55 ideas
| 5333 | Philosophy needs wisdom about who we are, as well as how we ought to be [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Any good philosophy will need to offer wisdom about who we are as well as about how we ought to be. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p. 14) | |
| A reaction: This sop should be accepted gratefully by fans of bioethics, who seem inclined to think that describing 'how we are' is all that needs to be said. Maybe the key wisdom lies in the relationship between the 'is' and the 'ought' of human nature. |
| 6575 | Philosophy may never find foundations, and may undermine our lives in the process [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Not only is traditional philosophy incapable of discovering the foundations it seeks, but the philosophical enterprise may itself dislodge the contingent, de facto supports that our daily life depends upon. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: In the end Fogelin is not so pessimistic, but he is worried by the concern of philosophers with paradox and contradiction. I don't remotely consider this a reason to reject philosophy, but it might be a reason to keep it sealed off from daily life. |
| 5334 | We resist science partly because it can't provide ethical wisdom [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: The inability of science to provide ethical wisdom is partly responsible for our resistance to the scientific image. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p. 14) | |
| A reaction: This seems right. A.J. Ayer, for example, declared "I believe in science", and his account of ethics was vacuously nihilistic. A description of the mechanisms of moral life is not the same as ethical wisdom. |
| 6585 | Rationality is threatened by fear of inconsistency, illusions of absolutes or relativism, and doubt [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: The three main threats to our rational lives are fear of inconsistency, illusions (of absolutism and relativism) and doubt. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a very nice analysis of the forces that can destroy the philosopher's aspiration to the rational life. Personally I still suffer from a few illusions about the possibility of absolutes, but I may grow out of it. The other three don't bother me. |
| 6557 | Humans may never be able to attain a world view which is both rich and consistent [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: It might be wholly unreasonable to suppose that human beings will ever be able to attain a view of the world that is both suitably rich and completely consistent. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Fogelin's lectures develop this view very persuasively. I think all philosophers must believe that the gods could attain a 'rich and consistent' view. Our problem is that we are a badly organised team, whose members keep dying. |
| 6568 | A game can be played, despite having inconsistent rules [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: The presence of an inconsistency in the rules that govern a game need not destroy the game. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: He only defends this thesis if the inconsistency is away from the main centre of the action. You can't have an inconsistent definition of scoring a goal or a touchdown. |
| 6560 | The law of noncontradiction is traditionally the most basic principle of rationality [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Traditionally many philosophers (Aristotle among them) have considered the law of noncontradiction to be the deepest, most fundamental principle of rationality. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: For Aristotle, see Idea 1601 (and 'Metaphysics' 1005b28). The only denier of the basic character of the law that I know of is Nietzsche (Idea 4531). Fogelin, despite many qualifications, endorses the law, and so do I. |
| 6565 | The law of noncontradiction makes the distinction between asserting something and denying it [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: People who reject the law of noncontradiction obliterate any significant difference between asserting something and denying it; …this will not move anyone who genuinely opts either for silence or for madness. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems a sufficiently firm and clear assertion of the basic nature of this law. The only rival view seems to be that of Nietzsche (Idea 4531), but then you wonder how Nietzsche is in a position to assert the relativity of the law. |
| 6574 | Legal reasoning is analogical, not deductive [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: There is almost universal agreement that legal reasoning is fundamentally analogical, not deductive, in character. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This raises the question of whether analogy can be considered as 'reasoning' in itself. How do you compare the examples? Could you compare two examples if you lacked language, or rules, or a scale of values? |
| 6582 | Conventions can only work if they are based on something non-conventional [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Convention, to exist at all, must have a basis in something that is not conventional; conventions, to work, need something nonconventional to build upon and shape. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Fogelin attributes his point to Hume. I agree entirely. No convention could ever possibly catch on in a society unless there were some point to it. If you can't see a point to a convention (like wearing ties) then start looking, because it's there. |
| 6576 | My view is 'circumspect rationalism' - that only our intellect can comprehend the world [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: My own view might be called 'circumspect rationalism' - the view that our intellectual faculties provide our only means for comprehending the world in which we find oruselves. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: He needs to say more than that to offer a theory, but I like the label, and it fits the modern revival of rationalism, with which I sympathise, and which rests, I think, on Russell's point that self-evidence comes in degrees, not as all-or-nothing truth. |
| 6589 | Knowledge is legitimate only if all relevant defeaters have been eliminated [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: In general a knowledge claim is legitimate only if all relevant defeaters have been eliminated. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: The problem here is what is 'relevant'. Fogelin's example is 'Are you sure the suspect doesn't have a twin brother?' If virtual reality is relevant, most knowledge is defeated. Certainly, imaginative people feel that they know less than others. |
