That's what I reckon morality is all about — how to preach, not how to act. My aim is not to answer this question of how to preach (except in the broadest outlines). I want to defend the claim that it is the, or at least a, central problem of ethics: that it is in fact the problem of what moral principles to accept.

My argument consists of an account of what is involved in accepting a moral principle. By a moral principle I mean a kind of principle about how people should act. Moral principles are not the only principles you can have about how people should act. There are principles of prudence, or rational self-interest. There are aesthetic principles, such as might be expressed in a remark like “you shouldn't put a magenta cushion on a scarlet sofa”. There are principles of etiquette. And no doubt there are others. I develop my account of morality by asking what distinguishes moral principles from the rest.

The papers by Ronald de Sousa and Steve Davis raise very interesting issues. I think that they have the issue almost right between us, but I want to make some small amendments, which will make a big difference.

First, de Sousa: with all the talk about the ‘significance feature,’ I’m not trying to make an in principle argument against the reduction of purpose/action to physical movement/change. Perhaps such an argument is possible, perhaps not. For the moment, all we have is the a posteriori. But that involves our making the most dear-headed possible judgments about our actual intellectual predicament, using this term as a shorthand for a whole set of issues to do with the nature of the phenomena we face, and how they relate or don't relate to the theories on offer. Philosophy can help in this, not because philosophers wheel in bright, shiny a priori (im)possibility arguments, but rather by clarifying what is at stake, and what is going on.

The Bible does not in general tell us to maximize or minimize anything. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount do n·ot, for example, tell us to maximize the glory of God. Instead they say, do this, don't do that, where ‘this’ and ‘that’ are replaceable by the name for such categories of action as stealing, committing adultery, and loving thy neighbour.

Until recently, at least, non-maximizing moralists have appeared irrational when confronted with such questions as: what if stealing or lying will save a life? Because they exclude consideration of particular circumstances, the dicta of traditional morality seem myopic and prejudiced next to ‘end-state’ doctrines like utilitarianism, which require that careful empirical investigation accompany virtually every moral decision. To many, traditional morality seems sincere and straightforward, but lacking in intellectual respectability.

I shall argue that the central doctrines of Locke's politics have a theological basis, a doctrine of Creation similar to the Thomist one. Locke does not elaborate this doctrine; he presupposes it. It is not a hidden, esoteric element in his thought; it is there on the surface, but in a scattered and fragmentary form.

I shall proceed in this fashion: First, I shall set out this doctrine of Creation and show its connexion with Locke's moral theory by way of an examination of his doctrines of property and power. I shall then show that Locke extends this doctrine of Creation to human productive activity with crippling results for his political theory.

The well known fact that beliefs may be ascribed either de dicto or de re raises a problem about the role of belief ascriptions in the explanation of action because it suggests that both kinds of ascriptions may help explain why an agent acted. Some explanations may require only de dicto belief ascriptions, others only de re ascriptions, while still others require ascriptions of both types. As a first step toward sorting out these alternatives I want to consider whether de re ascriptions which impute to the agent beliefs about himself or about some other person ever help to explain actions. I shall discuss this question from the perspective of two radically different theories of de re belief, assuming throughout that de dicto belief ascriptions are explanatory.

Although Kant's attempts in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to derive statements of specific duties from the categorical imperative have received much attention, there is still disagreement over the strategies of particular derivations, the status of the auxiliary assumptions employed therein, and the principles at work in the derivations generally. Yet an understanding of these matters is indispensable for a proper understanding of the Groundwork and bears on a much wider class of ethical theories as well. My aim here is to provide an account of the derivations and their auxiliary premises that explains both the strategy behind the derivations generally and the details of Kant's specific examples. In particular, I shall argue that the widespread view that the premises of the derivations are empirical is mistaken and that their conclusions are thus more general than is often supposed.

My title refers to three accounts of interpersonal love: the rationalist (and ultimately rational egoist) account that Terence Irwin ascribes to Plato; the anti-rationalist but strikingly similar account that Harry Frankfurt endorses in his own voice; and the ‘ekstatic’ account that I – following the lead of Martha Nussbaum – find in Plato's Phaedrus. My claim is that the ekstatic account points to important features of interpersonal love to which the other accounts fail to do justice, especially reciprocity and a regulative ideal of equality.

G.A. Cohen and David Estlund claim that, because of their fact-dependent nature, constructivist theories of justice do not qualify as moral theories about fundamental values such as justice. In this paper, I defend fact-dependent, constructivist theories of justice against this fact-independency critique. I argue that constructivists can invoke facts among the grounds for accepting fundamental principles of justice while maintaining that the foundation of morality has to be non-empirical. My claim is that constructivists ultimately account for the normativity of fact-dependent principles by referring to a fact-independent, moral conception of the person, which is not a principle of justice.1

In his 1993 article George Bealer offers three separate arguments that are directed against the internal coherence of empiricism, specifically Quine's version of empiricism. In doing so, Bealer identifies three fundamental principles of Quine's empiricism. First, the principle of empiricism states that:

Second, the principle of holism states that:

According Leibniz's thesis of universal expression, each substance expresses the whole world, i.e. all other substances, from its particular, unique viewpoint, or, in other words, the complete individual notion of a substance — the comprehensive notion which includes, in internal terms, everything truly attributable to a substance — is such a universal expression of, or ‘involves,’ every other substance, or, as Leibniz also frequently states, from any given complete individual notion one can ‘deduce’ or ‘infer’ or ‘demonstrate,’ or from it ‘follows,’ or it ‘leads to,’ (all truths about) the whole world. On the other hand, in Leibniz's view each (created) substance is internally individuated, self-sufficient and independent of other (created) substances, and the complete individual notion of a substance is such that it respects this requirement. Leibniz also says, with an apparent intention of pronouncing his doctrines of expression and self-sufficiency at the same time, that each substance is ‘as if a world apart,’ or like a ‘multiplication’ or ‘concentration’ of the world.

The idea that all people are moral equals enjoys broad support. Practically speaking, there is no doubt that this is a great moral victory. Inegalitarian views are often morally arbitrary, and many have been used to support self-serving and deeply harmful actions and policies. Coming, as it does, on the heels of ideas of racial, ethnic, religious, and gender-based superiority, there is no question that the world is a far better place for our commitment to the idea that all (normal adult) humans deserve to be shown equal moral respect or concern.

Among fundamental, widely shared values, there are two which often come into conflict, creating a serious moral dilemma, viz., the value of individual well-being and the value of individual self-direction. These values issue in two fundamental moral principles, one which prescribes the protection of others from harm (the principle of beneficence), and one which proscribes interfering with a person's right to direct his own life and actions (the principle of liberty). When an individual is doing or choosing something which subjects him to harm or significant risk of harm, the question of paternalistic interference arises.

Since John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, there have been a number of attempts to say when such protective interference with adults is morally acceptable.

It is a main theme of Donald Davidson's theory of interpretation that interpretive charity is a sine qua non of interpretation. Interpretive charity is necessary for interpretation to get off the ground, for without being charitable, that is, without taking the speaker to be rational by our standards and taking what he holds true to be in fact true by our lights as far as possible, there is no hope that we can, as it were, break into the circle of his mental states, meanings, and behavior. Charity is not merely a necessity at the initial stage of the interpretive process, but an ever-present constraint on interpretation. In other words, there can never be a point in the interpretive process where the interpreter can cease to be charitable. This is, at least partly, explained by another main theme of Davidson's theory, namely, that understanding and communication require massive agreement between interpreter and speaker.