Today, the notion of identity is usually linked with ethical-political discussions like multiculturalism, gender or sexual diversity, recognition of plurality, etc. Nevertheless, the flourishing of this vision that interprets “identity” mainly in its plural form (as “identities”) contrasts sharply with the sense that “identity” has had during most of the history of philosophy (in which identity was understood in connection with “unity” or “selfsameness”, not with “diversity” or “otherness”). In order to explain the passage from one notion of identity to (...) the other (a passage mainly made in the last third of the 20th century), we will focus on the reflections made by Ludwig Wittgenstein towards the middle of that century. Our contention is that these reflections open the way to a more plural understanding of human identity, against the many interpreters of Wittgenstein that defend the opposite: that he offered a strong notion of common human identity in his writings, a notion based on the idea of “human nature”. In order to sustain our thesis, we will have to give an interpretation of some key terms of Wittgenstein’s philosophy (like “forms of life” or “natural history”) from a pluralistic point of view; this is the only way of understanding to what extent he is a predecessor of contemporary discussions about plural identities. (shrink)

In order to articulate an account of erotic love that does not attempt to transcend its personal features, Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum lean on the speeches by Aristophanes and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium. This leads them to downplay the sense in which love is not only for another person, but also for the good. Drawing on a distinction between relative and absolute senses of speaking about the good, I mediate between two features of love that at first may seem (...) irreconcilable. The first is the sense in which love is deeply personal in character. The second is the sense in which we in love come to articulate ethical demands. With the help of the Diotimian ascent of love that Socrates presents in his speech, I submit that these two can come together in the realization that our personally conditioned responses in love are transformed to accommodate demands that carry an unconditional meaning. (shrink)

I draw on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cora Diamond to argue that imagination plays a key role in moral consideration. By broadening our concepts and drawing similarities, our imagination can help us see nonhuman beings as fellow beings, namely as beings with whom we share a life. I address two related issues: First, how can we ensure that the exercise of imagination does not merely lead to nonsense? Second, can the imagination remedy the supposed incommensurability between beings with (...) linguistic capacity and those without? An examination of these issues can allow for a conceptual refinement of imagination. (shrink)

Polemizując z poglądami niektórych filozofów moralności, autor broni tezy, iż jednoznacznie dobrzy ludzie mogą być pewni spokoju swej duszy.

This article reflects upon the debate, initiated by Bernard Williams in 1973, concerning the desirability of immortality, where the latter expression is taken to mean endless bodily life as a human or humanoid being. Williams contends that it cannot be desirable; others have disputed this contention. I discuss a recent response from Timothy Chappell and attempt to pinpoint the central disagreement between Chappell and Williams. I propose that neither side in the debate has firm grounds for its claims, and then (...) proceed to consider four reasons for suspecting that the whole debate has yet to be placed on a conceptually coherent footing. (shrink)

Engaging a listener’s trust imposes moral demands upon a presenter in respect of truthtelling and completeness. An agent lies by an utterance that satisfies what are herein defined as signal and mendacity conditions; an agent deceives when, in satisfaction of those conditions, the agent’s utterances contribute to a false belief or thwart a true one. I advert to how we may fool ourselves in observation and in the perception of our originality. Communication with others depends upon a convention or practice (...) of presumed nonuniversal truthfulness. In support of an asserted duty of nondeceptiveness, I offer a reconciliation of pertinent Kantian passages, a sketch of arguments within utilitarianism, contractarianism, and other views, and an account arguing for application of that duty to assertions, implicatures, omissions, equivocation, prevarication, and sophistry insofar as they affect listeners’ doxastic states. For scholarship, this duty is exceptionless. I describe the kernel of intellectual honesty as a virtuous disposition such that when presented with an incentive to deceive, the agent will not deceive. Intellectual honesty delivers candor when it counts. I contrast this with complementary virtues and the surpassing virtue of ingenuousness. An account is given of the connection between intellectual honesty and an influential physical model of integrity. (shrink)

It has been observed, by D. Z. Phillips among others, that philosophy suffers from a “lack of imagination”. That is, philosophers often fail to see possibilities of sense in forms of life and discourse due to narrow habits of thinking. This is especially problematic in the philosophy of religion, not least when cross-cultural modes of inquiry are called for. This article examines the problem in relation to the philosophical investigation of reincarnation beliefs in particular. As a remedial strategy, I argue (...) for increased attention both to ethnographic sources and to the articulation of distinctively religious moral visions that reincarnation-talk facilitates. (shrink)