| 19682 | Internalists are much more interested in evidence than externalists are [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: The notion of evidence generally plays a much more significant role in internalist epistemologies than it does in various forms of externalism. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Prop..') | |
| A reaction: I'm guessing that this is because evidence needs a certain amount of interpretation, whereas raw facts (which externalists seem to rely on) may never even enter a mind. |
| 19684 | Does spotting a new possibility count as evidence? [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Does the sudden realization of a heretofore unrecognized possibility count as evidence? | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Evid..') | |
| A reaction: [Nice use of 'heretofore'! Why say 'previously' when you can keep these wonderful old English words alive?] This means that we can imagine new evidence ('maybe the murderer was a snake'!). Wrong. The evidence is what suggests the possibility. |
| 19687 | Absence of evidence proves nothing, and weird claims need special evidence [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Two well know slogans (popularised by Carl Sagan) are 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence', ...and 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Absence') | |
| A reaction: [Sagan was a popular science writer and broadcaster] The second one is something like Hume's argument against miracles. The old problem of the 'missing link' for human evolution embodied the first idea. |
| 19688 | Every event is highly unlikely (in detail), but may be perfectly plausible [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: At a certain level of detail, almost any claim is unprecedented. How likely is 'Matilda won at Scrabble on Thursday with a score of 438 while drinking mint tea'? But there is nothing particularly unbelievable about the claim. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Extraordinary') | |
| A reaction: A striking idea, which rules out the simplistic idea that we can just assess evidence by its isolated likelihood. Context is crucial. How good is 438? What if she smoked opium? What if there is no Scrabble set on her island? |
| 19686 | Criminal law needs two separate witnesses, but historians will accept one witness [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: An ancient rule in law is that a criminal conviction needs evidence of two independent witnesses, but in history it is assumed that a document deserves the benefit of the doubt if it cannot be independently verified. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Interp..') | |
| A reaction: [compressed; McGrew's full account qualifies it a bit] A nice observation. One might even be suspicious of the two 'independent' witnesses, if there were lots of other reasons to doubt someon's guilt. A single weird document is also dubious. |
| 19680 | Maybe all evidence consists of beliefs, rather than of facts [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers have been attracted to the view that, strictly speaking, what counts as evidence is not a set of physical objects or even experiences, but rather a set of believed propositions. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Prop..') | |
| A reaction: This may be right. However, as always, I think animals are a key test. Do animals respond to evidence? Even if they did, they might need to 'make sense' of what they experienced, and even formulate a non-linguistic proposition. |
| 19681 | If all evidence is propositional, what is the evidence for the proposition? Do we face a regress? [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Taking evidence as propositional may trade one problem for another. If the bloodstain isn't evidence, but 'this is a bloodstain' is evidence, then what serves as evidence for the belief about the bloodstain? Is there an infinite regress? | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Prop..') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] I quite like evidence being propositional, but then find this. I'll retreat to my beloved coherence. I do not endorse Sellars's 'only a belief can justify a belief', because raw experience has to be part of what is coherent. |
| 19689 | Several unreliable witnesses can give good support, if they all say the same thing [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: The testimony of a number of independent witnesses, none of them particularly reliable, who give substantially the same account of some event, may provide a strong argument in its favor. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Testimonial') | |
| A reaction: A striking point. It obviously works well for panicking people in a crowd during an incident. Does it also apply to independent scientists who are known to cheat? They may not collaborate, but may all want the same result. |
| 19683 | Narrow evidentialism relies wholly on propositions; the wider form includes other items [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Evidentialism comes in both narrow and wide forms depending on whether evidence is taken to consist only of propositions or of a wider range of items. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Evid..') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Conee and Feldman for the wide view, which is not restricted to beliefs] You can hardly rely on occurrent beliefs as evidence, so we often have good knowledge with forgotten justification. But such knowledge has been 'weakened'. |
| 6596 | For coherentists, circularity is acceptable if the circle is large, rich and coherent [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Coherentists argue that if the circle of justifications is big enough, rich enough, coherent enough, and so on, then there is nothing wrong circularity. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: There must always be something wrong with circularity, and no god would put up with it, but we might have to. Of course, two pieces of evidence might be unconnected, such as an equation and an observation. |
