Encyclopedia of

ETHICS
 Board of Consulting Editors

Harold Alderman Raymond Geuss Onora O’Neill

Julia E. Annas Alan Gewirth Derek L. Phillips
Annette C. Baier Mary Gibson Tom Regan
Kurt Baier Kenneth E. Goodpaster Abdulaziz Sachedina
Marcia W. Baron Russell Hardin John Sallis
Sissela Bok R. M. Hare Thomas M. Scanlon, Jr.
R. B. Brandt Virginia Held Samuel Scheffler
David Braybrooke Paul Helm J. B. Schneewind
Hsueh-li Cheng Terence Irwin Robert L. Simon
Antonio S. Cua Joseph J. Kockelmans Holly M. Smith
Eliot Deutsch Christine M. Korsgaard Hillel Steiner
Cora Diamond Norman Kretzmann Jeffrey Stout
Alan Donagan David Lyons Laurence Thomas
Gerald Dworkin Henry John McCloskey Susan Wolf
Abraham Edel Howard McGary David B. Wong
William K. Frankena Martha Nussbaum Allen W. Wood
 Encyclopedia of
ETHICS
Second Edition

Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker

Editors

Volume I
A–G

Routledge
New York and London
 To G.S.K.

Published in 2001 by
Routledge
711 Third Avenue,
New York, NY 10017

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

All other content and compilation, copyright © 2001 by Lawrence C. Becker and
Charlotte B. Becker.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First edition published by Garland Publishing, New York, 1992.

Portions of Derk Pereboom’s “free will” were drawn from his introduction to Free Will,
edited by Derk Pereboom, Indianapolis: Hackett, ©1997, all rights reserved.
“deceit” © 2001 by Sissela Bok
“etiquette” © 2001 by Judith Martin and Gunther Stent
“moral terms,” “prescriptivism,” “slavery,” “universalizability,” and “weakness of will”
© 2001 by R. M. Hare

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Encyclopedia of ethics / Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker, editors. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-93672-1 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-93673-X (vol. 1 : alk. paper) —
ISBN 0-415-93674-8 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-93675-6 (vol. 3 : alk. paper)
1. Ethics — Encyclopedias. I. Becker, Lawrence C. II. Becker, Charlotte B., 1944 –

BJ63 .E45 2001

170'.3 — dc21
2001019657
 Contents

Volume I

Introduction and Acknowledgments vii

Note on Use ix
List of Entries xi
Contributors and Editors xix

A–G Entries 1

Volume II

H–O Entries 643

Volume III

P–W Entries 1267

Subject Index 1833

Citation Index 1955
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction and Acknowledgments

In this new edition, the Encyclopedia of Ethics has been substantially revised, and it
has been expanded by more than 30 percent. Its intended audience remains the same:
scholars, university students, and readers with a serious interest in philosophy. Its aims
with respect to subject matter remain the same: coverage of ethical theory as pursued
among English-speaking philosophers. Its 326 distinguished contributors (see the list
of Contributors and Editors) are authorities in their fields. The Encyclopedia’s content
(see List of Entries) was again designed through wide consultation, and its 581 signed
entries were peer reviewed. In addition, the encyclopedic apparatus has been improved
in various ways, most notably by the inclusion of references to other entries, set in
SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS, within the text of each entry. There are two indexes: a subject
index and a citation index.
The emphasis in this edition, as in the first, is on ethical theory. But as before, there
are entries on metaethics, applied ethics, and ethical issues that are especially important
to theory, as well as biographical entries on figures who have made significant contri-
butions to theory. There are thus entries on abortion, animals, blackmail, homicide, the
Holocaust, racism, rape, sexuality, slavery, and many other contemporary moral issues
that have become crucial test cases for theory, but not on the whole panoply of topics
one might find in a work devoted to applied ethics. There are entries on various religious
traditions, and survey entries on the history of ethics, but again these entries were
commissioned and written with an eye to themes that are especially important to ethical
theory.
Since the publication of the first edition in 1992, the number of new reference works
in philosophy has grown exponentially. There is now a large assortment of dictionaries,
companions, and even encyclopedias devoted to various areas of philosophy, and of
course there is now the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. However, the original
aims and coverage of the Encyclopedia of Ethics have not been duplicated in any of
those new works. The treatment of ethical theory in this work, for example, is densely
populated with rather narrowly focused entries (e.g., pride, humility), many of which
are accompanied by broadly conceived surveys (e.g., virtue ethics, virtues).
As before, however, the scope of this encyclopedia is considerably broader than the
term “ethical theory” might suggest. Readers will find lengthy survey entries on the
history and current status of philosophical ethics in other areas of the world; major
traditions in religious ethics; the relation of philosophical ethics to technology, religion,
law, literature, and social, political, and economic systems and theories; the relation of
philosophical ethics to important contemporary social/political movements and prob-
lems; and the relation of philosophical ethics to other fields of philosophy. Moreover,
the editors have given careful attention to theories of rational choice and economic
analysis; feminist ethics; virtue theory; and moral psychology. The encyclopedia also

vii
Introduction and Acknowledgments

includes a twelve-part, multi-authored, 60,000-word history of ethics from the pre-

Socratics through the twentieth century.
Our aims in producing this new edition were not to expand the scope of the work,
but rather to deepen and otherwise improve its original design. In doing this, the editors
once again had the assistance of an outstanding Board of Consulting Editors. In con-
structing the new table of entries, we surveyed the authors who contributed to the first
edition and incorporated suggestions about the second edition from correspondence
and reviews concerning the first.
Almost all of the 435 entries from the first edition have been retained, but many
have been substantially revised, and all of them have been reviewed for needed revi-
sions. A few entries from the first edition have been dropped, but only because coverage
of their topics has been reorganized by a set of newly commissioned entries. Most of
the original entries have been revised in at least minor ways, and, where appropriate
and possible, their bibliographies have been updated. Peer reviewing of these revised
entries was done by the editors, and in a few cases where the authors are now deceased,
the editors have supplied updated bibliographies.
For the 150 new entries, the process of selecting topics and authors began with a
circular to the contributors to the first edition, asking for judgments about the list of
additional entries proposed by the editors, as well as suggestions for other entries and
authors. A strong consensus was reached fairly quickly. Once again the most serious
divergence of opinion concerned which living philosophers should have biographical
entries, and once again there was virtually no support for the editors’ view (no doubt
a selfish one) that the best policy would be to include no such entries. All new entries
were peer reviewed, either by one of the editors, by one or more of the consulting
editors, or by a larger pool of critics. In one case, on the author’s initiative, an entry
was circulated to several hundred specialists for comment.
The idea for this new edition, as for the first one, came from Gary Kuris, then of
Garland Publishing. He has since moved on to a grander position, Garland has been
acquired by Taylor & Francis and subsequently merged with Routledge, and the En-
cyclopedia of Ethics now appears under their distinguished imprint, much revised and
much expanded.
As they did with the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Ethics, the contributors,
peer reviewers, and consulting editors have made these volumes possible. We owe them
all a debt of gratitude. We handled the remainder of the pre-production work, assisted
by the cheerful and efficient efforts of Sharon Durham. The detailed, perceptive, and
elegant subject index was prepared by Cynthia Crippen.
All of us who have worked on this project hope for astute readers. They will under-
stand that no encyclopedia in philosophy can be complete or definitive, nor should it
try to be, for that would mean trying to stop the philosophical enterprise itself. They
will understand that no encyclopedia in philosophy should be used as a substitute for
philosophy, or as a substitute for a direct encounter with the work it describes. And
they will not fail, at the end of the first entry they read, to follow the references into
the labyrinth.
Charlotte B. Becker
Lawrence C. Becker

viii
 Note on Use

Unlike the first edition, the entries in this revised edition are listed in word-by-word
alphabetical order. Spaces between the words in titles matter. Thus, for example, the
entry on Mo Tzu appears before the entry on motives. The List of Entries gives a con-
venient overview of the arrangement.
The dates given for people and events have been checked against standard biograph-
ical and bibliographical sources. Where standard sources differ from each other or from
the results of more recent scholarship, however, we have followed what appears to be
the prevailing view in recent sources, unless advised otherwise by our authors. This is
especially applicable to the entries on Greek and Chinese antiquity, where we have often
used approximate dates even though precise dates are listed in some sources. For the
modern era, such problems are fewer, but even here the reader should be wary. Sources
differ in minor ways. We are reliably informed, for example, that Richard Cumberland’s
year of birth was 1632, as we have given it, and not 1631 as many sources report.
We have not given birth dates for living figures, except in the titles of entries devoted
to them. But otherwise it has been our policy to insert birth and death dates at the first
mention of a historical person’s name in each entry. For works we have typically sup-
plied the date of first publication or, where that is not applicable, the date of composition
for nonrecent works. Some authors have naturally protested the resulting typographical
clutter, but we think readers will find the information worth the added reading effort.
Following general practice for encyclopedias, there are no footnotes, and parentheti-
cal references in the text have been kept to a minimum. In those few places where
citations are necessary, the page references are given in the relevant listing in the bib-
liography.
Within the text of an entry, a word or phrase set in SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS indicates
that there is an entry of that title elsewhere in the Encyclopedia. It does not constitute
a claim that the referenced entry is directly relevant to the topic under discussion. See
also references are included in a paragraph immediately following the entry’s text, prior
to the bibliography.
The choice of headwords for both topical and biographical entries is often problem-
atic. Where there is cause for confusion, the editors have provided appropriate cross-
references. In reference works, consistency in choosing headwords and then adhering
to them is of the utmost importance. Unfortunately, the consistent implementation of
one such choice fell through the safety net: the entry for Ibn Sı̄nā is listed under the
Anglicized form of his name (Avicenna), with a cross-reference from the transliterated
Arabic form, while the reverse is true of his fellow Islamic philosophers. The reader is
directed to the List of Entries for an overview of headwords and cross-references.
The Subject Index is an analytical index of topics and persons discussed in the text
of the entries. The Citation Index gives an author-by-author listing of writers, and some
editors, cited in the bibliographies of all 581 entries.

ix
This page intentionally left blank
 List of Entries

Abelard, Peter Aquinas, see Thomas Aquinas

abortion Arendt, Hannah
absolutes, see moral absolutes arete, see excellence; virtues
absurd, the Aristotelian ethics
Abunaser, see Farabi, al- Aristotle
academic ethics atheism
academic freedom attention, see moral attention; moral perception
action Augustine, Saint
acts, see voluntary acts authenticity
acts and omissions authority
additivity problems autonomy of ethics
Adler, Felix autonomy of moral agents
aesthetics Averroes, see Ibn Rushd
Africa Avicenna
agency and disability Ayer, A. J.
agent-centered morality bad faith
agents, see autonomy of moral agents; idealized Baier, Kurt E. M.
agents Balguy, John
agnosticism bargaining
agricultural ethics Barry, Brian (M.)
akrasia, see weakness of will Beauvoir, see de Beauvoir
al-Farabi, see Farabi, al- Beccaria, Cesar [Bonesana], Marchesi di
alienation beneficence
altruism benefit-cost analysis, see cost-benefit analysis
American moral philosophy benevolence
amnesty and pardon Bentham, Jeremy
analogical arguments bioethics
analytic philosophy and ethics biological theory
anger blackmail
animals, treatment of Bradley, F[rancis] H[erbert]
Anscombe, G. E. M. Brandt, Richard B.
Anselm, Saint Brentano, Franz Clemens
anthropology bribery
anti-realism, see metaphysics and epistemology; Buber, Martin
moral realism; moral relativism Buddha
applied ethics Buddhist ethics

Note: Cross-references are in italics.

xi
List of Entries

Burke, Edmund consequentialism

business ethics conservation ethics
Butler, Joseph conservatism
Calvin, John constructivism
Cambridge Platonists contraception, see reproductive technologies
Camus, Albert contractarianism
capital punishment contracts
care conventions
casuistry cooperation, conflict and coordination
categorical and hypothetical imperatives cooperative surplus
causation and responsibility coordination, see cooperation, conflict and
censorship coordination
character correctional ethics
charity corruption
cheating cosmopolitan ethics
children and ethical theory cost-benefit analysis
China courage
choice, see deliberation and choice; rational choice cradle arguments
Christian ethics critical theory
Chu Hsi cruelty
Chuang Tzu Crusius, Christian August
Cicero, Marcus Tullius Cudworth, Ralph
circumstances of justice, see justice, circumstances cultural studies
of Cumberland, Richard
civic duties, see civil rights and civic duties Cynics
civic good and virtue Cyrenaics
civil disobedience Darwin, Charles
civil rights and civic duties de Beauvoir, Simone
civility death
Clarke, Samuel deceit
coercion definition, see persuasive definition
cognitive science deliberation and choice
coherentism democracy
collective responsibility Democritus
commensurability deontology
common good Descartes, René
common sense moralists desert, see merit and desert
communitarianism desire
community, see moral community, boundaries of determinism, see freedom and determinism
comparative ethics deterrence, threats and retaliation
competition Dewey, John
compromise dignity
computers dilemmas, see moral dilemmas
confidentiality, see secrecy and confidentiality dirty hands
conflict, see cooperation, conflict and coordination; disability, see agency and disability
international justice: conflict discounting the future
Confucian ethics discrimination
Confucius distributive justice, see justice, distributive
conscience Donagan, Alan
consent double effect

xii
 List of Entries

Duns Scotus, John fittingness

Durkheim, Émile Foot, Philippa
duty and obligation forgery
Dworkin, Ronald forgiveness
economic analysis formalism
economic liberty, see liberty, economic forms of consciousness
economic systems Foucault, Michel
education, see moral education Frankena, William Klaas
Edwards, Jonathan free will
egoism freedom and determinism
elite, concept of, freedom of the press
Emerson, Ralph Waldo friendship
emotion Fuller, Lon
emotivism future generations
Engels, Frederick Gadamer, Hans-Georg
engineering ethics game theory
entitlements Gandhi, Mohandas Kamarchand
environmental ethics Gassendi, Pierre
envy gay ethics
Epictetus generosity
Epicureanism genetic engineering
Epicurus genocide
epistemology, see metaphysics and epistemology Gert, Bernard
equality Gewirth, Alan
ethical egoism, see egoism Godwin, William
ethical naturalism, see naturalism golden rule
ethics, see autonomy of ethics; history of Western good, theories of the
ethics government, ethics in
ethics and morality gratitude
etiquette Green, Thomas Hill
eudaimonia, -ism Grotius, Hugo
euthanasia groups, moral status of
evil guilt and shame
evolution Habermas, Jürgen
excellence happiness
excuses Hare, R. M.
existential ethics harm and offense
exploitation Hart, H. L. A.
externalism and internalism Hartmann, Nicolai
fairness hate
family hedonism
Farabi, al- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
fate and fatalism Heidegger, Martin
feminist ethics Hindu ethics
Fénelon, François historiography
Feuerbach, Ludwig history of Western ethics: 1. presocratic Greek
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb history of Western ethics: 2. classical Greek
fidelity history of Western ethics: 3. Hellenistic
fiduciary relationships history of Western ethics: 4. Roman
final good history of Western ethics: 5. early Medieval

xiii
List of Entries

history of Western ethics: 6. later Medieval intention

history of Western ethics: 7. Renaissance interests
history of Western ethics: 8. seventeenth and internalism, see externalism and internalism
eighteenth centuries international justice: conflict
history of Western ethics: 9. nineteenth-century international justice: distribution
British intolerance, see toleration
history of Western ethics: 10. nineteenth-century intransitivity
Continental intuitionism
history of Western ethics: 11. twentieth-century Islam
Continental Islamic business ethics
history of Western ethics: 12. twentieth-century Islamic ethics
Anglo-American Islamic medical ethics
Hobbes, Thomas Jainism
Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry James, William
Holocaust Japan
homicide Jefferson, Thomas
homosexuality Jesus of Nazareth
honor Jewish ethics
hope journalism
Hsün Tzu justice, circumstances of
human rights justice, distributive
humanism justice, international, see international justice:
Hume, David conflict; international justice: distribution
humility justice, rectificatory
Husserl, Edmund Kant, Immanuel
Hutcheson, Francis Kantian ethics
hypocrisy karma
hypothetical imperative, see categorical and Kierkegaard, Søren
hypothetical imperatives killing and letting die
Ibn Rushd King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Ibn Sı̄nā, see Avicenna land ethics
Ibn Tufayl Lao Tzu
ideal observer law and ethics, see legal ethics; legal philosophy
idealist ethics legal ethics
idealized agents legal philosophy
imagination, see moral imagination legitimacy
immoralism Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
impartiality Leopold, Aldo
imperative, see categorical and hypothetical lesbian ethics
imperatives Levinas, Emmanuel
incontinence, see weakness of will Lewis, Clarence Irving
India liberalism
individualism libertarianism
inequality liberty
infanticide liberty, economic
information professions, see library and library and information professions
information professions life and death
innocence life, meaning of
institutions life, right to
integrity literature and ethics

xiv
 List of Entries

Locke, John moral psychology

logic and ethics moral purity
love moral realism
loyalty moral reasoning
luck, see moral luck moral relativism
Lucretius moral rules
Luther, Martin moral saints
lying, see deceit moral sense theorists
Machiavelli, Niccolò moral status of groups, see groups, moral status of
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. moral terms
Maimonides, Moses morality, see ethics and morality
Malebranche, Nicolas mortality
Mandeville, Bernard motives
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus multiculturalism
marriage, see children and ethical theory; family; murder, see homicide
love; personal relationships Murdoch, Iris
Marx, Karl Murphy, Arthur Edward
Marxism mysticism
Marxism and Soviet communism, see Soviet ethics Nāgārjuna
mass media narrative ethics
materialism natural law
Mead, George Herbert naturalism
medical ethics naturalistic fallacy
medical ethics, historical nature and ethics
Mencius needs
mercy negligence
merit and desert neo-Kantian ethics
metaethics neo-Stoicism
metaphysics and epistemology neutral principles
military ethics Niebuhr, Reinhold
Mill, James Nietzsche, Friedrich
Mill, John Stuart nihilism
Mo Tzu non-human animals, see animals, treatment of
Montaigne, Michel de non-violence, see pacifism; violence and non-
Montesquieu, baron de violence
Moore, G. E. norms
moral absolutes Nozick, Robert
moral agents, see autonomy of moral agents; nuclear ethics
idealized agents nursing ethics
moral attention obedience to law
moral community, boundaries of Objectivism
moral development obligation, see duty and obligation
moral dilemmas Ockham, see William of Ockham
moral education offense, see harm and offense
moral imagination omissions, see acts and omissions
moral luck oppression
moral norms, see norms organic unity
moral perception ought implies can
moral pluralism pacifism
moral point of view pain and suffering

xv
List of Entries

Paine, Thomas proportionality

Paley, William Protagoras of Abdera
pardon, see amnesty and pardon prudence
partiality psychoanalysis
Pascal, Blaise psychology
passion public and private morality
paternalism public goods
Paul, Saint public health policy
peace, see war and peace public policy
Peirce, C. S. public policy analysis
perception, see moral perception Pufendorf, Samuel
perfectionism punishment
Perry, Ralph Barton puritanism
person, concept of purity, see moral purity
personal relationships racism and related issues
persuasive definition racism, concepts of
phenomenology Rand, Ayn
philosophical anthropology rape
philosophy of law, see legal philosophy rational choice
philosophy of religion rationality vs. reasonableness
phronesis Rawls, John
plagiarism realism, see moral realism
Plato reasonableness, see rationality vs. reasonableness
pleasure reason[ing], see moral reasoning; practical
Plotinus reason[ing]; rationality vs. reasonableness
pluralism, see moral pluralism reasons for action
police ethics reciprocity
political correctness rectificatory justice, see justice, rectificatory
political philosophy, see social and political reflective equilibrium
philosophy Reid, Thomas
political systems, evaluation of relationships, see friendship; personal relationships
pornography relativism, see moral relativism
possibilism religion
postmodernism religion, philosophy of, see philosophy of religion
power reproductive technologies
practical reason[ing] resentment
practical wisdom responsibility
pragmatism responsibility, collective, see collective
praxis responsibility
precedent retaliation, see deterrence, threats and retaliation
prescriptivism retributive justice, see justice, rectificatory
Price, Richard revenge
Prichard, H. A. revolution
pride Ricoeur, Paul
principlism right, concepts of
privacy right holders
private morality, see public and private morality rights
professional ethics rights, human, see human rights
promises risk
property risk analysis

xvi
 List of Entries

risk aversion sport

Ross, W. D. Staël, Madame de
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques stakeholder analysis
Royce, Josiah Stevenson, Charles L.
Russell, Bertrand Stewart, Dugald
saints, moral, see moral saints Stoicism
Santayana, George strategic interaction
Sartre, Jean-Paul Suarez, Francisco
scepticism, see skepticism in ethics; skepticism in subjectivism
ancient ethics suffering, see pain and suffering
Scheler, Max suicide
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Sunnism
Schiller, Friedrich von supererogation
Schopenhauer, Arthur sympathy
Schweitzer, Albert Taoist ethics
Scotus, John Duns, see Duns Scotus, John Taylor, Charles
secrecy and confidentiality technology
self and social self technology and nature
self-control teleological ethics
self-deception temperance
self-defense terrorism
self-esteem theism
self-knowledge theological ethics
self-ownership theory and practice
self-respect Thomas Aquinas, Saint
Seneca Thomasius, Christian
sexual abuse and harassment Thomson, Judith Jarvis
sexuality and sexual ethics Thoreau, Henry David
Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of threats, see deterrence, threats and retaliation
shame, see guilt and shame toleration
Shi’ism torture
Sidgwick, Henry tragedy
Singer, Marcus G. transcendentalism
situation ethics transitivity, see intransitivity
skepticism in ancient ethics trust
skepticism in ethics Tufts, James Hayden
slavery universalizability
slippery slope arguments utilitarianism
Smith, Adam value, concept of
social and political philosophy value, theory of
social contract vices, see virtues
social psychology violence and non-violence
social self, see self and social self virtue ethics
sociobiology, see biological theory virtues
sociology Vitoria, Francisco de
Socrates Voltaire
Sophists voluntarism
Soviet ethical theory voluntary acts
Spencer, Herbert Walzer, Michael
Spinoza, Baruch de Wang Yang-ming

xvii
List of Entries

war and peace Williams, Bernard

weakness of will wisdom
Weber, Max Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Weil, Simone Wittgensteinian ethics
welfare rights and social policy Wolff, Christian
Westermarck, Edward Wollaston, William
Whewell, William Wollstonecraft, Mary
wickedness women moral philosophers
William of Ockham work

xviii
 Contributors and Editors
Mitchell Aboulafia. Professor and Chair of Philosophy,
University of Colorado at Denver. Author, The Medi-
ating Self: Mead, Sartre, and Self-Determination, and
other works in social theory and American and Conti-
nental philosophy. Editor, Philosophy, Social Theory
and the Thought of George Herbert Mead. MEAD.
E. M. Adams. Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emeritus,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Author, Eth-
ical Naturalism and the Modern World-View; Philos-
ophy and the Modern Mind; The Metaphysics of Self
and World; and A Society Fit for Human Beings. AU-
TONOMY OF ETHICS; LEWIS; NATURALISM.
Harold Alderman. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus,
Sonoma State University. Author, Nietzsche’s Gift, and
other works in ethics, aesthetics, and continental phi-
losophy. Consulting editor. ELITE, CONCEPT OF; LIFE,
RIGHT TO; MACINTYRE; NIETZSCHE.
Ernest Alleva. Philosophy, Smith College and Hampshire
College. MORAL DEVELOPMENT.
Roger T. Ames. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Hawaii. Author, books in Chinese and comparative
philosophy; translator of classical texts; editor, Philos-
ophy East and West. CHUANG TZU; LAO TZU; TAOIST
ETHICS.
Julia Elizabeth Annas. Regents Professor, Department of
Philosophy, University of Arizona. Recent works in-
clude Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind; The Morality of
Happiness; Platonic Ethics Old and New. Consulting
editor. ETHICS AND MORALITY; FINAL GOOD; SKEPTICISM
IN ANCIENT ETHICS.
Kwame A. Appiah. Professor of Afro-American Studies
and Philosophy, Harvard University. Author, Assertion
and Conditionals; For Truth in Semantics; Necessary
Questions; and In My Father’s House: Essays in the
Philosophy of African Cultures. AFRICA; ANTHROPOL-
OGY.
Richard J. Arneson. Professor of Philosophy, University
of California, San Diego. Author of works on political
philosophy. EXPLOITATION.
John D. Arras. Porterfield Professor of Bioethics and Pro-
fessor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. Au-
thor of articles on bioethics; co-editor of Ethical Issues
xix
in Modern Medicine (5th ed.); editor of Bringing the
Hospital Home. NARRATIVE ETHICS; SLIPPERY SLOPE
ARGUMENTS.
John E. Atwell (1934–1995). Late Professor of Philoso-
phy, Temple University. Author, Ends and Principles in
Kant’s Moral Thought; Schopenhauer: The Human
Character; Schopenhauer on the Character of the
World: The Metaphysics of Will. General editor, Series
in Occupational Ethics. BRADLEY.
Annette C. Baier. Professor of Philosophy Emerita, Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh. Author, Postures of the Mind; A
Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s “Trea-
tise”; Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics; and The
Commons of the Mind: The Paul Carus Lecture Series
19. Consulting editor. HUME; PASSION.
Kurt Baier. Distinguished Service Professor of Philoso-
phy Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh. Author, The
Moral Point of View; The Rational and the Moral Or-
der; and Problems of Life and Death. Consulting editor.
MORAL REASONING.
Marcia W. Baron. Philosophy, Indiana University. Author,
Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology; and articles
on crime and culpability, Kantian ethics and Hume’s
ethics. Consulting editor. LOYALTY; SUPEREROGATION.
Brian Barry. Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of Philosophy
and Political Science, Columbia University. Works in-
clude Political Argument; Theories of Justice; Justice as
Impartiality; and Culture and Equality. EQUALITY; PO-
LITICAL SYSTEMS.
Margaret P. Battin. Distinguished Professor of Philoso-
phy, University of Utah. Author, Ethical Issues in Sui-
cide; Ethics in the Sanctuary; The Least Worst Death.
Co-author, Puzzles About Art and Ethical Issues in the
Professions. Co-editor, John Donne’s Biathanatos. SUI-
CIDE.
Charlotte B. Becker. Former music, catalog, and biblio-
graphic instruction librarian. Author of general interest
articles and reviews. Co-editor.
Lawrence C. Becker. Kenan Professor in the Humanities
and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, College of Wil-
liam and Mary; Fellow, Hollins University. Works in-
clude Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations; Reci-
Contributors and Editors
procity; A New Stoicism. Co-editor. GODWIN; MORAL
LUCK; NOZICK; PRIDE; PROPERTY; RECIPROCITY; SOCIAL
CONTRACT; WOLLSTONECRAFT.
Hugo Adam Bedau. Austin Fletcher Professor of Philos-
ophy Emeritus, Tufts University. Author, Making Mor-
tal Choices; Thinking and Writing About Philosophy;
Death is Different. Editor, The Death Penalty in Amer-
ica: Current Controversies; Civil Disobedience. APPLIED
ETHICS; BECCARIA; CAPITAL PUNISHMENT; CASUISTRY;
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.
Charles R. Beitz. Professor of Government and Legal
Studies, Bowdoin College. Works include Political
Theory and International Relations; Political Equality:
An Essay in Democratic Theory. Editor, International
Ethics. Editor of the journal, Philosophy & Public Af-
fairs. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE: CONFLICT.
Martin Benjamin. Professor of Philosophy, Michigan
State University. Author, Splitting the Difference: Com-
promise and Integrity in Ethics and Politics. Co-author,
Ethics in Nursing. COMPROMISE; NURSING ETHICS.
Robert Benne. Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion, Ro-
anoke College. Author, The Paradoxical Vision: A Pub-
lic Theology; Ordinary Saints: An Introduction to the
Christian Life. LUTHER; NIEBUHR.
Robert Bernasconi. Moss Professor of Philosophy, The
University of Memphis. Author, The Question of Lan-
guage in Heidegger’s History of Being; Heidegger in
Question. Co-editor, The Idea of Race; The Provoca-
tion of Levinas; and Rereading Levinas. HUMANISM;
LEVINAS.
Lawrence Blum. Professor of Philosophy, Distinguished
Professor of Liberal Arts and Education, University of
Massachusetts, Boston. Author, Friendship, Altruism,
and Morality; Moral Perception and Particularity. Co-
author, A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism.
ALTRUISM; CARE; PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS; WEIL.
James Bohman. Danforth Professor of Philosophy at
Saint Louis University. Author, Public Deliberation:
Pluralism, Complexity and Democracy; New Philoso-
phy of Social Science: Problems of Indeterminacy;
other work in critical theory, the philosophy of social
science, and political philosophy. CRITICAL THEORY.
Sissela Bok. Formerly, Professor of Philosophy, Brandeis
University. Author, Lying; Secrets; A Strategy for Peace;
Common Values; Mayhem; and Alva Myrdal: A
Daughter’s Memoir. Consulting editor. DECEIT.
E. J. Bond. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Queen’s
University, Kingston, Ontario. Author, Reason and
Value and other works in ethics, value theory, aesthet-
ics, and epistemology. GOOD, THEORIES OF THE; MA-
TERIALISM; PURITANISM; VALUE, CONCEPT OF.
Bernard R. Boxill. Professor of Philosophy, University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Author, Blacks and Social
Justice and other works in moral philosophy. CIVIL
xx
RIGHTS AND CIVIC DUTIES; KING; RACISM AND RELATED
ISSUES.
R. B. Brandt (1910–1997). Late Professor of Philosophy
Emeritus, University of Michigan. Works include Eth-
ical Theory; A Theory of the Good and the Right; and
Hopi Ethics. Consulting editor. IDEAL OBSERVER.
David Braybrooke. Centennial Commission Professor in
the Liberal Arts, Professor of Government and Profes-
sor of Philosophy, University of Texas. Fellow, Royal
Society of Canada. Works include Philosophy of Social
Science; Meeting Needs; Moral Objectives, Rules, and
the Forms of Social Change; Natural Law Modernized.
Co-author, Logic on the Track of Social Change. Con-
sulting editor. COMMON GOOD; CORRUPTION; INTER-
ESTS; NEEDS.
Richard Bronaugh. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and
Adjunct Professor of Law, University of Western On-
tario. Co-founder and Senior Editor, Canadian Journal
of Law and Jurisprudence. CONTRACTS; PROMISES.
John Broome. White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy,
University of Oxford. Author, Weighing Goods; Ethics
Out of Economics; Counting the Cost of Global Warm-
ing. DISCOUNTING THE FUTURE; ECONOMIC ANALYSIS.
Taft Broome, Jr. Professor of Engineering, Howard Uni-
versity. Works include “Engineering the Philosophy of
Science” and “Engineering Responsibility for Hazard-
ous Technologies.” ENGINEERING ETHICS.
Charlotte Brown. Associate Professor of Philosophy, Il-
linois Wesleyan University. Author of articles on David
Hume’s Ethics and on the British moralists. BALGUY;
MORAL SENSE THEORISTS; PALEY; STEVENSON; WOL-
LASTON.
Jacques Brunschwig. Professor Emeritus, University of
Paris—I. Author, Papers in Hellenistic Philosophy. Co-
editor, Le Savoir grec and Passions and Perceptions.
CRADLE ARGUMENTS.
Allen Buchanan. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Arizona. Author, Marx and Justice; Ethics, Efficiency
and the Market; Secession: The Morality of Political
Divorce. Co-author, The Ethics of Surrogate Decision
Making; From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice.
JUSTICE, DISTRIBUTIVE.
Ann Bumpus. Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Dart-
mouth College. Author of “Actors Without Intentions:
The Double Phenomenon View” and “Aiming and In-
tending.” INTENTION.
Charles Butterworth. Professor of Government and Poli-
tics, University of Maryland. Author, Between the State
and Islam; “The Political Teaching of Avicenna.” Edi-
tor and translator, Averroës’ Middle Commentary on
Aristotle’s Poetics. AVICENNA; FARABI, AL-; IBN RUSHD;
IBN TUFAYL.
Steven M. Cahn. Professor of Philosophy, City University
of New York Graduate School. Works include Saints

