The use of the English word “reason” in all of these contexts, and the way we translate equivalent terms from other languages, suggests a connection, but what exactly is it? Aristotle and Kant’s conception of what practical reasons are, I believe, can help us to answer this question, by bringing out what is distinctive, and distinctively active, about acting for a reason. That, at least, is what I am going to argue.

Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0048-3915%28198923%2918%3A4%3C334%3AAIACTD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P..

From the apathetic reaction to atrocities committed in Vietnam by the United States and its allies, one may conclude that moral restrictions on the conduct of war command almost as little sympathy among the general public as they do among those charged with the formation of U.S. military policy. Even when restrictions on the conduct of warfare are defended, it is usually on legal grounds alone: their moral basis is often poorly understood. I wish to argue that certain restrictions are (...) neither arbitrary nor merely conventional, and that their validity does not depend simply on their usefulness. There is, in other words, a moral basis for the rules of war, even though the conventions now officially in force are far from giving it perfect expression. (shrink)

As the ball flew towards us I leapt to my left to catch it. But it was you, reacting more rapidly than I, who caught the ball just in front of the point at which my hand was poised. Fortunate for us that you took the catch. The ball was headed on a course which, unimpeded, would have taken it through the glass window of a nearby building. Your catch prevented the window from being broken.

The concept of causation is fundamental to ascribing moral and legal responsibility for events. Yet the precise relationship between causation and responsibility remains unclear. This book clarifies that relationship through an analysis of the best accounts of causation in metaphysics, and a critique of the confusion in legal doctrine. The result is a powerful argument in favour of reforming the moral and legal understanding of how and why we attribute responsibility to agents.

I propose an amendment of Lewis's counterfactual analysis of causation, designed to overcome some difficulties concerning redundant causation.

This essay is an expansion and refinement of the key ideas and distinctions that Foot advances in ‘Killing and Letting Die’. Here, she defends two morally relevant distinctions: firstly, that between ‘what we do’ and what ‘we allow to happen’ and secondly, what we aim at and what we only foresee as the result of what we do. Utilitarianism as a moral theory is, Foot claims, at fault in overlooking these important distinctions. She describes cases in which although it would (...) be thought permissible to let one person die if we could then save a greater number, we should be outraged by the idea that we could kill one person in order to save them. Moreover, the impermissibility of even allowing one person to die deliberately in order to use the body to save others shows that the distinction between doing and allowing must be supplemented by the distinction between direct and indirect intention. Foot therefore argues that Utilitarianism is a deficient moral theory in that it overlooks these complexities of agency. This mistake came from the attempt to ground all moral judgements in purely causal relationships to better or worse ‘states of affairs,’ and in the latter part of the essay Foot calls into question the whole idea of ‘good states of affairs from a moral point of view’ that Utilitarians suppose to stand as the one foundation of all moral judgements. (shrink)