| 6597 | A rule of justification might be: don't raise the level of scrutiny without a good reason [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: One rule for the justification of knowledge might be: Do not raise the level of scrutiny in the absence of a particular reason that triggers it. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: That won't decide the appropriate level of scrutiny from which to start. One of my maxims is 'don't set the bar too high', but it seems tough that one should have to justify moving it. The early scientists tried raising it, and were amazed by the results. |
| 6588 | Scepticism is cartesian (sceptical scenarios), or Humean (future), or Pyrrhonian (suspend belief) [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: The three forms of scepticism are cartesian, Humean and Pyrrhonian. The first challenges belief by inventing sceptical scenarios; the second doubts the future; the third aims to suspend belief. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: A standard distinction is made between methodological and global scepticism. The former seems to be Cartesian, and the latter Pyrrhonian. The interest here is see Hume placed in a distinctive category, because of his views on induction. |
| 6590 | Scepticism deals in remote possibilities that are ineliminable and set the standard very high [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Sceptical scenarios deal in wildly remote defeating possibilities, so that the level of scrutiny becomes unrestrictedly high, and they also usually deal with defeators that are in principle ineliminable. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: The question of how high we 'set the bar' seems to me central to epistemology. There is clearly an element of social negotiation involved, centring on what is appropriate. If, though, scepticism is 'ineliminable', we must face up to that. |
| 6583 | Radical perspectivism replaces Kant's necessary scheme with many different schemes [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: We reach radical perspectivism by replacing Kant's single, necessary categorial scheme with a plurality of competing categorial schemes. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: It certainly looks as if Kant sent us down a slippery slope into the dafter aspects of twentieth century relativism. The best antidote I know of is Davidson's (e.g. Idea 6398). But then it seems unimaginative to say that only one scheme is possible. |
| 5340 | Explanation does not entail prediction [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Explanation does not entail prediction. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p. 73n) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the inverse of this is also true, as we might be able to predict through pure induction, without knowing why something happened. We predict that smoking is likely to cause cancer. Complex things might be explicable but unpredictable. |
| 19685 | Falsificationism would be naive if even a slight discrepancy in evidence killed a theory [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Data do not quite speak for themselves, which speaks against a naive form of falsificationism according to which even the slightest mismatch between theory and evidence suffices to overturn a theory. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Interp..') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Robert Boyle wisely ignoring some data to get a good fit for his graph] |
| 5346 | In the 17th century a collisionlike view of causation made mental causation implausible [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: In the seventeenth century the dominant idea that causation is collisionlike made mental causation almost impossible to envision. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.136) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. This makes Descartes' interaction theory look rather bold, and Leibniz's and Malebranche's rejection of it understandable. Personally I still think of causation as collisionlike, except that the collisions are of very very tiny objects. |
| 5341 | Only you can have your subjective experiences because only you are hooked up to your nervous system [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: It is easy to explain why certain brain events are uniquely experienced by you subjectively: only you are properly hooked up to your own nervous system to have your own experiences. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p. 87) | |
| A reaction: This is in reply to Nagel's oft quoted claim that mind can only be understood as "what it is like to be" that mind. I agree with Flanagan, and it is nice illustration of how philosophers can confuse themselves with high-sounding questions. |
| 5351 | We only have a sense of our self as continuous, not as exactly the same [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: We only have a sense of our self as continuous, but not as exactly the same. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.178) | |
| A reaction: Russell said this too, and it seems to me to be right. Personal identity is far too imprecise for me to assert that I remember my ten-year-old self as being identical to me now. Only physical objects like teddy bears can pass that test. |
| 5353 | The self is an abstraction which magnifies important aspects of autobiography [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: The self is an abstraction from the story of a person's life that isolates and magnifies the experiences, traits and aspirations that are assigned importance. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.240) | |
| A reaction: Personally I am inclined to see personal identity as the central controller of brain activity, the aspect of the biological machine which keeps all the mental events focused on what matters, which is health, safety and happiness. |
| 5354 | We are not born with a self; we develop a self through living [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: It is a bad mistake to think we are born with a self; the self develops, and acquiring it requires living in the world. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.260) | |
| A reaction: I think this is wrong. He is mistaking a complex cultural concept of the self as the subject for autobiography etc. for the basic biological self which even small animals must have if their brains are to serve any useful purpose in their lives. |
| 5349 | For Buddhists a fixed self is a morally dangerous illusion [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: According to Buddhism, the idea of a permanent, constant self is an illusion, and a morally dangerous one. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.161) | |
| A reaction: We are familiar with the idea that it might be an illusion, but I am unconvinced by 'morally dangerous'. If you drop both free will and personal identity, I can't see any sort of focus for moral life left, but I am willing to be convinced. |