and Scamps: Ethics in Academia. Editor, Morality, Re-
sponsibility, and the University: Studies in Academic
Ethics. General editor, Issues in Academic Ethics. AC-
ADEMIC ETHICS.
Cheshire Calhoun. Professor of Philosophy, Colby Col-
lege. Author, Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of
the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement. Editor,
What is an Emotion? POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.
J. Baird Callicott. Professor of Philosophy and Religious
Studies, University of North Texas. Works include In
Defense of the Land Ethic; Beyond the Land Ethic;
Earth’s Insights; and book chapters and journal arti-
cles. CONSERVATION ETHICS; ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS;
LEOPOLD.
James Campbell. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Toledo (Ohio). Author, Understanding John Dewey;
Recovering Benjamin Franklin; and other works in
social philosophy and the history of American Philos-
ophy. TUFTS.
Richmond Campbell. Professor of Philosophy, Dalhousie
University (Nova Scotia). Author, Illusions of Paradox;
Self-Love and Self-Respect. Co-editor, Paradoxes of
Rationality and Cooperation. An editor of Canadian
Journal of Philosophy. EGOISM.
Claudia Card. Professor of Philosophy, University of Wis-
consin, Madison. Author, Lesbian Choices and The
Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck. Editor
of Feminist Ethics; Adventures in Lesbian Philosophy;
On Feminist Ethics and Politics; and the forthcoming
Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. FIDEL-
ITY; LESBIAN ETHICS; MERCY.
Thomas L. Carson. Professor of Philosophy, Loyola Uni-
versity of Chicago. Author, The Status of Morality; and
Value and the Good Life. Co-Editor of Morality and
the Good Life; and Moral Relativism. BRIBERY.
Hsueh-li Cheng. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Hawaii, Hilo. Author, Empty Logic and Exploring Zen.
Translator and commentator, Nagarjuna’s Twelve Gate
Treatise. Co-editor, New Essays in Chinese Philosophy.
Editor-in-chief, International Review of Chinese Reli-
gion and Philosophy. Consulting editor. BUDDHA; BUD-
DHIST ETHICS; JAINISM; NAGARJUNA.
James F. Childress. Kyle Professor of Religious Studies
and Professor of Medical Education, University of Vir-
ginia. Author, Practical Reasoning in Bioethics. Co-
author, Principles of Biomedical Ethics. PRINCIPLISM.
Roderick M. Chisholm (1916–1999). Late Professor of
Philosophy Emeritus, Brown University. Author, Franz
Brentano and Intrinsic Value; Theory of Knowledge;
Perceiving; Person and Object; The First Person; and
On Metaphysics. Translator of Brentano. BRENTANO.
Thomas Christiano. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
University of Arizona. Author, Rule of the Many: Fun-
damental Issues in Democratic Theory, and articles on
xxi
Contributors and Editors
theories of justice, democratic theory, and foundations
of moral philosophy. DEMOCRACY.
Maudemarie Clark. George Carleton, Jr., Professor of
Philosophy, Colgate University. Author, Nietzsche on
Truth and Philosophy. Co-editor, Nietzsche’s Day-
break; Co-editor and co-translator, Nietzsche’s On the
Genealogy of Morality. IMMORALISM.
S. R. L. Clark. Professor of Philosophy, University of Liv-
erpool. Author, The Political Animal; Biology and
Christian Ethics; Civil Peace and Sacred Order; and
other works on Aristotle, animals, philosophy of reli-
gion, philosophical psychology, and neo-Platonism.
PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
C. A. J. (Tony) Coady. Gibson Professor of Philosophy
and Deputy Director of the Centre for Applied Philos-
ophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne. Au-
thor, Testimony: A Philosophical Study, and other
works on political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of
mind, epistemology. DIRTY HANDS; TERRORISM.
John M. Cooper. Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Prince-
ton University. Author, Reason and Human Good in
Aristotle; Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient
Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory. Editor, Plato:
Complete Works. FRIENDSHIP; HISTORY 2: CLASSICAL
GREEK.
David Copp. Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green
State University (Ohio). Author, Morality, Normativ-
ity, and Society. Co-editor, The Idea of Democracy;
Morality, Reason and Truth; and Pornography and
Censorship. METAETHICS; SKEPTICISM IN ETHICS.
John Cottingham. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Reading. Author, Philosophy and the Good Life; Des-
cartes; The Rationalists; “Varieties of Retribution”;
“Partiality and the Virtues”; “The Ethical Credentials
of Partiality”; and other works on history of philosophy,
ethics, and philosophy of law. JUSTICE, RECTIFICATORY.
Antonio S. Cua. Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Cath-
olic University of America. Author, Dimensions of
Moral Creativity; Ethical Argumentation: A Study in
Hsun Tzu’s Moral Epistemology; Moral Vision and
Tradition: Essays in Chinese Ethics. Co-editor, Journal
of Chinese Philosophy. Consulting editor. CONFUCIAN
ETHICS; HSUN TZU; WANG YANG-MING.
Garrett Cullity. Lecturer in Moral Philosophy, University
of St. Andrews. Author of essays in normative and
meta-ethics. Co-editor, Ethics and Practical Reason.
PUBLIC GOODS.
Randall Curren. Associate Professor, Philosophy and
Education, University of Rochester. Author, Aristotle
on the Necessity of Public Education, and other works
in ancient, moral, legal, political, and educational phi-
losophy. Editor, A Companion to the Philosophy of
Education (forthcoming). MORAL EDUCATION.
Norman Daniels. Professor of Philosophy, Tufts Univer-
sity. Author of Just Health Care; Am I My Parents’
Contributors and Editors
Keeper?; Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilib-
rium in Theory and Practice; and other works on ethics
and public policy. PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY; REFLECTIVE
EQUILIBRIUM.
Stephen L. Darwall. Professor of Philosophy, University
of Michigan. Author, Impartial Reason; The British
Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’; and other works on
moral theory and on the foundations and history of
ethics. CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS; CUDWORTH; HUTCH-
ESON; SHAFTESBURY.
G. Scott Davis. Booker Professor of Religion and Ethics,
University of Richmond. Author, works on medieval
and early modern ethics, ethics and religion, and the
just war tradition. HISTORY 5: EARLY MEDIEVAL; MYS-
TICISM.
N. Ann Davis. Professor of Philosophy, Pomona College.
Works include articles on abortion and self-defense,
the doctrine of double effect, deontology, utilitarian-
ism, and rights. ABORTION.
John Deigh. Associate Professor of Philosophy, North-
western University. Author, The Sources of Moral
Agency; and articles on moral and political philosophy.
Editor, Ethics. GUILT AND SHAME; INNOCENCE.
Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves. Chair of Philosophy, Uni-
versity of Cape Town. Author, Modernity, Justice and
Community and The Political Philosophy of Hannah
Arendt. Co-editor, Habermas and the Unfinished Pro-
ject of Modernity and Public and Private. COMMUNI-
TARIANISM.
Ronald de Sousa. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Toronto. Author, The Rationality of Emotion. Interests
include Greek philosophy, cognitive science, ethics,
philosophy of biology. EMOTION.
Eliot Deutsch. Professor of Philosophy, University of Ha-
waii, Manoa. Editor, Philosophy East and West. Works
include Personhood, Creativity and Freedom and Stud-
ies in Comparative Aesthetics. Translator of the Bha-
gavad Gita. Consulting editor.
Lewis Anthony Dexter (1915–1995). Held Visiting Pro-
fessorships at several universities and state government
positions in Massachusetts. Author, “Scandals and
Scandalization” (Encyclopedia of American Political
History). CORRUPTION.
Cora Diamond. William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Phi-
losophy, University of Virginia. Author, The Realistic
Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Editor,
Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathe-
matics. Consulting editor. ANSCOMBE; INTEGRITY;
WITTGENSTEIN; WITTGENSTEINIAN ETHICS.
Mary G. Dietz. Professor, Political Science, University of
Minnesota. Works include, Between the Human and
the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil. Ed-
itor, Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory. CIVIC GOOD
AND VIRTUE.
xxii
Alan Donagan (1925–1991). Late Doris and Henry
Dreyfuss Professor of Philosophy, California Institute
of Technology. Works include Choice: The Essential
Element in Human Action and Spinoza. Consulting
editor. CONSCIENCE; DELIBERATION AND CHOICE; HIS-
TORY 12: 20TH CENTURY ANGLO-AMERICAN; SPINOZA;
WHEWELL.
Thomas Donaldson. Mark O. Winkleman Professor, Pro-
fessor of Legal Studies, and Director, Wharton Ethics
Program, The Wharton School, University of Pennsyl-
vania. Co-author, Ties That Bind. JUSTICE, CIRCUM-
STANCES OF.
John Doris. Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University
of California, Santa Cruz. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
Gerald Dworkin. Professor of Philosophy, University of
California, Davis. Author, The Theory and Practice of
Autonomy; Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Sui-
cide. Editor, Mill’s ‘On Liberty’. Consulting editor.
PATERNALISM.
Abulfadl Mohsin Ebrahim. Professor of Islamic Studies,
School of Religion and Culture, University of Durban-
Westville (South Africa). Author, Abortion, Birth Con-
trol and Surrogate Parenting: An Islamic Perspective;
Organ Transplantation: Islamic Ethico-Legal Perspec-
tives. ISLAMIC MEDICAL ETHICS.
Abraham Edel. Research Professor of Philosophy, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania; Distinguished Professor of Phi-
losophy Emeritus, City University of New York. Works
include Method in Ethical Theory; Science, Ideology,
and Value; Aristotle and His Philosophy. Consulting
editor. NATURE AND ETHICS; PERRY; VALUE, THEORY OF.
Paul Edwards. New School University; Professor of Phi-
losophy Emeritus, Brooklyn College. Author, The Logic
of Moral Discourse; Heidegger and Death; Reincar-
nation: A Critical Examination. Editor-in-Chief, The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967). Editor, Voltaire’s
Philosophical Writing and Immortality. RUSSELL; VOL-
TAIRE.
Rem B. Edwards. Lindsay Young Professor of Humani-
ties Emeritus, University of Tennessee. Author, Bio
Ethics; Religious Values and Valuations; What Caused
the Big Bang? EDWARDS; JEFFERSON.
Gerard Elfstrom. Professor of Philosophy, Auburn Uni-
versity. Author, Moral Issues and Multinational Cor-
porations; New Challenges for Political Philosophy;
and International Ethics: A Reference Handbook. Co-
author, Military Ethics. COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS; HONOR;
MILITARY ETHICS.
Anthony Ellis. Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Com-
monwealth University. Author of articles in a wide area
of philosophy, including political philosophy and phi-
losophy of law. PUNISHMENT.
Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson. Lecturer in Philosophy, Uni-
versity of Iceland. Author, Plotinus on Sense-
Perception: A Philosophical Study. PLOTINUS.

Gertrude Ezorsky. Brooklyn College, City University of
New York, Emerita. Author, Racism and Justice: The
Case for Affirmative Action, and other publications in
ethics and social philosophy. Editor, Philosophical Per-
spectives on Punishment and Moral Rights in the
Workplace. DISCRIMINATION.
Joel Feinberg. Regents Professor of Philosophy and Law
Emeritus, University of Arizona. Author of The Moral
Limits of the Criminal Law. HARM AND OFFENSE.
Fred Feldman. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. Author, Utilitarianism, He-
donism, and Desert; Doing the Best We Can: An Essay
in Informal Deontic Logic; and Confrontations With
the Reaper. HEDONISM; LOGIC AND ETHICS.
John Martin Fischer. Professor of Philosophy, University
of California, Riverside. Author, The Metaphysics of
Free Will: An Essay on Control. Co-author, Responsi-
bility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility.
Editor, Moral Responsibility and God, Foreknowledge,
and Freedom. Co-editor, Ethics: Problems and Princi-
ples. DEATH; FATE AND FATALISM; FREEDOM AND DE-
TERMINISM.
James Fishkin. Professor and Chair, Department of Gov-
ernment, and Darrell K. Royal Regents Chair in Ethics
and American Society, University of Texas at Austin.
Director, Center for Deliberative Polling. Author of
“Tyranny and Legitimacy”; “Democracy and Delibera-
tion”; “The Dialogue of Justice”; and other works in
political theory and political behavior. BARRY.
Richard E. Flathman. George Armstrong Kelly Memorial
Professor of Political Science, The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity. Works include Willful Liberalism; Thomas
Hobbes, Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Poli-
tics; Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist; The Philos-
ophy and Politics of Freedom; and Toward a Liberal-
ism. LIBERALISM.
Elizabeth Flower (1913–1995). Late Professor Emerita
of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania. Author of
works in moral and legal philosophy. Co-author, A His-
tory of Philosophy in America and Morality, Philoso-
phy and Practice. STEWART.
Thomas R. Flynn. Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of
Philosophy, Emory University. Author of Sartre and
Marxist Existentialism; Sartre, Foucault and Historical
Reason; and other works on contemporary continental
philosophy. ABSURD, THE; AUTHENTICITY; BAD FAITH;
DE BEAUVOIR; SARTRE.
Nicholas Fotion. Professor of Philosophy, Emory Univer-
sity. Author, Military Ethics: Looking Toward the Fu-
ture, and works in medical ethics, ethical theory, and
philosophy of language. Co-author, Military Ethics:
Guidelines for Peace and War. HONOR; MILITARY
ETHICS.
William K. Frankena (1908–1994). Late Professor Emer-
itus of Philosophy, University of Michigan. Author of
xxiii
Contributors and Editors
books and papers in moral and educational philosophy,
including Ethics; Thinking about Morality; and Per-
spectives on Morality. Consulting editor.
Allie M. Frazier. Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Emeritus, Hollins University. Past President, Associa-
tion of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs. Editor,
Eastern Religious Thought. FEUERBACH; KARMA.
Alfred J. Freddoso. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Notre Dame. Translator, Ockham’s Quodlibeta sep-
tem; Part II of Ockham’s Summa logicae; Francisco
Suarez, On Creation, Conservation, and Concurrence;
Francisco Suarez, On Efficient Causality. Author, ar-
ticles on Ockham. WILLIAM OF OCKHAM.
Michael Freeman. Reader in Government, and Associate
Director, Human Rights Centre, University of Essex.
Author, Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political
Radicalism and other works on democratic theory, rev-
olutions, human rights, and genocide. BURKE; OPPRES-
SION.
Samuel Freeman. Professor of Philosophy and Law, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania. Editor and contributor, The
Cambridge Companion to John Rawls (forthcoming);
Editor, John Rawls’s Collected Papers. Author, articles
in political and legal philosophy. DEONTOLOGY; RAWLS.
R. G. Frey. Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State
University. Author, Interests and Rights; Rights, Killing,
and Suffering. Co-author, Euthanasia and Physician-
Assisted Suicide. Editor, Utility and Rights and Liabil-
ity and Responsibility. ACTS AND OMISSIONS; HARE;
MANDEVILLE; TORTURE.
Marilyn Friedman. Professor of Philosophy, Washington
University. Author, What Are Friends For? Feminist
Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral The-
ory; Autonomy, Gender, Politics (forthcoming). Co-
author, Political Correctness: For and Against. PARTI-
ALITY.
Manfred S. Frings. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy,
DePaul University. Works include: Max Scheler; The
Mind of Max Scheler: The First Comprehensive Guide
Based on the Complete Works. Editor, The Collected
Works of Max Scheler. Co-editor, The Collected Works
of M. Heidegger. SCHELER.
Thomas J. Froehlich. Professor, Library and Information
Science, Kent State University. Author, Survey and
Analysis of the Major Ethical and Legal Issues Facing
Library and Information Services. LIBRARY AND INFOR-
MATION PROFESSIONS.
Jack Fruchtman, Jr. Professor of Political Science, Tow-
son University. Author, Thomas Paine and the Religion
of Nature; Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom; studies
of Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Thomas Reid,
Thomas Hardy, Thomas Spence, and Helen Maria Wil-
liams. PAINE.
Contributors and Editors
Dwight Furrow. Philosophy, San Diego Mesa College.
Author, Against Theory: Continental and Analytic
Challenges in Moral Philosophy. POSTMODERNISM.
J. L. A. Garcia. Professor, Philosophy Department, Rut-
gers University, New Brunswick. MORAL ABSOLUTES;
PROPORTIONALITY; RACISM, CONCEPTS OF.
Newton Garver. Distinguished Service Professor of Phi-
losophy, State University of New York at Buffalo. Au-
thor, This Complicated Form of Life and Derrida and
Wittgenstein. Co-editor, Naturalism and Rationality
and Justice, Law and Violence. CIVILITY; GANDHI; PAC-
IFISM; SCHWEITZER.
Bernard Gert. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral
Philosophy, Dartmouth College. Author, Morality: Its
Nature and Justification. Co-author, Bioethics and Mo-
rality and the New Genetics. ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
AND ETHICS; CHEATING; GENETIC ENGINEERING; IMPAR-
TIALITY; MORAL RULES.
Joshua Gert. Visiting Assistant Professor, University of
Missouri at Columbia. Author of articles on rationality
and reasons. REASONS FOR ACTION.
Raymond Geuss. Professor of Political Science, Colum-
bia University. Author, The Idea of a Critical Theory
and other works on ethics and political and social phi-
losophy. Consulting editor.
Alan Gewirth. Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Ser-
vice Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago.
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Works
include Reason and Morality; Human Rights; The Com-
munity of Rights; and Self-Fulfillment. Consulting editor.
RATIONALITY VS. REASONABLENESS; RIGHTS.
Mary Gibson. Associate Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers
University. Author, Workers’ Rights; “Contract Moth-
erhood: Social Practice in Social Context.” Editor, To
Breathe Freely: Risk, Consent, and Air. Consulting ed-
itor. RISK.
Joseph J. Godfrey. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Saint Joseph’s University. Author, A Philosophy of Hu-
man Hope, and works on hope and trust. HOPE.
Alan H. Goldman. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Miami. Author, Moral Knowledge; The Moral Foun-
dations of Professional Ethics; Justice and Reverse Dis-
crimination; Empirical Knowledge; Aesthetic Value;
and Practical Rules. PRECEDENT; PROFESSIONAL ETHICS.
Alvin Goldman. Regents’ Professor of Philosophy, Uni-
versity of Arizona. Author, A Theory of Human Action;
Epistemology and Cognition; Liaisons: Philosophy
Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences; and Knowl-
edge and the Social World. Co-editor, Values and Mor-
als. ACTION.
Kenneth E. Goodpaster. Koch Professor of Business
Ethics, University of St. Thomas. Works include, Per-
spectives on Morality; Ethics and Problems of the 21st
Century; Policies and Persons; “Can a Corporation
xxiv
Have a Conscience?”; “Business Ethics and Stake-
holder Analysis”; “Conscience and its Counterfeits in
Organizational Life.” Consulting editor. BUSINESS ETH-
ICS; STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS.
Samuel Gorovitz. Professor of Philosophy and of Public
Administration, Syracuse University, and Faculty
Scholar in Bioethics, State University of New York
Upstate Medical University. Works include Doctors’
Dilemmas and Drawing the Line: Life, Death, and Eth-
ical Choices in an American Hospital. BIOETHICS.
J. C. B. Gosling. Retired Principal, St. Edmund Hall, Uni-
versity of Oxford. Works include Pleasure and Desire;
Plato; Plato’s Philebus; The Greeks on Pleasure; and
Weakness of the Will. PLEASURE.
James Gouinlock. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy,
Emory University. Works include John Dewey’s Phi-
losophy of Value; Excellence in Public Discourse: John
Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Social Intelligence; and
Rediscovering the Moral Life. Past President, Society
for the Advancement of American Philosophy. DEWEY.
Carol C. Gould. Professor of Philosophy, Stevens Insti-
tute of Technology, and Adjunct Professor of Interna-
tional Affairs, Columbia University. Author, Marx’s
Social Ontology and Rethinking Democracy. Editor,
Beyond Domination and The Information Web. Co-
editor, Women and Philosophy. SELF AND SOCIAL SELF.
Timothy Gould. Philosophy, Metropolitan State College
of Denver. Works include essays on Kant’s ethics and
aesthetics; on Romantic and feminist accounts of cul-
ture; on Mill, Emerson, and Nietzsche; and Hearing
Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley
Cavell. EMERSON; THOREAU; TRANSCENDENTALISM.
James M. Gustafson. Professor Emeritus, Emory Univer-
sity. Works include Ethics from a Theocentric Perspec-
tive; Intersections: Science, Theology, Ethics; Protes-
tant and Roman Catholic Ethics. CHRISTIAN ETHICS;
JESUS OF NAZARETH; SITUATION ETHICS.
Paul Guyer. Florence R.C. Murray Professor in the Hu-
manities, University of Pennsylvania. Author, Kant and
the Claims of Taste; Kant and the Claims of Knowl-
edge; Kant and the Experience of Freedom; and Kant
on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Editor, Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays. Co-translator
of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of the
Power of Judgment. SCHILLER; WOLFF.
Knud Haakonssen. Professor of Philosophy, Boston Uni-
versity. Author, The Science of a Legislator and Natural
Law and Moral Philosophy. Editor, Thomas Reid’s
Practical Ethics; Enlightenment and Religion; and Tra-
ditions of Liberalism. CUMBERLAND; GROTIUS; NATU-
RAL LAW.
Philip P. Hallie (1922–1994). Late Griffin Professor,
Emeritus, of Philosophy and Humanities, Wesleyan

University. Works include Cruelty and Lest Innocent
Blood be Shed. CRUELTY.
Alan Hamlin. Professor of Economics, University of
Southampton (England). Author, Ethics, Economics
and the State. Co-author, Democratic Devices and De-
sires. Co-editor, The Good Polity. ECONOMIC SYSTEMS.
Jean Hampton (1954–1996). Late Professor of Philoso-
phy, University of Arizona. Author, Hobbes and the
Social Contract Tradition, and articles on social con-
tract theory, punishment, moral culpability, and liber-
alism. Co-author, Forgiveness and Mercy. HOBBES.
Russell Hardin. Professor of Politics, New York Univer-
sity. Author, Collective Action; Morality Within the
Limits Of Reason; One For All: The Logic Of Group
Conflict; and Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and De-
mocracy. Consulting editor. COOPERATION, CONFLICT
AND COORDINATION; GAME THEORY; RATIONAL CHOICE;
STRATEGIC INTERACTION; TRUST.
John E. Hare. Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College.
Author, Plato’s Euthyphro; The Moral Gap. Co-author,
Ethics and International Affairs. Congressional Fellow,
American Philosophical Association, 1981–83. GOV-
ERNMENT, ETHICS IN.
R. M. Hare. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University
of Florida, Gainesville. Formerly White’s Professor of
Moral Philosophy, Oxford. Works include The Lan-
guage of Morals; Freedom and Reason; Moral Think-
ing; Sorting Out Ethics; and Objective Prescriptions.
Consulting editor. MORAL TERMS; PRESCRIPTIVISM; SLAV-
ERY; UNIVERSALIZABILITY; WEAKNESS OF WILL.
George W. Harris. Chancellor Professor of Philosophy,
College of William and Mary. Author, Dignity and Vul-
nerability: Strength and Quality of Character; Agent-
Centered Morality: An Aristotelian Alternative to Kan-
tian Internalism. ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS; SELF-ESTEEM;
SELF-KNOWLEDGE.
Ross Harrison. Reader in Philosophy, University of Cam-
bridge. Author, Democracy; Bentham. WILLIAMS.
Joseph Heath. Professor of Philosophy, University of To-
ronto. Author, Communicative Action and Rational
Choice. TAYLOR.
Virginia Held. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at
the City University of New York, Graduate School and
Hunter College. Works include Feminist Morality:
Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics; Rights and
Goods: Justifying Social Action; The Public Interest
and Individual Interests. Consulting editor. MASS ME-
DIA; MORAL PLURALISM.
Paul Helm. Reader in Philosophy, University of Liver-
pool. Author, The Varieties of Belief; Eternal God;
other works in the philosophy of religion and episte-
mology. Consulting editor. CALVIN; RELIGION.
Barbara Herman. Professor of Philosophy, University of
California at Los Angeles. Author, The Practice of
xxv
Contributors and Editors
Moral Judgment, and other works in ethics and Kan-
tian moral theory. DESIRE; MOTIVES.
Steven Hetcher. Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt Univer-
sity School of Law. Works include “Creating Safe So-
cial Norms in a Dangerous World” and “Burning
Chrome from the One-way Mirror: The Emergence of
Website Privacy Norms.” NORMS.
Thomas E. Hill, Jr. Professor of Philosophy, University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Works include Autonomy
and Self-Respect and Dignity and Practical Reason.
AUTONOMY OF MORAL AGENTS; SELF-RESPECT.
Margaret Holland. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
University of Northern Iowa. Author of “Touching the
Weights: Moral Perception and Attention” and “What’s
Wrong with Telling the Truth? An Analysis of Gossip.”
MORAL ATTENTION; MORAL PERCEPTION; MURDOCH.
Helen Bequaert Holmes. Independent scholar. Research
interests include assessment of new technology in re-
productive medicine. Editor, Feminist Perspectives in
Medical Ethics; Issues in Reproductive Technology.
REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES.
Sarah Holtman. Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Uni-
versity of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Works include articles
on moral, legal, and political philosophy, in particular
on Kant’s theory of justice. FIDUCIARY RELATIONSHIPS.
Brad Hooker. Philosophy, University of Reading (En-
gland). Author, Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-
Consequentialist Theory of Morality. SUBJECTIVISM.
Jasper Hopkins. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Minnesota. Co-translator and commentator, Anselm’s
works; translator of Nicholas of Cusa’s works. Au-
thored works include Hermeneutical and Textual Prob-
lems in the Complete Treatises of St. Anselm and A
Companion to the Study of St. Anselm. ANSELM.
Laurence D. Houlgate. Professor of Philosophy, Califor-
nia Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Au-
thor, Family and State: The Philosophy of Family Law;
The Child and the State: A Normative Theory of Juve-
nile Rights; Morals, Marriage and Parenthood: An In-
troduction to Family Ethics. CHILDREN AND ETHICAL
THEORY.
John Howes. President, Learningguild (Brunswick, Vic-
toria, Australia). Formerly, Senior Lecturer in Philos-
ophy, University of Melbourne, and Professor of Phi-
losophy, Cape Town. Works include Making Up
Sentences and articles on Plato and Mill. CICERO;
GREEN; SENECA.
Donald C. Hubin. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Ohio State University. Works include “Parental Rights
and Due Process”; “The Moral Justification of Benefit/
Cost Analysis”; “What’s Special About Humeanism”;
and “Hypothetical Motivation”. COST-BENEFIT ANALY-
SIS.
Contributors and Editors
Paul M. Hughes. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
and Chair, Department of Humanities, University of
Michigan-Dearborn. Author, “Temptation and the Ma-
nipulation of Desire”; “Paternalism, Battered Women,
and the Law”; “Moral Anger, Forgiving, and Condon-
ing.” ANGER; HATE.
Lester H. Hunt. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Wisconsin. Author, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue;
Character and Culture; and articles on ethics, philos-
ophy of law, and philosophy in literature. ENVY; GEN-
EROSITY.
Thomas Hurka. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Calgary. Author, Perfectionism; Virtue, Vice, and
Value; and articles on punishment, future generations,
and value theory. FUTURE GENERATIONS; PERFECTION-
ISM.
Kenneth K. Inada. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy,
State University of New York, Buffalo. Author, Nagar-
juna, and other works on Asian and comparative phi-
losophy. Translator, The Logic of Unity. General editor,
Guide to Buddhist Philosophy. JAPAN.
Terence Irwin. Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy
and Humane Letters, Cornell University. Works in-
clude Aristotle’s First Principles; Classical Thought;
Plato’s Ethics; translations with notes of Plato’s Gor-
gias and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Consulting
editor. ARISTOTLE; PLATO; SOCRATES.
John Claiborne Isbell. Department of French and Italian,
Indiana University, Bloomington. Author, The Birth of
European Romanticism. STAEL.
Alison M. Jaggar. Professor of Philosophy and Women’s
Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder. Author,
Feminist Politics and Human Nature; Living With
Contradictions: Controversies In Feminist Ethics. Co-
editor, Feminist Frameworks. FEMINIST ETHICS.
Deborah G. Johnson. Professor, Director of the Program
in Philosophy, Science and Technology, School of Pub-
lic Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology. Author,
Computer Ethics. Co-editor, Computers, Ethics and So-
cial Values; editor, Ethical Issues in Engineering. COM-
PUTERS.
Edward Johnson. Professor of Philosophy, University of
New Orleans. Author, “Treating the Dirt: Environmen-
tal Ethics and Moral Theory”; “Inscrutable Desires”;
“Media Ownership”; other works on environmental
ethics, philosophy of technology, philosophy of edu-
cation, and philosophy of sex and love. AGENT-
CENTERED MORALITY.
Mark L. Johnson. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Oregon. Author, The Body in the Mind and Moral
Imagination. Co-author, Metaphors We Live By and
Philosophy in the Flesh. COGNITIVE SCIENCE.
David H. Jones. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Col-
lege of William and Mary. Author, Moral Responsibility
xxvi
in the Holocaust and other works in ethics and philos-
ophy of mind. HOLOCAUST; HOMICIDE; INFANTICIDE.
Albert R. Jonsen. Department of Medical History and
Ethics, School of Medicine, University of Washington.
MEDICAL ETHICS, HISTORICAL.
Robert Welsh Jordan. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Colorado State University. Author of essays on phe-
nomenological value theory, Kafka’s and Brentano’s
ethics, historicality in Husserl’s works, and philosophy
of social sciences. HARTMANN.
Lynn S. Joy. Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre
Dame. Author, Gassendi the Atomist and articles in the
philosophy of science and the history of ethics. GAS-
SENDI.
Charles H. Kahn. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Pennsylvania. Author, Anaximander and the Origins of
Greek Cosmology; The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek; The
Art and Thought of Heraclitus; Plato and the Socratic
Dialogue. HISTORY 1: PRESOCRATIC GREEK.
Morris B. Kaplan. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Purchase College in the State University of New York.
Author, Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the
Politics of Desire; “Intimacy and Equality: The Ques-
tions of Lesbian and Gay Marriage”; and Sodom on the
Thames: Policing Male Desire in Late Victorian Lon-
don (forthcoming). GAY ETHICS.
Gregory S. Kavka (1947–1994). Late Professor of Phi-
losophy, University of California, Irvine. Author, works
on Hobbes, nuclear ethics. BRANDT; DETERRENCE,
THREATS AND RETALIATION; NUCLEAR ETHICS.
John Kekes. Professor of Philosophy, State University of
New York, Albany. Author, Against Liberalism; A Case
for Conservatism; Pluralism in Philosophy: Changing
the Subject. BENEVOLENCE; CONSERVATISM; HAPPINESS;
LIFE, MEANING OF; MORAL IMAGINATION; WISDOM.
Douglas Kellner. George Kneller Chair in Philosophy of
Education, University of California at Los Angeles. Au-
thor, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity; Televi-
sion and the Crisis of Democracy; Media Culture. Co-
author, Camera Politica. CULTURAL STUDIES.
John Kelsay. Professor, Department of Religion, Florida
State University. Author, Islam and War. Co-editor and
contributor, Just War and Jihad and Cross, Crescent,
and Sword. ISLAMIC ETHICS.
Kenneth Kipnis. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Hawaii. Author, Legal Ethics; “Confessions of an Ex-
pert Ethics Witness”; and other works in practical
ethics. Co-editor, Property: Cases, Concepts, Critiques.
Editor of various works in legal and social philosophy.
BARGAINING.
Eva Feder Kittay. Professor of Philosophy, State Univer-
sity of New York, Stony Brook. Author, Metaphor;
Love’s Labor: Essays on Women; Equality and Depen-
dency; and other works on philosophy of language, nor-

