire to re-visit. (shrink)

This article argues for the elimination of the concept of life worth living from philosophical vocabulary on three complementary grounds. First, the basic components of this concept suffer from multiple ambiguities, which hamper attempts to ground informative evaluative and classificatory judgments about the worth of life. Second, the criteria proposed to track the extension of the concept of life worth living rest on unsupported axiological assumptions and fail to identify precise and plausible referents for this concept. And third, the concept (...) of life worth living is not shown to serve any major evaluative or classificatory purpose besides those served by already available axiological concepts. By eliminating the concept of life worth living, philosophers will free themselves of the task of addressing ill-posed axiological questions and ground reflection about the worth of life on more rigorous conceptual foundations. (shrink)

Many believe that the world exists without a cause or reason. Most of them reject an explanation for the whole concrete world because they accept the traditional idea that concrete existence comes only from things that concretely exist. But I provide reasons for thinking that the world might be actual as a result of a feature that is not concrete but abstract. I begin by outlining ideas that some followers of the Platonic Theory of Forms have developed about whether actuality (...) of something can be explained by its possibility. Next, I show that many who think they reject all paths for explaining actuality by abstract facts about possibilities in fact follow such paths. The question of why there exists anything concrete might be answered not by saying that the world exists reasonlessly, but by following some such paths: Having a certain nature for something concrete can turn its possibility into its actuality. Still, we might in the end be forced to accept that the world exists without any reason. (shrink)

Several philosophers, both in Buddhist and Western philosophy, claim that the self does not exist. The no-self view may, at first glance, appear to be a reason to believe that life is meaningless. In the present article, I argue indirectly in favor of the no-self view by showing that it does not entail that life is meaningless. I then examine Buddhism and argue, further, that the no-self view may even be construed as partially grounding an account of the meaning of (...) life. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Daan Evers and Gerlinde Emma van Smeden () defend Wolf's hybridism against objectivist counterexamples advanced by Metz, Smuts, and Bramble. They also offer their own new hybridism, which they take to be even less vulnerable to such counterexamples. In this paper, I argue that Evers and van Smeden's defense of their and Wolf's hybridizing from objectivist counterexamples is problematic and that they do not, in fact, succeed in meeting the challenge the objectivist counterexamples (...) pose. Evers and van Smeden do not read the counterexamples charitably and, hence, are not coping with the strongest challenges the counterexamples have to offer. I conclude that Metz's, Smuts's and Bramble's objectivist counterexamples continue to pose serious challenges to hybridism, both in Wolf's and in Evers and van Smeden's versions. (shrink)

David Benatar and Thomas Nagel are both claiming that life is meaningless if judged from a cosmic perspective and both are claiming that our life is absurd. However, they understand ‘the absurdity of life’ in different ways. Benatar’s understanding of absurdity refers to the impossibility to transcend our limits from the cosmic perspective. This is strictly tied to a negative evaluation of our life. According to Benatar we have therefore a reason to regret our existence. Again, Nagel’s absurdity arises from (...) a clash of attitudes we have when we evaluate our life from the subjective and the objective perspective. Absurdity results from the incompatibility of our attitudes regarding our own life. We should therefore approach our lives with irony.I argue that neither regret nor irony are rationally recommended attitudes we should have to our life. I show that Benatar’s transcending-ones-limits approach to life’s meaning does not necessarily go hand in hand with a negative evaluation of our life. Although a transcending-ones-limits-approach of life’s meaning implies that our life is admittedly meaningless from a cosmic perspective it does not imply that it is to be judged as good or bad. However, the irony that Nagel advises is not recommended either, as subjective and objective attitude do not necessarily collide. As I read Nagel’s position the attitudes must collide because of a difference in evaluative certainty. I think this is not true because the evaluation of life is beset by doubts subjectively as well as objectively. (shrink)

Ted Honderich, 74, formerly Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University of London, recently published a short book on consciousness (Honderich, 2004). Colin McGinn, 57, his former colleague at University College London and now a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, Florida, reviewed it (McGinn, 2007a). The review is quite long and detailed, but the first sentences set the tone. McGinn on Honderich: 'This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the (...) ludicrous to the merely bad. It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.'. (shrink)