| 5338 | Normal free will claims control of what I do, but a stronger view claims control of thought and feeling [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: The standard view of free will is that I have something like complete control over what I do. A stronger view (not widely held) is that I also have complete control over what I think and what I feel. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p. 60n) | |
| A reaction: To claim free control of feelings looks optimistic, but it does look as if we can decide to think about something, such as a philosophical problem. Deciding what to say comes somewhere between thought and action. |
| 5344 | Free will is held to give us a whole list of desirable capacities for living [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Free will is said to give us self-control, self-expression, individuality, reasons-sensitivity, rational deliberation, rational accountability, moral accountability, the capacity to do otherwise, unpredictability, and political freedom. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.104) | |
| A reaction: Nice list. His obvious challenge is to either say we can live happily without some of these things, or else show how we can have them without 'free will'. Personally I agree with Flanagan that we meet the challenge. |
| 5332 | People believe they have free will that circumvents natural law, but only an incorporeal mind could do this [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Most people believe we have free will, and that this consists in the ability to circumvent natural law. The trouble is that the only device ever philosophically invented that can do this sort of job is an incorporeal soul or mind. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], Pref) | |
| A reaction: I think this is exactly right. We currently have a western world full of people who have rejected dualism, but still cling on to free will, because they think morality depends on it. I think morality depends on personal identity, but not on free will. |
| 5345 | We only think of ourselves as having free will because we first thought of God that way [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: It is unimaginable to me that, despite the feeling that we control what we do, such a strong conception of ourselves as unmoved movers would have been added to our self-image unless we had first conceived of God along these lines. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.107) | |
| A reaction: I think this is right, though there are signs in fifth century Greece of contradictory evidence. The 'unmoved mover' seems unformulated before Plato's 'Laws' (idea 1423), but there is an implied belief in free will a hundred years earlier. |
| 5343 | People largely came to believe in dualism because it made human agents free [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: I would say that that my consciousness doesn't seem either physical or non-physical, ..but the belief that the mind is non-physical partly took hold because that fits well with thinking of human agents as free. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.102) | |
| A reaction: I think this is right. I personally think there is no such thing as free will, and that belief in it has been the single greatest delusion amongst philosophers (and others) for the last two thousand years. Dualism has now gone, and free will is next. |
| 5347 | Behaviourism notoriously has nothing to say about mental causation [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Behaviourism was notorious in its heyday for having nothing to say about mental causation. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.141) | |
| A reaction: This is a bit unfair, as Ryle (idea 2622, following Spinoza, 4862) was one of the first to point out the paradox of 'double causation'. You have to be a mentalist to worry about mental causation, and eliminativists aren't bothered. |
| 5339 | Cars and bodies obey principles of causation, without us knowing any 'strict laws' about them [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Although everyone thinks cars and bodies obey the principles of causation, no one thinks it a deficiency that we don't know strict laws of automechanics or anatomy. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p. 65) | |
| A reaction: This attacks Davidson's claim that there are no strict psycho-physical laws, and I agree with Flanagan. Huge dreams of free will and human dignity are being pinned on the flimsy point that we have no strict laws here. But brains are very complicated. |
| 5342 | Physicalism doesn't deny that the essence of an experience is more than its neural realiser [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: One may be committed to the truth of physicalism without being committed to the claim that the essence of an experience is captured fully by a description of its neural realiser. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p. 90) | |
| A reaction: This is a reply to the Leibniz Mill question (idea 2109) about what is missing from a materialist view. Flanagan's point is that just as the essence of a panorama is the view from the hill, so the essence of consciousness requires you to be that brain. |
| 5335 | Emotions are usually very apt, rather than being non-rational and fickle [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: One can question the idea that emotions are non-rational, fickle and flighty; on the contrary, emotions normally seem to be very apt. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p. 16) | |
| A reaction: This is the modern view of emotion which is emerging from neuroscience, which is greatly superior to traditional views, apart from Aristotle, who felt that wisdom and virtue arose precisely when emotions were apt for the situation. |
| 6555 | We are also irrational, with a unique ability to believe in bizarre self-created fictions [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: We as human beings are also irrational animals, unique among animals in our capacity to place faith in bizarre fictions of our own construction. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is glaringly true, and a very nice corrective to the talk of Greeks and others about man as the 'rational animal'. From a distance we might be described by Martians as the 'mad animal'. Is the irrational current too strong to swim against? |