mative ethics, and feminist theory. Co-editor, Frames,
Fields, and Contrasts and Women and Moral Theory.
HYPOCRISY.
Ted Klein. Professor of Philosophy, Texas Christian Uni-
versity. Co-translator of works by Husserl and Heideg-
ger. Author, articles on Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Ri-
coeur, hermeneutical ethics, legal reasoning and analogy.
ANALOGICAL ARGUMENT.
John Kleinig. Professor of Philosophy, John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Works
include Punishment and Desert; Paternalism; and Val-
uing Life. CONSENT.
George L. Kline. Milton C. Nahm Professor Emeritus of
Philosophy, Bryn Mawr College. Works include, Spi-
noza in Soviet Philosophy and Religious and Anti-
Religious Thought in Russia. SOVIET ETHICAL THEORY.
Charles H. Koch, Jr. Dudley Warner Woodbridge Profes-
sor of Law, College of William and Mary. Works in-
clude: Administrative Law and Practice, second; Ad-
ministrative Law: Cases and Materials; and law journal
articles. COOPERATIVE SURPLUS.
Joseph J. Kockelmans. Distinguished Professor of Philos-
ophy, Emeritus, Pennsylvania State University. Works
include, On the Truth of Being and Heidegger on Art
and Art Works. Editor, books on European philosophy.
Consulting editor. CAMUS; HUSSERL; PHENOMENOL-
OGY.
Marvin Kohl. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, State
University of New York, College at Fredonia. Author,
The Morality of Killing. Editor, Beneficent Euthanasia
and Infanticide and the Value of Life. BENEFICENCE;
EUTHANASIA; LIFE AND DEATH.
Christine M. Korsgaard. Arthur Kingsley Porter Profes-
sor of Philosophy, Harvard University. Author of The
Sources of Normativity; Creating the Kingdom of Ends;
and articles on practical reason and the self in ethics
and the history of ethics. Consulting editor. KANT;
PRICE; RAWLS.
Jill Kraye. Reader in the History of Renaissance Philos-
ophy, Warburg Institute (London). Editor, Cambridge
Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts. Co-
editor, Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy. Ed-
itor, Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Human-
ism. HISTORY 7: RENAISSANCE; NEO-STOICISM.
David Farrell Krell. Professor of Philosophy, DePaul Uni-
versity. Author, Contagion; Archeticture; The Good Eu-
ropean; Lunar Voices; Infectious Nietzsche; and Dai-
mon Life. MORTALITY; NIHILISM; SCHELLING.
Norman Kretzmann (1928–1998). Late Susan Linn Sage
Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University. Principal
editor, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Phi-
losophy. Editor, The Philosophical Review. Consulting
editor.
xxvii
Contributors and Editors
John Lachs. Centennial Professor of Philosophy, Vander-
bilt University. Author, Intermediate Man; The Rele-
vance of Philosophy to Life; In Love with Life. AMER-
ICAN MORAL PHILOSOPHY.
Berel Lang. Professor of Humanities, Trinity College
(Connecticut). Works include Act and Idea in the Nazi
Genocide; The Future of the Holocaust; Holocaust
Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and
Ethics. GENOCIDE; MAIMONIDES.
Judith Lichtenberg. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
and Research Scholar, Institute for Philosophy and
Public Policy, University of Maryland. Editor, Democ-
racy and the Mass Media. Author of essays in moral
theory, media ethics, and international ethics. FREEDOM
OF THE PRESS; JOURNALISM.
Ralph Lindgren. William Wilson Selfridge Professor of
Philosophy Emeritus, Lehigh University. Editor, The
Early Writings of Adam Smith. Author, The Social Phi-
losophy of Adam Smith. Co-author, The Law of Sex
Discrimination. SMITH.
Shu-hsien Liu. Research Fellow, Institute of Chinese Lit-
erature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taipei.
Emeritus Professor, The Chinese University of Hong
Kong. Author, Understanding Confucian Philosophy:
Classical and Sung-Ming, and works on Chu Hsi and
Huang Tsung-hsi. Editor, Harmony and Strife: Contem-
porary Perspectives, East & West. CHU HSI.
Loren E. Lomasky. Professor of Philosophy, Bowling
Green State University (Ohio). Author, Persons, Rights,
and the Moral Community. PERSON, CONCEPT OF.
A. A. Long. Professor of Classics, and Irving Stone Pro-
fessor of Literature, University of California, Berkeley.
Author, Hellenistic Philosophy and other works on
Greek philosophy and literature. CYNICS; CYRENAICS;
HISTORY 3: HELLENISTIC; HISTORY 4: ROMAN.
David Luban. Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Phi-
losophy, Georgetown University Law Center. Author,
Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study, and other
works on political and legal philosophy and on law.
ARENDT; LEGAL ETHICS; SECRECY AND CONFIDENTIAL-
ITY.
Steven Lukes. Professor of Sociology, New York Univer-
sity. Author, Émile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A
Historical and Critical Study; Essays in Social Theory;
Individualism; and Marxism and Morality. DURKHEIM;
INDIVIDUALISM; POWER.
David Lyons. Professor of Law and of Philosophy, Boston
University. Works include Forms and Limits of Utili-
tarianism; Ethics and the Rule of Law; Moral Aspects
of Legal Theory; and Rights, Welfare, and Mill’s Moral
Theory. Consulting editor. UTILITARIANISM.
Jim MacAdam. Professor Emeritus, Philosophy, Trent
University. Works include “What is Prichard’s Intui-
tionism?”; “Obligations: From Common to Uncommon
Contributors and Editors
Morality, The Latimer Case”; Prichard, Harold Arthur,
(Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy). PRICHARD.
Scott MacDonald. Professor of Philosophy, Cornell Uni-
versity. Author of articles on ancient and medieval
ethics, metaphysics, and theory of knowledge. Editor,
Being and Goodness and Aquinas’s Moral Theory. HIS-
TORY 6: LATER MEDIEVAL.
Alasdair MacIntyre. Research Professor of Philosophy,
University of Notre Dame. Works include A Short His-
tory of Ethics and After Virtue. VIRTUE ETHICS.
Eric Mack. Professor of Philosophy, Tulane University.
Author, “Deontic Restrictions are not Agent-Relative
Restrictions” and “In Defence of the Jurisdiction The-
ory of Rights.” Editor, Spencer’s The Man Versus the
State. LIBERTY, ECONOMIC; SPENCER.
Douglas MacLean. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Maryland, Baltimore County. Editor, Values at Risk.
RISK ANALYSIS; RISK AVERSION.
Jeffery E. Malpas. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Tasmania. Author, Place and Experience; Donald Da-
vidson and the Mirror of Meaning. Editor, Philosoph-
ical Papers of Alan Donagan. DONAGAN.
Rudolf Malter (1937–1994). Late Professor of Philoso-
phy, University of Mainz. Author of works on theory
of knowledge, metaphysics, aesthetics, Luther, Kant,
and Schopenhauer. SCHOPENHAUER.
William E. Mann. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Vermont. Author of articles in the philosophy of reli-
gion and medieval philosophy. EVIL; PHILOSOPHY OF
RELIGION; VOLUNTARISM.
Joseph Margolis. Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philoso-
phy, Temple University. Works include The Truth about
Relativism and The Persistence of Reality. PSYCHO-
ANALYSIS; PSYCHOLOGY.
John Marshall. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Uni-
versity of Virginia. Author, Descartes’s Moral Theory.
FENELON; KANTIAN ETHICS.
Judith Martin. Works include the “Miss Manners” books
and syndicated column; the novels, Gilbert and Style
and Substance; and the essay, “Common Courtesy”.
ETIQUETTE.
Mike W. Martin. Professor of Philosophy, Chapman Uni-
versity. Works include Self-Deception and Morality;
Love’s Virtues; Meaningful Work: Rethinking Profes-
sional Ethics. SELF-DECEPTION.
Gareth B. Matthews. Professor of Philosophy, University
of Massachusetts at Amherst. Author, Thought’s Ego
in Augustine and Descartes; The Philosophy of Child-
hood; Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philoso-
phy. Co-translator of Ammonius’s On Aristotle’s Cate-
gories. AUGUSTINE; MORAL DEVELOPMENT.
Larry May. Professor of Philosophy, Washington Univer-
sity. Author, The Morality of Groups; Sharing Respon-
xxviii
sibility; The Socially Responsive Self; Masculinity and
Morality. Co-author, Praying for a Cure. Co-editor,
Collective Responsibility. COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY;
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORALITY.
William L. McBride. Professor of Philosophy, Purdue
University. Co-founder of the Sartre Society of North
America. Works include The Philosophy of Marx; So-
cial Theory at a Crossroads; Sartre’s Political Theory;
Philosophical Reflections on the Changes in Eastern
Europe. PRAXIS.
Thomas McCarthy. Professor of Philosophy, Northwest-
ern University. Works include The Critical Theory of
Jürgen Habermas and Ideals and Illusions: On Recon-
struction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical
Theory. Series editor, Studies in Contemporary Ger-
man Social Thought. HABERMAS.
Henry John McCloskey (1925–2000). Late Emeritus
Professor, La Trobe University. Works include Meta-
Ethics and Normative Ethics; John Stuart Mill; God
and Evil; Derechos y sociedad en la filosófica analı́tica;
and Ecological Ethics and Politics. Consulting editor.
PAIN AND SUFFERING.
Mary A. McCloskey. Senior Associate in Philosophy, Mel-
bourne University. Works include Kant’s Aesthetic.
GRATITUDE.
Howard McGary. Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers, The
State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick. Au-
thor, Race and Social Justice. Co-author, Between Slav-
ery and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery.
Consulting editor. GROUPS, MORAL STATUS OF.
Ralph M. McInerny. Director, Jacques Maritain Center,
and Grace Professor of Medieval Studies, University of
Notre Dame. Works include Boethius and Aquinas
and First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas. ABELARD;
THOMAS AQUINAS.
Dennis McKerlie. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Calgary. INEQUALITY.
Chrisopher McMahon. Professor of Philosophy, Univer-
sity of California, Santa Barbara. Author of works on
moral, political, and social philosophy. AUTHORITY.
John McMurtry. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Guelph. Author, The Structure of Marx’s World-View;
Understanding War; Unequal Freedoms: The Global
Market as an Ethical System; The Cancer Stage of
Capitalism; and other works in value theory and social
philosophy. COMPETITION; FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
Alfred R. Mele. Professor of Philosophy, Florida State
University. Works include Irrationality; Springs of
Action; Autonomous Agents; and Self-Deception Un-
masked. SELF-CONTROL; TEMPERANCE.
Susan Mendus. Professor of Political Philosophy, and Di-
rector of the Morrell Studies in Toleration Program,
University of York. Works include Toleration and the
Limits of Liberalism. Editor, Justifying Toleration. Co-

editor, John Locke’s Letter on Toleration in Focus. TOL-
ERATION.
Michael J. Meyer. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Santa Clara University. Co-editor, The Constitution of
Rights: Human Dignity and American Values. Author
of works in ethics and political philosophy. DIGNITY.
Mary Midgley. Formerly Senior Lecturer, University of
Newcastle-on-Tyne. Author, Beast and Man; Wicked-
ness; Heart and Mind; Wisdom, Information and Won-
der; Animals and Why They Matter; Can’t We Make
Moral Judgements? WICKEDNESS.
Richard W. Miller. Professor of Philosophy, Cornell Uni-
versity. Works include Fact and Method; Analyzing
Marx; Moral Differences; and articles on justice, moral
realism, Marx, and explanation and confirmation in the
sciences. MARXISM; MORAL REALISM.
Seumas Miller. Professor of Social Philosophy, and Di-
rector, Special Research Centre in Applied Philosophy
and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University, Canberra,
Australia. Author, Social Action. Co-author, Police
Ethics. CONVENTIONS.
Phillip Mitsis. Professor of Classics, and Director, Alex-
ander S. Onassis Program in Hellenic Studies, New
York University. Works include Epicurus’ Ethical The-
ory: The Pleasures of Invulnerability. EPICUREANISM;
EPICURUS; LUCRETIUS.
Richard D. Mohr. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Illinois, Urbana. Works include The Platonic Cosmol-
ogy and Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society, and
Law. HOMOSEXUALITY.
Arthur P. Monahan. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus,
Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Au-
thor, Consent, Coercion and Limit and From Personal
Duties Towards Personal Rights. Translator of medie-
val political works. COMMON GOOD.
Edward F. Mooney. Professor of Philosophy, Sonoma State
University. Author, Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kier-
kegaard’s Moral-Religious Psychology; Knights of Faith
and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s “Fear and
Trembling.” Editor, Wilderness and the Heart; other
works on Kierkegaard, ethics, and philosophy in litera-
ture. SYMPATHY.
Kathleen Dean Moore. Professor of Philosophy, Oregon
State University. Author, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and
the Public Interest; Reasoning and Writing; and Hold-
fast. AMNESTY AND PARDON.
Ebrahim Moosa. Professor of Islamic Thought, Stanford
University and the University of Cape Town. Author,
“Languages of Change in Islamic Law: Redefining
Death in Modernity”; “Allegory of the Rule (Hukm):
Law as Simulacrum in Islam.” Editor, Revival and Re-
form in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism.
SHI-ISM; SUNNISM.
xxix
Contributors and Editors
Christopher Morris. Professor of Philosophy, Bowling
Green State University. Author, An Essay on the Mod-
ern State and essays on contractarian ethics and other
topics. Editor, The Social Contract Theorists: Critical
Essays on Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. CONTRAC-
TARIANISM.
Mary Mothersill. Professor of Philosophy, Barnard Col-
lege, Columbia University. Author, Beauty Restored.
FITTINGNESS.
Janice Moulton. Philosophy, Smith College. Co-author,
Ethical Problems in Higher Education; Scaling the
Dragon; and The Organization of Language. ACADEMIC
FREEDOM; PLAGIARISM.
Amy Mullin. Associate Professor of Philosophy, Univer-
sity of Toronto. Author of works in feminist philoso-
phy, the history of philosophy, and aesthetics. MORAL
PURITY.
Jeffrie G. Murphy. Regents Professor of Law and Philos-
ophy, Arizona State University. Author, Retribution,
Justice and Therapy; Character, Liberty and Law. Co-
author, The Philosophy of Law and Forgiveness and
Mercy. FORGIVENESS; LEGAL PHILOSOPHY.
Steven Nadler. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Wisconsin, Madison. Author, books and articles in the
history of early modern philosophy, including Spinoza:
A Life. MALEBRANCHE.
Jan Narveson. Professor of Philosophy, University of Wa-
terloo (Ontario). Author, Morality and Utility; The Lib-
ertarian Idea; and Moral Matters. ENTITLEMENTS.
Daniel Nelson. Senior Associate Dean of the College,
Dartmouth College. Author of works on virtue theory
and on Thomas Aquinas. PRUDENCE.
Mark T. Nelson. Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Univer-
sity of Leeds. Co-editor, Christian Theism and Moral
Philosophy. Author of works in ethics, philosophy of
religion, epistemology and philosophy of mind. THE-
ISM.
James W. Nickel. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Colorado, Boulder. Author, Making Sense of Human
Rights; “Group Agency and Group Rights”; “Economic
Liberties.” HUMAN RIGHTS.
Kai E. Nielsen. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Uni-
versity of Calgary. Works include Marxism and the
Moral Point of View; Philosophy and Atheism; Ethics
Without God; and After the Demise of the Tradition.
ATHEISM; ENGELS; MORAL POINT OF VIEW; MURPHY;
REVOLUTION.
Michael Nill. Head of School, Brooklyn Friends School
(Brooklyn). Author, Morality and Self-Interest in Pro-
tagoras, Antiphon, and Democritus. DEMOCRITUS;
PROTAGORAS; SOPHISTS.
Martha Nussbaum. Ernst Freund Distinguished Service
Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chi-
cago. Works include The Fragility of Goodness; Love’s
Contributors and Editors
Knowledge; The Therapy of Desire; Poetic Justice; Cul-
tivating Humanity; Sex and Social Justice; and Women
and Human Development. Consulting editor. CHAR-
ACTER; LITERATURE AND ETHICS; TRAGEDY.
Timothy O’Connor. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Indiana University. Author, Persons and Causes: The
Metaphysics of Free Will, and articles in metaphysics,
philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion. CAU-
SATION AND RESPONSIBILITY.
Onora O’Neill. Newnham College, Cambridge. Author,
Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice, and De-
velopment; Constructions of Reason: Explorations of
Kant’s Practical Philosophy; Towards Justice and Vir-
tue; Bounds of Justice. Consulting editor. CHARITY;
DUTY AND OBLIGATION; FORMALISM; INTERNATIONAL
JUSTICE: DISTRIBUTION.
Gene Outka. Dwight Professor of Philosophy and Chris-
tian Ethics, Yale University. Author, Agape: An Ethical
Analysis. Co-editor, Prospects for a Common Morality;
Norm and Context in Christian Ethics; Religion and
Morality. KIERKEGAARD; LOVE.
Richard D. Parry. Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Philos-
ophy, Agnes Scott College. Works include, Plato’s Craft
of Justice; “The Unique World of the Timaeus”; “The
Uniqueness Proof of Forms in Republic X”; “Morality
and Happiness: Book IV of Plato’s Republic”; and “The
Craft of Justice.” EUDAIMONIA, -ISM.
Terence Penelhum. Professor Emeritus of Religious Stud-
ies, University of Calgary. Author, God and Skepticism;
Themes in Hume; Survival and Disembodied Exis-
tence; Religion and Rationality; Butler. BUTLER.
Derk Pereboom. Professor and Chair, Department of Phi-
losophy, University of Vermont. Author of Living With-
out Free Will. FREE WILL.
Philip Pettit. Professor of Social and Political Theory, The
Australian National University. Author, The Common
Mind: From Intentional Psychology to Social and Po-
litical Theory; Republicanism; The Fundamentals of
Freedom. Co-author, Not Just Deserts: A Republican
Theory of Criminal Justice. INSTITUTIONS.
Derek L. Phillips. Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Univ-
ersiteit van Amsterdam. Works include Toward a Just
Social Order and Looking Backward. Consulting edi-
tor. SOCIOLOGY; WEBER.
Roger Pilon. Vice President for Legal Affairs, B. Kenneth
Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies, and Director,
Center for Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute. Au-
thor of works in law and legal theory. GEWIRTH.
Edmund L. Pincoffs (1919–1991). Late Professor Emer-
itus of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin. Works
include The Rationale of Legal Punishment and Quan-
daries and Virtues: Against Reductivism in Ethics.
MORAL COMMUNITY, BOUNDARIES OF; VIRTUES.
xxx
Gerald J. Postema. Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Phi-
losophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Ed-
itor, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law; former
Fellow, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Au-
thor, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition; and
Jeremy Bentham: Moral, Political and Legal Philoso-
phy. BENTHAM.
George Proctor. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Son-
oma State University. Author of works on the history
and philosophy of science. DUNS SCOTUS.
Susan M. Purviance. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
University of Toledo (Ohio). Works include “The
Moral Self and the Indirect Passions”; “The Facticity of
Kant’s Fact of Reason”; “Social Meliorism, Virtue, and
Vice: Bernard Mandeville”; and other articles on ethi-
cal theory, the history of ethics, and health care ethics.
JAMES MILL.
Ruth Anna Putnam. Professor of Philosophy, Emerita,
Wellesley College. Works include “Perceiving Facts
and Values”; “Some of Life’s Ideals”; “Why Not a Femi-
nist theory of Justice?”; Neither A Beast Nor a God.
Editor, The Cambridge Companion to William James.
JAMES; PRAGMATISM.
Andrew Pyle. Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Uni-
versity of Bristol. Author, Atomism and Its Critics. Ed-
itor, Agnosticism: Contemporary Responses to Spencer
and Huxley. General Editor, Dictionary of Seventeenth
Century British Philosophers. AGNOSTICISM.
Philip L. Quinn. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, Uni-
versity of Notre Dame. Author, Divine Commands and
Moral Requirements. Co-editor, A Companion to Phi-
losophy of Religion and The Philosophical Challenge
of Religious Diversity. THEOLOGICAL ETHICS.
James Rachels. University Professor of Philosophy, Uni-
versity of Alabama at Birmingham. Works include The
End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality and Created
From Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism.
KILLING AND LETTING DIE; THEORY AND PRACTICE.
Stuart Rachels. Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Uni-
versity of Alabama. Articles include “Counterexamples
to the Transitivity of Better Than”, “Is it Good to Make
Happy People?”, and “Is Unpleasantness Intrinsic to
Unpleasant Experiences?” INTRANSITIVITY.
Diane C. Raymond. Professor of Philosophy and Women’s
Studies, Simmons College. Author, Existentialism and
the Philosophical Tradition; Looking at Gay and Les-
bian Life. Editor, Sexual Politics and Popular Culture.
WORK.
Andrews Reath. Professor of Philosophy, University of
California at Riverside. Works include articles on the
history of ethics, in particular on Kant’s moral philos-
ophy. CATEGORICAL AND HYPOTHETICAL IMPERATIVES;
CONSTRUCTIVISM; ROUSSEAU.
Tom Regan. Professor of Philosophy, North Carolina
State University. Works include: The Case for Animal

Rights; Bloomsbury’s Prophet: G. E. Moore and the
Development of his Moral Philosophy; and The Thee
Generation. Consulting editor. ANIMALS, TREATMENT
OF; MOORE; ROSS.
Frank Reynolds. Professor of History of Religious and
Buddhist Studies, the Divinity School and the Depart-
ment of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Uni-
versity of Chicago. Co-editor, Cosmogony and Ethical
Order. HINDU ETHICS.
David A. J. Richards. Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law,
New York University School of Law. Works include:
Identity and the Case for Gay Rights; Italian American:
The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity; Free Speech and
the Politics of Identity; A Theory of Reasons for Action;
Toleration and the Constitution; and Foundations of
American Constitutionalism. CENSORSHIP.
Norvin Richards. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Alabama. Works include Humility; “Forgiveness”;
“Luck and Desert”; and “Criminal Children.” HUMIL-
ITY.
Henry Richardson. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Georgetown University. Author, Practical Reasoning
about Final Ends; “Specifying Norms as a Way to Re-
solve Concrete Ethical Problems”; “Beyond Good and
Right: Towards a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism.”
COMMENSURABILITY.
John Robertson. Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Syr-
acuse University. Works include “Internalism about
Moral Reasons” and “Hume on Practical Reason”. EX-
TERNALISM AND INTERNALISM.
George Robinson. Psychology, Smith College. Co-author,
Ethical Problems in Higher Education; Scaling the
Dragon; and The Organization of Language. ACADEMIC
FREEDOM; PLAGIARISM.
Sandra B. Rosenthal. Provost Distinguished Professor of
Philosophy, Loyola University, New Orleans. Author,
Speculative Pragmatism; Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic
Pluralism; Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy; and
other works on pragmatism and on the relation be-
tween pragmatism and phenomenology. PEIRCE.
William L. Rowe. Professor of Philosophy, Purdue Uni-
versity. Author, Thomas Reid on Freedom and Moral-
ity. CLARKE; REID.
Sara Ruddick. Faculty emerita, Eugene Lang College,
New School for Social Research. Works include Ma-
ternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, and arti-
cles in ethics and social and political philosophy. VIO-
LENCE AND NON-VIOLENCE; WAR AND PEACE.
William Ruddick. Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct
Professor of Psychiatry, New York University. Author:
“Parenthood: Three Concepts and a Principle”; “Hope
and Deception”; “Do Doctors Undertreat Pain?”; and
other essays on parenthood and medical ethics. Editor:
Philosophers in Medical Centers. Co-editor, Having
xxxi
Contributors and Editors
Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on Par-
enthood. FAMILY; MEDICAL ETHICS.
Michael Ruse. Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Phi-
losophy. Florida State University. Works include Mo-
nad to Man; Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense?; Taking
Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philos-
ophy. DARWIN; EVOLUTION.
Abdulaziz Sachedina. Professor of Religious Studies,
University of Virginia. Author, The Islamic Roots of
Democratic Pluralism; The Just Ruler in Shı̄ite Islam;
and Islamic Messianism. Co-author, Human Rights
and the Conflict of Cultures: Western and Islamic Per-
spectives on Religious Liberty. Consulting editor. IS-
LAM; ISLAMIC BUSINESS ETHICS.
Mark Sagoff. Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy,
University of Maryland. Author, The Economy of the
Earth. PUBLIC POLICY ANALYSIS.
John Sallis. Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy
at The Pennsylvania State University. Author of Force
of Imagination; Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s
“Timaeus”; Shades—Of Painting at the Limit; and
other books on continental philosophy, philosophy of
art, and history of philosophy. Consulting editor.
FICHTE; GADAMER.
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord. Bowman and Gordon Gray Pro-
fessor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Author of a variety of papers on metaeth-
ics, moral theory, the history of ethics and epistemol-
ogy. COHERENTISM.
Thomas M. Scanlon, Jr. Alford Professor of Natural Re-
ligion, Harvard University. Author, What We Owe to
Each Other. Consulting editor.
Richard Schacht. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Author, Alienation; Hegel
and After; Nietzsche; Making Sense of Nietzsche; and
The Future of Alienation. ALIENATION; HISTORY 10:
19TH CENTURY CONTINENTAL.
Samuel Scheffler. Class of 1941 World War II Memorial
Professor of Philosophy and Law, University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley. Author, The Rejection of Consequen-
tialism; Human Morality. Editor, Consequentialism
and its Critics. Consulting editor.
Naomi Scheman. Professor of Philosophy and Women’s
Studies, University of Minnesota. Author of Engender-
ings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privi-
lege; and editor of the forthcoming Feminist Interpre-
tations of Wittgenstein: Re-Reading the Canon. RAPE;
SEXUAL ABUSE AND HARASSMENT.
J. B. Schneewind. Professor of Philosophy, The Johns
Hopkins University. Author, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Vic-
torian Moral Philosophy and The Invention of Auton-
omy. Editor, Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to
Kant, and other studies in the history of ethics. Con-
sulting editor. COMMON SENSE MORALISTS; CRUSIUS;
Contributors and Editors
HISTORY8: 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES; MONTAIGNE;
THOMASIUS.
Ferdinand D. Schoeman (1945–1992). Late Professor of
Philosophy, University of South Carolina. Author, Pri-
vacy and Social Freedom and other studies in respon-
sibility and privacy. PRIVACY.
William R. Schroeder. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Author, Sar-
tre and his Predecessors: The Self and the Other; “Con-
tinental Ethics”; and other works on continental ethics
and philosophy of mind. Editor, The Blackwell Com-
panion to Continental Philosophy. HISTORY 11: 20TH
CENTURY CONTINENTAL; RESENTMENT.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Visiting Scholar, Department
of Politics, New York University. Author, Total Free-
dom: Toward A Dialectical Libertarianism; Ayn Rand:
The Russian Radical; Marx, Hayek, and Utopia. Co-
editor of Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand and of
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. OBJECTIVISM; RAND.
Jorge Secada. Associate Professor of Philosophy, Univer-
sity of Virginia, and regularly Visiting Professor at the
Graduate School of the Universidad Catolica del Peru
in Lima. Author, Cartesian Metaphysics: The Scholas-
tic Origins of Modern Philosophy; “Berkeley y el ideal-
ismo”; “Ontologia de la obra de arte”; and other arti-
cles. HISTORIOGRAPHY; SUAREZ; VITORIA.
Michael Seidler. Professor of Philosophy, Western Ken-
tucky University. Author of articles on German natural
law theory and other early modern topics. Translator,
The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf; editor and
translator, Samuel Pufendorf’s “On the Natural State
of Men.” PUFENDORF.
George Sher. Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Philosophy,
Rice University. Author of Desert; Beyond Neutrality:
Perfectionism and Politics; Approximate Justice: Stud-
ies in Non-Ideal Theory; and essays in metaphysics,
ethics, and social and political philosophy. MERIT AND
DESERT; NEUTRAL PRINCIPLES.
Nancy Sherman. Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown
University. Author, The Fabric of Character; Making a
Necessity of Virtue; and other works on the history of
moral philosophy, the emotions, and moral psychology.
Editor, Aristotle’s Ethics: Critical Essays. EXCELLENCE;
PRACTICAL WISDOM.
Charles M. Sherover. Professor Emeritus of Philosophy,
Hunter College, City University of New York. Works
include Heidegger, Kant and Time; Time, Freedom, and
the Common Good; The Human Experience of Time;
and “Royce’s Pragmatic Idealism and Existential Phe-
nomenology”. HEIDEGGER; ROYCE.
Kristin Shrader-Frechette. O’Neill Family Professor of
Philosophy and Concurrent Professor of Biological Sci-
ences, University of Notre Dame. Author of books and
articles on philosophy of science, environmental ethics,
and ethical/scientific problems in quantitative risk as-
xxxii
sessment. AGRICULTURAL ETHICS; LAND ETHICS; TECH-
NOLOGY.
Henry Shue. Professor of Ethics and Public Life, Cornell
University. Works include Basic Rights. Editor, Nuclear
Deterrence and Moral Restraint. PUBLIC POLICY; WEL-
FARE RIGHTS AND SOCIAL POLICY.
Kwong-loi Shun. Professor of Philosophy, University of
California, Berkeley. Author of works on Chinese ethics
and contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophy.
CHINA; CONFUCIUS; MENCIUS.
Anita Silvers. Professor of Philosophy, San Francisco
State University. Co-author, Disability, Difference,
Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics
and Public Policy; and Puzzles About Art. Co-Editor,
Americans With Disabilities: Exploring Implications of
the Law for Individuals and Institutions; Physician-
Assisted Suicide; and Health Care and Social Justice
(forthcoming). AGENCY AND DISABILITY.
A. John Simmons. Commonwealth Professor of Philoso-
phy, University of Virginia. Author, Moral Principles
and Political Obligations; The Lockean Theory of
Rights; On the Edge of Anarchy; and Justification and
Legitimacy. FAIRNESS; LEGITIMACY; OBEDIENCE TO
LAW.
Robert L. Simon. Professor of Philosophy, Hamilton Col-
lege. Author, Neutrality and The Academic Ethic;
Sports and Social Values; and other works on ethics,
philosophy of sport, and political and social philoso-
phy. Co-author, The Individual and the Political Order.
Consulting editor. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY;
SPORT.
Marcus G. Singer. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus,
University of Wisconsin, Madison. Author, Generaliza-
tion in Ethics. Editor, Morals and Values and Reason,
Reality, and Speculative Philosophy. ADLER; GOLDEN
RULE; HISTORY 9: 19TH CENTURY BRITISH; SIDGWICK.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. Professor of Philosophy, Dart-
mouth College. Author, Moral Dilemmas. Co-author,
Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Infor-
mal Logic. Co-editor, Moral Knowledge? New Read-
ings in Moral Epistemology. GERT; INTUITIONISM;
MORAL DILEMMAS; OUGHT IMPLIES CAN.
John E. Sisko. Assistant Professor of Philosophy, College
of William and Mary. Author of articles on Ancient
Greek Philosophy. PHRONESIS.
Quentin Skinner. Regius Professor of Modern History,
University of Cambridge. Works include The Founda-
tions of Modern Political Thought; Machiavelli; Rea-
son and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes; Liberty
Before Liberalism. MACHIAVELLI.
R. C. Sleigh, Jr. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Massachusetts. Author, Leibniz and Arnauld: A Com-
mentary on Their Correspondence. Co-editor, The Yale
Leibniz. LEIBNIZ.

