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Practical necessity

In Donald MacKenzie MacKinnon, Brian Hebblethwaite & Stewart R. Sutherland (eds.), The Philosophical frontiers of Christian theology: essays presented to D.M. MacKinnon. New York: Cambridge University Press (1982)

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  1. Against Commitment.Nikhil Venkatesh - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3511-3534.
    In his famous ‘Integrity Objection’, Bernard Williams condemns utilitarianism for requiring us to regard our projects as dispensable, and thus precluding us from being properly committed to them. In this paper, I argue against commitment as Williams defines it, drawing upon insights from the socialist tradition as well as mainstream analytic moral philosophy. I show that given the mutual interdependence of individuals (a phenomenon emphasised by socialists) several appealing non-utilitarian moral principles also require us to regard our projects as dispensable. (...)
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  • Knowledge of Moral Incapacity.Ryan Cox - 2023 - Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (2):385-407.
    Are the limits on what we can do, morally speaking—our “moral incapacities” as Bernard Williams calls them—imposed on us from within, by reason itself, or from without, by something other than reason? Do they perhaps have their source in the will, as opposed to reason? In this essay, I argue for a theory of moral incapacity on which our moral incapacities have their source in reason itself. The theory is defended on the grounds that it provides the best explanation of (...)
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  • The Self-Effacing Functionality of Blame.Matthieu Queloz - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1361-1379.
    This paper puts forward an account of blame combining two ideas that are usually set up against each other: that blame performs an important function, and that blame is justified by the moral reasons making people blameworthy rather than by its functionality. The paper argues that blame could not have developed in a purely instrumental form, and that its functionality itself demands that its functionality be effaced in favour of non-instrumental reasons for blame—its functionality is self-effacing. This notion is sharpened (...)
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  • Generalized Update Semantics.Simon Goldstein - 2019 - Mind 128 (511):795-835.
    This paper explores the relationship between dynamic and truth conditional semantics for epistemic modals. It provides a generalization of a standard dynamic update semantics for modals. This new semantics derives a Kripke semantics for modals and a standard dynamic semantics for modals as special cases. The semantics allows for new characterizations of a variety of principles in modal logic, including the inconsistency of ‘p and might not p’. Finally, the semantics provides a construction procedure for transforming any truth conditional semantics (...)
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  • Ich kann nicht anders: Social Heroism as Nonselfsacrificial Practical Necessity.Bryan Smyth - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
    Most self-reports of heroic action in both reactive and social (proactive) cases describe the experience as involving a kind of necessity. This seems intuitively sound, but it makes it unclear why heroism is accorded strong approbation. To resolve this, I show that the necessity involved in heroism is a nonselfsacrificial practical necessity. (1) Approaching the intentional structure of human action from the perspective of embodiment, focusing especially on the predispositionality of pre-reflective skill, I develop a phenomenological interpretation of Bernard Williams’ (...)
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  • Practical reason not as such.Kenneth Walden - 2018 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 13 (2).
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  • Weak and Strong Necessity Modals: On Linguistic Means of Expressing "A Primitive Concept OUGHT".Alex Silk - 2021 - In Billy Dunaway & David Plunkett (eds.), Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes From the Work of Allan Gibbard. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Maize Books. pp. 203-245.
    This paper develops an account of the meaning of `ought', and the distinction between weak necessity modals (`ought', `should') and strong necessity modals (`must', `have to'). I argue that there is nothing specially ``strong'' about strong necessity modals per se: uses of `Must p' predicate the (deontic/epistemic/etc.) necessity of the prejacent p of the actual world (evaluation world). The apparent ``weakness'' of weak necessity modals derives from their bracketing whether the necessity of the prejacent is verified in the actual world. (...)
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  • Moral Cultivation and Confucian Character: Engaging Joel J. Kupperman.Chenyang Li & Peimin Ni (eds.) - 2014 - Albany: State University of New York Press.
    In this volume, leading scholars in Asian and comparative philosophy take the work of Joel J. Kupperman as a point of departure to consider new perspectives on Confucian ethics. Kupperman is one of the few eminent Western philosophers to have integrated Asian philosophical traditions into his thought, developing a character-based ethics synthesizing Western, Chinese, and Indian philosophies. With their focus on Confucian ethics, contributors respond, expand, and engage in critical dialogue with Kupperman’s views. Kupperman joins the conversation with responses and (...)
