Recently, technology has impacted upon sports umpiring and refereeing. One effect is that the means to make sound judgments has becoe ?distributed? to new groups of people such as TV viewers and commentators. The result is that justice on the sports field is often seen not to be done and the readiness to question umpires' decisions that once pertained only to the players and, in some sports, to the crowd, has spread to anyone who has a television. What is more, (...) the questioning can now be done on good grounds. This change is explained and a way of thinking about it is put forward. The aim is to develop a theory of the relationship between human match officials and technology. Toward this end I offer a new terminology for the kinds of justice that are involved in match officiating. I argue that the introduction of new technology should be done in such a way as to maintain the justice of decisions and that justice is not the same as accuracy. Justice is best served with a restrained use of new technology. (shrink)

In Finite and Infinite Goods, Adams develops a sophisticated and richly detailed Platonic-theistic framework for ethics. The view is Platonic in virtue of being Good-centered; it is theistic both in identifying God with the Good and, more distinctively, in including a divine command theory of moral obligation. Readers familiar with Adams’s earlier divine command theory will recall that in response to the worry that God might command something evil, Adams introduced an independent value constraint, claiming that only the commands of (...) a loving God were fit to constitute moral obligations. In Finite and Infinite Goods he develops this notion of a loving and good God in what is now a fundamentally Good-centered ethical framework with a subordinate divine command theory of moral obligation. There is much of worth here, especially for theists wishing to think through the merits of a good-based theistic ethics, but also for those nontheists like myself who have a general interest in the nature of value and obligation. (shrink)

Robert Merrihew Adams has been a leader in renewing philosophical respect for the idea that moral obligation may be founded on the commands of God. This collection of Adams' essays, two of which are previously unpublished, draws from his extensive writings on philosophical theology that discuss metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues surrounding the concept of God--whether God exists or not, what God is or would be like, and how we ought to relate ourselves to such a being. Adams studies the (...) relation between religion and ethics, delving into an analysis of moral arguments for theistic belief. In several essays, he applies contemporary studies in the metaphysics of individuality, possibility and necessity, and counterfactual conditionals to issues surrounding the existence of God and problems of evil. (shrink)

Renowned scholar Robert Adams explores the relation between religion and ethics through a comprehensive philosophical account of a theistically-based framework for ethics. Adams' framework begins with the good rather than the right, and with excellence rather than usefulness. He argues that loving the excellent, of which adoring God is a clear example, is the most fundamental aspect of a life well lived. Developing his original and detailed theory, Adams contends that devotion, the sacred, grace, martyrdom, worship, vocation, faith, and other (...) concepts drawn from religious ethics have been sorely overlooked in moral philosophy and can enrich the texture of ethical thought. (shrink)

Presents translations of five dialogues from Plato, as well as additional notes on history and mythology.

Independence‐Friendly logic introduced by Hintikka and Sandu studies patterns of dependence and independence of quantifiers which exceed those found in ordinary first‐order logic. The present survey focuses on the game‐theoretical interpretation of IF‐logic, including connections to solution concepts in classical game theory, but we shall also present its compositional interpretation together with its connections to notions of dependence and dependence between terms.

In addressing objections to the theological voluntarist program, the consensus response by defenders of theological voluntarism has been to affirm a restricted theological voluntarism on which some, but not all, important normative statuses are to be explained by immediate appeal to the divine will. The aim of this article is to assess the merits and demerits of this restricted view. While affirming the restricted view does free theological voluntarism from certain objections, it comes at the cost of committing the theological (...) voluntarist to the view that no theses about the divine nature itself could alone be sufficient to motivate a theological voluntarist thesis about any normative status. And when we examine the case for a theological voluntarist account of any particular normative status – say, rightness, or obligatoriness – there are severe difficulties with that case as it stands. It is thus unclear whether the theological voluntarist program of providing good reasons to affirm a voluntarist explanation of non‐trivially‐theistic normative statuses has borne fruit. (shrink)

First published in 1962, contains the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. It sets out Austin's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts for at least the last ten years of his life. Starting from an exhaustive examination of his already well- known distinction of performative utterances from statements, Austin here finally abandons that distinction, replacing it by a more general theory of 'illocutionary forces' of utterances which has important bearings on a wide (...) variety of philosophical problems. (shrink)

If one sits in the stands for awhile at a local sporting contest, whether it is wrestling, soccer, baseball or particularly basketball, before long someone will exclaim toward a referee, ?That was a makeup call. You owe us one.? Everyone knows what this means but if an eight-year old beside you hears this screamed for the first time and asks, ?What does that mean?? An explanation given to her will be something like ?that's when an official makes a call and (...) immediately realizes it was a wrong call so at the first opportunity he can he makes a call against the team that has benefitted from the previous call; he is trying to even things out for his mistake.? The referee or umpire is attempting to be fair by ?giving back? the call with a ?makeup call.? A make-up call can be defined as the act of compensating for a questionable or bad officiating call by making a proportionally even call against the team that was aided by the first call. Usually these are immediate and obvious. They can also be conscious or subconscious, intentional or unintentional. The hope is that the two calls generally offset one another without either team being dramatically harmed. I will argue that the makeup call is prima facie immoral but if one were to attempt to find moral justification for it, this could best be done through a corrective theory of justice. But this presents a number of moral questions and ambiguities, most significantly, is a makeup call just and fair? Is it appropriate to understand the makeup call as an example of two wrongs making a right? A broader philosophic al question about officiating is whether each call in a contest should be viewed by as an independent single call with the goal of the official getting that one immediate call correct or should each call be understood as in a direct relationship with every other call in that game as a type of gestalt thus justifying makeup calls? This work will probe the depths of the highly suspect yet common moral puzzle, the makeup call. (shrink)

Sport, Rules and Values presents a philosophical perspective on some issues concerning the character of sport. Central questions for the text are motivated from real life sporting examples as described in newspaper reports. For instance, the (supposed) subjectivity of umpiring decisions is explored via an examination of the judging ice-skating at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games of 2002. Throughout, the presentation is rich in concrete cases from sporting situations, including baseball, football, and soccer. While granting the constitutive nature of (...) the rules of sport, discussion focuses on three broad uses commonly urged for rules: in defining sport; in judging or assessing sport (as deployed by judges or umpires); and in characterizing the value of sport, especially if that value is regarded as moral value. In general, McFee rejects a conception of the determinacy of rules as possible within sport, and a parallel picture of the determinacy assumed to be required by philosophy. (shrink)