R. M. Hare

Nell’articolo di Fanciullacci, dapprima viene esaminata la precomprensione che orienta le analisi della Regola d’oro operate dalla filosofia moderna e dalla filosofia analitica: il confronto con Hobbes, Kant, Sidgwick, Gewirth, Hare e altri mostra come, nella riflessione volta a stabilire se la Regola d’oro possa valere come il principio pratico supremo in cui si troverebbe compendiata «l’intera legalità naturale», essa sia preliminarmente accostata in rapporto all’ideale di una regola così pienamente determinata da avere in sé il metodo della sua applicazione. Da qui anche gli sforzi di analisi logico-formale della Regola d’oro volti a ricostruirne la formulaione più trasparente ed univoca (paradigmatici i lavori di W. Trapp e H. Gensler). Fanciullacci tenta poi di evidenziare i limiti teorici di questo variegato e pur unitario programma attraverso una rilettura di orientamento pragmatista delle osservazioni sul seguire una regola avanzate da Wittgenstein: posta come termine di un rapporto puramente intellettualistico, ossia, estrusa dalla pratica cui è immanente, nessuna regola può dettare il metodo corretto di applicarla. La conclusione dell’articolo è che solo se è pensata, per lo meno anche, come endoxon, ossia come un contenuto che incontriamo a partire dallo sfondo del mondo della vita e al cui senso concreto noi accediamo e diveniamo familiari in quanto apparteniamo a questo stesso mondo e alle sue pratiche, la Regola d’oro può valere come norma che orienta e ordina il nostro agire. Solo all’interno di questo orizzonte segnato dallo sfondo pratico e dagli habitus attraverso cui i singoli vi si situano, si può progettare una chiarificazione logico-linguistica della Regola d’oro, una fondazione speculativa del suo nucleo vero e magari anche, auspica Fanciullacci, un rinnovato ascolto di essa capace di lasciarsi realmente meravigliare dalla sua ricchezza.

Is/Ought survey article, presupposing a little more logical sophistication that the above paper for Philosophy Now. For the Academia version  I have added footnotes  referencing the papers in which I argue at length for my more contentious claims.

For papers which expand on  the historical Hume and the implications of No-Ought-From-Is for contemporary Meta-Ethics, see below  'Letter from a Gentleman' and 'Snare's Puzzle/Hume's Purpose'

Brief summary and critique of Hare's universal prescriptivism.  I contend that Hare's attempt to derive a utilitarian ethic from his prescriptivist meta-ethic (given a non-fanatical set of desires) is a failure.  Rather than deriving utilitarianism from prescriptivism he assumes utilitarianism in order to save prescriptivism from disaster.

There are certain 'hard cases' of weakness of will that seem to occur, indeed to be common, but are very difficult to give a non-paradoxical account of.  It is just not clear how they are possible.  This paper is largely an attempt to get them in focus.  What conditions must such weak-willed actions satisfy?  In what sense must they be intentional, for example?  And must the weak-willed agent thinks his action objectively worse than some alternative action open to him?  And must that alternative action actually be open to him?  The paper concludes by considering the condition that a clear case of weakness of will must be in certain sense non-procrastinatory and this turns out to be particularly difficult to satisfy.  Other explanations, ones that do not postulate weakness of will (though they may involve paradoxes of their own), always seem to be available.

l. There is an antinomy in Hare's thought between Ought-Implies-Can and No-Indicatives-from-Imperatives.  It cannot be resolved by drawing a distinction between implication and entailment.  2. Luther resolved this antinomy in the l6th century, but to understand his solution, we need to understand his problem.  He thought the necessity of Divine foreknowledge removed contingency from human acts, thus making it impossible for sinners to do otherwise than sin.  3. Erasmus objected (on behalf of Free Will) that this violates Ought-Implies-Can which he supported with Hare-style ordinary language arguments.  4. Luther a) pointed out the antinomy and b) resolved it by undermining the prescriptivist arguments for Ought-Implies-Can.  5. We can reinforce Luther's argument with an example due to David Lewis.  6. Whatever its merits as a moral principle, Ought-Implies-Can is not a logical truth and should not be included in deontic logics.  Most deontic logics, and maybe the discipline itself, should therefore be abandoned.  7. Could it be that Ought-Conversationally-Implies-Can?  Yes - in some contexts.  But a) even if these contexts are central to the evolution of Ought, the implication is not built into the semantics of the word; b) nor is the parallel implication built into the semantics of orders; and c) in some cases Ought conversationally implies Can, only because Ought-Implies-Can is a background moral belief.  d) Points a) and b) suggest a criticism of prescriptivism - that Oughts do not entail imperatives but that the relation is one of conversational implicature.  8. If Ought-Implies-Can is treated as a moral principle, Erasmus' argument for Free Will can be revived (given his Christian assumptions).  But it does not 'prove' Pelagianism as Luther supposed.  A semi-Pelagian alternative is available

The aim of this thesis is to articulate an actual consent account of legitimate government as appointed by a free association of people, to protect them from harm, with the power to use coercion both to apprehend wrongdoers and to collect taxes in order to finance its activities in the most efficient way possible. The account itself is articulated in section III. 2, and depends on a form of moral skepticism defended in section II. 1, and an argument for the legitimacy of certain forms of coercion articulated in section II. 3, claiming that those who non-consent to an authority whose only purpose is to provide protection from harm to all who consent to it have no moral standing to protest being coerced by the authority as it carries out its duty. This argument is able to justify only a minimal state, or the minimal core of a larger, altogether non-voluntaristic state, concerned with providing protection from harm, though it doesn’t exclude the possibility of justifying further government powers with additional arguments. Section III. 3 discusses some lines of argument for supplementing the voluntaristic state with a regime of private property.