This essay introduces a tension between the public Wittgenstein’s optimism about knowledge of other minds and the private Wittgenstein’s pessimism about understanding others. There are three related reasons which render the tension unproblematic. First, the barriers he sought to destroy were metaphysical ones, whereas those he struggled to overcome were psychological. Second, Wittgenstein’s official view is chiefly about knowledge while the unofficial one is about understanding. Last, Wittgenstein’s official remarks on understanding themselves fall into two distinct categories that don’t match (...) the focus of his unofficial ones. One is comprised of those remarks in the Investigations that challenge the thought that understanding is an inner mental process. The other consists primarily of those passages in PPF and On Certainty concerned with the difficulty of understanding others without immersing oneself into their form of life. In its unofficial counterpart, Wittgenstein focuses on individuals, rather than collectives. The official and the unofficial sets of remarks are united in assuming a distinction between understanding a person and understanding the meaning of their words. If to understand a language is to understand a form of life, then to understand a person is to understand a whole life. (shrink)

Drawing heavily on Wittgenstein, Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science advanced a forceful and still valuable critique of positivist/empiricist conceptions of social science. In its more self-confident assertions concerning the nature of philosophy and society, however, Winch failed to recognize Wittgenstein’s acknowledgement of and appreciation for the indeterminacy and unsettled character of social and moral life.

It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people’s moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the (...) relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people’s moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. It is argued that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first. (shrink)

This article presents a long overdue analysis of the idea of an ethically committed social science, which, after the demise of positivism and the deeming of moral neutrality as impossible, has come to dominate the self-understanding of many contemporary sociological approaches. Once adequately specified, however, the idea is shown to be ethically questionable in that it works against the moral commitments constitutive of academic life. The argument is conducted with resources from the work of Peter Winch, thus establishing its continuing (...) relevance and critical importance for the social sciences, sociology in particular. Special reference is made to heretofore unappreciated aspects of Winch’s work, including within the groundbreaking The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, but focusing specifically on his later contributions to ethics. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 1, Page 21-39, January 2022.

In its treatment of capital punishment Amnesty International gives a central place to the suffering of the prisoner. Two quite distinct forms of suffering are relevant here. There is the psychological anguish of the person awaiting execution; and there is the physical suffering which may be involved in the execution itself. It is suggested that if we reflect clearly on this suffering we will conclude that the death penalty involves cruelty of a kind which makes it quite unacceptable. It is (...) to be condemned on the same ground as torture is to be condemned: on the ground, that is, that it involves the infliction of an unacceptable degree of suffering. (shrink)

Dorothea, an idealistic young lady, is the central figure of George Eliot's Middlemarch . She longs to devote her life to something valuable, looking up to people like St Teresa as her ideal. Contrary to all expectations, she decides to marry Casaubon, an elderly clergyman. For years, Casaubon has been preparing his magnum opus called ‘Key to All Religions’. In the milieu where Dorothea is living—a quiet English parish in the 1830s—Casaubon's scholarly project appears to her as the right object (...) of her devotion. She would lighten the burden of his solitary labour; share his life of wisdom and pursuit of truth. (shrink)

Philosophers have often claimed that the requirements of morality have an absolute and categorical status. Other values may be relative to the agent's ends, other imperatives hypothetical on his desires: their requirements must be justified by relating the action enjoined to the attainment of those ends or desires, and can be avoided by being shown to be incompatible with them. But the requirements of morality bind us whatever our ends or desires might be: they are not to be justified by (...) reference to anything beyond themselves; they cannot be avoided by being shown to be incompatatible with our existing purposes. Other values and imperatives may be determined—be given their status as values or imperatives—by our own prior purposes and desires: but those of morality themselves determine which purposes or desires we may or may not pursue. For convenient reference I label this the Absolutist view. (shrink)

Peter Winch believed that the central task of philosophy was to investigate ‘the force of the concept of reality’ in human practices. This involved creative dialogue with critical metaphysics. In ‘Ceasing to Exist’, Winch considered what it means to judge that something unheard-of has happened. Referring to Wittgenstein, Winch argued that judgments concerning reality must relate our observations to a shared ‘flow of life’. This implies criticism of the form of epistemology associated with metaphysical realism. Just as, according to Wittgenstein, (...) a sentence has no fixed meaning in isolation, an observation does not constitute knowledge outside shared human practices. (shrink)