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  • Forgiveness and the Limits of Duty.Archer Alfred - 2017 - Etica and Politica/ Ethics and Politics 19 (1):225-244.
    Can there be a duty to forgive those who have wronged us? According to a popular view amongst philosophers working on forgiveness the answer is no. Forgiveness, it is claimed, is always elective. This view is rejected by Gamlund (2010a; 2010b) who argues that duties to forgive do exist and then provides conditions that are relevant to determining whether forgiveness is obligatory or supererogatory. In this paper I will argue that the conditions that Gamlund provides do not provide a plausible (...)
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  • Agentive Modals.Matthew Mandelkern, Ginger Schultheis & David Boylan - 2017 - Philosophical Review 126 (3):301-343.
    This essay proposes a new theory of agentive modals: ability modals and their duals, compulsion modals. After criticizing existing approaches—the existential quantificational analysis, the universal quantificational analysis, and the conditional analysis—it presents a new account that builds on both the existential and conditional analyses. On this account, the act conditional analysis, a sentence like ‘John can swim across the river’ says that there is some practically available action that is such that if John tries to do it, he swims across (...)
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  • Deontic Logic and Normative Systems.Olivier Roy, Allard Tamminga & Malte Willer (eds.) - 2016 - London, UK: College Publications.
    The biennial DEON conferences are designed to promote interdisciplinary cooperation amongst scholars interested in linking the formal-logical study of normative concepts and normative systems with computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, organization theory and law. In addition to these general themes, DEON 2016 encouraged a special focus on the topic "Reasons, Argumentation and Justification.".
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  • Deontic logic as a study of conditions of rationality in norm-related activities.Berislav Žarnić - 2016 - In Olivier Roy, Allard Tamminga & Malte Willer (eds.), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems. London, UK: College Publications. pp. 272-287.
    The program put forward in von Wright's last works defines deontic logic as ``a study of conditions which must be satisfied in rational norm-giving activity'' and thus introduces the perspective of logical pragmatics. In this paper a formal explication for von Wright's program is proposed within the framework of set-theoretic approach and extended to a two-sets model which allows for the separate treatment of obligation-norms and permission norms. The three translation functions connecting the language of deontic logic with the language (...)
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  • Autonomous Self-Expression and Meritocratic Dignity.Somogy Varga - 2016 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (5):1131-1149.
    While “dignity” plays an increasingly important role in contemporary moral and political debates, there is profound dispute over its definition, meaning, and normative function. Instead of concluding that dignity’s elusiveness renders it useless, or that it signals its fundamental character, this paper focuses on illuminating one particular strand of meritocratic dignity. It introduces a number of examples and conceptual distinctions and argues that there is a specific strand of “expressive” meritocratic dignity that is not connected to holding a special office (...)
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  • I Believe I Can φ.Matthew Mandelkern, Ginger Schultheis & David Boylan - 2015 - In Thomas Brochhagen, Floris Roelofsen & Nadine Theiler (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium. pp. 256-265.
    We propose a new analysis of ability modals. After briefly criticizing extant approaches, we turn our attention to the venerable but vexed conditional analysis of ability ascriptions. We give an account that builds on the conditional analysis, but avoids its weaknesses by incorporating a layer of quantification over a contextually supplied set of actions.
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  • Saints, Heroes and Moral Necessity.Alfred Archer - 2015 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 77:105-124.
    Many people who perform paradigmatic examples of acts of supererogation claim that they could not have done otherwise. In this paper I will argue that these self-reports from moral exemplars present a challenge to the traditional view of supererogation as involving agential sacrifice. I will argue that the claims made by moral exemplars are plausibly understood as what Bernard Williams calls a ‘practical necessity’. I will then argue that this makes it implausible to view these acts as involving agential sacrifice.