Michael A. Slote. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Maryland, College Park. Author, Goods and Virtues;
From Morality to Virtue; Morals from Motives;
Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism; and
Beyond Optimizing. CONSEQUENTIALISM; TELEOLOGI-
CAL ETHICS.
Saul Smilansky. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Haifa, Israel. Author of Free Will and Illusion. BLACK-
MAIL.
Holly M. Smith. Professor of Philosophy, and Dean, So-
cial and Behavioral Sciences, University of Arizona.
Author of articles on moral theory, utilitarianism, and
medical ethics. Consulting editor. ACTION; EXCUSES;
IDEALIZED AGENTS; NEGLIGENCE; POSSIBILISM.
Alan Soble. University Research Professor and Professor
of Philosophy, University of New Orleans. Author, Por-
nography; The Structure of Love; Sexual Investiga-
tions; The Philosophy of Sex and Love. Editor, Sex,
Love, and Friendship; The Philosophy of Sex; Eros,
Agape, and Philia. SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL ETHICS.
Moshe Z. Sokol. Professor and Chairman, Philosophy
Department, Touro College. Author, works on Jewish
ethics and philosophy. Editor, Personal Autonomy and
Rabbinic Authority and Tolerance, Dissent and De-
mocracy. JEWISH ETHICS.
Wm. David Solomon. Professor of Philosophy, University
of Notre Dame. Co-author, The Synoptic Vision: The
Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. Co-editor, Abortion and
Social Policy. DOUBLE EFFECT.
André Spies. Associate Professor of History, Hollins Uni-
versity. Author, Opera, State and Society in the Third
Republic, 1875-1914. MONTESQUIEU.
T. L. S. Sprigge. Professor Emeritus and Endowment Fel-
low, University of Edinburgh. Works include Santay-
ana; The Vindication of Absolute Idealism; Theories of
Existence; The Rational Foundations of Ethics; and
James and Bradley: American Truth and British Real-
ity. AYER; IDEALIST ETHICS; NATURALISTIC FALLACY;
ORGANIC UNITY; SANTAYANA.
Hillel Steiner. Professor of Political Philosophy, Univer-
sity of Manchester. Author, An Essay on Rights; A De-
bate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries; and other
works on rights, justice, and liberty. Editor, Left-
Libertarianism and Its Critics. Consulting editor. LIB-
ERTARIANISM; LIBERTY.
Gunther S. Stent. Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology,
University of California, Berkeley. Works include Na-
zis, Women and Molecular Biology; Paradoxes of Pro-
gress. Editor, Norton Critical Edition of J. D. Watson’s
The Double Helix: Morality as a Biological Phenome-
non. ETIQUETTE.
Calvin Stewart. Philosophy, Santa Clara University. THOM-
SON.
xxxiii
Contributors and Editors
Robert M. Stewart. Professor of Philosophy, California
State University, Chico. Co-author, Moral Philosophy:
A Comprehensive Introduction. Editor, Readings in So-
cial and Political Philosophy; Philosophical Perspec-
tives on Sex and Love. FRANKENA.
Michael Stocker. Professor of Philosophy, Syracuse Uni-
versity. Works include Plural and Conflicting Values.
EXTERNALISM AND INTERNALISM.
Jeffrey Stout. Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion,
Princeton University. President, editorial board, Jour-
nal of Religious Ethics. Works include, The Flight from
Authority and Ethics after Babel. Consulting editor.
Gisela Striker. Professor of Classical Philosophy, Harvard
University. Author, Essays on Hellenistic Epistemology
and Ethics. EPICTETUS; MARCUS AURELIUS; STOICISM.
Timothy Stroup. Professor of Philosophy, John Jay Col-
lege of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.
Author, Westermarck’s Ethics. Editor, Edward Wester-
marck; co-editor, Police Ethics. Co-founder, Criminal
Justice Ethics. CORRECTIONAL ETHICS; POLICE ETHICS;
WESTERMARCK.
Nicholas L. Sturgeon. Professor of Philosophy, Cornell
University. Author of works on the metaphysical and
epistemological foundations of morality. METAPHYSICS
AND EPISTEMOLOGY.
John A. Taber. Associate Professor of Philosophy, Uni-
versity of New Mexico. Author, Transformative Philos-
ophy: A Study of Sankara, Fichte, and Heidegger; and
other works in Asian and comparative philosophy.
INDIA.
Larry S. Temkin. Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers Uni-
versity. Author, Inequality and other works on equality,
rationality, transitivity, additivity, and the good. ADDI-
TIVITY PROBLEMS.
Laurence Thomas. Professor of Philosophy and Professor
of Political Science, Syracuse University. Author, Liv-
ing Morally: A Psychology of Moral Character; Vessels
of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust; and other
works in moral and social philosophy. Consulting edi-
tor. BAIER; MORAL PSYCHOLOGY.
Mark Timmons. Professor of Philosophy, University of
Memphis. Author, Morality without Foundations: A
Defense of Ethical Contextualism. Co-editor, Moral
Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology.
Editor, Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretive Es-
says (forthcoming). SINGER.
James Tully. Professor and Chair, Department of Political
Science, University of Victoria (Canada). Author,
Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of
Diversity; An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke
in Contexts. FOUCAULT; LOCKE.
Suzanne Uniacke. Associate Professor of Philosophy,
University of Wollongong. Author, Permissible Killing:
Contributors and Editors
The Self-Defense Justification of Homicide. REVENGE;
SELF-DEFENSE.
J. O. Urmson. Emeritus Professor, Stanford University;
Emeritus Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Au-
thor, Philosophical Analysis; Emotive Theory of Ethics;
Berkeley; and Aristotle’s Ethics. EMOTIVISM.
Peter Vallentyne. Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Com-
monwealth University. Author of works on consequen-
tialism, moral dilemmas, egalitarian theories of justice,
and left-libertarianism. SELF-OWNERSHIP.
Harry van der Linden. Professor of Philosophy, Butler
University. Author, Kantian Ethics and Socialism and
articles on Kant, Marx, Marburg neo-Kantianism, and
international relations. NEO-KANTIAN ETHICS.
Donald VanDeVeer. Professor of Philosophy, North Caro-
lina State University. Author, Paternalistic Intervention.
Co-editor of works including Health Care Ethics; AIDS:
Ethics and Public Policy; People, Penguins, and Plastic
Trees; And Justice for All; The Environmental Ethics and
Policy Book. PORNOGRAPHY.
Aram Vartanian (1922–1997). Late Kenan Professor of
French Literature, Emeritus, University of Virginia.
Author, Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific
Naturalism in the Enlightenment and Lamettrie’s
‘L’Homme Machine’: A Study in the Origins of an Idea.
HOLBACH.
Allen D. Verhey. Blekkink Professor of Religion, Hope
College. Works include The Great Reversal: Ethics and
the New Testament. PAUL.
Candace Vogler. Philosophy, University of Chicago. Au-
thor of Reason in Action; John Stuart Mill’s Delibera-
tive Landscape; and articles on ethics, social and po-
litical philosophy, feminism, sex, gender and culture
studies. FOOT.
Mary Ellen Waithe. Professor of Philosophy, and Direc-
tor, Bioethics Program, Cleveland State University.
Founder, Project on the History of Women in Philoso-
phy. Author of A History of Women Philosophers.
WOMEN MORAL PHILOSOPHERS.
Douglas N. Walton. Professor of Philosophy, University
of Winnipeg. Author, Courage: A Philosophical Inves-
tigation; Informal Logic. Co-author, Commitment in
Dialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning.
COURAGE; PERSUASIVE DEFINITION; PRACTICAL REA-
SON[ING].
Georgia Warnke. Professor of Philosophy, University of
California, Riverside. Author, Gadamer: Hermeneu-
tics, Tradition and Reason; Justice and Interpretation;
and Legitimate Differences: Interpretation in the Abor-
tion Controversy and other Public Debates. MULTICUL-
TURALISM; WALZER.
Richard A. Watson. Professor of Philosophy, Washington
University. Works include The Breakdown of Cartesian
xxxiv
Metaphysics. DESCARTES; PASCAL; TECHNOLOGY AND
NATURE.
Stephen H. Watson. Professor of Philosophy, University
of Notre Dame. Works include articles on continental
philosophy. RICOEUR.
Carl Wellman. Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished
Professor Emeritus, Washington University. Works in-
clude Welfare Rights; A Theory of Rights; Real Rights;
An Approach to Rights. RIGHT, CONCEPTS OF; RIGHT
HOLDERS.
Alan Wertheimer. McCullough Professor of Political Sci-
ence, University of Vermont. Author, Coercion; Ex-
ploitation. Co-editor, Majorities and Minorities. CO-
ERCION.
Henry R. West. Professor of Philosophy, Macalester Col-
lege. Author, “Utilitarianism” (Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica); “Mill’s ‘Proof’ of the Principle of Utility”; and
other works on Mill’s utilitarianism. Co-editor, Moral
Philosophy. JOHN STUART MILL.
Forrest Williams. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Uni-
versity of Colorado, Boulder. Associate Editor, Conti-
nental Philosophy. Author of essays on twentieth cen-
tury French and German philosophers; translator of
writings by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault. EX-
ISTENTIAL ETHICS.
Patricia A. Williams. Independent Scholar. Author, Do-
ing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original
Sin. Co-editor, Evolution and Human Values. BIO-
LOGICAL THEORY.
Kenneth Winston. Lecturer in Ethics and Assistant to the
Dean for Special Projects on International Ethics and
Diversity, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University. DWORKIN; FULLER; HART.
Susan Wolf. Duane Peterson Professor of Ethics, The
Johns Hopkins University. Author, Freedom Within
Reason and other works on ethics and the philosophy
of mind. Consulting editor. MORAL SAINTS.
David B. Wong. Professor of Philosophy, Duke Univer-
sity. Author, Moral Relativity and other works in ethi-
cal theory, Chinese philosophy, and the history of phi-
losophy. Consulting editor. COMPARATIVE ETHICS; MO
TZU; MORAL RELATIVISM.
Allen W. Wood. Professor of Philosophy, Stanford Uni-
versity. Author, Karl Marx; Hegel’s Ethical Thought;
Kant’s Ethical Thought. Translations include Kant’s
writings on religion and rational theology, and Critique
of Pure Reason. Editor: Hegel’s Elements of the Phi-
losophy of Right. Consulting editor. HEGEL; MARX.
Robert E. Wood. Professor and Chair, Department of Phi-
losophy, University of Dallas. Author, Martin Buber’s
Ontology; A Path into Metaphysics; Placing Aesthetics:
 Contributors and Editors

Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition. Editor, Amer-
ican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. BUBER.
Michael Wreen. Professor of Philosophy, Marquette Uni-
versity. Author, works in ethics, aesthetics, argumen-
tation theory, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and
action theory. AESTHETICS; FORGERY.
Michael J. Zimmerman. Professor of Philosophy, Univer-
sity of North Carolina, Greensboro. Author, An Essay
on Human Action; The Concept of Moral Obligation;
An Essay on Moral Responsibility; The Nature of In-
trinsic Value; and other works on ethics. RESPONSIBIL-
ITY; VOLUNTARY ACTS.

xxxv
This page intentionally left blank
Encyclopedia of
ETHICS
This page intentionally left blank
 A
Abelard, Peter (1079–1142)
Peter Abelard lived a life which could be called in
its entirety what he called a portion of it: the story
of his calamities. From the moment of his arrival in
the logic schools of Paris, he was a figure of contro-
versy. He successfully challenged the doctrines of his
teacher William of Champeaux (1071–1121) and,
when he turned to the study of theology, almost im-
mediately challenged his teacher Anselm of Laon (d.
1117). Abelard reached the apex of his career in his
late thirties when he was master of the cathedral
school of Notre Dame. It was then that he met He-
loise (1101–1164), became a boarder in her uncle’s
house, where she lived, and seduced her under the
guise of tutoring her in logic. When she became
pregnant, he took her to Brittany, where she bore
him a son. Against her wishes—self-effacingly, she
feared what marriage would do to his career—they
married, but secretly. Her uncle’s attempts to pub-
licize the marriage ended in an attack on Abelard
during which he was castrated. Eventually, Heloise
repaired to a convent and Abelard became a monk.
In the course of his career, he was twice condemned
for heresy, and attempts on his life were made by his
monks when he was abbot. He ended his life in an
edifying way at Cluny, having fallen ill on his way to
Rome to appeal his second condemnation for heresy.
Among the writings of Abelard is an ethical work
called Nosce teipsum (Know Thyself ). Abelard did
not clearly distinguish between philosophical and
1
theological discourse. What we shall call Abelard’s
ethics is clearly the work of a Christian who is con-
cerned with the precise nature of sin, that is, with
moral fault as an offense against God. The Nico-
machean Ethics would be translated into Latin
shortly after Abelard’s death and exercised no influ-
ence on his thought. Far more relevant to under-
standing his approach are contemporary manuals
for confessors. And indeed his book ends—it would
be better to say that it stops, since it is an unfinished
work—with discussions of reconciliation and sac-
ramental confession. Nonetheless, the work has in-
terest for moral philosophers and moral theologians,
not least because of its suggestion as to precisely
what makes an action wrong.
Abelard spends some time distinguishing willing
from willing sinfully, and evil DESIRE from CONSENT,
and a very long time establishing that PLEASURE is
not as such sinful. The principal interest in Abelard’s
discussion lies in what he has to say about the rela-
tion between desire and consent, on the one hand,
and the external act, on the other. His aim is to locate
the source of moral wrong in the INTENTION with
which the act is done and to reject the notion that it
is the external act as externally described, without
attention to the intention of the agent, that is suffi-
cient. This leads him to say that the prohibitions of
the Decalogue bear on internal consent and not on
the objective deed. His reason is that the same ex-
ternal act can be performed by a good agent and a
bad agent. Their difference as morally good and bad
Abelard, Peter
cannot then lie in the deed they both do, but rather
in the intention with which they do it. The examples
he uses suggest why he attracted censure. Christ was
delivered up by Judas to be crucified, but also by
God the Father. In the former case it is unjust, in the
latter just, so the deed done cannot decide the moral
matter. The position toward which Abelard moves
is that moral worth lies in the intention of the agent
and not in the deed done.
While he is not at all consistent in this, sometimes
speaking of deeds themselves as unfitting, what he
seems clearly to want to say is that intention is the
sole source of moral value, a bad intention making
an act bad, a good intention making it good.
That what would otherwise be a good act can be
morally vitiated by the intention with which it is
done is clear enough. One might help another in or-
der to lull him into a condition in which he can more
easily be exploited. Then helping him is no longer
praiseworthy. Moreover, there are what will come to
be called indifferent acts (e.g., waggling one’s fin-
gers), which when performed are either good or bad
because of the intent with which they are done. To
waggle one’s fingers in order to signal to an assassin
that his victim is approaching is considerably differ-
ent from waving good-bye to one’s spouse or bid-
ding at an auction. In all these cases we have to
know the intent with which the deed is done in order
to know whether it is morally good or bad. But just
when Abelard’s position shows its value, its spong-
iness also reveals itself.
If it is a bad intention that makes the doing of the
deed bad, in what does a bad intention consist?
There are reasons to think Abelard might have an-
swered, when the intention is to disobey God it is
wrong. This would put him securely in the Divine
Command camp. The truth is, Abelard has taken
away the only thing that finally can make an inten-
tion bad. A bad intention has to be the intention to
perform a bad action, to do a deed that is reprehen-
sible. But if there are no criteria for a bad action
other than intention, the account becomes vacuous.
An unsurprising corollary of his position is the de-
nial that the actual doing of the external deed adds
to the good or EVIL of the intention.
Although we do not find a clear-cut distinction
between philosophy and theology in Abelard, he was
a champion of pagan philosophers. He was able to
argue for the justification of pagans by appeal to
NATURAL LAW, relying on PAUL’s (C.E. 5?–67?)
2
Epistle to the Romans (2:13). He also looked for
evidence of Trinitarian beliefs in the pagans, how-
ever, which got him into rough waters theologically.
See also: AGENT CENTERED MORALITY; AUTONOMY
OF MORAL AGENTS; CHRISTIAN ETHICS; CONSENT;
DESIRE; EVIL; EXTERNALISM AND INTERNALISM; FIT-
TINGNESS; FREE WILL; KANT; NATURAL LAW; PHILOS-
OPHY OF RELIGION; SELF-KNOWLEDGE; THEOLOGI-
CAL ETHICS; VOLUNTARISM.
Bibliography
Works by Abelard
Historia calamitatum. Translated by J. T. Muckle. P.I.M.S.:
Toronto, 1954.
Peter Abelard’s Ethics. Translated by D. E. Luscombe. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Contains useful introduc-
tion and notes.
Works about Abelard
Luscombe, David. The School of Peter Abelard. Cam-
bridge, 1969.
Proceedings of the International Conference, 1971. Peter
Abelard. The Hague, 1974.
Williams, Paul. The Moral Philosophy of Peter Abelard.
Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980.
Ralph McInerny
abortion
Abortion can be defined as the intentional termina-
tion of in utero fetal life after conception and before
birth. The question of when, if ever, abortion is per-
missible has been widely discussed and fiercely de-
bated in academic circles, in the media, and on side-
walks outside abortion clinics across the United
States. The 1973 Supreme Court decision that le-
galized abortion, Roe v. Wade, increased both the
volume and the heat of this discussion, and more
recent Court decisions that have clarified or re-
stricted abortion rights have added fuel to an already
roaring fire. Both debates about the morality of
abortion and discussions of PUBLIC POLICY have
been polarized, notoriously acrimonious, and, some
would say, futile. Perhaps the only point of agree-
ment among the various factions lies in the recog-
nition that abortion is one of the least tractable is-
sues in applied ethics and one of the most troubling
public policy issues of the late twentieth century.

The Views Characterized
Those who discuss the morality of abortion can
be divided into three groups: Restrictives (who are
often characterized as Conservatives or as ‘Pro-life’);
Permissives (who are often characterized as Liberals
or as ‘Pro-choice’); and Moderates.
Restrictives believe that abortion is rarely if ever
morally permissible. Most Restrictives regard the fe-
tus as a full moral person from very early on in its
development (perhaps as early as conception) and
believe that it is entitled to the same sorts of moral
protections that postfetal persons enjoy, most nota-
bly the stringent protections against being killed that
many take to be conferred by persons’ possession of
rights to life. Extreme Restrictives allow no excep-
tions, but most Restrictives permit abortion when it
is deemed necessary to save the pregnant woman’s
life or when the continuation of the pregnancy pre-
sents a serious and immediate threat to her health.
In such cases, Restrictives think, although the killing
of the fetus is indeed the killing of a person, it may
be a permissible form of killing in SELF-DEFENSE.
Permissives hold the view that abortion is rarely
if ever morally impermissible. Many of the Permis-
sives who describe themselves as feminists maintain
that recognition of female EQUALITY requires ac-
knowledgment of substantive reproductive rights,
including a woman’s right to decide whether or not
her pregnancy will be brought to term. Other Per-
missives focus more on the issue of personal auton-
omy or self-determination: overruling a woman’s re-
productive choices is seen as inconsistent with
respect for her as an autonomous or full moral per-
son. Though most Permissives acknowledge some
moral constraints on the termination of fetal life in
utero, all believe that there are morally relevant
asymmetries between the fetus and the pregnant
woman. Because a fetus lacks at least some of the
psychological and affective properties that Permis-
sives take to be essential to moral personhood (for
example, the capacities for self-consciousness, self-
initiated activity, communication, or interaction),
Permissives regard the fetus as less a person than
the pregnant woman or—if personhood is an all-or-
nothing matter—as not a person at all. They thus
maintain that, although abortion involves the ter-
mination of fetal life, it does not involve the killing
of a full moral person.
Moderates believe that abortion is sometimes
3
abortion
morally permissible and sometimes not. Moderates
differ widely in their views, both normatively and
theoretically. Some take the permissibility of abor-
tion to turn on the stage of fetal development, and
would thus allow abortion only in the earlier stages
of pregnancy. Others regard the future or potential
child’s health or welfare prospects as critical, and
thus would permit the abortion of a severely dam-
aged fetus in circumstances in which they might dis-
allow the abortion of a normal fetus. Some focus on
the projected effects of the continued pregnancy and
birth on the woman, her FAMILY, and the community
of which she is a part. And some hold the permis-
sibility of abortion to turn on assessments of how
much RESPONSIBILITY the woman bears for becom-
ing pregnant, or assessments of how good or bad her
reasons are for seeking an abortion. If, for example,
a woman is pregnant owing to RAPE, fraud, or con-
traceptive failure, then she bears less responsibility
for becoming pregnant than she would if she had
become pregnant owing to a reckless failure to em-
ploy contraception in the first place, and her deci-
sion to abort may be seen in a different light. Mod-
erates may also assess differently an indigent
fifteen-year-old’s desire not to continue with a preg-
nancy that is the result of intercourse with her uncle,
and an affluent married twenty-five-year-old’s desire
to postpone childbearing to a more opportune time.
Public opinion polls indicate that most Americans
regard themselves as Moderates, and that it is a
woman’s reasons for seeking abortion, the stage of
fetal development, and a fetus’s prospects for future
well-being that most strongly affect their views of
abortion’s permissibility. A significant majority of
Americans regard abortion as morally defensible in
case of a threat to the woman’s life or health, rape,
incest, or severe fetal deformity.
Discussions about the morality of abortion have
usually focused on two connected issues: the ques-
tion of when (or whether) the fetus becomes a per-
son, and the nature and scope of the moral protec-
tions, obligations, and liberties that members of the
moral community possess.
Personhood
Questions about fetal personhood—perhaps
most notably the question of when a developing hu-
man being becomes a person, and hence a full mem-
ber of the moral community—are notoriously slip-
abortion
pery and contentious ones. As observation of
discussions of the issue makes clear, disagreements
about when one becomes a person generally reflect
radically different understandings of what it is to be
a person, and disagreements about what it is to be
a person are quite intractable. Restrictives who lo-
cate the onset of personhood very early in fetal
development tend to see personhood as an all-or-
nothing matter, and to understand personhood
largely in biological or structural terms. They tend
to stress both the fact that the fetus is a unique hu-
man being and the fact that human biological de-
velopment is a continuous process. Because there is
no point in fetal development that is importantly dis-
continuous with any other, there is no ‘magic mo-
ment’ at which a fetus who was not already a person
can be said to turn into one. Birth is rejected as an
implausible dividing line between persons and not-
yet-persons, for it is thought to allow us to attribute
personhood to the premature neonate who is born
after eight months’ gestation while denying that
status to the fetus who is still in utero at nine
months. Since there may be no relevant develop-
mental or structural differences between an eight-
month-old fetus who is still in utero and one who
has just been born, those who understand person-
hood largely in biological or structural terms regard
birth as too late and too arbitrary a dividing line
between persons and not-yet-persons.
Those who locate the onset of personhood later
in fetal development tend to have a very different
understanding of personhood. Permissives who see
personhood as less a matter of biological humanity
or structural development and more a matter of the
development of the psychological capacities that en-
able one to be a self-conscious, and eventually, at
least minimally self-determining, individual tend to
locate the onset of personhood at birth, or later.
Though a fetus that belongs to the species Homo
sapiens (rather than to any other) is biologically hu-
man, Permissives do not think that this is sufficient
or perhaps even necessary for personhood. If it is
the possession of psychological, social, or moral ca-
pacities that is critical to personhood, then there
may be Homo sapiens who are not persons, and per-
sons who are not Homo sapiens. Neonates who are
anencephalic (lacking an upper brain) and individ-
uals who are profoundly mentally retarded may all
count as humans who are not persons, while extra-
terrestrial beings who were not Homo sapiens, but
4
possessed a psychology, intellect, and social organi-
zation comparable to ours, would indeed be moral
persons.
Permissives who emphasize social, interactive, or
conventional aspects of personhood may regard a
neonate’s potential for social interaction with a va-
riety of other members of the community as critical.
They may thus be quite willing to attribute person-
hood to a premature neonate while denying it to the
nine-month fetus that remains in utero. For the child
who is born prematurely at eight months is in a po-
sition to interact with other individuals, and hence,
even though their physical development may be com-
parable, the ‘younger’ neonate and ‘older’ fetus have
relevantly different relationships to other individuals,
as well as an altogether different sort of relationship
to the woman who is the biological mother.
Finally, those who think that the psychological ca-
pacities that are essential to being a self-conscious
individual are ones that do not develop until later in
infancy (or early childhood) may think that even a
normal neonate is not properly counted as a person.
Usually, those who espouse such a view maintain
either that personhood is a matter of degree, rather
than an all-or-nothing matter, or that neonates pos-
sess some important properties that distinguish
them morally from fetuses. Either supposition al-
lows them to assert that it may be wrong to kill neo-
natal proto-persons even though they are not yet
(full) persons.
Most Moderates are not content with either Re-
strictive or Permissive conceptions of personhood.
Many people believe that there are points in fetal
development that are importantly morally discontin-
uous with others: some believe that the end of the
embryonic stage—when all the organ systems are
present in the developing organism—marks a mor-
ally significant boundary; others think that neuro-
logical developments, and in particular, those asso-
ciated with the beginnings of sentience, are what is
critical (though there is disagreement about when
sentience occurs). Still others hold that the onset of
viability, the point at which the fetus could survive
on its own if born prematurely, is what marks the
all-important moral boundary.
The Moral Community
Though much of the discussion of the morality of
abortion has centered on the question of fetal per-

sonhood, people have increasingly come to believe
that issues about the morality of abortion cannot be
resolved by arguing about the personhood of the fe-
tus; any hope of progress requires a change of strat-
egy. Some people arrive at this position as a prag-
matic matter. They believe that disagreements about
the nature of moral personhood, and the methods
by which it can be discovered or conferred, are log-
ically irresolvable, and hence futile. Some of the peo-
ple who draw this conclusion regard it as showing
that hopes for resolution of conflict about the mo-
rality of abortion lie in shifting the discussion to
other moral issues, while others take it to show that
discussions about the morality of abortion should be
suspended in favor of discussions about public
policy.
Some people favor a change of strategy not be-
cause they suppose that disagreement about the na-
ture of personhood must be intractable, but because
they believe that the issue is largely moot: the rights
and protections that go along with personhood are
not as strong, or as important, as discussants of
abortion have generally supposed them to be. On the
one hand, even if the fetus is deemed a person and
thus the bearer of strong rights, including rights to
life, killing may be permissible in a wide range of
circumstances. Judith THOMSON has forcefully ar-
gued that rights to life cannot be intelligibly re-
garded as absolute protections against ever being
killed, but must instead be seen as protections
against being unjustly killed, and she presents a
number of cases in which it would not be obviously
unjust to kill someone, even when the individual in
question is incontrovertibly a person. If—as Thom-
son argues—there are many different sorts of cir-
cumstances in which killing the fetus would not be
unjust, then abortion may not violate a fetus’s rights,
even if it is regarded as the killing of a person.
On the other hand, even if the fetus is deemed a
nonperson, it does not follow that it is usually per-
missible to kill it. Many of those who have discussed
the moral claims of nonhuman animals have argued
persuasively that creatures who are not (and may
never be) persons may nevertheless have INTERESTS,
and are thus entitled to some moral protection. De-
pending on what sorts of interests a fetus is taken to
possess, and what weight those interests are thought
to carry, one might maintain that the fetus is not a
person and yet think that abortion is often wrong.
For one might believe that, although the pregnant
5
abortion
woman has reproductive rights and is entitled to re-
spect as an autonomous individual, the fetus has in-
terests that are morally considerable. Those inter-
ests—in the avoidance of pain, or the continuation
of life, for example—may be thought to counter-
balance the pregnant woman’s interest in personal
or reproductive autonomy except in quite extreme
circumstances.
There are also other grounds for thinking that
the issue of fetal personhood cannot be decisive. The
relationship between the pregnant woman and the
developing fetus, and the nature of the dependency
of the fetus upon the woman are, in many important
respects, unique: they do not have clear analogues
in the relationships—even the closest, and most
one-sided, dependencies—between postfetal per-
sons. Because of this, one may be unhappy with ei-
ther the assertion of fetal personhood or its denial.
For the uniqueness of the fetus/woman relationship
may be thought to undermine one of abortion dis-
cussants’ favorite strategies, that of attempting to
determine the morality of abortion by modeling po-
tential conflicts of interest between the fetus and the
pregnant woman on those that occur between post-
fetal persons. Though many of those who believe
that the morality of abortion does not turn on the
ascription (or denial) of fetal personhood are Mod-
erates, this belief can be consistent with Permissive
or Restrictive views as well.
If the killing of the fetus may often be permissible
even if it is a person from the point of conception,
or impermissible even if personhood is seen as be-
ginning at birth or later, then the question of fetal
personhood is indeed moot. But how, then, should
issues concerning the morality of abortion be ap-
proached? It is tempting to suppose that discussions
of fetal personhood can be gainfully bypassed in fa-
vor of incursions into moral theory, in particular, di-
rect discussion about the nature and scope of the
rights, liberties, and obligations that members of the
moral community possess. But this strategy may
prove to possess many of the defects that the focus
on fetal personhood does. For reflection on the in-
tractability of discussions of fetal personhood sug-
gests that disagreements about the morality of abor-
tion are both deeper and broader than much of the
polarized, black-or-white discussion suggests. It
seems plausible to suppose that disagreements about
what it is to be a person are not isolated metaphys-
ical disagreements, but rather ones that reflect dif-
abortion
ferent understandings of moral community and hu-
man relationship, and hence different views of
individuals’ obligations to and responsibilities for
each other. But if this is so, then disagreements
about the morality of abortion may be less local
normative disagreements about when the life of
a person begins, or comes to merit special protec-
tion, than broad and pervasive differences in world
view. Though moral theory may be able to help us
articulate these differences, and spell out their im-
plications, it is doubtful whether it can provide a
basis for resolving—or even harmonizing—such
differences.
See also: ANIMALS, TREATMENT OF; AUTONOMY OF
MORAL AGENTS; DEATH; DOUBLE EFFECT; ENTITLE-
MENTS; EUTHANASIA; FAMILY; FEMINIST ETHICS; GE-
NETIC ENGINEERING; HOMICIDE; HUMAN RIGHTS; IN-
FANTICIDE; INNOCENCE; KILLING/LETTING DIE; LIFE
AND DEATH; LIFE, RIGHT TO; MEDICAL ETHICS;
MORAL COMMUNITY, BOUNDARIES OF; PERSON, CON-
CEPT OF; PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORALITY; PUBLIC
HEALTH POLICY; PUBLIC POLICY; RAPE; REPRODUC-
TIVE TECHNOLOGY; RIGHT HOLDERS; SELF-DEFENSE;
SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL ETHICS; SLIPPERY SLOPE AR-
GUMENTS; THOMSON; WELFARE RIGHTS AND SOCIAL
POLICY.
Bibliography
Bondesman, William B., et al., eds. Abortion and the
Status of the Fetus. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983. Essays on
moral, legal, medical, and religious issues about
personhood.
Brody, Baruch. Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life:
A Philosophical View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975.
Defense of a restrictive view.
Butler, J. Douglas, and David F. Walbert. Abortion, Med-
icine, and the Law. 3d ed. New York: Facts on File,
1986. Medical, legal, and ethical questions.
Callahan, Sidney, and Daniel Callahan, eds. Abortion: Un-
derstanding Differences. New York: Plenum, 1984.
Philosophical, social science, and social services
perspectives.
Devine, Phillip E. The Ethics of Homicide. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1978. Restrictive view de-
fended in the larger context of a discussion of the mo-
rality of killing.
Feinberg, Joel. “Abortion.” In Matters of Life and Death,
edited by Tom Regan. 2d ed. New York: Random
House, 1986. An overview.
———, ed. The Problem of Abortion. 2d ed. Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth, 1984. Broad spectrum of views.
6
Among them: “Abortion and the Concept of a Person”
by Jane English argues that the concept of a person
cannot take the weight that the abortion controversy
has put on it. “A Defense of Abortion” by Judith Jarvis
Thomson (orig. pub. Philosophy and Public Affairs,
vol. 1, 1971) is a classic and widely cited paper criti-
cizing the restrictive view. “On the Moral and Legal
Status of Abortion” by Mary Anne Warren defends the
permissive view.
Garfield, Jay L., and Patricia Hennessey, eds. Abortion:
Moral and Legal Perspectives. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1984. Includes a summary of
relevant legal decisions. See especially “Abortion and
Self-Defense” by Nancy Davis (orig. pub. Philosophy
and Public Affairs, vol. 13, 1984), which discusses
some of the difficulties of applying self-defense argu-
ments to the abortion context.
Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Socio-
logical analysis of the abortion debate in the United
States.
Mohr, James C. Abortion in America. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1978. Classic historical sourcebook.
Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. Abortion and Woman’s
Choice. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985.
Comprehensive discussion of abortion in the context
of reproductive rights.
Sachdev, Paul. International Handbook on Abortion. New
York: Greenwood, 1988. Comprehensive assembly of
demographic data relating to abortion.
Sumner, Wayne. Abortion and Moral Theory. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981. Defense of a mod-
erate view.
Tooley, Michael. Abortion and Infanticide. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1983. Comprehensive defense of
a permissive view.
(Nancy) Ann Davis
absolutes
See moral absolutes.
absurd, the
The classic formulation of the “philosophy of the
absurd” is found in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus
(1942), where he writes: “I don’t know whether this
world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know
that I do not know that meaning and that it is im-
possible for me just now to know it. I can under-
stand only in human terms. What I touch, what re-
sists me—that is what I understand. And these two
certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for

unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to
a rational and reasonable principle—I also know
that I cannot reconcile them.” This necessary but
futile search for ultimate meaning constitutes absurd
existence in its fundamental form. It finds imagina-
tive expression in the Theater of the Absurd with
works of authors like Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
and Eugene Ionesco (1912–1994) and it enters
theological discourse with the negative theologies of
the mystics and the theology of paradox of Søren
KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855) as well as in the works
of authors from the voluntarist and fideist traditions.
In other words, the absurd need not be synonymous
with NIHILISM, even if the two terms have been
closely associated since the nineteenth century.
The philosophy of the absurd has become syn-
onymous with atheistic existentialism beginning
with Friedrich NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) and cul-
minating in the writings of Albert CAMUS (1913–
1960). Camus translated Nietzsche’s famous “death
of God” proclamation into the premise of a philos-
ophy of life that is neo-Stoic in tone and anticipates
a thesis of many postmodernist thinkers with its
counsel to persevere in living despite the abandon-
ment of HOPE for ultimate meaning in life. “The only
hope is to know there is no [ultimate] hope.” (Myth
of Sisyphus.) As the narrator in his novel The Plague
(1947) observes, it is only those who seek limited
HAPPINESS who can be satisfied; the idealist in search
of the absolute is condemned to a lifelong futile
quest. Correspondingly, moral values are to be cre-
ated, not discovered in some metaphysical system.
This Nietzschean theme is echoed by Jean-Paul SAR-
TRE (1905–1980) in his prescription from Existen-
tialism Is a Humanism (1946): “You are free, there-
fore choose, that is, invent!” Although he too denies
an absolute meaning prior to human existence, Sar-
tre avoids nihilism by his commitment to human
freedom as itself the supreme value and source of all
other values. And he does not subscribe to the “lim-
ited happiness” thesis that, many Marxist critics
claim, seems to align Camus (and Michel FOUCAULT
[1926–1984], so it has been argued by Jürgen HA-
BERMAS and others) with a reformist, if not a neo-
conservative camp.
From a nonexistentialist perspective, Thomas Na-
gel argues that our philosophical sense of absurdity
arises from “the collision between the seriousness
with which we take our lives and the perpetual pos-
sibility of regarding everything about which we are
7
absurd, the
serious as arbitrary or open to doubt.” Though this
thesis seems close to that of Camus, it differs by fo-
cusing entirely on the “collision within ourselves” of
two attitudes rather than on the tension between our
attitude and the world. Nagel likens the absurdist
belief to epistemological skepticism in that both po-
sitions, on his account, recognize the futility of seek-
ing a noncircular defense of our system of beliefs. In
the case of absurdism, “we continue to take life
largely for granted while seeing that all our decisions
and certainties are possible only because there is a
great deal we do not bother to rule out.” (“The Ab-
surd.”) What results in either case, he concludes, is
a new attitude toward knowledge and life, namely, a
certain resignation mixed with irony.
Perhaps the difference between these approaches
to the absurd is best reflected emotionally in the con-
trast between irony and anguish (Angst). The French
existentialist supports a chastened hope that has
fallen away from the utopian dream of a Revolution
that had assumed mythic proportions, whereas the
American philosopher counsels a more pragmatic
way of dealing with life’s pressing but unanswerable
mysteries.
Absurdist theater, of which Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot (1952) is the paradigm, articulates this at-
mosphere of abandonment and ultimate hopeless-
ness in which one cries “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
(The Unnamable [1953].) Like Camus’s Sisyphus,
condemned for eternity to push the stone repeatedly
up the hill only to see it roll back again, Beckett’s
characters are making the best of what might other-
wise be called a “bad deal,” except that there is no
possibility of a better deal in the offing. If the only
serious problem in our day, consequently, is SUICIDE,
that too becomes an absurd decision. As Camus ex-
plains: “The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning
is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the accep-
tance of the desperate encounter between human in-
quiry and the silence of the universe. . . . But it is
obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human
life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life
that makes this encounter possible and since, with-
out life, the absurdist wager would have no basis.”
(The Rebel [1951].)
Mystics, negative theologians, and fideists of vari-
ous stripes have profited from the absurdity of our
condition which the shipwreck of total rationality
seems to entail in order to direct our attention toward
an entirely other dimension of meaning and/or
absurd, the
existence. This is the point of Tertullian’s (c. C.E.
160–220) credo quia absurdum est (I believe be-
cause it is absurd), which Kierkegaard cites when
appealing to the “paradox” of the Christian’s belief
in the divinity of Christ. Such theological “absurd-
ism” resembles much philosophical skepticism: a
strategic move to disarm the power of a destroying
rationality in defense of traditional values or NORMS.
Where philosophy and theology overlap on the
matter of absurdity is in the problem of moral EVIL.
The questions—which cannot be answered ade-
quately—“Why do bad things happen to good peo-
ple?” and more specifically, “Why do good people
suffer at the hands of others?” have been common
objections to the idea of a God that cares (Provi-
dence). Though this need not lead to the conclusion
that the universe is not only indifferent but mean-
ingless, it often does—so close, in the eyes of many,
is the conceptual link between “it all making sense”
and the existence of a personal God.
In the wake of postmodernist critiques of a mono-
lithic “Enlightenment Reason” and the concomitant
claim that “the fission of meaning” is the philosoph-
ical “sign of our times”, much as the revolutionary
enthusiasm for freedom was the sign (die Begeben-
heit) of history in KANT’s (1724–1804) day, a cer-
tain absurdist specter seems to linger on the horizon
of contemporary thought.
See also: ATHEISM; CAMUS; EVIL; EXISTENTIAL
ETHICS; FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM; KIERKE-
GAARD; LIFE, MEANING OF; METAPHYSICS AND EPIS-
TEMOLOGY; MORAL IMAGINATION; MYSTICISM; NEO-
STOICISM; NIETZSCHE; NIHILISM; POSTMODERNISM;
RATIONALITY AND REASONABLENESS; SARTRE; SKEP-
TICISM IN ETHICS; SUICIDE; THEOLOGICAL ETHICS;
VOLUNTARISM.
Bibliography
Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997. Tr. of L’Innommable [1953].
———. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1954.
Tr. of En attendant Godot [1952].
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.
Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1995.
———. The Plague. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. Tr. of La peste [1947].
———. The Rebel. Translated by Anthony Bower. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954. Tr. of L’Homme révolté
[1951].
8
Crosby, Donald A. The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and
Criticisms of Modern Nihilism. Albany, NY: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1988.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Sign of History.” In his The
Differend: Phrases in Dispute, translated by Georges
Van Den Abbeele, 151–81. Minneapolis, MN: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1979. Chapter 2, “The Ab-
surd,” 11–23.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by
Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Humanities Press, Philo-
sophical Library, 1956. Tr. of L’Être et le néant [1943].
———. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” In Existentialism
from Dostoevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufmann,
287–311. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, Meridian
Books, 1956. Tr. of L’Existentialism est un humanisme
[1946].
Thomas R. Flynn
Abunaser
See Fārābı̄, al-.
academic ethics
Academic life generates a variety of moral issues.
These issues may be faced by students, staff, admin-
istrators, trustees, or even alumni, but most often
revolve around the obligations of the faculty. Its in-
formed judgments lie at the heart of the educational
process, and the study of its critical role is the central
focus of academic ethics.
The essence of the professor’s life is the pursuit
of knowledge. To ensure that this search is not ob-
structed on political, religious, or any other grounds,
faculty members are protected by ACADEMIC FREE-
DOM, the right of professionally qualified persons to
seek, teach, and publish the truth as they see it
within their fields of competence.
Academic freedom is imperiled whenever an
ideological test is imposed to determine who will be
appointed to the faculty, whenever a school adopts
an official stance on issues unrelated to its educa-
tional mission, or whenever a presentation by some
campus speaker is interfered with on the grounds
that the views expressed are unpalatable. Some have
argued that such actions may occasionally be justi-
fied on the grounds that they achieve a greater good,
such as preventing the spread of racial or religious

bigotry, but it is generally accepted that the onus lies
on those who would subordinate academic freedom
to a supposedly higher end. Faculty autonomy, how-
ever, does not imply the absence of RESPONSIBILITY.
Teaching, scholarship, and service all have an ethical
dimension.
Teaching
Professors are authorities, experts in their fields,
and in virtue of superior knowledge they are as-
signed AUTHORITY to guide the educational process.
Mishandled, however, the use of authority can de-
generate into authoritarianism, guidance can be-
come domination, and education can turn into in-
doctrination. These crucial distinctions need to be
drawn with care.
Professors are expected to judge fairly the extent
of each student’s accomplishment. Examinations
and grades are traditionally used to achieve this goal.
Yet examinations have been criticized for stifling
students’ creativity, and grades, it has been said, are
inherently inaccurate devices which, in attempting
to measure people, succeed only in traumatizing and
dehumanizing them. A critical challenge is to for-
mulate methods of evaluation that can withstand
such criticisms.
Fair evaluation requires the absence of PARTIAL-
ITY. But FRIENDSHIP, unlike friendliness or goodwill,
implies favoritism. How, then, can professors be
friends with those they are supposed to evaluate?
If friendship between professor and student is in-
appropriate, so, a fortiori, is romance. Furthermore,
given the POWER and prestige of the faculty, students
are especially vulnerable to sexual EXPLOITATION.
When an unscrupulous professor is known to have
used cajolery or COERCION to take advantage of a
student, faculty colleagues are thereby challenged to
make an appropriate ethical judgment and take suit-
able action.
Evaluating Teaching
Virtually every empirical study of alternative
methods of judging teachers has concluded that peer
review is a major component of any sound evalua-
tion. Yet many schools rely almost entirely on stu-
dent opinion. What are the appropriate limits to this
practice, given that students, by definition, do not
know the subjects they are studying? And how can
9
academic ethics
student views be solicited without exposing the
teacher to intimidation?
Scholarship
Professors profess the worth of their subjects, and
no subject can thrive in the absence of new contri-
butions. Publications, then, ought to result from a
faculty member’s commitment to the advance of a
discipline. In addition, those instructors expected to
provide original perspectives in the classroom ought
to have their abilities to do so evaluated periodically
in accordance with rigorous standards set and main-
tained by peers who referee works for publication
and comment on materials when they appear.
Yet it has been argued that emphasis on publish-
ing can lead to neglect of teaching. To what extent
are the two activities complementary, and what is the
appropriate balance between them?
All researchers are bound by common ethical
principles. Chief among these is the axiom that in-
dividuals should not claim credit for work they have
not done. In addition, they are obligated to study
available literature carefully, provide accurate cita-
tions, not distort opposing views, and not overstate
their own conclusions.
It seems to follow directly that research findings
should be made public, so that they are available for
use by the community of scholars. But suppose a
funding agency insists that it will finance a study
only if the results are kept confidential or remain
entirely under its control. Given a university’s com-
mitment to an open atmosphere of unrestricted in-
quiry, when, if ever, is a researcher justified in ac-
cepting support under conditions of secrecy?
Service
Scholars are engaged in a cooperative enterprise
and ought to treat each other with amity and INTEG-
RITY. In offering evaluations of research they should
not indulge in captious criticism; in providing letters
of recommendation they should not offer exagger-
ated praise.
An additional professorial duty is to take on a fair
share of the sundry, day-to-day tasks that are an in-
escapable part of the institution’s life. Failure to join
in this work unfairly burdens colleagues.
Faculty members are also obliged to ensure that
individuals deserve the degrees they are awarded.
academic ethics
For example, students granted liberal arts degrees
should actually have obtained the essentials of a lib-
eral education. Suitable requirements should be es-
tablished to guarantee the worth of a diploma, and
these should be examined regularly and modified
appropriately.
Personnel Decisions
Appointments to a faculty ought to be made only
after a widespread search has been carried out with
scrupulous attention to proper procedures. At every
stage of the process, ethical issues may arise. These
frequently call for balancing an applicant’s RIGHTS
and an institution’s INTERESTS. For example, to what
extent is it appropriate to ask candidates questions
about their personal life?
Other issues relate to decision procedures in mat-
ters of appointment or promotion. Who is entitled
to vote, and should individual judgments be kept
secret?
The most crucial personnel decision is the award-
ing of tenure. This prerogative protects academic
freedom by providing professors an extraordinary
degree of latitude and security. Yet such privilege
leads into an ethical thicket, for how can unprofes-
sional conduct be deterred without undermining
faculty autonomy?
A university is morally committed to harbor dis-
sent, nonconformity, and even the most unpopular
of heresies. What ought never be tolerated is pro-
fessorial malfeasance.
See also: ACADEMIC FREEDOM; AUTHORITY; COER-
CION; EXPLOITATION; FAIRNESS; FRIENDSHIP; IMPAR-
TIALITY; INSTITUTIONS; PATERNALISM; PERSONAL RE-
LATIONSHIPS; PLAGIARISM; POWER; PROFESSIONAL
ETHICS; RESPONSIBILITY; SEXUAL ABUSE AND HA-
RASSMENT.
Bibliography
American Association of University Professors. “State-
ment on Professional Ethics.” Academe 73 (1987): 49.
Brown, William R. Academic Politics. Birmingham: Uni-
versity of Alabama Press, 1982.
Cahn, Steven M. Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia.
Rev. ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994
[1986].
———, ed. Morality, Responsibility, and the University:
Essays in Academic Ethics. Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1990.
10
———, gen. ed. Issues in Academic Ethics. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1993–. Ten volumes have
been published; ten are in preparation.
Robinson, George M., and Janice Moulton. Ethical Prob-
lems in Higher Education. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren-
tice Hall, 1985.
Shils, Edward. The Calling of Education. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Steven M. Cahn
academic freedom
The freedom to teach and do research in any schol-
arly discipline without constraint; to discover and
promulgate new ideas no matter how controversial.
Like other accepted freedoms, academic freedom re-
quires individuals, authorities, and governments not
only to allow scholars to work without restraint but
also to prevent any interference with this freedom.
In addition, academic freedom seems to require
something more: that society provide conditions in
which new ideas can be generated, nurtured, and
freely exchanged.
Historical examples show the need for academic
freedom. SOCRATES (c. 470–399 B.C.E.) was put to
death for corrupting the youth of Athens with his
ideas. Galileo (1564–1642) was sentenced to life
imprisonment for advocating the Copernican view
of the solar system. DESCARTES (1596–1650) sup-
pressed his own writing to avoid similar trouble.
Teachers were fired for telling their students about
DARWIN’s (1809–1882) views. The ideas of these
great thinkers have survived, but we will never know
how many others were completely suppressed. Rec-
ognizing the need to protect controversial ideas,
nineteenth-century German universities affirmed the
ideal of academic freedom. During the modern era,
the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed aca-
demic freedom in Sweezey v. New Hampshire
(1957): “to impose any straitjacket upon the intel-
lectual leaders in our colleges and universities would
imperil the future of the nation.”
Academic freedom can be justified in two ways.
First, one can appeal to a higher value—the pursuit
of truth—to argue that we must protect ideas that
may be unpopular, controversial, or without imme-
diate practical benefit in order to support truth. Sec-
ond, one can argue that academic freedom is nec-
essary to benefit human welfare, which depends on
the discovery and propagation of new knowledge.

Since we cannot predict which knowledge will be
helpful in the future, all new knowledge should be
protected.
The first justification seems to be the simpler. If
we take the pursuit of truth as a higher value, then
no knowledge should be suppressed. Even harmful
truths are truths nonetheless. But there is a problem.
If the discovery and promulgation of truth is our
primary aim, it might be acceptable or even desirable
to suppress false information that threatens to dis-
place true information. The problem is the difficulty
in determining what new information is true. Who
decides what is true and what is false? Historically,
those who tried to suppress new information usually
believed they were trying to preserve the truth. Now
we know that they were mistaken. We might assume
that, given enough intellectual scrutiny, true infor-
mation will eventually defeat false information.
Then we can decide the best policy is to suppress no
information. However, there is no guarantee that
true information will always displace false or that
this system is an efficient way to establish truth.
Consider now the second justification: that hu-
man welfare is primary. This justification seems to
allow limits on academic freedom. Some things that
are discovered and taught might be harmful, might
even endanger the future of our species. False infor-
mation is more likely to be harmful, but true infor-
mation might also be harmful. Some argue that ac-
ademic freedom must be limited when there is a
serious threat to human welfare. They cite examples
such as the danger caused by radioactivity from nu-
clear weapons research or the danger of biological
“wildfire” from accidents in recombinant genetic
engineering.
Even if we take human welfare to be primary, we
can still defend the principle of academic freedom.
It is too difficult to anticipate what knowledge will
turn out to be harmful. It is too dangerous to allow
some people to decide what may be studied and
what may not, what information should be available
and what should be suppressed. In general, the
larger benefit of supporting the principle of uncon-
strained research and teaching seems to be worth the
risk of occasional harmful effects. Therefore, we
should support the principle of academic freedom.
Academic Freedom: Privilege or Right
The exercise of academic freedom depends on re-
sources that are not available to everyone. Teaching
11
academic freedom
requires access to students; research requires librar-
ies, laboratories, and other facilities. Modern schol-
ars need access to photocopy machines, computer
databases, colleagues to consult, journal and book
editors willing to publish their work. These re-
sources are limited. Not everyone can be accom-
modated. The difficulty of deciding how to distrib-
ute these limited resources raises serious questions
about academic freedom.
Educational institutions are the primary provid-
ers of scholarly resources. Therefore the protection
of academic freedom is usually thought to be the
responsibility of colleges and universities. However,
academic institutions are meritocracies, not democ-
racies. They make no attempt to distribute their re-
sources to everyone. Instead, they try to reserve
these resources for people who they judge can best
make use of them. But how do educational institu-
tions judge who is most suitable?
The freedom to develop and teach new ideas can
be encouraged or discouraged in many ways. The
most prominent way that educational institutions
encourage academic freedom is the granting of ten-
ure. Tenure provides job security for teachers and
scholars. It is usually granted after a period of pro-
bation, as a symbol of merit. This reinforces the idea
that academic freedom is a privilege.
The tenure system has been criticized because it
can be easily abused. People with tenure can hold
their positions and do very little work. They cannot
be fired for being lazy teachers, poor researchers, or
uncooperative employees. Defenders of the tenure
system, like defenders of other protective systems,
argue that protecting the work of original, unpopu-
lar thinkers is more important than preventing the
“deadwood” in academic departments from slack-
ing off.
Tenure has also been criticized because its pro-
tection of academic freedom is withheld from the
people who may need it the most—younger scholars
who are more likely to innovate and to challenge
established paradigms. Unless their senior col-
leagues support them enthusiastically, untenured
scholars may be fired no matter how excellent or
original their teaching or research. Junior scholars
may lose their jobs because their senior colleagues
do not approve of their research or the material they
teach, regardless of its quality.
There is usually a six-year probationary period be-
fore tenure is granted at the university level; it is
academic freedom
often shorter for secondary school teachers. In
higher education the average period a junior scholar
must work before receiving tenure is increasing in
length as the supply of academic jobs decreases.
Many scholars go from one untenured position to
another. Scholars who do get tenure may wait twelve
or more years. During this time they work under
conditions of restricted academic freedom. They
must be cautious about expressing scholarly or per-
sonal views that may offend senior faculty members
and cost them their jobs. The pressure to “publish
or perish” also discourages innovation because in-
novation requires taking chances that may not result
in publication. Many of those who are finally granted
tenure after this long period have learned to avoid
daring or controversial research and teaching. Ironi-
cally, those who finally receive tenure’s protection of
academic freedom may be the ones who need it least.
Some hold that tenure should be restricted, that
full academic freedom is a privilege to be granted
only after the new scholar demonstrates a record of
extraordinary contributions. Untenured status is an
apprenticeship that allows the university to identify
the most talented scholars. The more untenured
scholars an institution has, the more easily it can
replace them with people who have new ideas. Un-
fortunately, this view offers no protection to unten-
ured scholars who have new ideas that displease se-
nior colleagues or that fall outside established
paradigms.
Others believe that it is young scholars with new
ideas who are most in need of protection. They see
scholars who do original work being dismissed for
irrelevant reasons and want junior scholars to have
the same job security as their seniors. They argue
that the quality of research and teaching would be
improved if working conditions were more secure
and the POWER differences between tenured and un-
tenured faculty members were lessened. This system
is generally followed in Great Britain and some other
countries. Opponents point out that in countries
where job security is granted to new scholars, there
are fewer academic jobs available and fewer scholars
can find any academic employment. To compromise,
institutions might give longer contracts to all schol-
ars but eliminate tenure.
Many who have discussed academic freedom
equate it with tenure. Yet the job security that tenure
provides is not enough. Tenure may increase the ac-
ademic freedom of some scholars, but it does not
12
guarantee the ability to teach or study freely. Ten-
ured faculty members have been fired for their po-
litical beliefs or private indiscretions. Tenured fac-
ulty members with controversial ideas have been
given undesirable teaching assignments, burdened
with tedious administrative jobs, or denied research
facilities. While tenure is the main formal protection
for academic freedom offered by educational insti-
tutions, not all institutions offer it. Educational in-
stitutions have the power to foster academic free-
dom in many ways besides tenure: for example,
reducing teaching loads, or granting travel funds
and sabbatical leaves so that faculty members can
develop new ideas and exchange ideas with col-
leagues at other institutions. Many institutions ex-
tend the academic freedom of their students by al-
lowing a wide choice of courses. They extend
academic freedom outside the institution by giving
members of the public access to their libraries and
some research facilities.
In some fields, other resources are more impor-
tant to academic freedom than tenure—access to ar-
tifacts, special libraries, private collections, labora-
tory space, and equipment. These resources can be
denied to scholars whose views threaten the people
who control access. And even if the research is suc-
cessfully completed, it still needs to be made public.
Journal editors and referees are less likely to rec-
ommend publication of articles that challenge their
own ideas. Publishing houses have been pressured
by academics not to produce certain books. Librar-
ies and bookstores have been pressured to withdraw
offending books from circulation. Government and
industry keep secret the results of research done un-
der their auspices, even when conducted in institu-
tions of higher education.
Teachers, especially those whose evaluations are
based on class size and student opinion surveys, feel
pressure to please their audiences, sometimes at the
expense of educational goals. Teaching curricula are
affected by ideology, politics, and current intellec-
tual fashions. Researchers feel pressure to focus on
subjects supported by grants from government, in-
dustry, and foundations.
Research and teaching will always be constrained
by outside pressures. The means for exercising aca-
demic freedom—tenure, research support, and pub-
lication space—will always be relatively scarce re-
sources. We should evaluate how these resources are
distributed. We must consider who should choose

the recipients of these resources. It may seem that
those who have demonstrated competence in a
scholarly discipline are best able to make the deci-
sions. However established scholars are intellectu-
ally, emotionally, and financially invested in certain
theories, approaches, and dogma. Given human na-
ture, it is difficult for judges to accept a new idea
that challenges what they themselves believe, espe-
cially when they know that their views are shared by
other leading scholars in a field. We should recog-
nize the dangers of self-perpetuating paradigms and
try to discover ways of overcoming them.
We can look beyond tenure for means of preserv-
ing academic freedom and ask whether the resources
for academic freedom should be distributed more
widely or more narrowly; whether these resources
should be distributed to encourage merit, diversity,
or some other property; and whether the creative
thinking and hard work that results in new knowl-
edge is more likely to be inspired by the pressure of
regular evaluation or by freedom from job insecurity.
See also: ACADEMIC ETHICS; AUTHORITY; CENSOR-
SHIP; DESCARTES; ELITE, CONCEPT OF; GOVERNMENT,
ETHICS IN; LIBERTY; LIBRARY AND INFORMATION PRO-
FESSIONS; MERIT AND DESERT; POLITICAL CORRECT-
NESS; PROFESSIONAL ETHICS; SOCRATES.
Bibliography
Atherton, M., S. Morgenbesser, and R. Schwartz. “On
Tenure.” Philosophical Forum 10 (1979): 341–52.
Junior scholars need protection, too.
Brubacher, J. S. On the Philosophy of Higher Education.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977. Chapter 3 presents
a thorough discussion of academic freedom, its justi-
fication, limits, and relation to other rights.
Cahn, S. M. Education and the Democratic Ideal. Chi-
cago: Nelson-Hall, 1979. Argues that tenure is neces-
sary to protect academic freedom but that it should be
granted less often and terminated more frequently.
Hook, Sidney. In Defense of Academic Freedom. New
York: Pegasus, 1971. Student challenges to university
traditions in the 1960s are seen as a threat to academic
freedom.
Hook, Sidney, P. Kurtz, and M. Todorovich. The Ethics of
Teaching and Scientific Research. Buffalo, NY: Pro-
metheus, 1977. Hook argues that academic freedom
(which he equates with tenure) is a privilege. Kurtz
examines claims that some scientific research should
not be done because of dangers or possible misuses.
Jaggar, Alison. “Tenure, Academic Freedom and Profes-
sional Competence.” Philosophical Forum 10 (1979):
13
action
360–70. Political and personal factors affect judg-
ments of who deserves tenure.
Robinson, G. M., and J. Moulton. Ethical Problems in
Higher Education. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1985. Chapter 3 treats the hiring and evaluation of fac-
ulty; chapter 5 covers ethical problems in teaching.
Schneewind, Jerome. “On ‘On Tenure’.” Philosophical Fo-
rum 10 (1979): 353–59. A defense of the tenure
system.
George Robinson
Janice Moulton
action
Moral judgments ostensibly presuppose that there
are actions, or acts, since it is precisely acts, or
deeds, that are frequently called right or wrong.
While the existence of acts remains slightly contro-
versial among metaphysicians, more intense contro-
versy concerns what they are.
Types and Tokens
First, we must distinguish act types from act to-
kens. An act type is a kind of action, like whistling
or mailing a letter. An act token is a particular ac-
tion, performed by a particular person, at a partic-
ular time. When speaking of acts as right or wrong,
usually act tokens are in question; the specific deed
done by Jones in a particular context is said to be
wrong, even if other deeds of the same type might
not be wrong. It is also possible to hold, however,
that an act type is wrong, meaning perhaps that any
token of the type is wrong.
Act Individuation
The main controversies in action theory concern
act tokens. Suppose that Sally opens her hand,
thereby releasing a plastic cup, thereby littering the
highway, and thereby violating a statute. Presumably
each of the following is an act token: (a) Sally’s
opening her hand; (b) her releasing the cup; (c) her
littering the highway; and (d) her violating a statute.
Are these one and the same act token, or four dis-
tinct act tokens?
The first answer, that they are the same act token,
has been defended by G. E. M. ANSCOMBE (1919–
2001) and Donald Davidson, the latter’s defense be-
ing partly based on his account of the logical form
of action sentences. According to Davidson’s ac-
action
count, the sentence “Sally opened her hand” is
(roughly) equivalent to: “There was an event E such
that E was a hand opening and E was performed by
Sally.” The same event can also be described in terms
of its effects, namely, the release of the plastic cup,
litter being on the highway, and a statute being vi-
olated. Hence, this event was the releasing (by Sally)
of the cup, and was the littering of the highway and
was the violating of a statute. Call this the unity ap-
proach to act individuation.
Although intuitively appealing, the unity ap-
proach faces ostensibly damaging problems. Some
of these concern causal properties of the act(s). As
Alvin Goldman observes, it looks true to say that
Sally’s opening her hand caused the release of the
cup, but false to say that Sally’s littering the highway
caused the release of the cup. How does this square
with the alleged fact that the highway littering is the
hand opening? A second problem, posed by Judith
THOMSON and others, involves temporal properties.
Booth killed Lincoln by shooting him. Can the kill-
ing be identical with the shooting, as the unity ap-
proach claims? The time of the killing surely
stretches until the time of death, which in this case
occurred well after the shooting. If the shooting were
the killing, however, they would occupy the same
time interval.
Unity theorists try to reply to these problems, but
other theorists opt for a pluralist approach. In each
example, they claim, there is a multiplicity of distinct
(though possibly overlapping) acts. One version
construes each causative act as a sequence or fusion
of events: an initial act plus a chain of its causal
consequences. Booth’s killing Lincoln is a whole of
which his shooting is just a part (a view endorsed by
Thomson, Irving Thalberg, Lawrence Davis, and
Fred Dretske). A second variant of pluralism has
been advanced by Jaegwon Kim for events generally
and by Goldman for actions. This is the property
exemplification approach, which in the action case
identifies an act token with the exemplifying of an
act type (a property) by an agent at a specific time
(cf. Jonathan Bennett’s “trope” theory). Exemplify-
ings of distinct act types are distinct act tokens, even
if their agent and time are the same. How does this
approach accommodate the intuition that groups of
such acts are intimately related? They are related, it
says, via the “by” relation, the relation holding be-
tween action pairs when one is done by doing the
other.
14
Doing versus Undergoing
When you are “seized” by a sneeze or cough, or
when you sweat, you do not act; you do not do any-
thing. What is the difference? One theory here is
causalism: a piece of behavior qualifies as action if
it is caused by an appropriate mental event, such as
an INTENTION, a volition, a trying, or a set of desires
and beliefs. This is related to theories claiming that
reasons explanations are causal explanations. It goes
a bit further in claiming a “reduction” of the notion
of action to the notions of behavior, event causation,
and selected mental events. A principal difficulty for
this view is the existence of “deviant” causal chains
between inner events and behavior, chains that don’t
render the resulting behavior an action. Opposed to
causalism are two views. The agency theory (of
Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm [1916–
1999], for example) claims that an action is some-
thing produced by a particular kind of subject, an
agent, who is something like an unmoved mover.
The exact nature of such a being, however, and its
mode of operation are obscure. A second and com-
plementary approach, teleologism, claims that doing
something for a purpose, or in order to achieve an
end, is a primitive and irreducible notion.
Basic and Nonbasic Acts
It seems natural to distinguish acts that are “di-
rectly” versus only “indirectly” within our power.
Curling a finger and smiling fall in the first category;
starting a revolution falls in the second. Members of
the first category are basic acts. A basic act type
might be explained as a property that a person can
exemplify at will, even without specialized means-
ends knowledge (or belief).
With respect to act tokens, the unity theorist has
no need to distinguish basic from nonbasic, because
all act tokens would be (identical to) basic ones. The
pluralist, by contrast, standardly insists on this dis-
tinction. Every act token is either basic or arises
from a basic act token via the “by” relation. In Gold-
man’s theory, the “by” relation (dubbed level gen-
eration) spawns an action “tree” from each basic act
token. A token on such a tree is intentional if the
agent has a plan featuring that token (either as a goal
or a means) and the plan causes (in the “right” way)
its own realization, or at least partial realization.