I  start  by  arguing  that  Mackie’s  claim  that  there  are  no  objective  values  is  a nonsensical one. I do this by ‘assembling reminders’ of the correct use of the term ‘values’ and by  examining  the  grammar  of  moral  propositions  à  la  Wittgenstein.  I  also  examine Hare’s thought experiment which is used to demonstrate “that no real issue can be built around the objectivity or otherwise of moral values” before briefly looking at Mackie’s ‘argument from queerness’.  In  the  final  section  I  propose  that  Robert  Arrington’s  ‘conceptual  relativism’, inspired by Wittgenstein, helps to make our use of moral language more perspicuous and avoids the problems faced by Mackie.

In Chapter 2 of Escape from Leviathan, Jan Lester defends two hypotheses: that instrumental rationality requires agents to maximise the satisfaction of their wants and that all agents actually meet this requirement. In addition, he argues that all agents are self-interested (though not necessarily egoistic) and he offers an account of categorical moral desires which entails that no agent ever does what he genuinely feels to be morally wrong. I show that Lester’s two hypotheses are false because they cannot accommodate weakness of will, because they are inconsistent with agency, which requires free will, because ends, obligations and values cannot be reduced to desires, and because maximisation is often not possible. Further, Lester’s claim that agents are self-interested is vacuous, his attempted reduction of moral behaviour to want-satisfaction fails, and his contention, that agents always do what they genuinely think to be morally required, seems untenable. A defence of freedom that depends on homo economicus is far from promising.

This is a copy of my (unpublished) doctoral dissertation, which I successfully defended at the University of Toronto in 1990. I wrote it under the supervision of Professors Michael Vertin and Joseph Boyle, of Saint Michael's College and the Philosophy Department. It surveys arguments for and against the position known as "ethical noncognitivism," i.e. the theory that moral propositions of a certain sort are neither true nor false.

Davidson and Kolnai in different ways emphasise that practical syllogistic reasoning can only tell one that one has a reason to do or not to do something.  It cannot adjudicate between conflicting reasons.  It can tell one the means to certain ends but not which ends to pursue.  This paper considers possible responses to this predicament.  What if anything can be done to put deliberation - the 'weighing' of competing reasons - on  a rational basis?

This is the course-book for my 'Themes from Hume' paper, which is largely based on my two edited collections, 'Hume, Motivation and Virtue' (HMV) and 'Hume on Is and Ought' (HIO). It contains  most of my papers on  Is and Ought, the Slavery of Reason thesis and the  Motivation Argument, including  'Directors Cut' versions of my contributions to HIO and HMV, and my first paper on these topics: 'Logic and  the Basis of Ethics' . It also contains a couple of  papers on  G.E Moore and the  Naturalistic Fallacy,  and what I call the Generalised Hume Thesis  (Beliefs of kind X are not the products of reason but of some non-rational causal mechanisms Y. Sometimes Hume seems to approve of going with the flow of the non-rational causal mechanisms and sometimes he does not. Has he a principled reason for his preferences?) The course-book  also includes my essay on Hume and Jane Austen. Thus in the current absence of a 'Collected Papers' it is a useful compendium for anyone interested in my views on these subjects.

COURSE-BLURB
This is a paper straddling metaethics (the nature and justification of moral judgements), the history of philosophy and the philosophy of logic. It deals with three themes from the work of David Hume (1711-1776) together with "matters arising" from the Humean agenda:

The Slavery of Reason Thesis ("reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions"). What does this mean? Is the Slavery of Reason Thesis (or something like it) correct? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the nature of ethics?
The Motivation (or Influence) Argument:
Morals have an influence on the actions and affections. [Premise]
Reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. [Premise]
Morals...cannot be derived from reason
What exactly is this argument supposed to prove? Does it succeed? If not, is there a decent argument in the neighbourhood that proves something similar? Can it be used to support non-cognitivism, the idea that moral judgements are neither true nor false?
Hume's No-Ought-From-Is thesis: "[It] seems altogether inconceivable", says David Hume, "that this new relation or affirmation [ought] can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it". What did Hume mean by this? Can you deduce an ought from an is? If not, why not? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the status of moral judgements? We focus on the idea, common in the 18th century, that logic is conservative - that in a valid inference you cannot get out what you haven't put in. In a famous paper the great New Zealand logician Arthur Prior challenged No-Ought-From-Is, along with the concept of conservativeness. We discuss the responses of Pigden, Schurz, Greg Restall and Gillian Russell, who all try to vindicate different versions of No-Ought-From-Is in the face of Prior's counterexamples.