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  • Two puzzles about deontic necessity.Dilip Ninan - 2005 - In J. Gajewski, V. Hacquard, B. Nickel & S. Yalcin (eds.), New Work on Modality, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
    The deontic modal must has two surprising properties: an assertion of must p does not permit a denial of p, and must does not take past tense complements. I first consider an explanation of these phenomena that stays within Angelika Kratzer’s semantic framework for modals, and then offer some reasons for rejecting that explanation. I then propose an alternative account, according to which simple must sentences have the force of an imperative.
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  • Truthfulness and Business.Lubomira Radoilska - 2008 - Journal of Business Ethics 79 (1-2):21 - 28.
    According to a common assumption, truthfulness cannot have an intrinsic value in business. Instead, it is considered only instrumentally valuable for business, because it contributes to successful trust-building. Some authors deny truthfulness even this limited role by claiming that truth-telling is not an essential part of business, which is a sui generis practice like poker. In this article, I argue that truthfulness has indeed an intrinsic value in business and identify the conceptual confusions underlying the opposite view. My account of (...)
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  • Variability and moral phenomenology.Michael B. Gill - 2008 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1):99-113.
    Many moral philosophers in the Western tradition have used phenomenological claims as starting points for philosophical inquiry; aspects of moral phenomenology have often been taken to be anchors to which any adequate account of morality must remain attached. This paper raises doubts about whether moral phenomena are universal and robust enough to serve the purposes to which moral philosophers have traditionally tried to put them. Persons’ experiences of morality may vary in a way that greatly limits the extent to which (...)
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  • The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...)
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  • Distinctive substantial self-knowledge and the possibility of self-improvement.Josep E. Corbí - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-22.
    Quassim Cassam distinguishes between trivial and substantial cases of self-knowledge. At first sight, trivial cases are epistemically distinctive insofar as the agent needn't provide any sort of evidence to ground her claim to knowledge. Substantial cases of self-knowledge such as ‘I know I want to have a second child’ do not seem to bear this distinctive relation to evidence. I will argue, however, that substantial cases of self-knowledge are often epistemically distinctive and, to this end, I will challenge a crucial (...)
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  • Business and the Ethics of Recognition.Caleb Bernacchio - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 185 (1):1-16.
    Recognition is a fundamental good that corporations ought to give to employees, a good that is essential to their well-being, and thus, recognition should be among the central notions in our understanding of organizations and in any theory of business ethics. Drawing upon the work of Philip Pettit and Robert Brandom as well as themes from instrumental stakeholder theory, I develop a complex notion of recognition involving both status recognition and capacity recognition and argue that this account meets three fundamental (...)
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  • Regret and Necessity: Bernard Williams' Critique of the Free Will Debate.Kazuki Watanabe - 2021 - Pense University of Edinburgh Philosophy Society Journal 2:23-31.
    In this paper, I will present the responsibility-compatibilist argument against responsibility-incompatibilists (hard-determinists and libertarians), according to whom the existence of ‘free-will’, threatened by determinism, is necessary for moral responsibility. First, I will identify what responsibility-incompatibilism presupposes as necessary conditions of moral responsibility: the Strong Doctrine of Free-Will and the Voluntary Control Principle. Second, inspired by Williams, I will demonstrate that our real practice of responsibility does not necessarily presuppose these conditions. Finally, I will defend responsibility-compatibilism from an objection.
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  • Wang Yangming’s Reductionist Account of Practical Necessity: General and Particular.Yat-Hung Leung - 2020 - Sophia 59 (3):413-436.
    In this article, I argue that we can have a plausible account of the experience of practical necessity, namely, the experience that some action is necessitated for someone, by referring to the philosophy of Wang Yangming, a Neo-Confucian philosopher in Ming Dynasty China. The experience of practical necessity, according to Wang, can be of two kinds: general and particular, both having their bases on human nature and related to the fulfillment of the self. I argue that this account fares better (...)
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  • Internalism about reasons: sad but true?Kate Manne - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (1):89-117.
    Internalists about reasons following Bernard Williams claim that an agent’s normative reasons for action are constrained in some interesting way by her desires or motivations. In this paper, I offer a new argument for such a position—although one that resonates, I believe, with certain key elements of Williams’ original view. I initially draw on P.F. Strawson’s famous distinction between the interpersonal and the objective stances that we can take to other people, from the second-person point of view. I suggest that (...)