Sources and Plans of Action
There are many theories about the springs of ac-
tion. One controversy is whether all sources of ac-
tion include desire-like elements (the Humean ap-
proach), or whether there are REASONS FOR ACTION,
such as respect for duty, that have a different char-
acter (the Kantian approach). A second controversy
concerns the logical and temporal structure of PRAC-
TICAL REASONING. How do intentions and plans for
action change in response to new MOTIVES and in-
formation, and how is it rational for these to
change?
The Moral Status of Actions
How does moral status attach to acts? In the lan-
guage of the unity theory, does it attach to whole
“concrete” actions or only to some descriptions
thereof? In pluralist terms, must all acts on an act
tree have the same moral status, or can their status
differ? Differences seem possible. If X does Y a fa-
vor, but in a fashion that causes Z harm, the first
act, but not the second, seems meritorious. How-
ever, there may be a principle of “inheritance” dic-
tating that whenever one act on an act tree has a
certain moral status, lower acts on the tree inherit
that status. Or perhaps acts on the same tree can
differ in prima facie rightness or wrongness but not
in overall rightness or wrongness. A satisfactory the-
ory of moral status should address this issue.
See also: ACTS AND OMISSIONS; ANSCOMBE; AUTON-
OMY OF MORAL AGENTS; CAUSATION AND RESPON-
SIBILITY; CONSEQUENTIALISM; DELIBERATION AND
CHOICE; DESIRE; DOUBLE EFFECT; FREEDOM AND DE-
TERMINISM; INTENTION; INTRANSITIVITY; METAETH-
ICS; MORAL ABSOLUTES; MOTIVES; PRACTICAL REA-
SON[ING]; RATIONAL CHOICE; REASONS FOR ACTION;
RESPONSIBILITY; THOMSON; VOLUNTARY ACTS;
WEAKNESS OF WILL.
Bibliography
Anscombe, G. E. M. Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1957.
Bennett, Jonathan. Events and Their Names. Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett, 1988.
Brand, Myles. Intending and Acting. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1984.
Bratman, Michael. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
15
acts and omissions
Chisholm, Roderick. “Freedom and Action.” In Freedom
and Determinism, edited by Keith Lehrer. New York:
Random House, 1966.
Davidson, Donald. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980.
Davis, Lawrence. Theory of Action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1979.
Dretske, Fred. Explaining Behavior. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1988.
Goldman, Alvin. A Theory of Human Action. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970.
Hornsby, Jennifer. Actions. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1980.
Kim, Jaegwon. “Events as Property Exemplifications.” In
Action Theory, edited by Myles Brand and Douglas
Walton. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976.
Taylor, Richard. Action and Purpose. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966.
Thalberg, Irving. Perception, Emotion and Action. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. Acts and Other Events. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Alvin Goldman
Holly Smith
acts
See voluntary acts.
acts and omissions
Very broadly, the act/omission distinction is that
between acting and failing to act, between a doing
or a doing-something and a not-doing or a doing-
nothing. Further refinement is clearly necessary,
however, since not all failures to act are omissions.
A nonsurgeon who fails to save a child who can be
saved only through surgery would seem a case in
point. Moreover, when one is doing something, e.g.,
reading a book, one is not doing a number of other
things, e.g., mowing the lawn or cooking a meal, and
some way is needed of telling which of those things
one is not doing counts as an omission.
At a minimum, three conditions are necessary for
turning a failure to act into an omission. First, one
must have the ability to do whatever is in question.
A nonsurgeon lacks the ability to save the child, just
as a nonswimmer lacks the ability to swim out and
save a drowning person. Second, one must have the
opportunity to do whatever is in question. If a swim-
acts and omissions
mer never comes across a drowning person or if a
firefighter never encounters people trapped in a
burning building, then they do not omit to save
someone. To this second condition, a restriction
might be appended, namely, that the opportunity to
save a life must occur in circumstances that are not
themselves life threatening or otherwise represent
catastrophic loss to the agent. A firefighter who can
save someone only by going into an out-of-control,
raging inferno would seem to fall under this restric-
tion. Third, one is or will be expected to do whatever
is in question. When we say that surgeons or fire-
fighters “omitted” to save someone, we in part allude
to the fact that they are or may be expected to save
them. This helps to deal with the many things sur-
geons and firefighters do not do (at a time when they
are doing something), things which we do not treat
as omissions on their parts. At a minimum, then,
ability, opportunity, and expectation are elements re-
quired in order to turn a failure to act into an
omission.
Each of these elements can be controversial.
Thus, ability can take the form, not of having a kind
of technical expertise, but of having a resource, such
as a dollar. Suppose one buys a newspaper: are all
the other things one does not do with one’s dollar
omissions? If so, then it is comparatively easy to
charge people with a great number of omissions at
every moment of their lives. This in turn seems to
drain the notion of its significance: it merely refers
to all the things one is not doing, when one is doing
something. Again, over opportunity, it can be un-
clear what represents catastrophic loss to agents.
Loss of life clearly counts; but what about loss of
dollars to spend? Can one deny that one has omitted
to save famine victims by arguing that loss of these
dollars would, though not severely, nevertheless sig-
nificantly affect how one lives? (More on the expec-
tation condition follows below.)
Plainly, not all omissions are immoral/illegal
ones: in failing to turn out the light upon leaving the
room, one is not usually held to be guilty of an im-
moral/illegal omission. To obtain this result, we
need to add, for instance, that the agent is under a
moral and/or legal duty to do whatever is in ques-
tion. (Our knowledge that the agent is under such a
duty helps explain why we expect the agent to do
something in the situation.) Jobs such as surgeon,
firefighter, and lifeguard are in part defined in terms
of the duties they impose on their holders, and hold-
16
ers who fail to discharge these duties can be held,
absent some excusing condition, to be guilty of an
immoral/illegal omission.
Of course, something other than duty can explain
why one is expected to act in the situation, though
the line of argument to an immoral/illegal omission
may be less clear. Is a man who habitually mows his
neighbor’s lawn guilty of an immoral omission, if he
does not mow it this time? Certainly, his past be-
havior has led his neighbor to expect him to mow.
But is his failure to meet his neighbor’s expectations
in this regard a moral matter? Whereas, if he is un-
der a duty, say, as the result of promising to mow
throughout the summer, the neighbor’s expectations
arise as the result of a moral undertaking on the
agent’s part.
If a lifeguard walks past a drowning person, then,
absent some excusing condition, she is guilty of an
immoral omission. If the child of the drowning per-
son walks past, some might want to claim that there
is a moral duty of RECIPROCITY or of GRATITUDE be-
tween children and parents and so claim that the
child is guilty of an immoral omission. What if a
stranger walks past? Here, some have wanted to ap-
peal to a general moral duty of rescue (there may no
prescribed general legal duty of rescue in the legal
code in question) or to a moral duty to render mu-
tual aid in order to hold the stranger guilty of an
immoral omission. Precisely because the moral cases
for these last alleged duties are still contested, it is
not clear how persuasive general moral claims for
rescue are. Moreover, if there is such a general moral
duty, then one’s liberty to spend one’s dollar on a
newspaper constantly runs up against one’s duty to
feed the starving poor. Do duties always trump lib-
erties? Or can some of one’s liberties defy a duty,
say, to aid others?
If the duty view enables us to identify which fail-
ures to act on the agent’s part are immoral/illegal
omissions, it also enables us to characterize an omis-
sion as the failure of the discharge of the duty to
occur, where the discharge of the duty would be, so
to speak, the completed act. In other words, once
we know what the completed act would be, i.e.,
what the discharge of the duty would be, we know
what an omission or failure to achieve the completed
act would be; we then construe the latter in terms
of the former. If the lifeguard jumps in, she dis-
charges her duty and saves a person from drowning;
if she does not jump in, she fails to discharge her

duty and so fails to save a person from drowning.
We understand her omission—not saving a life—by
first understanding what the completed act—saving
a life—would be, if she discharged her duty.
With this duty view of immoral/illegal omissions,
of course, complications can arise and, on occasions,
of a peculiar kind. What if the drowning man’s son
is required by some duty to aid or to show gratitude
to jump in after his father but is required as a doctor,
at the same time, to perform the serious operation
he is scheduled to perform? Since he cannot do
both, is he guilty of an immoral omission, whichever
act he fails to perform? The mere claim that the son
is confronted with a conflict of duties and must de-
cide in the circumstances which is more stringent
provides no answer. For this simply tells us how the
son is to decide what to do; it does not show that,
should he decide to save his father, he is under no
duty to operate. If, then, the decision of stringency
does not extinguish the other duty, is the son guilty
of an immoral omission, whichever way he decides?
Certainly, even though the conditions of the duty
view have been satisfied, it seems harsh to suggest
that he is; equally, however, those conditions are sat-
isfied, and life, it might be thought, often has a way
of making us “damned if we do and damned if we
don’t.”
Is the act/omission distinction morally signifi-
cant? On the whole, consequentialists deny that it
is, since so many of the consequences of, say, killing
a man and of omitting to feed him and letting him
starve to death are the same. Others, including vir-
tually all deontologists, typically find a moral differ-
ence between acting and omitting, which in contem-
porary moral debate is often construed as the
distinction between killing and letting die, though
deontologists differ on what this difference is. Sug-
gestions include distinguishing between: (1) intend-
ing a death, and “allowing” or “permitting” a death;
(2) actively intervening and killing, and passively let-
ting “nature” or some causal sequence run its course;
(3) causing a death, and not preventing a death;
(4) positing a negative duty to avoid harm and a
positive duty to aid, and claiming that the former is
more stringent than the latter; and (5) trying to sepa-
rate the moral guilt of an agent for an outcome from
his (guiltless) presence in a situation of tragic cir-
cumstances. These distinctions themselves are con-
troversial, in how they are drawn, in their implica-
tions, morally, and in the fundamental claim that
17
acts and omissions
they are attempts to capture and support. This
claim—that, if we think of the act/omission distinc-
tion in terms of that between killing and letting die,
killing is morally worse than letting die—is strongly
disputed by consequentialists and on a number of
counts. Yet its defense is of the utmost importance
to the character of the deontological positions that
many of their opponents espouse and find compat-
ible with (what they take to be) “ordinary” or “com-
monsense” morality.
In short, current controversies over the KILLING/
LETTING DIE distinction and over the doctrine of
DOUBLE EFFECT have brought the act/omission dis-
tinction to great prominence in ethics and have
made it, and the issues that surround it, one source
of major disagreement between consequentialists
and their opponents.
One of these surrounding issues that has proved
absorbing and important in its own right is whether
omissions are causes. If one omits to save a drown-
ing man, and if the man dies, then it is not only
consequentialists to whom it may well appear that
one’s omission plays a causal role in the man’s death.
Deontologists have generally rejected any such sug-
gestion, insisting, among other things, that killing
and letting die have different causal structures as-
sociated with them. In killing, one is the direct agent
of death; in “allowing” or “permitting” to die, one is
not the direct agent of death. In medical cases, e.g.,
it will be the underlying illness or disease that is said
to kill the patient. So, are omissions causes?
The question “What caused the fire?” can be bro-
ken down into other, more specific questions. For
example, it can be construed as asking “How did the
fire come to start?” Construed this way, the answer
we give focuses upon Jack’s playing with matches; it
was his dropping lighted matches on the porch that
began the fire. The question can also be construed,
however, as asking “How did the fire, given matches
were struck, spread?” Here, we might mention the
high winds. Equally, though, the question can also
be construed as asking “How did the house, given
that matches were struck and that high winds were
present, come to be consumed by the flames?” Here,
we might mention the sprinkler system’s failure to
operate and Jill’s failure to act in alerting the fire
department.
Any one of these three construals would be an
appropriate answer to the question “What caused
the fire?” Which one we choose to give depends
acts and omissions
upon how narrowly or how broadly we want to treat
the question, and how we treat the question de-
pends, among other things, upon our purpose in
raising the question in the first place. A board of
inquiry will not be satisfied with a narrow construal
of the question, since that construal may not pick
out significant, distinctive features present in the
case that contributed to or helped to produce or
bring about the destruction of the house. In other
words, the board is going to construe the question
“What caused the fire?” to be asking “What brought
about the destruction of the house by the flames?”,
and it would be wrong to give as the answer to this
question only Jack’s playing with matches.
Thus, while the three construals are all appropri-
ate construals of the question “What caused the
fire?”, it is not true that the answer to any specific
construal is the same in all three cases. If asked what
brought about the spreading of the fire, the answer
that Jack was playing with matches would not be
right; for it would not take into account the high
winds that were present, even though it did account
for how the flames initially got started. Similarly, if
asked what brought about the destruction of the en-
tire house, it would not be right to mention only
Jack’s playing with matches and the high winds; for
significant, distinctive features of the case are the
failure of the sprinkler system and Jill’s failure to act.
Which of the construals we adopt depends upon our
purpose in asking the causal question, and if one’s
purpose, in retrospect, is that of a board of inquiry,
i.e., to cast a broad net over the factors that helped
to bring about the destruction of the house by the
flames, then narrow construals of the question are
clearly not going to be selected.
When we ask the question “What caused the
fire?”, one of the things we are often interested in is
outcomes and what produced them. In the above
case, the outcome is that the house is entirely de-
stroyed by fire, so that what we are in fact asking
about is what factors helped to bring about this out-
come. This is why it can be misleading, on a billiard
ball view of causality, to speak of the fire as cause
and the destruction of the house as effect; for there
is no straight line of active agency that runs from
Jack’s playing with matches to the destruction of the
house. Rather, certain factors which do not share in
active agency are present, viz., the sprinkler’s system
failure to operate and Jill’s failure to act, that Jack’s
playing with matches and the high winds combine
18
with to help produce or bring about the outcome.
We regard and treat omissions as causes just because
they can and do combine with active agency to help
bring about outcomes, and a person who operates
with a billiard ball view of causality, who maintains
that omissions do not share in active agency, does
not rebut this point.
Are, then, omissions causes? No, they are not, if
billiard ball causality is the only view of causality one
will accept; yes, they are, if we focus upon what
brought about the outcomes that interest us.
See also: ACTION; AGENCY AND DISABILITY; CAUSA-
TION AND RESPONSIBILITY; CONSEQUENTIALISM; DE-
ONTOLOGY; DOUBLE EFFECT; DUTY AND OBLIGATION;
KILLING/LETTING DIE; OBEDIENCE TO LAW; RESPON-
SIBILITY; SITUATION ETHICS; SUPEREROGATION.
Bibliography
D’Arcy, Eric. Human Acts. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1963.
Denton, F. E. “The Case Against a Duty to Rescue.” Ca-
nadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 4 (1991):
101–32.
Dworkin, G., R. G. Frey, S. Bok. Euthanasia and Physician-
Assisted Suicide. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998.
Feinberg, Joel. Harm to Others. Chapter 4. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1984.
Frey, R. G. “Killing and the Doctrine of Double Effect.”
In his Rights, Killing, and Suffering. Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1983. Pp. 118–40.
Kamm, Frances. “Actions, Omissions, and the Stringency
of Duties.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review
142 (1994): 1493–1512.
Leavens, Arthur. “A Causation Approach to Criminal
Omissions.” University of California Law Review 76
(1988): 547–91.
Moore, Michael. Act and Crime. Chapters 2, 4, and 5.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Simester, A. P. “Why Omissions Are Special?” Legal The-
ory 1 (1995): 311–35.
Steinbock, Bonnie, ed. Killing and Letting Die. Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980.
Williams, Bernard. “Acts and Omissions, Doing and Not
Doing.” In his Making Sense of Humanity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 56–64.
R. G. Frey

additivity problems
Additivity has long been associated with UTILITARI-
ANISM, and has often been thought to underlie some
of its deepest problems. Yet additivity is not a spe-
cific concept peculiar to utilitarianism; rather it is a
cluster or “family” of concepts which frequently play
an integral role in nonutilitarian views. Additive as-
sumptions are natural and plausible, but unfortu-
nately their importance and pervasiveness is largely
unrecognized, and it is far from clear to what extent
they are justified.
Utilitarianism and Additivity
Classical utilitarians and their modern descen-
dants believe in maximizing total utility where this
is determined by adding together individual utilities.
At the core of this view is an additive assumption
regarding the goodness of outcomes.
Many standard objections to utilitarianism in-
volve its additive assumption, including problems of
aggregation, distribution, incommensurability, and
interpersonal utility comparisons. For example, on
total utilitarianism the best outcome has the greatest
aggregate utility. Correspondingly, no matter how
large or well-off a population might be, there must
be some possible population, sufficiently large,
which would be better even though all its members
had lives barely worth living (cf., Derek Parfit’s Re-
pugnant Conclusion). Similarly, since utilitarianism
focuses on how much utility obtains rather than its
distribution, it would approve large inequalities for
slight gains in utility. Moreover, utilitarianism’s ad-
ditivity assumes that all values can be put on a com-
mon scale. Yet many believe some values—like the
pain of TORTURE and the PLEASURE of eating cake—
are incommensurable. Finally, since utilitarianism
adds different people’s utilities, it requires mean-
ingful interpersonal utility comparisons. Yet many
argue these are both conceptually and practically im-
possible (intrapersonal intertemporal utility com-
parisons raise analogous worries).
Nonutilitarianism and Additivity
Nonutilitarians implicitly invoke additivity in nu-
merous ways, including the following.
1. Nonutilitarians deny that only utility mat-
ters. But, like W. D. ROSS (1877–1971),
19
additivity problems
many accept that utility (or BENEFICENCE)
is one ideal, among others, of moral signif-
icance. Accordingly, in assessing outcomes
many accept that how good a situation is
regarding utility is an additive function of
its individual utilities.
2. Additive principles involve two natural and
plausible assumptions: (a) given any two
situations, the best situation regarding
some factor F will be the one in which the
most F obtains if F is desirable, and where
the least F obtains if F is undesirable, and
(b) to determine how much F obtains in a
situation one need only sum the magnitude
of the individual instances of F. Hence, non-
utilitarians may invoke additive principles
for ideals besides utility. For example, it is
likely additive assumptions underlie the
claims that, ceteris paribus, it is better to
prevent as much injustice or INEQUALITY as
possible, or to minimize infractions of basic
RIGHTS or liberties.
3. Many arguments—named contrast argu-
ments by Shelly Kagan—assess the moral
relevance of a given factor by constructing
two cases alike in all relevant respects ex-
cept the one at issue. Our judgments about
such cases are then taken to be evidence
regarding the intrinsic moral relevance of
the factor in question. Intuitively, people as-
sume that since everything else is held con-
stant, any preference in such cases must be
due to the additional reason provided by
the factor in question; while indifference
must show the factor lacks intrinsic signif-
icance, as it does not add any reason for
choosing even between (otherwise) equiv-
alent alternatives. Here, as elsewhere, the
assumption is that how good a situation is,
all things considered, is an additive func-
tion of how good it is regarding each mor-
ally relevant factor.
4. Philosophers often construct simple, “pure”
examples which purposely abstract from
the world’s messy complexity in order to
test the moral significance of particular
factors. In doing this, they assume their re-
sults can be legitimately employed to shed
light on complex real situations. Such an
approach implicitly assumes that morally
additivity problems
relevant factors can be understood and as-
sessed independently and additively com-
bined, after giving each its due weight, to
yield an overall judgment about outcomes.
(Note, the methodology of “transporting”
results from simple experiments or models
to complex situations is a staple of the so-
cial sciences.)
5. Additivity also underlies many standard as-
sumptions about rationality. The very met-
aphors of “weighing” or “balancing” rea-
sons suggest an additive model. Reasons,
like stones, are thought to contribute a fixed
weight to any situations where they occur.
For example, suppose increasing Daniel’s
wealth is a reason for doing A, then if doing
B would increase Daniel’s wealth the same
amount there would be an equally strong
reason for doing B whatever other reasons
favor A or B. Similarly, people assume if the
reasons supporting A and B are identical ex-
cept for one extra (or stronger) reason sup-
porting A, then A would be more rational
than B, and, moreover, the extent to which
this was so would be exactly proportional
to the strength of the extra (or differential)
reason supporting A. Here, again, the
model is additive.
Questions about Additivity
Additive assumptions are natural and plausible,
and they underlie many views about morality and
rationality. But in addition to the standard objections
usually leveled against utilitarianism, serious ques-
tions abound as to whether factors can be treated
and valued independently and then added together
in overall judgments. The view in question is op-
posed by G. E. MOORE’s (1873–1958) doctrine of
ORGANIC UNITY, by gestalt PSYCHOLOGY, and by the
Hegelian and hermeneutic traditions (which see
each part as inextricably connected with the whole’s
totality).
On more particular issues, there is a sense in
which many would claim (even) the (intrinsic) bad-
ness of pain is context-dependent. For example, Im-
manuel KANT (1724–1804) and G. W. F. HEGEL
(1770–1831) would contend pain is bad when un-
deserved, but good when meted out proportionally
to guilt. Similarly, some contend that whether in-
20
equality is (intrinsically) bad depends on whether it
benefits the worse-off. In addition, where the value
of human lives is concerned, some—such as Kant
and John Taurek—reject the notion that numbers
count. While even those who generally believe that,
ceteris paribus, it is better to save more lives rather
than fewer may resist the additive model’s implica-
tion that saving five lives would be five times better
than saving one, or that the difference between an
outcome where 7 million and one die and one where
7 million die is as great as the difference between an
outcome where one dies and an outcome where
none dies.
In conclusion, additive assumptions are perva-
sive, but they raise many worries. It is unclear when,
if ever, additive assumptions are defensible. But how
to think about morality and rationality in the ab-
sence of such assumptions is even less clear.
See also: CASUISTRY; COMMENSURABILITY; CONSE-
QUENTIALISM; EQUALITY; INTRANSITIVITY; LOGIC
AND ETHICS; MOORE; MORAL REASONING; ORGANIC
UNITY; PROPORTIONALITY; ROSS; UTILITARIANISM.
Bibliography
Anscombe, G. E. M. “Who Is Wronged?” Oxford Review
5 (1967). Denies the additive model for the value of
human lives.
———. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy 33/124
(1958): 1–19. Challenges the additivity of utilitarian
thinking.
Bennett, Jonathan. “Morality and Consequences.” In vol.
2 of The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, edited by
Sterling McMurrin, 45–116. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981. Many examples of contrast
arguments.
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation. 1780. Bentham’s “hedonic cal-
culus” has been the subject of much discussion. See
especially chapters 1, 4, and 5.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Holism and Hermeneutics.” Review
of Metaphysics 34, no. 1 (1980): 3–23.
Hegel, G. W. F. Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia
of the Philosophical Sciences. Translated by William
Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1830]. See,
for example, paragraph 15, one of many places where
Hegel discusses the relation of part to totality, and phi-
losophy as a “circle of circles.”
———. The Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M.
Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969 [1821].
Kagan, Shelly. “The Additive Fallacy.” Ethics 99, no. 1
(1988): 5–31. A germinal article; the best direct dis-
cussion of additivity.

Kamm, Frances Myrna. “Killing and Letting Die: Meth-
odology and Substance.” Pacific Philosophical Quar-
terly (Winter 1983): 297–312. Interesting and useful
discussion of contrast arguments.
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Mor-
als. 1785. Kant’s theory is deeply nonadditive; his
views regarding the infinite value of persons are a no-
table manifestation of this.
———. The Philosophy of Law. Translated by W. Hastie,
T. T. Clark. Edinburgh, 1887 [1797]. Translation of
“Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Rechtslehre” (part
1 of Die Metaphysik der Sitten).
Katz, David. Gestalt Psychology: Its Nature and Signifi-
cance. Translated by Robert Tyson. New York, 1950.
A useful introductory text.
Kohler, Wolfgang. The Place of Value in a World of Facts.
New York: Live Right, 1966 [1938]. A standard work
in gestalt psychology; chapter 8 contains a discussion
of organic fitness.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. 1861.
Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. 1903.
Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981. See parts 1 and 3 of
chapter 5 for discussions of organic unity, and the
weighing and balancing of moral reasons.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984. Part 4 raises many fascinating issues rele-
vant to additivity.
Philips, Michael. “Weighing Moral Reasons.” Mind 96
(1987): 367–76.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1971. See his discussion of the dif-
ference principle for a view in which the (intrinsic)
value of equality seems to depend on whether it bene-
fits the worst-off.
Ross, W. D. The Right and the Good. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1930. See the discussion of prima facie reasons.
Sen, Amartya, and Bernard Williams, eds. Utilitarianism
and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982. Contains discussions of many objections to util-
itarianism; extensive bibliography.
Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 7th ed. London:
Macmillan, 1907 [1st ed., 1874]. See book 2, chapters
2, 3; book 3, chapter 14; book 4.
Smart, J. J. C., and Bernard Williams. Utilitarianism: For
and Against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1973. See the last paragraphs of section 2 in Williams’s
“A Critique of Utilitarianism.”
Taurek, John. “Should the Numbers Count?” Philosophy
and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (1977): 293–316. A classic
which has spawned a cottage industry of articles re-
garding the moral appropriateness of adding human
lives.
Temkin, Larry. “Intransitivity and the Mere Addition Par-
adox.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16, no. 2 (1987):
21
Adler, Felix
138–87. Parts 2 and 3 raise many questions relevant
to additivity.
———. “Inequality.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15,
no. 2 (1986): 99–121. An additive principle of equality
is discussed.
Larry S. Temkin
Adler, Felix (1851–1933)
American moralist, ethical philosopher, social phi-
losopher and reformer, philosopher of education,
and ethical leader. Adler’s greatest accomplishment
was his founding of the Ethical Culture Movement,
a humanistic-secular religion founded on ethical
principles, a movement that spread rapidly through-
out the United States and Europe and attracted a
number of outstanding moral philosophers, such as
William JAMES (1842–1910), Josiah ROYCE (1855–
1916), and Henry SIDGWICK (1838–1900), as lead-
ers of local ethical societies. This movement, inter-
national in scope, with branches in England, Ger-
many, France, Japan, New Zealand, and elsewhere,
continued expanding until the advent of World War
I; even today there are Ethical Culture Schools and
Societies in various places in the United States. Ad-
ler was an active ethical reformer, leader of an in-
ternational ethical movement, and also a consider-
able philosopher who had profound original ideas
about ethics, MORAL EDUCATION, and social reform.
Adler regarded the practical or applied side of ethics
as of the greatest importance, and his discussions of
these matters inevitably led him to develop an ethi-
cal philosophy, though he viewed theoretical ethics
as having as its overriding object improvements in
human life and well-being.
Adler was born in Germany and brought to the
United States in 1857. He studied at Columbia Uni-
versity and at the Universities of Berlin and Heidel-
berg, receiving a Ph.D. from Heidelberg in 1873. In
1874–1876 he was Professor of Hebrew and Ori-
ental Literature at Cornell University, but, despite
his popularity as a lecturer, he was forced to leave
that post because his rationalistic interpretation and
criticism of the Bible generated so much controversy,
especially among the trustees. He then founded the
New York Society for Ethical Culture, on the invi-
tation of a number of civic leaders, at which point
the ethical culture movement spread rapidly. In
1902 Adler was appointed Professor of Social Ethics
Adler, Felix
at Columbia University and in this capacity he came
into contact with a number of extraordinary students
and protégés, as well as a number of distinguished
colleagues, such as John DEWEY (1859–1952).
Adler lectured constantly at the regular meetings
of the ethical societies, wrote about 1,500 lectures
and essays in addition to thirteen books. His philo-
sophically most important work is An Ethical Phi-
losophy of Life (1919). Morris Cohen (1880–1947),
once one of Adler’s protégés, recorded these obser-
vations on it: “The appearance of a book which for-
mulates a distinct philosophy of life is a rare and
noteworthy event. . . . Professor Adler has shown us
anew that it is possible to combine the insight of
practical experience with the discipline of philo-
sophical reflection, to mix with one’s fellow citizens
in the market place in such activities as tenement-
house reform and child-labor committees, and yet
retire at times to the mountain to pray and survey
one’s work, the needs of the multitudes, and our
cosmic background, with that time-conquering vi-
sion which is the essence of all genuine philoso-
phy. . . . Professor Adler’s conception of ethical life
as an exercise of human energy provides a basis for
a truly emancipating philosophy of conduct.” And
Cohen went on to speak of “the radical and revolu-
tionary character of . . . Adler’s contribution to
ethics.”
Adler’s thought was stimulated by such concrete
and widespread evils as poverty, misery, OPPRESSION,
and injustice, and in this respect he was the polar
opposite of such philosophers as G. E. MOORE
(1873–1958), whose philosophical thought was
stimulated only by the writings of other philoso-
phers. He was unusual among moral philosophers
in both generating fundamental criticisms of estab-
lished INSTITUTIONS and devising programs for im-
proving or reconstructing these institutions and the
wider society. For Adler philosophy was to be not
just the guide of life but also instrumental in im-
proving society and the human condition in accord
with essential human DIGNITY. Starting from a solid
foundation in the philosophies of Immanuel KANT
(1724–1804) and G. W. F. HEGEL (1770–1831),
Adler formulated an original and stimulating moral
philosophy which both developed and transformed
his starting points.
Adler rejected Kant’s metaphysics while accept-
ing Kant’s emphasis on the dignity and intrinsic
worth of the person, and he combined a supreme
22
moral principle something like Kant’s with an ideal
of self-realization that he worked out in considerable
detail. He constantly emphasized the free develop-
ment of the human person in relation to communal
concerns and human fellowship. Well before Dewey,
Adler concerned himself with the “problems of men”
rather than with the technical problems of philoso-
phers. Although Adler’s thought had certain affini-
ties to PRAGMATISM, he was not a pragmatist; he was
rather an ethical idealist with great practical reform-
ing zeal, and he advanced an idealistic form of moral
PERFECTIONISM. Yet he was also realistic and not in
the least a sentimentalist, holding that “many a man
has done . . . evil, and done it most deliberately,
knowing evil as evil.” Little could he know in 1918
how far this would extend to the rest of the century,
and how much evil would be committed in it.
In Adler’s ethics we find an unusual combination
of appeal to universal principles with moral particu-
larism, which emphasizes the uniqueness of each
person and each set of circumstances and under-
standing the situation as a whole. Thus Adler em-
phasized the importance and indispensability of gen-
eral principles and also of careful consideration of
concrete circumstances in their full particularity. For
Adler, since everyone is unique, no moral law can
apply identically to different persons, even though
moral principles apply to all. “Kant,” he said, “at-
tempts to deduce out of an empty formula a worth
while object. Kant’s formula is: Treat man never
merely as a means, but also as an end per se. But
how far man may be treated as a means, and what
the relation of the means to the end may be is un-
determined.” Adler set out to determine this: “For
the formula ‘not merely as a means but also as an
end’ I would substitute: Treat every [person] as a
spiritual means to thine own spiritual end and con-
versely.” This formula is elaborated and explained in
his writings.
Adler maintained that “a genuine philosophy of
life can only be reached by the ethical approach to
the problems of life,” thus insisting on the primacy
of ethics. He defined “an ultimate principle . . . as
one which is presupposed in every attempt to ac-
count for it.” His first principle of ethics he formu-
lated thus: “Act as a member of the ethical manifold
(the infinite spiritual universe); Act so as to achieve
uniqueness (complete individualization . . .); [and]
Act so as to elicit in another the distinctive, unique
quality characteristic of him as a fellow-member of