Telling Stories -Narrative ethicsThe paper attempts to give a systematic survey of different strands and intentions of “narrative ethics” both in philosophy and in theology, and makes a proposal for how to devel-op narrative ethics in the future. This proposal features three different dimensions of the term “moral vision,”, i.e. morally substantial ideas that are embedded in traditions, the appropriation of these ideas by particular historical cultures or individuals and moral perception channelled by Moral Vision 2. Narrative ethics, the paper (...) argues, can describe how traditions can inspire moral thinking and learning without falling prey to traditionalism. Theological ethics is about forming an ethical culture in which we remind each other of the stories that continue to inspire us and in which we tell each other of our moral world-view and commitments, our strong feelings about the good and the bad which are based in our individual and common lives and not derived from grammatical rules or ultimate principles. (shrink)

This article aims to shed light on some core challenges of liberating social criticism. Its centerpiece is an intuitively attractive account of the nature and difficulty of critical social thought that nevertheless goes missing in many philosophical conversations about critique. This omission at bottom reflects the fact that the account presupposes a philosophically contentious conception of rationality. Yet the relevant conception of rationality does in fact inform influential philosophical treatments of social criticism, including, very prominently, a left Hegelian strand of (...) thinking within contemporary Critical Theory. Moreover, it is possible to mount a defense of the conception by reconstructing, if with various qualifications and additions, an argument from classic—i.e., mid twentieth-century—Anglo-American philosophy of the social sciences, in particular, the argument that forms the backbone of Peter Winch’s _The Idea of a Social Science_. Winch draws his guiding insights from the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, and one of the payoffs of considering Winch’s Wittgenstein-inspired work against the backdrop of Hegel-inspired work in Critical Theory is to contest the artificial professional strictures that are sometimes taken to speak against reaching across the so-called ‘Continental Divide’ in philosophy. The larger payoff is advancing, by means of this philosophically ecumenical approach, the enterprise of liberating social thought. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is a particular kind of fear. The danger to which it is a response is the possibility that the evaluative dimension of life from which we derive the values by which we live is arbitrary. If it were arbitrary, nothing we value would be valuable. There are strong reasons both for and against this kind of fear. I am concerned with understanding these reasons and judging their strengths and weaknesses.

Knobe's laudable conclusion that we make sense of our social world based on moral considerations requires a development account of human thought and a theoretical framework. We outline a view that such a moral framework must be rooted in social interaction.

Does Darwinism generally, and human sociobiology in particular, lead to an unwarranted (and possibly socially offensive) determinism? I argue that one must separate out different senses of determinism, and that once one has done this, a Darwinian approach to human nature can be seen to shed important light on our intuitions about free will, constraint, and control.

I begin with the story told by Herman Melville in his short novel, Billy Budd.The year is 1797. Britain is engaged in a long and bitter war against France, and the British war effort has been threatened by two naval mutinies: the Nore Mutiny and the mutiny at Spithead. The scene is His Majesty’s Ship, the Indomitable, and the central character is Billy Budd, sailor. Billy Budd is a young man of exceptional beauty, both physical and moral, whose only flaw (...) is a stammer. He is loved by all his fellow sailors except the master-at-arms, John Claggart. The incarnation of evil, Claggart recognises in Billy the incarnation of goodness, and is consumed by a jealousy which leads him to accuse Billy (falsely) of inciting the crew to mutiny. Alone with Claggart and the ship’s Captain, Edward Vere, Billy hears the lying charge against him. He is enraged, but his stammer prevents him from responding in words. He strikes Claggart, and the blow is fatal. Billy Budd, sailor, has killed the master-at-arms of one of His Majesty’s ships on active service, and the penalty for this is death. (shrink)

We will look critically at three essays by Cora Diamond concerning Peter Winch's views on the possibility of communication and criticism between language-games. We briefly present our understanding of Winch's approach to philosophy. Then, we argue that Diamond misidentifies Winch's views, taking them to imply language-game relativism or linguistic idealism. When she does raise valid criticisms against language-game relativism, her critical points mainly coincide with things that Winch has already stressed in his own work. That leaves us with the question (...) what their real disagreement amounts to. Finally, we suggest that at the bottom of Diamond's objections lies her failure to appreciate Winch's insights about the place of logic in human intercourse. (shrink)

This article explores Peter Winch’s account of the relationship between language and reality. It defends Winch against some common misunderstandings of his views but identifies two problematic areas. The first concerns the internal coherence of his account of philosophy. The second relates to the issue of rejecting particular ways of life or cultural practices as erroneous or illusory. One source of these problems is a tension between Winch’s official conception of philosophy and his own commitment to ‘defending’ the plurality of (...) diverse ways of life. (shrink)

I: Winch’s emphasis on philosophy’s concern with language and on rule-following; II: Winch’s misgivings about limits of analogy between rules and language; III: Rhees’ comparison of the unity of discourse with conversation, and claim that language makes sense if living makes sense; IV: Winch’s later emphasis on the fragility of conditions for understanding both between cultures and within our own.

