Philosophers are fond of fiction and of imaginary examples to fill out their discussions of ethics. As with the stories of Jim and the guerrillas, of down and outs unwisely wandering into transplant hospitals and of railway wagons careering out of control towards philosophically minded points switchers, these examples are inclined to become baroque in their complexity and over-elaboration; any initial force or verisimilitude they may have had in their unadorned state is quickly overlain with a heavy varnish of cleverness and complication.

As an antidote to this modern day scholasticism, we could propose the true story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, recently made into a film in which the two protagonists actually describe (independently) what happened.

The paper is a tribute to the late Stuart Hampshire's investigations of the ramifying role of intention in our conceptual scheme. It surveys the central argument of Thought and Action and the third chapter of Freedom of the Individual. Emphasis is placed upon Hampshire's constructive account of human agency and consequent description of the manner in which perception and action are interwoven. His analysis of the character of intentional action, self-knowledge and autonomy is described. Various lacunae in Hampshire's account are identified and an attempt is made to fill them in in a manner consistent with Hampshire's insights.

Do minority groups have a right to the preservation of their language? I argue that the rights of groups are always reducible to the rights of individuals. In that case, the question whether minorities have a right to the preservation of their language is a question of whether individuals have a right to it. I argue that, in the only relevant sense of ‘right’, they do not. They may have an interest in the preservation of their language, but, if so, that interest must be weighed against the costs of satisfying it, and, normally at least, we should expect that the costs will be quite out of proportion to the weight of the interests involved.

In the paper, starting from a slightly modified version of van Fraassen's pragmatic approach to explanation, I will propose a pragmatical meta-model for the different biological explanatory models. That is, I will offer a pragmatic point of view to rule different explanatory models in function of the biological context from which the given biologist explains.

The world we lost, and now barely understand, was one where everyone knew her place, and her attendant duties. Civilized groups were the likeliest to insist on a diversity of rôle and rule. Primitive societies are ones where there are rather fewer such distinctions. Slaves and merchants offered a way of being outside the orders, and from the older point of view, the life of slaves and merchants is exactly what the ‘liberal’ ideal entails. No one can count on her connections; everything is up for sale; no one is dishonoured by the acts of friends or family; only animal passions keep us all together. Even in societies that profess egalitarian theories, castes and classes re-emerge. If there is another option it may lie in drawing, as the ancients did, a clear division between selfhood and nature: even in a traditionally hierarchical society it is possible to recall the mere selves that play their various parts. In a would-be egalitarian society that hopes for something more than the hedonic or agonistic bonds that may bind small-scale communities together, recalling, and reconstructing, that distinction may be even more important.

Bad things often happen, and morally good people ought to be sorry that they happen. What could be more obvious to a good person than that one ought to be sorry about the occurrence of bad things? And even more so, it would seem, if the bad things occur in one's vicinity, or one is involved with them. I argue that sometimes it is morally permissible not to be sorry when bad things happen. Perhaps it is even permissible to be happy about it.

There are good grounds for seeing a deep opposition between reason and violence. Yet some forms of argument appear to link the two; and a prominent example is the argumentum ad baculum, where the premise contains a threat. Consideration of the connection between premise and conclusion in such an argument can, it seems, yield some cases where the status of the author of the threat renders the argument not only valid but also sound. Examples of such arguments cluster in the areas near Pascal's Wager and Rawls' argument for justice. However even these arguments fail to effect a reconciliation between reason and violence.

A reply to Landau's objections to the author's earlier ‘An Argument against Marriage’ (Philosophy, 78, 2003, 79-91). In particular it is argued that ‘working’ at a relationship is valid only when there is a relationship to be worked at; it cannot, as Landau urges, be a reason for maintaining a relationship which has ceased.