the infinite whole.” “The ethical end [is] the main-
tenance and development of personality” and “a rule
is ethical when the conduct prescribed is instrumen-
tal to the development of personality.” “The supreme
ethical rule” is “So act as to elicit the unique per-
sonality in others, and thereby in thyself,” or “Act so
as to elicit the best in others and thereby in thyself.”
By this means “both egoism and altruism are tran-
scended.” Adler held that “the ethical principle must
run like a golden thread through the whole of a [per-
son’s] life,” and since he took his ethical principles
seriously, Adler applied them in his own life and
teachings. He argued that virtue is and must be its
own reward, else it is not virtue, and characterized
a virtuous act as one “in which the ends of self and
of the other are respected and promoted jointly.”
Thus Adler attempted to coordinate a Kantian uni-
versalistic imperative ethics with a form of PERFEC-
TIONISM. But, despite his emphasis on a self-reali-
zation that must also enhance the self-realization of
others, Adler was no consequentialist. He regarded
CONSEQUENTIALISM, in the form of UTILITARIANISM,
as an attempt to impose a totally inappropriate
quantitative measure on that which is essentially
qualitative. “The quantitative standard implied in
such phrases as ‘the greatest good of the greatest
number’ is out of place [in] ethical relations, which
in their very nature are qualitative.”
Adler’s contemporary judgments still have rele-
vance today. His assessment of the evils and future
consequences of colonialism was acute and turned
out to be prescient. He argued that moral progress
lies in “extending the sense of responsibility so as to
cover the indirect taking of life. . . . [and that] the
use of poisonous substances in industry, bad sani-
tation, and inadequate fire protection must be stig-
matized as indirect murder.” This was quite pene-
trating for the time, and still is. And his claim that
“The root disease that afflicts the world at the pres-
ent day is the supremacy of the commercial point of
view,” if true at beginning of the twentieth century,
was no less true at its end.
See also: AUTONOMY OF ETHICS; AUTONOMY OF
MORAL AGENTS; CHILDREN AND ETHICAL THEORY;
COMMUNITARIANISM; CONSEQUENTIALISM; DEWEY;
EXPLOITATION; FAMILY; GOLDEN RULE; HUMANISM;
IDEALIST ETHICS; INDIVIDUALISM; JAMES; LIBERAL-
ISM; LIFE, MEANING OF; MORAL EDUCATION; OPPRES-
SION; PERFECTIONISM; PRACTICAL REASONING; PRAG-
23
Adler, Felix
MATISM; PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORALITY; ROYCE;
SITUATION ETHICS; UTILITARIANISM; WELFARE
RIGHTS AND SOCIAL POLICY.
Bibliography
Works by Adler
The Moral Instruction of Children. New York: Appleton,
1892.
The World Crisis and its Meaning. New York: Appleton,
1915.
An Ethical Philosophy of Life. New York: Appleton, 1919.
Quotations are from pp. 172, 100, 139, 132, 112, 117,
185, 197, 208, 220, 56, 214, 317, 180, 337.
The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal. New York. Ap-
pleton, 1924. Hibbert Lectures delivered at Oxford in
1923. Second in importance only to An Ethical Philos-
ophy of Life.
“Ethics and Culture.” The Ethical Record 1 (1888): 1–12.
“The Problem of Teleology.” International Journal of
Ethics 14 (1904): 265–80.
“The Relation of the Moral Ideal to Reality.” International
Journal of Ethics 22 (1922): 118.
“A Critique of Kant’s Ethics.” Mind n.s. 11 (1902): 162–
95.
“Personality: How to Develop it in the Family, the School,
and Society.” In Essays in Honor of John Dewey on the
Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, October 20, 1929.
New York: Holt, 1929. Reprinted, New York: Octagon,
1970.
Works about Adler
Cohen, Morris Raphael. “An Ethical Philosophy of Life.”
In his The Faith of a Liberal, 78–84. New York: Henry
Holt, 1946. Reprinted, Freeport, NY: Books for Li-
braries, 1970. Originally appeared in The New Repub-
lic, 1919. Quotations from pages 78–79, 83.
Fite, Warner. “Felix Adler’s Philosophy of Life.” Journal
of Philosophy Psychology and Scientific Methods 16
(1919): 141–51.
Friess, Horace L. “Adler, Felix.” Dictionary of American
Biography, vol. 21, supp. 1, 13–14. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1944. The best brief biographical
account.
———. Felix Adler and Ethical Culture. New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1981. A biography, and a
good one, with a bibliography of Adler’s books and
pamphlets.
Guttchen, Robert S. “Felix Adler’s Concept of Worth.”
Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973): 213–
27. An excellent paper, by far the best on Adler’s moral
philosophy.
———. Felix Adler. New York: Twayne, 1974. Unfortu-
Adler, Felix
nately a posthumous work. Guttchen had much to
contribute.
Radest, Howard B. Toward Common Ground: The Story
of the Ethical Societies in the United States. New York.
Frederick Ungar, 1969. Contains a useful chronology
and a good bibliography.
———. “Work and Worth: Felix Adler.” Journal of the
History of Philosophy 16 (1978): 71–81.
Singer, Marcus G. “The Place of Felix Adler in American
Philosophy.” Journal of Humanism and Ethical Reli-
gion 1 (1988): 13–36. Contains a number of citations.
This whole issue is devoted to Adler.
Sleeper, R. W. “Felix Adler and John Dewey: From Ideal-
ism to Pragmatism.” Journal of Humanism and Ethical
Religion 1 (1988): 65–82.
Thilly, Frank. “The Kantian Ethics and its Critics.” The
Philosophical Review 27 (1918): 646–50.
———. Review of An Ethical Philosophy of Life. The Phil-
osophical Review 27 (1918): 651–59.
Marcus G. Singer
aesthetics
The relations between aesthetics and ethics are
many and mysterious. One useful way to get at sim-
ilarities and differences between them is to distin-
guish three different “levels” of value theory—sub-
stantive issues, normative theory, and meta-theory—
and to see how the two work in concert, or are in
conflict, or interrelate in some other way on each
level.
Substantive Issues
Prima facie, it would seem that although many
substantive ethical issues have no aesthetic dimen-
sion at all (e.g., ABORTION), and many aesthetic is-
sues likewise no ethical dimension (e.g., criteria for
judgments of elegance), some issues are naturally
given to both kinds of evaluation. Among prominent
issues of this sort are PORNOGRAPHY, CENSORSHIP,
and the FORGERY of works of art. Since these issues
and others of a like sort, e.g., PLAGIARISM, are cov-
ered elsewhere in this Encyclopedia, they need not
be discussed here.
Normative Theory
While at first glance “many substantive ethical is-
sues have no aesthetic dimension at all, and many
aesthetic issues likewise no ethical dimension,” both
of these propositions have been challenged. On the
24
one hand, some have contended that moral values
rest, at base, on ideals, ultimate decisions, or fun-
damental commitments that are aesthetic or at least
aesthetic-like in nature. Somewhat less extreme (or
perhaps somewhat more extreme) is a view, some-
times called aestheticism, which does recognize a
basic difference between aesthetic and moral values,
but claims that artworks and people’s actions
shouldn’t be appraised from the MORAL POINT OF
VIEW but only from the aesthetic one, or that aes-
thetic values always override moral values. At times
Friedrich NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) seems to advo-
cate the first of these “less extreme” views, and
Theophile Gautier (1811–1872), Walter Pater
(1839–1894), and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
sometimes give voice to the second. Nietzschean
aestheticism, however, is an inchoate theory and one
difficult to interpret, and no other form of aestheti-
cism has been systematically worked out or de-
fended. Many of the nonphilosophical expressions
of aestheticism—for instance, in the passionate de-
scription of the “beauty” of a bomb exploding in a
crowd of unarmed civilians (a description tendered
by Mussolini’s son-in-law)—are not just without
philosophical substance but, more importantly,
blood-curdling.
On the other hand—at the other extreme—are
the view that all or some aesthetic values rest upon
or are reducible to moral values, and the somewhat
less extreme set of views, sometimes called moral-
ism, which does recognize a definite difference be-
tween the two sorts of values, but claims that art-
works and people’s actions shouldn’t be appraised,
or primarily appraised, from the aesthetic point of
view, or that moral values always override aesthetic
ones. Late in his life, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
seems to have advocated the first of these views, par-
ticularly in the form that aesthetic values simply re-
duce to moral ones, and many Marxists subscribe to
one of the “less extreme” views. In contrast to ex-
treme forms of aestheticism, both forms of moralism
have attracted adherents and been systematically
worked out and defended.
Tolstoy. Vehemently rejecting the view that art
has to do with beauty (a quality defined in terms of
PLEASURE), Tolstoy defines art as “a human activity
consisting in this, that one man consciously by
means of certain external signs, hands on to others
feelings he has lived through, and that others are
infected bv these feelings and also experience them.”

Art, then, is essentially the successful communica-
tion of feeling from one person to another by means
of an external object, the artwork. “In the limited
sense,” though, art does “not mean all human activ-
ity transmitting feelings but only that . . . which we
for some reason select . . . and to which we attach
special importance.” The “special importance,” he
says, comes from “feelings flowing from . . . reli-
gious perceptions.” Even if, in the broad sense and
in general, “the stronger the infection, the better the
art” regardless of the kind of feeling conveyed, in
the narrow sense of the term, art is necessarily reli-
gious in nature, and the “infectiousness” of religious
feeling of an artwork an “indubitable sign” that it is
“real art” (good art) as opposed to “counterfeit” art
(bad art). Finally, since the “purpose of art” is to
replace “feelings less kind and less necessary for the
well-being of mankind . . . by others kinder and
more needful for that end,” and since “religions have
always furnished [a] guide” for moral progress of
just that sort, a moral-cum-religious criterion of ar-
tistic or aesthetic value is arrived at. Good art is art
that transmits the best moral feelings with a high
degree of infectiousness, with religion telling us
what the best moral feelings are. In our own age,
Christianity provides the moral beacon to guide us
and details the moral ideal we should strive for, viz.,
the brotherhood of man. Good art is thus Christian
and moral in nature, and unites men with each other
and with God. Art that does not do that, either be-
cause it conveys the wrong feelings or conveys the
right ones with a very low degree of infectiousness,
is bad art. It is on this basis that Tolstoy condemns
the bulk of Western art, including the plays of
Shakespeare, the symphonies of Beethoven, and al-
most all of his own work.
Obviously this view has its problems.
Marxism. In its simplest form, a Marxist theory
of aesthetic value identifies, in a way similar to Tol-
stoy’s theory, aesthetic value with values that pro-
mote certain political and moral ideals, such as the
overthrow of the bourgeois state. More commonly,
however, Marxist theories don’t begin, or even end,
with such a reduction, but see artistic activity in the
context of, and ultimately based on, production and
productive relations in society in general, and take
art to be a historically located product of a certain
social class. Art, like the great majority of social ac-
tivities, is part of a culture’s superstructure and re-
flects a class ideology, while the superstructure itself
25
aesthetics
is determined historically, and especially by the eco-
nomic relations between the classes that compose it.
Since the nature, and thus the value, of an artwork
is inextricably tied to the socioeconomic conditions
under which it was produced, an artwork cannot be
understood and properly evaluated until its socio-
economic and historical place is fixed. Art is thus
always a reflection of reality—which is to say that it
is always a reflection of socioeconomic, historical re-
ality—and so art cannot be devoid of ideological
content.
Although Karl MARX’s (1818–1883) own view
of art allowed for the production of great art in so-
cieties in which the “general [level of societal] de-
velopment” was not high—he mentions ancient
Greece as an example—many later Marxists weren’t
as flexible. Proper political content—meaning the
promotion of revolutionary goals—increasingly
came to be regarded as the sole criterion of the ac-
ceptability of an artwork, with aesthetic values
brushed aside as unimportant or denigrated as the
lingering effects of bourgeois capitalism. Eventually,
a simple and rigid “socialist realism” became the of-
ficial creed of the Soviet Union and other countries
of “real socialism.” But that’s now largely a thing of
the past. Artistic experimentation and art criticism
which view art as something more than mere prop-
aganda with decorative trimmings are tolerated, and
even encouraged (within limits), in virtually all
countries today.
In fact, sophisticated Marxists—Marx, Vladimir
Lenin (1870–1924), Frederick ENGELS (1820–
1895), and Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), among
many others—have always allowed the aesthetic
value of an artwork to be relatively independent of
its ideological content (Marx himself thought very
highly of Shakespeare, Balzac, and Goethe, none of
whom waved a red flag, or even a pink one), and
have accounted for the fact in a number of ways.
Among them are: (1) By arguing that the superstruc-
ture (which includes art) interacts dialectically with
the historicoeconomic base, and so art, and its aes-
thetic value, aren’t simply epiphenomena of the
base; (2) by recognizing that art, perhaps more than
other parts of the superstructure, develops at least
in part in accordance with laws of its own, that is,
with some degree of autonomy, and so has to be
judged accordingly; (3) by embracing, as one crite-
rion of aesthetic value, a realism that emphasizes
“typicality” and “reflectivity,” that is, the accurate
aesthetics
depiction of historically realistic and typical mem-
bers of a social class, regardless of the work’s po-
litical leanings; (4) by drawing a distinction between
the “conscious” and “unconscious” dimensions of an
artwork, the former having to do with the work’s
explicit ideological content, the latter with what it
actually reveals, perhaps despite itself. In this way,
typical Marxists have avoided reductionism and al-
lowed art and aesthetics some private property of
their own, even if they haven’t allowed them to own
or control the means of production. And that they
certainly haven’t allowed, for when revolutionary
push comes to counterrevolutionary shove, it is
dulce which yields to utile. Aesthetic value is dear
to Marxists, but dearer still is the REVOLUTION —
that is, their political, social, and ethical values.
Thus even sophisticated Marxists hold that artworks
shouldn’t be primarily appraised—and, in some
cases, shouldn’t be appraised at all—from the aes-
thetic point of view. In the long run, the aesthetic is
subservient to the political, even if the leash it’s kept
on is very long. The possibility of an intrusive mor-
alism, and perhaps even censorship, is part and par-
cel of even the most sophisticated forms of
MARXISM.
Other Views. On the level of normative theory,
the central question is simply how independent
moral and aesthetic values are or should be. Between
the two extreme positions discussed above are any
number of others. Two which merit consideration
are that the two realms are wholly independent—
neither kind of value is reducible to or overlaps with
the other, and perhaps in addition, neither automat-
ically takes precedence over the other (“art for art’s
sake,” the slogan of the artistic movement some-
times called aestheticism, is sometimes interpreted
this way)—and that there is a partial, but only a
partial, overlap between the two—aesthetic criteria
have some, but only some, place in moral assess-
ment, and/or moral criteria have some, but only
some, place in aesthetic assessment. A staunch val-
uational separatism of the first sort might be argued
for on the basis of the desirability of the indepen-
dence and autonomy of a plurality of realms of
value. In a sense, the argument here would parallel,
on a different plane, that for the separation of
church and state. The second view could marshal
evidence of a more direct sort, drawing on, for ex-
ample, seemingly aesthetic criteria used in the moral
assessment of acts of certain sorts (e.g., in judging
26
an act to be one of SUPEREROGATION, or in judging
Mother Teresa to be a beautiful person) and/or
seemingly moral criteria used in the aesthetic as-
sessment of artworks (e.g., in judging a novel to be
aesthetically bad because its main thesis is the eu-
genic necessity of exterminating people with an IQ
less than 85).
Meta-theory
Questions of substantive issues and normative
theory would be easier to resolve if answers on the
level of meta-theory were available. On this level,
the central questions are, What is an aesthetic judg-
ment? and What is a moral judgment? If we knew
what made a moral judgment a moral judgment, and
what made an aesthetic judgment an aesthetic judg-
ment, we could tell how independent the realms are.
One complication that sets in at the start is that
the term “moral,” more accurately “ethical,” is used
in at least two very different ways, and thus delimits
two realms of value, realms which are not co-
extensive. In one sense (a sense that dates back to
ancient Greece), the term circumscribes what might
be called all-things-considered value: the ethically
right (to focus on a central concept) is what ought to
be done all things, all points of view, considered. Eth-
ical value is simply the sum of all values, properly
weighted, and so by definition is overriding value.
The question, Why ought I to be ethical? is self-
answering on this conception of morality, and the
view that ethical (moral) values always override aes-
thetic ones similarly an analytic truth. On the other
hand, the question isn’t self-answering and the view
not analytically true if “ethical” or “moral” is con-
strued, as it more commonly is, as delimiting (at least
prima facie) a distinct kind of value that, logically
speaking (again, prima facie), is on a par with other
kinds of value, such as legal, economic, or prudential
value. It is when “moral” is used in this way that some
of the more puzzling questions about the relations
between ethics and aesthetics arise.
Hampshire. A radical view that some have ad-
vanced is that there are no relations between them,
because there is no such subject as aesthetics. There
is ethics, the philosophical study of problems of
human conduct, according to Stuart Hampshire, a
proponent of this position, but there can be no phil-
osophical study of art and beauty, aesthetics. “Aes-
thetic judgments,” Hampshire thinks, “are not com-

parable in purpose with moral judgments, and . . .
there are no problems of aesthetics comparable with
the problems of ethics”; hence the systematic study
known as ethics is possible, while that known as aes-
thetics is not. Hampshire advances a number of ar-
guments for a sharp contrast between moral and aes-
thetic judgments, with most of them resting on an
alleged difference of practical necessity between the
two. His argument is basically as follows.
No matter what situation a person is in, he must
act; choices always confront us. Choice is thus im-
posed; and choice is the solution to a practical prob-
lem, itself imposed. Now human life being what it
is, the problems of human conduct are recurring
problems, and rational people seek a general method
to solve recurring problems. But a method inevitably
yields rules and principles; thus to moralize—to cite
reasons in support of a line of conduct—is neces-
sarily to generalize. System, generality, and reason-
giving in a situation of forced choice characterize
morality.
But they certainly don’t characterize aesthetics. A
work of art is gratuitous; “it is not essentially the
answer to a question or the solution of a presented
problem.” Moreover, “if something is made or done
gratuitously, and not in response to a problem posed,
there can be no question of preferring one solution
to another.” Aesthetic judgments need not be
made—no one need choose between artworks—
and any judgments that are made needn’t be sup-
ported with reasons, that is, justified on the basis of
general principles. Not the general but the particu-
lar—this unique object—is the proper object of the
critic’s scrutiny. The critic’s job is to direct attention
on particular features of the object, features that
make it beautiful, sublime, ugly, harmonious, or
whatever, and the purpose of doing so is to make
others see those features, “not simply to lead them
to say: ‘That’s good.’” Ultimately, then, “everyone
needs a morality to make exclusions in conduct; but
neither an artist nor a critical spectator unavoidably
needs an aesthetic; and when in Aesthetics one
moves from the particular to the general, one is trav-
elling in the wrong direction.”
A detailed discussion of this provocative argu-
ment isn’t possible here (but see Zemach), but, as
might be expected, aestheticians haven’t been con-
vinced. Specifics aside, Hampshire seems to have an
unduly restrictive, and even a distorted, view of both
27
aesthetics
moral and aesthetic judgments. Let me briefly dis-
cuss problems on the moral side.
Moral evaluation is not only of actions, but of
desires, intentions, tendencies, emotions, beliefs,
character traits, states of affairs, and people, none
of which are chosen in any simple sense; and even
when we judge actions, no problem of real or imag-
ined immediacy need be present. We can judge
purely hypothetical actions, or actions in the distant
past or in situations which we know we could never
be in, and we can judge another’s actions in terms
of moral problems (e.g., the deep disgrace to her
family that her action would occasion) that wouldn’t
or couldn’t occur to her. In fact, it may not even be
that all moral judgments in situations of immediacy
are practical, in Hampshire’s sense of calling for ac-
tion. Judgments of supererogation in such circum-
stances don’t seem to be. In addition, the question
arises why the practical problems that never stop
confronting us are to be labeled “moral problems.”
(I assume that Hampshire doesn’t mean “moral” in
the broad sense indicated a few paragraphs back.)
Why are they moral rather than, say, prudential? For
that matter, why is talk of “problems” even in place?
I, for one, don’t seem to be constantly confronting
problems of any sort, or even sorts. The applicability
of the concept of a problem, a linchpin notion in
Hampshire’s argument, thus needs to be explained
and justified. But that just points up the deepest
problem with the argument: the question of what a
moral and aesthetic judgment is, what makes a judg-
ment one or the other or neither, is never clearly
addressed by Hampshire. What we’re told is what
such judgments—or rather one sort of them, moral
judgments—are used for, namely, to solve practical
problems. That doesn’t tell us what their nature is
even if their nature is solely a function of their use
(something Hampshire doesn’t argue for or even
mention), for it doesn’t distinguish moral judgments
from other judgments respecting the solution of
practical problems, such as prudential judgments.
Thus Hampshire’s argument is, at best, incomplete.
Kant. In order to know the exact relations be-
tween ethics and aesthetics, we need to know the
nature of moral and aesthetic judgments. Unfortu-
nately, although theories of both are rife—especially
theories of moral judgment—there is no consensus
on either. A number of philosophers have discussed
both, however, usually in an attempt to construct a
unified and comprehensive theory of value, or a uni-
aesthetics
fied and comprehensive philosophical system. One
very prominent example is Immanuel KANT (1724–
1804).
KANT and KANTIAN ETHICS need not be discussed
here. His much less well-known aesthetics is both a
distinct and important branch of his critical philos-
ophy (of which his moral philosophy also forms a
major part) as well as a completion, of sorts, of it.
In his third critique, the Critique of Judgment
(1790), he considers the nature and status of aes-
thetic judgments. Aesthetic judgments can concern
the merely agreeable, the beautiful, or the sublime,
according to Kant, but judgments of the first sort
(such as “This is pleasant”), since they make no
claim to universal validity, are relatively unimpor-
tant, philosophically speaking. Judgments of the sec-
ond and third sorts do make a claim to universal
validity, however, but since judgments of the sub-
lime, though both important and importantly differ-
ent in some respects from those of the beautiful,
don’t add anything distinctive to judgments of
taste—that is, judgments of the beautiful—as far as
our present purposes are concerned, they won’t be
considered here.
Judgments of taste are logically singular (in
proper form, they take a singular term, and perhaps
a demonstrative singular term, as their subject) and,
at the level of grammar, attribute a property, beauty,
to an object. A typical judgment of taste would be
“This flower is beautiful.” But beauty isn’t a prop-
erty, Kant thinks, for it doesn’t exist independently
of a relation to a subject’s feelings. Since judgments
of taste make a claim to universal validity, how-
ever—that is, to everyone’s considered assent—the
particular feeling in question, though undoubtedly
one of pleasure, must not be the pleasure of the
merely agreeable, i.e., pleasure that, logically speak-
ing, is a function of a subjective make-up that may
not be universally shared. “Beautiful is what, with-
out a concept, is liked universally”—which isn’t an
empirical claim, and doesn’t entail that everyone
will, as a matter of fact, like any particular object.
The universal validity of judgments of taste is sub-
jective, not objective, in nature, according to Kant,
but such judgments are distinguished from judg-
ments of agreeableness by being disinterested, that
is, not informed with an interest in the existence of
the object as related to sense. Rather, they are re-
flective judgments and are contemplative, but they
are not, in contrast to “logical” judgments (e.g.,
28
“This is a square”) and practical judgments (e.g.,
“This is good”), cognitive, since they don’t formulate
or connect concepts at all. Granted, we speak as
though such judgments were cognitive—that is, in-
volve subsumption under a concept—and beauty a
property; that can be accounted for by noting the
disinterested character of such judgments and their
transcendental ground. For the power of judgment,
in trying to find a concept to subsume the particular
(“this flower”) under, and no determinate concept
(e.g., “red”) being available, we make use of an in-
determinate concept, an indeterminate concept
which, of necessity, is supplied by the power of judg-
ment itself. This is the concept of “nature’s subjec-
tive purposiveness,” or nature’s purposiveness for
the power of judgment. In essence, this is the inde-
terminate concept of nature’s lending itself to judg-
ment, so far as its empirical particulars (individual
objects) are concerned. What constitutes this con-
cept is the idea of lawfulness in general (not in
particular, for that would make it a determinate con-
cept). As such, it is a concept that exactly corre-
sponds to the understanding as such (that is, the
understanding as indeterminate, considered inde-
pendently of any particular concept), and so also ex-
actly corresponds to the imagination as such, since
the imagination must harmonize with the under-
standing in order to “produce” cognition. In judg-
ments of taste, then, there is purposiveness, but it is
not based on a concept; hence the idea of purpo-
siveness without a purpose characterizes such judg-
ments, in fact is the nature of such judgments. Imag-
ination and understanding harmonize without the
usual constraint of a determinate concept; they play
with each other, so to speak, rather than work with
another. Aesthetic awareness (in the case of judg-
ments of taste) thus doesn’t involve a cognition—
the requisite determinate concept is absent—and so
can only be experienced in nonconceptual or “felt”
form, as pleasure. This awareness/feeling is precisely
a nonconceptual awareness of the apprehended
form’s purposiveness for cognition as such. Beauty,
then, though not a property, is given an analysis that,
though not a cognitive one, essentially involves the
productive faculties of cognition as such, and thus
can claim a universal validity in application, even
though it is a subjective determination.
But Kant’s aesthetic goes beyond this to forge an
explicit link with morality. Although the details of
Kant’s conception of moral judgment cannot be pur-

sued here, suffice it to say that morality is conceptual
on his account, and thus fully cognitive (though
linked to PRACTICAL REASON, not pure reason). Now,
grounding the universality of judgments of taste is
the idea of an intelligible—that is, a supersensible—
underlying nature’s purposiveness for our cognitive
powers; taste has this supersensible “in view” in
judging as it does, and reference to such a supersen-
sible is needed in order to resolve the antinomy of
taste. (The antinomy of taste is roughly the paradox
that judgments of taste aren’t based on concepts
[since if they were, disputes about taste would be
possible; but there is no disputing about taste], and
judgments of taste are based on concepts [since if
they weren’t, quarreling about judgments of taste
wouldn’t be possible, because general assent
couldn’t be demanded].) The supersensible that the
idea in question points to has various aspects, and
thus can be “identified” in various ways: (1) as the
supersensible as just described, namely, the super-
sensible underlying nature’s purposiveness for our
cognitive powers; (2) as the substrate of objects and
of ourselves as subjects; and (3) as the supersensible
that the concept of freedom “contains practically.”
The first aspect is needed to resolve the antinomy of
taste, but the last is more important for our pur-
poses. Conceived under this last aspect, the super-
sensible in question, concerned as it is with practical
reason, links the “morally good” and “moral feel-
ings” with beauty and taste, and thus unites ethics
and aesthetics, integrates the two into a comprehen-
sive whole. That said, it must be admitted that the
whole in question is rather loosely jointed, and, in-
deed, must be rather loosely jointed, since the bridge
from beauty to morality must be through an aspect
of the supersensible that does not resolve the antin-
omy of taste, else, contrary to Kant’s repeated
claims, judgments of taste would be practical, and
thus cognitive and conceptual. Beauty is the “sym-
bol” of morality, Kant says, and morality can, at best,
provide taste with guidance—not standards of jus-
tification or criteria. In the end, then, despite the
linkage between the two, beauty doesn’t borrow
from morality, nor morality from beauty, and the do-
mains remain relatively autonomous.
Schiller. Not satisfied with this conclusion, but
nonetheless very influenced by Kant, Friedrich
SCHILLER (1759–1805) tried to draw aesthetics and
ethics closer together. Accepting what is basically a
Kantian conception of dual human nature—people
29
aesthetics
have essentially both sensuous and rational im-
pulses—he attempts to reconcile the duality and re-
integrate the human being. This has to be done,
Schiller thinks, in the aesthetic, and through aes-
thetic education.
The sensuous impulse binds us to nature and the
continuing passage of time, according to Schiller,
and presses for the “reality of existence, for some
content in our perceptions and for purposes in our
actions.” The formal or rational impulse is basically
the demand of the free rational self “to bring har-
mony into the diversity of manifestations [appear-
ances].” The former is associated with our empirical
and embodied nature, the latter with our rational
and moral nature. In effect, Schiller’s entire aes-
thetic theory turns on a number of dualities system-
atically related to the sensuous impulse-formal im-
pulse duality: material-spiritual, multiplicity-unity,
content-form, inclination-duty, phenomena-nou-
mena, subjective-objective, passive-active, contin-
gent-necessary. All such dualities characterize the
fractured condition of modern humanity, and all are
basically derived from the more fundamental sen-
suous impulse-formal impulse duality. The problem
is how to keep the dualities from splitting us apart;
the problem is how to integrate fragmented human-
kind.
Schiller’s answer is that the sensuous and formal
impulses can be overcome or reconciled by being
lifted to a higher plane in a synthesis he calls the
play impulse. Since the sensuous impulse seeks out
life as its object, and the formal impulse shape, the
play impulse seeks out and responds to living shape.
This Schiller identifies with beauty. So construed,
beauty is, in contrast with Kant, an objective quality.
Like Kant, however, Schiller evidently thinks of play
as the harmonious working of our cognitive facul-
ties. Unlike Kant once again, though, he gives the
notion much more content in stressing, in play, a
blend of freedom and necessity in voluntary submis-
sion to rules for the sheer joy of it, something which
surely characterizes play in the ordinary sense of the
term. Such play is a meeting ground for the ra-
tional—there are clear echoes of Kant’s views on
practical reason in the play impulse—and the sen-
suous—again, there are clear echoes of Kant’s views
on sensation, pleasure, and beauty in the play im-
pulse. Play is thus the essence of fully developed hu-
man behavior; the play impulse is the impulse to be
fully human. As Schiller says in a famous passage:
aesthetics
“Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the
word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is
playing.”
This special sort of play is itself characterized by
Schiller as a condition of “utter rest and extreme
movement . . . at the same time a relaxing and a
tightening effect.” Some “play” tends to invoke a
“melting” effect, while other “play” is more “ener-
gizing.” Aesthetic experience itself is “the highest en-
joyment . . . freedom of spirit in the vivacious play
of all its powers.” In short, the aesthetic is more than
the symbol of the moral; it’s also what makes us
whole as human beings, what unites the moral or
rational—freedom and the supersensible realm—
with the worldly and empirical—nature and the sen-
suous realm.
But more than that, only beauty or the aesthetic
makes social life possible, in the highest sense of the
term: “Beauty alone can confer on [man] a social
character,” Schiller says. “Taste alone brings har-
mony into society, because it establishes harmony in
the individual. All other forms of perception divide
a man, because they are exclusively based on the
sensuous or on the intellectual part of his being; only
the perception of Beauty makes something whole of
him, because both his natures must accord with it.”
Aesthetic education is thus necessary for social life,
and is, in a sense, the most basic of all forms of
education.
Eloquent and provocative as Schiller’s philoso-
phy is, there are problems with it. Not the least im-
portant difficulty is the elaborate but undeveloped
and undefended transcendental machinery that
Schiller borrows from Kant, together with the large
number of associated dualities that that machinery
pulls in train. If the Kantian apparatus is questioned
or called into doubt, many of Schiller’s views would
be as well (as would Kant’s, of course).
That rather large problem aside, there is also a
crucial ambivalence in the development of Schiller’s
thought. Schiller’s initial question is, How can man
pass from the sensuous to the rational or moral con-
dition? He argues that art makes this possible by
providing an intermediate condition in which the
two are combined. In the intermediate condition, the
play impulse is given free rein, and there is delight
in appearance but detachment from the world of
sense: both the sensuous and the rational are given
their due in a single experience. This, however, isn’t
so much uniting the aesthetic and the moral as it is
30
using the aesthetic to unite the human being in a
quest for “the higher self,” the rational self. The aes-
thetic is simply the means for passing from the sen-
suous condition to the moral condition, and in the
final analysis the two conditions have to remain dis-
tinct if that’s to be effected. The moral and aesthetic
are thus not united in any meaningful, ultimate way,
even if there is a necessary connection between
the two.
There is, however, a different strand of argument
that’s also developed by Schiller, that of the aesthetic
not as a step toward a higher state but as a constit-
uent of it, as a final value. According to this line of
argument, the aesthetic is itself the, or at least a,
condition of the higher self. The FINAL GOOD is the
whole human being, and a human being “is only
wholly man when he is playing.” Here the moral and
aesthetic are truly inextricably united, with the aes-
thetic as the dominant valuation mode, even if con-
ceptually and ontologically dependent on the moral.
It’s worth noting that as far as the sense of the eth-
ical as all-in-value, as that which conduces to or con-
stitutes human flourishing is concerned, Schiller’s
second aesthetic project identifies the ethical and the
aesthetic, even if, in the other sense of the term “eth-
ical,” it subordinates the ethical to the aesthetic. In
any case, this ambivalence of purpose is never re-
solved by Schiller.
Beardsley. Much more empirical and less theory-
dependent in his approach is Monroe Beardsley. Tak-
ing works of art to be essentially “aesthetic objects,”
Beardsley asks whether “aesthetic objects have in-
herent effects that are themselves of great worth.”
His slightly tentative answer is that they do, for four
distinct reasons: aesthetic experience (1) “relieves
tensions and quiets destructive impulses” (a reason
that dates back to ARISTOTLE [384–322 B.C.E.], as
Beardsley notes), (2) “resolves lesser conflicts within
the self, and helps to create an integration, or har-
mony” (a reason reminiscent of Schiller, but without
the metaphysical or transcendental baggage), (3) “re-
fines perception and discrimination” (a reason that
philosophers who embrace cognitive theories of
art—Nelson Goodman being prominent among
them—have stressed), and (4) “develops the imag-
ination, and along with it the ability to put oneself
in the place of others” (a reason that, in a less meta-
physical and transcendental way, is once again rem-
iniscent of Schiller). Moreover, if aesthetic experi-
ence does have inherent effects of the four sorts