The paper argues that the debate between objectivist criticism and postmodern critique represents a fracturing of the modes of mundane social and linguistic practice. The two together miss the open-textured character of language-in-use and the reflexive properties of situated human practice. Both difference and agreement are grounded in the multiplicity of criteria that are a feature of the logical grammar of language, and therefore of everyday praxis, including that of critique. To escape the duality of foundationalism on the one hand, (...) and radical relativism on the other, attention to the praxiological details of human action and reasoning is needed. The paper draws on Wittgensteinian philosophy and ethnomethodological studies of reasoning to make its case. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of trust in nurse–patient relationships from the perspective of the patient's trust in the nurse and what might be said to then render such a relationship trustworthy, from the patient's point of view. The paper commences with a general examination of the nature of trust, followed by consideration of the nature of professional–patient relationships in healthcare, with emphasis on nurse– patient relationships in particular. The nature of this relationship is used to provide grounds for arguing, (...) both morally and conceptually, that the nature of patients’ trust in those who nurse them is generally such that for the nurse to respond in a trustworthy way, she must care about her patients, not just for them. In arriving at this conclusion, the paper deliberately restricts its focus to nurse–patient encounters where patients are adults and a relationship, as opposed to a brief engagement between two people, can be said to have taken place. The context for this focus is public sector health care in the United Kingdom. In the text, gendered pronouns referring to doctors, nurses and patients are meant to be inclusive of both sexes. (shrink)

Many point to Peter Winch’s discussion of rationality, relativism, and religion as a paradigmatic example of cultural relativism. In this paper, I argue that Winch’s relationship to relativism is widely misinterpreted in that, despite his pluralistic understanding of rationality, Winch does allow for universal features of culture in virtue of which cross-cultural understanding and even critique is possible. Nevertheless, I also argue that given the kind of cultural universals that Winch produces, he fails to avoid relativism. This is because in (...) order to provide the standards without which relativism ensues, one requires a certain kind of criteria of rationality, namely, what I here call substantive universals, a kind of criteria which Winch rejects. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

This article presents a response to a recent article by Yotam Lurie and Robert Albin in which they discuss and present the merits of casuistry as a method for resolving moral dilemmas in business, principally by developing 'edifying' perspectives on the situation, and in doing so highlight the shortcomings of principles (such as the categorical imperative) in generating insights and thereby moral choices. The present article accepts the importance of cases and examples as a source of insight, but argues that (...) the process of conceptualisation involved in understanding these necessarily involves some reference to principles. However, principles and cases are best seen as complementary to the ethical decision-making process rather than in opposition. The complementary functions of these are highlighted in processes such as reflection upon experience, in applications of moral imagination and in the integration of emotive and cognitive elements in ethical choice. (shrink)

There seem to be two clearly-defined camps in the debate over the problem of moral expertise. On the one hand are the “Professionals”, who reject the possibility entirely, usually because of the intractable diversity of ethical beliefs. On the other hand are the “Ethicists”, who criticise the Professionals for merely stipulating science as the most appropriate paradigm for discussions of expertise. While the subject matter and methodology of good ethical thinking is certainly different from that of good clinical thinking, they (...) argue, this is no reason for rejecting the possibility of a distinctive kind of expertise in ethics, usually based on the idea of good justification. I want to argue that both are incorrect, partly because of the reasons given by one group against the other, but more importantly because both neglect what is most distinctive about ethics: that it is personal in a very specific way, without collapsing into relativism. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Stanley Hauerwas has not taken up many of the topics normally associated with virtue ethics, has explicitly distanced himself from the enterprise known as “virtue ethics,” and throughout his career has preferred other categories of analysis, ranging from character and agency to practices and liturgy, it is nevertheless clear that his work has had a deep and transformative impact on the recovery of virtue within Christian ethics, and that this impact has largely to do with the (...) ways in which his thought resists normalization. This essay traces the evolution of Hauerwas's reflections on virtue and the virtues over the course of his career, with special attention to how this has been bound up with an increasingly emphatic theological particularism that has remained ambivalent between what I term “comprehensive” versus “exclusive” particularism. I argue that it is important to distinguish between these, and suggest that grasping the destructive tendencies of “exclusive” particularism should cement our commitment to shouldering the responsibilities associated with comprehensive particularism. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