| 5348 | Intellectualism admires the 'principled actor', non-intellectualism admires the 'good character' [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: There are two main pictures of the good person: there is the 'good character', and there is the 'principled actor'. ..The first picture is non-intellectualist, and the second is intellectualist. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.145) | |
| A reaction: The second ideal elevates the principle itself above the actor who carries it out. Presumably consistency is a virtue, so a good character will at least pay some attention to principles. A good magistrate comes out the same in both views. |
| 6605 | Critics must be causally entangled with their subject matter [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Critics must become causally entangled with their subject matter. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: This remark is built on Hume's views. You may have a strong view about a singer, but it may be hard to maintain when someone plays you six rival versions of the same piece. I agree entirely with the remark. It means there are aesthetic experts. |
| 6607 | The word 'beautiful', when deprived of context, is nearly contentless [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Like the word 'good', the word 'beautiful', when deprived of contextual support, is nearly contentless. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: If I say with, for example, Oscar Wilde that beauty is the highest ideal in life, this doesn't strike me as contentless, but I still sympathise with Fogelin's notion that beauty is rooted in particulars. |
| 6604 | Saying 'It's all a matter to taste' ignores the properties of the object discussed [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: "It is all a matter of taste" may be an all-purpose stopper of discussions of aesthetic values, but it also completely severs the connection with the actual properties of the object under consideration. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: This remark grows out of his discussion of Hume. I like this remark, which ties in with Particularism in morality, and with the central role of experiments in science. The world forces beliefs on us. |
| 5355 | Cognitivists think morals are discovered by reason [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Cognitivists think morals are discovered by reason. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.301n) | |
| A reaction: I take cognitivism to be (strictly) the view that morals are knowable in principle. Our intellects might not be up to the task (and so we might have to ask the gods what is right). There is also the possibility that morals might be known by intuition. |
| 6586 | Cynics are committed to morality, but disappointed or disgusted by human failings [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Cynics are usually unswerving in their commitment to a moral ideal, but disappointed or disgusted by humanity's failure to meet it. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: I felt quite suicidal the other day when I saw someone park diagonally across two parking spaces. They can't seem to grasp the elementary Kantian slogan 'What if everybody did that?' It's all hopeless. I wonder if I am becoming a bit of a Cynic? |
| 5336 | Ethics is the science of the conditions that lead to human flourishing [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Ethics is the normative science that studies the objective conditions that lead to flourishing of persons. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p. 17) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice slogan for the virtue theory account of the nature of ethics. I think it is the view with which I agree. I am intrigued that he has smuggled the word 'science' in, which is a nice challenge to conventional views of science. |
| 6572 | Deterrence, prevention, rehabilitation and retribution can come into conflict in punishments [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: The purposes of punishment include deterrence, prevention, rehabilitation, and retribution, but they don't always sit well together. Deterrence is best served by making prisons miserable places, but this may run counter to rehabilitation. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: It seems to most educated people that retribution should be pushed far down the list if we are to be civilised (see Idea 1659), and yet personal revenge for a small act of aggression seems basic, normal and acceptable. We dream of rehabilitation. |
| 6573 | Retributivists say a crime can be 'paid for'; deterrentists still worry about potential victims [Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: A strict retributivist is likely to say that once a crime is paid for, that's that; a deterrence theorist is likely to say that the protection of potential victims overrides the released convict's right to a free and fresh start. | |
| From: Robert Fogelin (Walking the Tightrope of Reason [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: Interesting since the retributivist here has the more liberal attitude. Reformists will also have a dilemma when years in prison have failed to reform the convict. Virtue theorists like balance, and sensitively consider our relations with the criminals. |
| 5350 | The Hindu doctrine of reincarnation only appeared in the eighth century CE [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: The doctrine of a cycle of rebirths and reincarnations that are normally required before one achieve nirvana was only proposed in the eighth century CE, and then spread like wildfire among Hindus and, to a lesser extent, among Buddhists. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.166n) | |
| A reaction: Intriguing. Plato had proposed it in the fourth century BCE. Presumably Hindus had always been dualists, and then suddenly saw and exciting possibility that followed from it. The doctrine strikes me as (to put it mildly) implausible. |
| 5352 | The idea of the soul gets some support from the scientific belief in essential 'natural kinds' [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: The idea of the soul could be easily trashed if science does not countenance essences, but science does countenance essences in the form of what are known as 'natural kinds' (such as water, salt and gold). | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.181) | |
| A reaction: The existence of any essences at all does indeed make the existence of a soul naturally possible, but scientific natural kinds are usually postulated on a basis of chemical stability. Animals, for example, are no longer usually classified that way. |