I begin with some remarks on Christian Atheism and the Death of God Theology. These are not, as might be thought, identical movements. Rather, as I shall try to make clear, Christian Atheism is one form that the Death of God theology has assumed.

The question “What is humour?” has exercised in varying degrees such philosophers as Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer and Bergson and has traditionally been regarded as a philosophical question. And surely it must still be regarded as a philosophical question at least in so far as it is treated as a conceptual one. Traditionally the question has been regarded as a search for the essence of humour, whereas nowadays it has become almost a reflex response among some philosophers to dismiss the search for essences as misconceived. Humour, it will be said, is a family-resemblance concept: no one could hope to compile any short list of essential properties abstracted from all the many varieties of humour— human misfortune and clumsiness, obscenity, grotesqueness, veiled insult, nonsense, wordplay and puns, human misdemeanours and so on, as manifested in forms as varied as parody, satire, drama, clowning, music, farce and cartoons. Yet even if the search for the essence of humour seems at first sight unlikely to succeed, I do not see how we can be sure in advance of any conceptual investigation; and in any case we might do well to start with the old established theories purporting to give the essence of humour, for even if they are wrong they may be illuminatingly wrong and may help us to compile a list of typical characteristics.

Can a man intend to do the impossible? That is, can a man undertake to do some action, A—and not merely to come as close as possible to doing A with the hope that the doing of A will result—when he believes he has no chance of doing A?

Sir David Ross introduced and discussed his notion of prima facie duties in chapter 2 of The Right and the Good, and it is to this chapter that I shall devote most attention. I wish to show that the distinction between prima facie and “actual” duties, as expounded by Ross, entails that there are no “actual” duties; and I wish to show that this unfortunate consequence of the distinction arises from Ross's explicit epist-emological views. Writers such as Ewing, Baier and Frankena, who have quoted Ross's distinction with some degree of approval, force one to ask how, precisely, they interpreted it. In the first part of this paper I set out Ross's exposition in detail, since failure to do this has blinded adherents to its difficulties; in the second part I summarise my findings and indicate the problems Ross rightly poses for us; in the third part I suggest possible sources for Ross's views. Two points should be noted at the outset. Firstly, the distinction applies to acts, not actions; “act” refers to “the thing done, the initiation of change, and ‘action’ (to) the doing of it, the initiating of change, from a certain motive” (p. 7). Secondly, the term “right” is used throughout as synonymous with “what is my duty” (p. 6).

In his book, Theory of Knowledge, Roderick Chisholm distinguishes very precisely between, amongst others, what he calls acceptable, reasonable and evident propositions. A proposition is acceptable if with-holding it is not more reasonable than believing it; a proposition is reasonable if believing it is more reasonable than with-holding it; and a proposition is evident for a person provided it is reasonable for him, and there is no other proposition such that the latter is more reasonable than the former. The notion of being more reasonable is obviously pivotal, and Chisholm explains what it is for an attitude to be more reasonable than another in the following words: “If the person in question were a rational being, if his concerns were purely intellectual, and if he were to choose between the two attitudes, then he would choose the more reasonable in preference to the less reasonable”. The wording of this conditional suggests that Chisholm does not think a person is necessarily rational, so it is imperative that we ask: When is a person rational?