This paper explores the nature of trust in nurse–patient relationships from the perspective of the patient's trust in the nurse and what might be said to then render such a relationship trustworthy, from the patient's point of view. The paper commences with a general examination of the nature of trust, followed by consideration of the nature of professional–patient relationships in healthcare, with emphasis on nurse– patient relationships in particular. The nature of this relationship is used to provide grounds for arguing, (...) both morally and conceptually, that the nature of patients’ trust in those who nurse them is generally such that for the nurse to respond in a trustworthy way, she must careabouther patients, not justforthem. In arriving at this conclusion, the paper deliberately restricts its focus to nurse–patient encounters where patients are adults and a relationship, as opposed to a brief engagement between two people, can be said to have taken place. The context for this focus is public sector health care in the United Kingdom. In the text, gendered pronouns referring to doctors, nurses and patients are meant to be inclusive of both sexes. (shrink)

This article takes up Winch’s exploration of a certain dialectic in philosophical accounts of social inquiry, the poles of which I refer to as the under-laborer and over-laborer conceptions of philosophy. I argue that these conceptions, shown in Risjord and Reed, respectively, are caught in a dialectic of treating philosophy’s roles as either modestly clarifying or broadly determining the claims of social science. A third conception of philosophy, the therapeutic conception, is exemplified by Read et al.’s “New Wittgensteinian” interpretation of (...) Winch’s work as a way out of the dialectic. Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the latter, I conclude that a stronger development of the therapeutic approach is needed to move past the dialectic. (shrink)

This article clarifies the puzzling lack of adequate human environmental behavior, the primary driver of the ongoing climate crisis. It advocates using Wittgensteinian attitude analysis as an investigative framework and argues that attitudes toward nature are crucial yet understudied factors in shaping environmental behavior. The study focuses on the Romantic attitude toward nature as wilderness (understood as the negation of extractivism) and reveals its profound yet often misunderstood adverse impact on environmental behavior. This leads to a reflection on which attitude (...) toward nature could foster more adequate environmental behavior, suggesting kinship as its core. (shrink)

This paper challenges a dualistic picture popularised by Nigel Pleasants at the centre of influential investigations into the possibility of Wittgensteinian forms of moral certainty. The dualistic picture takes it for granted that moral certainty concerns both a series of hinge propositions that are beyond doubt, make no sense to justify and cannot be expressed in ordinary discourse and a phenomenon that is only ever instantiated in our ways of acting. I consider tensions in this account as they relate to (...) ‘Murder is wrong’ as a moral hinge proposition by drawing on the life and lyrics of US hip‐hop artist Kendrick Lamar. My claim is that the Lamar example highlights important tensions in our relation to the wrongness of murder that many would understand to occur within the moral realm, but which are conceptually ruled out from dualistic accounts of moral certainty. The plausibility of the dualistic picture must therefore be reassessed. (shrink)

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first I outline and defend Elizabeth Anscombe's claim that consequentialism is a shallow philosophy by considering how two contemporary consequentialists reach opposing but equally outlandish moral conclusions on a matter as fundamental as whether it is good or bad that the human race continues. In the second I argue that in order to show what is wrong with the consequentialist arguments presented in part one, we need to deploy a wider range (...) of critical resources than what typically appears in contemporary analytic moral philosophy. One example of a relevant and under‐appreciated resource I then consider is satire as a mode of moral thought. (shrink)

The article discusses the case of Microsoft's Twitter chatbot Tay that “turned into a Nazi” after less than 24 hours from its release on the Internet. The first section presents a brief recapitulation of Alan Turing's proposal for a test for artificial intelligence and the way it influenced subsequent discussions in the philosophy of mind. In the second section, I offer a few arguments appealing for caution regarding the identification of an accomplished chatbot as a thinking being. These are motivated (...) principally by Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussions of mind and soul and by some Wittgensteinian philosophers' criticisms of AI endeavours. I will try to show that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of AIs such as chatbots as thinking beings, rather independently of their technical perfection and accomplishment. In the third section, the case of the “Nazi chatbot” Tay will offer me material for some light to be shed on the peculiar character of our interconnected concepts of thinking, soul and person and on the importance of their further ramified connections. (shrink)

Peter Winch's famous argument in "The Universalizability of Moral Judgments" that moral judgments are not always universalizable is widely thought to involve an essentially sceptical claim about the limitations of moral theories and moral theorising more generally. In this paper I argue that responses to Winch have generally missed the central positive idea upon which Winch's argument is founded: that what is right for a particular agent to do in a given situation may depend on what is and is not (...) morally possible for them. I then defend the existence of certain genuine moral necessities and impossibilities in order to show how certain first-person moral judgements may be essentially personal. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.