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  • Expressivism and Moral Dilemmas: A Response to Marino.Carl Baker - 2011 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (4):445-455.
    Simon Blackburn’s expressivist logic of attitudes aims to explain how we can use non-assertoric moral judgements in logically valid arguments. Patricia Marino has recently argued that Blackburn’s logic faces a dilemma: either it cannot account for the place of moral dilemmas in moral reasoning or, if it can, it makes an illicit distinction between two different kinds of moral dilemma. Her target is the logic’s definition of validity as satisfiability, according to which validity requires an avoidance of attitudinal inconsistency. Against (...)
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  • Caring and incapacity.Jeffrey Seidman - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 147 (2):301 - 322.
    This essay seeks to explain a morally important class of psychological incapacity—the class of what Bernard Williams has called “incapacities of character.” I argue for two main claims: (1) Caring is the underlying psychological disposition that gives rise to incapacities of character. (2) In competent, rational adults, caring is, in part, a cognitive and deliberative disposition. Caring is a mental state which disposes an agent to believe certain considerations to be good reasons for deliberation and action. And caring is a (...)
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  • Faith and the suspension of the ethical in fear and trembling.Andrew Cross - 2003 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 46 (1):3 – 28.
    This paper concerns Kierkegaard's notion of a teleological suspension of the ethical, which is presented by his pseudonym Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling in connection with the biblical narrative of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. Against prevailing readings, I argue that Abraham's suspension of the ethical does not consist in his violating the ethical in order to satisfy a higher normative requirement. Rather, it consists in his preparedness to violate an overriding ethical norm, even where he does not believe (...)
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  • Mental images and imagination in moral education.Wojciech Kaftanski - 2024 - Journal of Moral Education 53 (1):119-138.
    ABSTRACT This article argues for a unique role of imagination and mental images in the moral education of students. Imagination is rendered here as a capacity oriented toward realizable and salient goals; mental images are understood as particular future-oriented self-representations (FOSRs) devised by and held in imagination. FOSRs have four moral attributes: they are 1) expressive of us as moral agents, 2) shape our moral identity, 3) serve as moral pointers, and 4) help devise mitigating strategies. FOSRs can be created (...)
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  • On Moral Understanding.David Levy - 2004 - Dissertation, University of London
    I provide an explanation of moral understanding. I begin by describing decisions, es- pecially moral ones. I detail ways in which deviations from an ideal of decision-making occur. I link deviations to characteristic critical judgments, e.g. being cavalier, banal, coura- geous, etc. Moral judgments are among these and carry a particular personal gravity. The question I entertain in following chapters is: how do they carry this gravity? In answering the question, I try “external” accounts of moral understanding. I distin- guish (...)
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  • Intuitions of fittingness.A. W. Price - 2009 - Common Knowledge 15 (3):348-364.
    In one sense of the term current among analytical philosophers, the quietist_lacks skeptical doubts about the metaphysical or epistemological status of ethical judgments as a class of judgment. He may still have doubts about, say, the current state of morality. There are criteria of courage by which, though they are open-ended, a man may count as acting bravely. It need not follow that he has adopted the best tactics. Yet he must have responded fittingly to danger. But how is that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Economies: Good, Bad, Indifferent.Raymond Geuss - 2012 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 55 (4):331-360.
    Abstract There has been a strong tendency in economic thought to try to take human wants, desires, and preferences as the basis for deciding how to act. This essay argues that ?needs? constitute a distinct category which cannot be reduced to preference. The reductive strategy is partly connected with a philosophical mistake about the relation between the subjective and the objective. The distinction between needs and wants must be central to any continuing form of human action, but it may also (...)
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  • (1 other version)One Ought Too Many.Stephen Finlay & Justin Snedegar - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1):102-124.
    Some philosophers hold that „ought‟ is ambiguous between a sense expressing a propositional operator and a sense expressing a relation between an agent and an action. We defend the opposing view that „ought‟ always expresses a propositional operator against Mark Schroeder‟s recent objections that it cannot adequately accommodate an ambiguity in „ought‟ sentences between evaluative and deliberative readings, predicting readings of sentences that are not actually available. We show how adopting an independently well-motivated contrastivist semantics for „ought‟, according to which (...)
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