Many philosophers, psychologists, and medical practitioners believe that killing is no worse than letting die on the basis of James Rachels's Bare-Difference Argument. I show that his argument is unsound. In particular, a premise of the argument is that his examples are as similar as is consistent with one being a case of killing and the other being a case of letting die. However, the subject who lets die has both the ability to kill and the ability to let die (...) while the subject who kills lacks the ability to let die. Modifying the latter example so that the killer has both abilities yields a pair of cases with morally different acts. The hypothesis that killing is worse than letting die is the best explanation of this difference. (shrink)

An attractive admirer of George Bernard Shaw once wrote to him with a not-so modest proposal: ``You have the greatest brain in the world, and I have the most beautiful body; so we ought to produce the most perfect child.'' Shaw replied: ``What if the child inherits my body and your brains?''What if, indeed? Shaw's retort is interesting not because it revealsa grasp of elementary genetics, but rather because it suggests his grasp of an interesting and important principle of axiology. (...) Since the brainy but ugly Shaw and his beautiful but apparently dim admirer both fall short of the ideal, she suggests that the best thing would be to genetically recombine his intelligence with her beauty. But what then would be the value of another genetic possibility: that of recombining his ugliness with her stupidity? Underlining the prompted inference is a fundamental principle of the theory of value which, perhaps surprisingly, has so far gone largely unnoticed in the ethical literature. I will call it the principle of recombinant values. (shrink)

This essay discusses monism and pluralism about two related evaluative notions: welfare, or what makes people better off, and value simpliciter, or what makes the world better. These are stipulatively referred to as 'axiological value'. Axiological value property monists hold that one of these notions is reducible to the other (or else eliminable), while axiological value property pluralists deny this. Substantive monists about axiological value hold that there is just one basic kind of thing that makes our lives or the (...) world better, while substantive pluralists hold that there is more than one such thing. A more radical kind of pluralism holds that each of the plurality of good things is good in its own way, thus raising questions concerning value comparability and compensability. The essay elucidates these theories and discusses important arguments for and against them. (shrink)

We discuss the one–many problem as it appears in the Philebus and find that it is not restricted to the usually understood problem about the identity of universals across particulars that instantiate them (the Hylomorphic Dispersal Problem). In fact some of the most interesting aspects of the problem occur purely with respect to the relationship between Forms. We argue that contemporary metaphysicians may draw from the Philebus at least three different one–many relationships between universals themselves: instantiation, subkind and part, and (...) thereby construct three new ‘problems of the one and the many’ (an Eidetic Dispersal Problem, a Genus–Species Problem, and an Eidetic Combination Problem), which are as problematic as the version generally discussed. We then argue that this taxonomy sheds new and interesting light on certain discussions of higher-order universals in recent Australian analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.” Extrinsic value is value that is not intrinsic.

I defend these claims: (1) 'Pleasure' has exactly one English antonym: 'unpleasure.' (2) Pleasure is the most convincing example of an organic unity. (3) The hedonic calculus is a joke. (4) An important type of pleasure is background pleasure. (5) Pleasures in bad company are still good. (6) Higher pleasures aren't pleasures (and if they were, they wouldn't be higher). Thesis (1) merely concerns terminology, but theses (2)-(6) are substantive, evaluative claims.

The bare‐difference methodology is considered to be a powerful tool in ethical reasoning. The underlying idea is that we can identify the intrinsic evaluative significance of some feature by constructing contrast cases or bare‐difference cases, i.e., two cases that hold everything constant but for the feature of interest. While this popular methodology has been challenged by prominent philosophers such as Kagan, Thomson, and Kamm, it is intuitively appealing because, as Perrett identifies, the methodology appears to share the same logical structure (...) as a fruitful scientific procedure. In this paper, I argue that examining this ‘scientific analogy’ is crucial to understanding both the limitations and the prospects for ethical bare‐difference reasoning. I expand upon Perrett's discussion of the scientific analogy and examine another relevant similarity. I then highlight two relevant dissimilarities between ethical bare‐difference reasoning and its scientific analogue. Though these differences threaten to undermine the analogy, I show how the analogy might be mended to better bring the ethical methodology in line with its scientific counterpart and avoid challenges to ethical bare‐difference methodology raised by philosophers in the literature. (shrink)

In order to guide the decisions of real people who want to bring about good epistemic outcomes for themselves and others, we need to understand our epistemic values. In Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman has proposed an epistemic value theory that allows us to say whether one outcome is epistemically better than another. However, it has been suggested that Goldman's theory is not really an epistemic value theory at all because whether one outcome is epistemically better than another (...) partly depends on our non-epistemic interests. In this paper, I argue that an epistemic value theory that serves the purposes of social epistemology must incorporate non- epistemic interests in much the way that Goldman's theory does. In fact, I argue that Goldman's theory does not go far enough in this direction. In particular, the epistemic value of having a particular true belief should actually be weighted by how interested we are in the topic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In recent experimental work, the spectrum-like nature of the phenomenon of ordering subjectivity has been accounted for by recourse to the distinction, within the class of subjective adjectives, between multi-dimensional and judge-dependent ones. One way to cash out judge-dependency is in terms of some kind of experiencer-sensitivity. In this paper, we argue that this approach is insufficient. Applying Solt’s experimental paradigm to moral adjectives suggests that, within the class of judge-dependent adjectives, one must draw a further distinction between experiential (...) and evaluative adjectives. This opens up the question of what, if anything, characterizes judge-dependency. We propose that judge-dependency is characterized by the notion of holistic multi-dimensionality: a predicate is holistically multidimensional just in case its denotation is composed by various dimensions whose contribution is inseparable. (shrink)

In his recent work in social epistemology, Alvin Goldman argues that truth is the fundamental epistemic end of education, and that critical thinking is of merely instrumental value with respect to that fundamental end. He also argues that there is a central place for testimony and trust in the classroom, and an educational danger in over‐emphasizing the fostering of students’ critical thinking. In this paper I take issue with these claims, and argue that (1) critical thinking is a fundamental end (...) of education, independently of its instrumental tie to truth, and (2) it is critical thinking, rather than testimony and trust, that is educationally basic. (shrink)

Whether value is “additive,” that is, whether the value of a whole must equal the sum of the values of its parts, is widely thought to have significant implications in ethics. For example, additivity rules out “organic unities,” and is presupposed by “contrast arguments.” This paper reconsiders the significance of value additivity. The main thesis defended is that it is significant only for a certain class of “mereologies”, roughly, those in which both wholes and parts are “complete”, in the sense (...) that they can exist independently. For example, value additivity is significant in the case of a mereology of material objects, but not in the case of a mereology of propositions. (shrink)

If we receive information from multiple independent and partially reliable information sources, then whether we are justified to believe these information items is affected by how reliable the sources are, by how well the information coheres with our background beliefs and by how internally coherent the information is. We consider the following question. Is coherence a separable determinant of our degree of belief, i.e. is it the case that the more coherent the new information is, the more justified we are (...) in believing the new information, ceteris paribus? We show that if we consider sets of information items of any size (Holism), and if we assume that there exists a coherence Ordering over such sets and that coherence is a function of the probability distribution over the propositions in such sets (Probabilism), then Separability fails to hold. (shrink)