noted, three other, more remote effects might also
be expected. It might well also (5) be “an aid to men-
tal health,” (6) “foster mutual sympathy and under-
standing,” and (7) “offer an ideal for human life”
(all three reasons here once more having echoes in
Schiller).
As Beardsley is attempting to justify the aesthetic
by invoking something outside it, something con-
cerning the whole canvas of human life, his is an
ethical justification of the aesthetic, in the broader
sense of the term “ethical,” and a justification that
integrates the aesthetic with the ethical. His first
four reasons, however, stand or fall on whether cer-
tain causal connections obtain, and the evidence, as
Beardsley himself knows, might not be with him.
Indeed, the cathartic effect of art, reason (1), seems
rather minimal, and in general, stronger and more
effective tension-relievers are readily available in the
form of exercise, drugs, conversation with friends,
and therapy. One wonders why the aesthetic would
be necessary or very useful, given the alternatives.
Similar considerations apply to the second reason,
concerning the resolution of conflicts, and even, mu-
tatis mutandis, to the third and fourth reasons.
There are more direct and effective ways to refine
perception and discrimination and to improve the
imagination than studying and appreciating art, even
a lot of art. In fact, it might even be wondered
whether art refines the perception and discrimina-
tion of anything other than art. The experiences of
auto mechanics and laboratory technicians, for ex-
ample, refine their perception and discrimination of
engines, cells, tissues, and the like, but have little
carry-over into the other areas of life. Why should it
be any different with art? The same holds for the
imagination. The cultivation of a vivid and active
scientific imagination seems to have little or no ef-
fect on the imagination in other areas of life, or to
make a person more able and willing to put herself
in the place of others. Worse still as far as this con-
sideration is concerned, many Nazis had a keen ap-
preciation of art and a developed aesthetic imagi-
nation, but were extremely insensitive and cruel.
Their moral imagination was severely lacking.
Many of the points of the preceding paragraph
also bear on Beardsley’s fifth and sixth reasons (the
aesthetic as an aid to mental health, and the aesthetic
as fostering SYMPATHY and understanding), with all
six facing two general objections: (1) empirical sup-
port is lacking in each case, and commonsense ob-
31
aesthetics
servations even seem to count against some of them;
(2) even if all six were empirically well supported,
similar effects are more easily attained by other
means, means having nothing to do with art or the
aesthetic. If, in reply to this second objection, it’s
said that the aesthetic alone can bring about all six
effects, the correct response is, Why is that impor-
tant, philosophically speaking? If a single wonder
pill could accomplish all six effects, it would have
little philosophical significance, and there would be
no felt need to explore the relations between the
realm of pill-values and the realm of ethical values,
much less to integrate the two. In fact, as the analogy
makes clear, there aren’t really two realms of value
present at all: aesthetic value, as a distinct kind of
value, has dropped out of Beardsley’s account. His
first six reasons integrate aesthetics and ethics and
provide a justification for the aesthetic, by subsum-
ing it under ethics, as means to end. In brief, there
is nothing distinctly and irreducibly aesthetic about
any of the six causal effects Beardsley claims for aes-
thetic objects.
Not so with his seventh reason, the aesthetic as
an ideal of human life. The connection between the
aesthetic and the moral isn’t contingent or causal,
according to this reason, but much closer, concep-
tually speaking. Kant expresses a similar sentiment
in calling beauty the symbol of morality, as does
Nietzsche in speaking of a life as a work of art, and
Schiller in speaking of man being fully man—which
includes being fully ethical—only when engaged in
the aesthetic. Even if there’s a shared root in these
and other philosophers, what direction such a com-
mon element will grow in very much depends on
how it’s integrated into a more comprehensive phi-
losophy, including not just ethics and aesthetics but
METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY as well. This is
evident in Kant and Schiller (and also Nietzsche,
whose philosophy hasn’t been discussed here), but
it’s also true of Beardsley. Influenced by John DEWEY
(1859–1952), he stresses the integration of means
and end. “If some of the satisfyingness of the end
could be brought into the means,” he says, “and the
means at every stage felt as carrying the significance
of the end, we should have in life something more
of the quality of aesthetic experience itself.”
Other philosophers, however, develop the idea of
art as a model for, ideal for, symbol of, or full reali-
zation of the ethical in very different directions, and
no detailed answer can be given to how ethics and
aesthetics
aesthetics are related without an even more detailed
examination of each such philosophy. In short, there
is no very complete, satisfying, or enlightening an-
swer to the question of the relation of aesthetics and
ethics, or art and morality, outside of the context of
a comprehensive view of people and their relation
to the world. On what some may consider a more
positive or cheerful note, though, it can also be said
that any truly comprehensive view of people and
their relation to the world will have something to
say about both aesthetics and ethics, will probably
bring the two together, and may well express and
develop the sentiment common to Kant, Schiller,
Nietzsche, and Beardsley.
See also: AUTONOMY OF ETHICS; CENSORSHIP; CRITI-
CAL THEORY; DEWEY; EMOTION; EMOTIVISM; ETHICS
AND MORALITY; ETIQUETTE; FITTINGNESS; FORGERY;
FORMALISM; HISTORIOGRAPHY; HUMANISM; IDEAL
OBSERVER; IDEALIST ETHICS; INTUITIONISM; KANT;
KANTIAN ETHICS; LITERATURE AND ETHICS; MARX;
MARXISM; METAETHICS; METAPHYSICS AND EPISTE-
MOLOGY; MORAL PERCEPTION; MORAL REALISM;
MORAL REASONING; MORAL TERMS; MYSTICISM; NAT-
URALISM; NATURE AND ETHICS; NIETZSCHE; PLAGIA-
RISM; PLEASURE; PORNOGRAPHY; PRACTICAL REA-
SON[ING]; PRESCRIPTIVISM; RELIGION; SCHILLER;
SKEPTICISM IN ETHICS; SPORT; SYMPATHY; TRAGEDY;
VALUE, THEORY OF.
Bibliography
Avron, Henri. Marxist Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1970. A short and clear general
survey.
Bates, Stanley. “Tolstoy Evaluated: Tolstoy’s Theory of
Art.” In Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, edited by
George Dickie and Richard Sclafani. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1977.
Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philoso-
phy of Criticism. 2d ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1981. See chapters 11 and 12 for a discussion of aes-
thetic value and art and morality.
———. “The Aesthetic Point of View.” In his The Aes-
thetic Point of View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1983. Grounding the aesthetic.
Beardsmore, R. W. Art and Morality. London: Macmillan
Press, 1971. Short and suggestive.
Cohen, Ted, and Paul Guyer, eds. Essays in Kant’s Aes-
thetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Important papers and a full bibliography.
Coleman, Francis X. J. The Harmony of Reason: A Study
32
in Kant’s Aesthetics. Pittsburgh: University of Pitts-
burgh Press, 1974.
Crawford, Donald W. Kant’s Aesthetic Theory. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1974.
Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976. Short and
readable.
Eaton, Marcia Muelder. Aesthetics and the Good Life.
Rutherford, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1980.
Chapter 7.
Foot, Philippa. “Nietzsche: The Revaluation of Values.” In
Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by
Robert Solomon. South Bend, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1980.
Gautier, Theophile. “Preface to Mademoiselle de
Maunin.” Translated by A. Sumichrast. In Paths to the
Present: Aspects of European Thought from Romanti-
cism to Existentialism, edited by Eugen Weber. New
York: Dodd, Mead, 1960. A biting statement of Gau-
tier’s aestheticism.
Goldmann, Lucien. The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic
Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of
Racine. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. A
major Marxist critical work.
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Hampshire, Stuart. “Logic and Appreciation.” Originally
published in The World Review (1952). In Art and Phi-
losophy, 2d ed., edited by William Kennick. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1979.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Wer-
ner Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987. Part One
is on aesthetic judgments. An excellent translation, in-
troduction, bibliography, and index.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Articles on Tolstoy. Moscow: For-
eign Languages Publishing House, 1951.
Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism: A Socio-
logical Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal,
Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Others. New York: Howard
Fertig, 1998 [1964]. An important work by a leading
Marxist critic.
Marx, Karl, and Fredrick Engels. On Literature and Art.
Edited by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. New
York: International General, 1973. A full collection of
Marx and Engels’s writings on art.
Morawski, Stefan. Inquiries into the Fundamentals of
Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974. A col-
lection of essays by a leading Marxist aesthetician.
Mothersill, Mary. Beauty Restored. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1984. Contains interesting discussions of
a number of philosophers, including Hume, Kant, and
Hampshire.
Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated
by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Press, 1966.

Nietzsche’s aestheticism is actually scattered through-
out a number of his writings.
Parsons, Kathryn Pyne. “Nietzsche and Moral Change.” In
Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by
Robert Solomon. South Bend, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1980.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. Chicago: Academy Press,
1978. The “Conclusion” is many times taken to be a
classic statement of aestheticism.
Plato. Ion. The Republic, Books II, III, and X. Many trans-
lations. Plato’s views on art and its effects on morality.
Some of the earliest arguments for extensive
censorship.
Schaper, Eva. Studies in Kant’s Aesthetics. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1979.
Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man.
Translated by Reginald Snell. New York: Fredrick Un-
gar, 1974.
Sircello, Guy. A New Theory of Beauty. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1975. Sections 23–26 discuss
beauty and morality.
Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? Translated by Aylmer Maude.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1971. An important and
intelligent discussion.
Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic. Edited by Richard Ell-
mann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. See especially
“Intentions” and “Preface to The Picture of Dorian
Gray” for Wilde’s aestheticism.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1977.
Zemach, Eddy. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Ethics-
Aesthetics Parallelism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism (1971): 391–98. A sustained critique of
Hampshire.
Michael J. Wreen
Africa
Africa is extremely culturally diverse; linguists sug-
gest that well over a thousand languages are spoken
on the continent. Africa’s fifty modern states include
peoples descended from literally hundreds of pre-
colonial societies, ranging in their degree of political
organization from the acephalous hunter-gathering
!Kung of central southern Africa, through the hier-
archical states of Buganda—in the east—or the Yo-
ruba—in the west—to the Islamic emirates and
monarchies of the Sahel and northwest Africa.
Sub-Saharan African cultures can be seen as the
product of the interaction of so-called traditional
systems of thought with Islam and Christianity. (Eth-
33
Africa
ical theory in the Maghreb, however, which has been
part of the literate Islamic world for more than a
millennium, needs to be considered as part of Is-
lamic ethics. Similar reasons rule out consideration
here of Ethiopia’s literate philosophical traditions,
which are also quite distinctive, and those of South
Africa’s white population, whose moral ideas are a
European legacy. This article consequently deals
with sub-Saharan Africa, excluding Ethiopia and
[white] South Africa.) If we start with traditional
cultures, we may say that ethnography suggests a
number of broad generalizations about the ethical
dimensions of such systems (in that generous sense
of “ethical” that takes in all the central features of
PRACTICAL REASON). We may begin with a number
of formal features.
Formal Features
First of all, it is widely agreed that these tradi-
tional societies were essentially communitarian or
communalistic in their ethical ideas, holding both
that RIGHTS of many sorts inhere not in individuals
but in various corporate groups—families, lineages,
villages, societies; and that what is good is the flour-
ishing of certain corporate interests, to which the
projects of individuals ought to be subsidiary. Thus,
in many cultures PROPERTY rights—the claim for
some period to exclusive use of an area of land for
farming, say—were assigned by chiefs to lineages,
with the head and senior members of each such
group allocating both responsibilities and crops to
members of the group and managing profits from
any sales to cover the needs of individual members.
In many cultures marriage (and what is seen as the
attendant obligation to raise and support children)
is a relationship between families, in which control
of children (and their correlative obligation to obe-
dience) belongs to the family of one spouse, a fact
which is symbolically acknowledged by payments of
bride-price or dowry.
A second significant feature of traditional ethical
thought is an effect of taking FAMILY or clan as a
basis for practical reflection. This produces a struc-
ture of thought that is anti-universalizing: “because
she’s my kinswoman” is an essentially indexical rea-
son—referring back in its essence to a historical re-
lation to the agent—and is not consonant with the
Kantian demand for universality. (It is a familiar idea
that obligations to family members do not depend
Africa
on their general qualities; we are not supposed to
care more for our siblings than for strangers for
some extrinsic reason.)
Third, traditional religious ideas were largely nat-
uralistic—conceiving of gods, spirits, and ancestors
as continuous with and continually operative within
the natural world. These beings were supposed to be
concerned to varying degrees with the flourishing of
certain specific groups: again, often the people of
certain places or lineages. Ritual practice in associ-
ation with cult for spirits and ancestors very gener-
ally involved the observance of taboos, for which the
sanctions were usually misfortunes—a hunting ac-
cident, disease, failed crop—visited upon the indi-
vidual (or, as likely, some group to which he or she
belonged). Questions of avoiding harm of this sort
loomed large in PRACTICAL REASONING; and there
was rarely an articulated notion of doing right that
was distinct from doing what conformed to custom
and PRUDENCE (and thus, in particular, violated no
taboos) or was distinct from what was “seemly.” In-
deed, one of the highest terms of commendation for
conduct in many African societies was also used to
describe physical beauty or “aesthetic” appeal in ar-
tifacts. (This notion can perhaps be understood by
analogy with Greek notions of kalokagathia, a vir-
tue that unites beauty and goodness.)
In this sense, fourthly, there is often no clearly
differentiated and distinctively moral vocabulary, as
opposed to a vocabulary of aesthetic or technical
commendation, a fact that is itself reflective of the
relatively low degree of linguistic division of labor
within most preliterate communities.
A further consequence of regular involvement
with lineage spirits and spirits of place is that, in that
overwhelming majority of cultures which recognize
a high God, associated with the heavens, it is usually
a deus remotus, whose interest in the detailed every-
day affairs of men and women is minimal. The no-
tion that conduct should be aimed at affecting one’s
state in an afterlife is unusual, and concern for af-
fairs after one’s death seems usually to focus on
questions of having descendants to do cult for one
as an ancestor and having a reputation that “lives
on.” In that sense, such systems of thought are often
profoundly—this is a fifth, broadly formal charac-
teristic—anthropocentric or humanistic, centered
on the contemporary concerns of human beings (in-
cluding ancestors) rather than on otherworldly
considerations.
34
Ethical Education
The transfer of ethical ideas between generations
in preliterate societies was accomplished not only by
admonition and correction but also by the following
means: recounting the history of one’s own people
in terms that underwrote current social arrange-
ments (“history” rather than myth, because in con-
temporary usage “myth” connotes fictional status,
and these narrations are usually told as true); ritual
enactment of these histories; performing folk tales—
stories told as fictions, often with an “Aesopian”
moral; and proverbs (which are themselves often
shorthand references back to history and folk tale).
In some cultures young people undergo special pe-
riods of education prior to the transition to adult
status, often removed from the community; and in
these periods of training religious and ethical ideas
may be a central object of study.
Contrasts with Contemporary Euro-American
Ethical Theories
At the level of content, there is, as one would
expect, less detailed similarity among African tra-
ditions than at the level of the rather abstract formal
features catalogued above. But the basically com-
munitarian and anti-universalist character of ethical
thought means that, in most traditional African sys-
tems of ideas, public questions of practical reason—
as they arise, for example, in courts or in family de-
cision making—rarely focus on the enforcement of
individual rights, concentrating rather on individual
needs and a concern for corporate harmony. This is,
of course, in striking contrast to formal juridical
practice in contemporary literate societies.
Another major item of contrast is that in tradi-
tional African systems of thought, propriety, repu-
tation, and status are central to practical reasoning.
This is striking because in Euro-American culture
these questions are all usually seen as having to do
only with the surface of ACTION, and a concern with
them is generally seen as shallow or superficial, in
ways that contrast with genuinely moral concerns.
Anyone familiar with European or Asian moral
philosophy will want to ask how such public ethical
discourse relates to the “inner” language of private
decision; but there is a major difficulty in under-
standing this relationship since our access to such
information in those cultures is a consequence of

literacy. Not only, in preliterate societies, is there no
recording of ethical views except through the collec-
tive sphere of oral traditions, but there are also no
generic conventions—such as that of the confession
(on the model of St. AUGUSTINE [354–430]) or the
Protestant diary (as the record of an individual CON-
SCIENCE)—to provide models of organized reflec-
tion on questions outside the public sphere. More
than this, such central genres as the novel provide
us with models of interiority in moral life that do not
occur in the major genres of orature. To the extent
that a nuanced language of private moral reflection,
distinct from the discourse of collective decision
making, is the product of the kind of PRIVACY made
possible through the conventions that constitute
genres of writing such as autobiography and novel,
we may say that there is no such private morality in
the largely preliterate cultures of precolonial Africa.
It is facts such as these that lead anthropologists
to speak of cultures of (external) shame as opposed
to (internal) guilt. In using such a classification, one
should remember that shame, like guilt, requires one
to share the values that one has failed to live up to—
it is not just a question of embarrassment; so that it
would be quite misleading to think of African cul-
tures without developed discourses of individualized
“private” morality as being governed by the notion
that only what is publicly known is of any real ethical
significance.
It should be stressed, finally, that there is little
reason to think that the features we have identified
in contrasting African ethical ideas and those of
Euro-America distinguish African ethical ideas from
those of many other traditional peoples from outside
the areas of influence of the literate ethical culture
of the monotheistic world religions.
Contemporary Trends
Against this background, it is possible to under-
stand the very substantial ethical crises associated,
on the one hand, with the growth of literacy, the
development of the African novel, and access to
Western literary forms; and, on the other, with ur-
banization and the growth of commodity production
and wage labor. Each of these changes contributes
to undermining the fit between traditional ethical
ideas—of kinship and community—and contem-
porary practical life. The problem of political cor-
ruption in many modern African states, for example,
35
Africa
is best seen as arising, in part, from the fact that state
officials in the modern sector are paid salaries that
are intended to support a family unit closer to a
Euro-American “nuclear” model, while inheriting—
or, at least, believing that they inherit—obligations
to corporate groups—lineages, hometowns, and so
on—that they cannot sustain. The question of “nep-
otism” or “tribalism” should be seen in the context
of a conflict between formal rights-based notions of
the role of state agents, on the one hand, and tra-
ditional corporate obligations, on the other.
When we come to consider contemporary sub-
Saharan ethical discourse, the influence of Islamic
and Christian theory is very evident, as are Marxist
and liberal political and moral ideas introduced
through European colonial education. These latter
secular traditions are not distinctively different from
their Euro-American counterparts. So far as these
major religious traditions are concerned, the con-
trast between traditional and contemporary ideas is,
perhaps, less striking in Islamic areas. This is be-
cause, in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Islam
was well established before the period of European
colonialism and existed for a long period as a literate
tradition alongside the popular culture of a largely
nonliterate populace. There was, in consequence, a
fairly substantial mutual accommodation of Islamic
ideas and the ethical thought of the pre-Islamic cul-
tures into which they were introduced. Nevertheless,
just as Islam in other parts of the contemporary
Muslim world has developed both new secularizing
traditions and new forms of “fundamentalism,” so
this has happened in Africa. Secularization has
tended to be the response of a literate intelligentsia
with substantial familiarity with European culture,
while fundamentalism has had a more popular—
though usually also literate—base. One conse-
quence of the increasing flow of information,
through broadcast media as well as through literacy,
is that public ethical discourse in sub-Saharan Is-
lamic Africa may now be closer to that in the rest of
the Muslim world than it has been since the early
period of African Islam.
The effect of Christianity has been to challenge
the content of traditional ethical thought in many
places—for example, through objections to polyg-
amy, to caste-like hereditary status systems, and to
appeal to the ancestors and other spirits. Further-
more, Christian otherworldliness and individualistic
notions of merit and RESPONSIBILITY (the latter
Africa
probably deriving as much from contemporary eco-
nomic relations) have penetrated many cultures.
Nevertheless it is fair to say that the ethical thought
of most contemporary African Christians is closer to
that of the precolonial period—especially in its com-
munalism—than it may sometimes appear. And, of
course, to the extent that African Christians partici-
pate in formal literate ethical discourse, they do so—
with the significant exception of Coptic churches in
Egypt and Ethiopia—largely within contemporary
traditions that belong to European Christianity.
See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; CHILDREN AND ETHICAL
THEORY; COMMUNITARIANISM; CULTURAL STUDIES;
FAMILY; GUILT AND SHAME; INDIVIDUALISM; ISLAMIC
ETHICS; MORAL EDUCATION; NARRATIVE ETHICS; PUB-
LIC AND PRIVATE MORALITY.
Bibliography
Floistad, Guttorm, ed. Contemporary Philosophy: A New
Survey. Vol. 5. Amsterdam: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.
Contains useful articles.
Forde, Daryll, ed. African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmo-
logical Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples.
London, New York: Published for the International Af-
rican Institute by Oxford University Press, 1954. Ox-
ford University Press, 1954.
Gyekye, Kwame. An Essay on African Philosophical
Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. New
York: Praeger, 1969.
p’Bitek, Okot. African Religions in Western Scholarship.
Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1970.
Wright, Richard A., ed. African Philosophy: An Introduc-
tion. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America,
1977. Contains useful articles.
Kwame A. Appiah
agency and disability
Disability
In its original usage, a disability is a limitation
suffered by individuals because they belong to a
class regarded as incompetent to exercise at least
some of the RIGHTS people normally enjoy. Children,
for instance, are disabled in respect to entering into
CONTRACTS, purchasing alcoholic beverages, and
protecting their PRIVACY. Women once were dis-
36
abled from voting, owning PROPERTY, and retaining
custody of their own children because they were
imagined to be too biologically fragile and emo-
tional, and consequently too dependent, to bear the
RESPONSIBILITY of doing so. Feminist emancipatory
politics explicitly pursued legislation to eliminate
such “women’s disabilities.” In a similar vein, to ab-
rogate the bans racist disparagement of their civic
and commercial competence constructed against
them, African Americans embraced juridical strate-
gies to establish that race and color are not disabil-
ities under the law.
Today, having a physical, sensory or cognitive im-
pairment is the condition most commonly equated
with disability. In this recent narrower usage, and in
its broader original meaning as well, disability raises
a number of issues for moral theory, especially in
respect to equitability and inclusiveness. Theories
that emphasize dependency rather than agency are
challenged to explain how individuals whose bio-
logical differences appear to limit their powers can
be of equal status with fully capable persons. The-
ories that accentuate agency are challenged to em-
brace people whose biological differences impede
their executing the activities through which moral
agency is exercised.
Agency
Who counts as a person for purposes of com-
manding equitable treatment and respect? John
RAWLS proposes that “a person is someone who can
be a citizen, that is, a fully cooperating member of
society over a complete life” but adds that “for our
purposes . . . I leave aside permanent physical dis-
abilities or mental disorders so severe as to prevent
persons from being normal and fully cooperating
members of society in the usual sense.” In response
to Rawls’s conceptualization, Ruth Anna Putnam
asks, “are we to conclude that a permanently dis-
abled human being is not a person, or at any rate
not a citizen?” From an agency-focused moral per-
spective, such an individual’s status will be relativ-
ized to whatever physical, sensory, or cognitive per-
formances are designated as crucial expressions of
moral activity. The less replete and flexible the rep-
ertoire of instrumentally valuable performances, the
less inclusive the theory will be in attributing full
moral agency to individuals whose powers to per-
form differ from the normal or customary range.

We can see why this is so by way of an example.
Seyla Benhabib urges that humans capable of speech
and action are to be considered equal from a MORAL
POINT OF VIEW. In the context of this or similar di-
alogical accounts of morality, what is the status of
deaf individuals who communicate through sign lan-
guage rather than speech? In practice, whether such
individuals are afforded fully equitable treatment
and respect turns on whether they can communicate
with whomever the theory takes to be the morally
significant interlocutor(s).
When sign language was developed in the eigh-
teenth century, manual signing was believed to be
based on natural, self-interpreting symbols that en-
gaged the intelligence directly and lucidly and facili-
tated the moral sense. For this reason, deaf people
who signed rather than spoke were considered to be
insulated from the transient fashions of conven-
tional conversation, and therefore to be less cor-
ruptible. Signing thus was considered a respectable,
effective activity conducive to the purest communi-
cation with, and about, God, whose significant role
in moral conversation was a given.
But, by the late nineteenth century, relationships
among humans had become more significant for the
propitious ordering of society than ties between hu-
mans and God were made out to be. Where once
language’s highest function had been to engage in-
dividuals with transcendent sources of right belief
and right conduct, it now most importantly engaged
people with one another in productive commercial
and civic interaction. Furthermore, as priority
shifted from personal to social improvement, the
ideal of communal participation by people who
functioned in a common dialogical mode in the pub-
lic sphere superseded that of individualized moral
perfection. Eventually, individuals who signed in-
stead of speaking were diagnosed as being in deficit
of the powers that distinguish humans and their so-
cieties from lesser primates. On account of their di-
alogical difference, deaf individuals were made le-
gally inferior and vulnerable by being decreed
incompetent to own property and to retain custody
of their children (especially of their hearing
children).
In response, deaf rights advocates now urge that
sign language be recognized as the language of a mi-
nority community with its own identifiable history
and culture, and that deaf people be accorded the
same moral and political status as other cultural mi-
37
agency and disability
norities. Whether doing so isolates, or instead ele-
vates, those who sign rather than speak remains a
subject of considerable controversy. For whether the
inability to speak to the majority of other people, and
not just to a minority similar to one’s self, compro-
mises an individual’s moral agency turns on whether
the spoken word is theorized as being essential, or
instead as serendipitous, to whatever dialogical
functions are crucial to human flourishing.
Similar considerations pertain to most other mor-
ally relevant physical, sensory, and cognitive func-
tioning. For example, the theologian John Hull di-
agnoses the isolation his blindness occasions by
explaining that “the main point about [sighted peo-
ple’s practice in relating to the blind] is its lack of
reciprocity.” What prompts this remark is his reflec-
tion on the difference between the ways in which
blind and sighted people are aware of each others’
presence and, consequently, in how they attend to
one another: “a common deterioration of mutuality
takes place when a blind . . . person believes . . . they
are in a face-to-face situation but in fact you, the
sighted one, are looking out of the window.” Hull
observes that “the mere fact that blind and sighted
people cannot watch things together . . . deprives
them of a major field of togetherness.”
So it is not the inferiority of personal powers, but
rather the nonmutuality of social practice, that
erodes EQUALITY between individuals who cannot
see and those who can at the level of personal con-
nectedness. In this regard, the Americans With Dis-
abilities Act (1990) traces disablement to social ar-
rangements intolerant of physical, sensory, or
cognitive difference rather than to the functional in-
adequacies of individuals. From the viewpoint rep-
resented by this “social” model of disability, when-
ever having such differences diminishes a person’s
agency, injustice, not incompetence or biological def-
icit, is most likely at blame.
Despite its increasing political influence, how-
ever, this model of disability is susceptible to a lim-
iting case, namely, that in which no reform of social
practice, nor improvement in environment or situ-
ation, can enable an impaired individual to become
self-determining. Robert Veatch, for one, holds that
some people whom justice urges be compensated
for their disabilities “are not competent, rational
decision-makers,” so, for them, the equality implicit
in the principle of self-determination is not an
achievable component of justice. The literature of-
agency and disability
fers at least two competing ways of addressing their
circumstance. The first argues that dependency
rather than agency is a definitive attribute of morally
engaged individuals, while the second expands how
agency is recognized so as to increase the number of
those who are considered capable of being morally
engaged.
Dependency
Some feminists and some communitarians insist
that the importance of agency has been magnified
misleadingly, promoted by a parochial paradigm of
self-determination. Feminists associate self-deter-
mination with self-sufficiency and independence and
then condemn it for being nothing more than an ex-
trapolation from the paradigmatic male relationship
between nonintimate equals that disregards the
common female circumstance of being intimately
connected to others of very different POWER or
status. Communitarians associate self-determination
with INDIVIDUALISM, complaining that it invites in-
dividuals to operate as idiosyncratic atomistic arbi-
ters of value who abjure traditional understandings
about the COMMON GOOD.
A criticism commonly levied from both these
camps is that self-determination constitutes a hope-
less and therefore an unfairly imposed goal for peo-
ple who are powerless and vulnerable, and especially
so for the disabled. To be inclusive of individuals too
frail or otherwise compromised to conform to this
paradigm, they argue, moral theory should promote
relationships that bond powerless to more powerful
people. Annette Baier, for example, contends that
the INEQUALITY manifested in dependence connects
care giver and care recipient morally by exposing
them to mutual RISK. For the relationship to work,
each gives up control because each is, figuratively, a
hostage to the other’s role; this mutuality of depen-
dence constitutes the paradigmatic moral bond.
But modeling moral connectedness on how de-
pendence links people of greatly differing powers
still fails to be responsive to some of the perfor-
mance limitations that impairment can occasion. For
example, people with autism and people with cog-
nitive deficits such as those characteristic of certain
stages of senile dementia are individuals whose im-
pairment compromises their empathizing and trust-
ing, and thereby limits their ability to rely on others.
And many more people, evidencing very different
38
kinds of impairments, are forestalled from assuming
trusting relationships by a social environment hos-
tile to, unreliable for, or dismissive of individuals
like themselves.
It is often assumed that those free of impairment
have an obligation to care for the disabled, regard-
less of whether the latter can reciprocate. This claim
is a commonplace of social welfare theory, but it is
not so commonly implemented, and with good rea-
son, for what it appears to call for is a moral econ-
omy that privileges neediness. Such schemes noto-
riously call for determining who is better and who
worse off, so as to decide whose private assets to
transform into common resources, and whom to
supply from the latter.
Further, the price extracted to be eligible for such
benefits makes them of dubious advantage, for the
social NORMS that shape our patterns of obligation
to those classified as unable to care for themselves
can be harmfully confining to whoever finds herself
occupying the dependent’s role. If the respect ac-
corded able-bodied individuals is influenced by oth-
ers’ perceptions of the extent of their caring, people
with disabilities face being coerced into dependence
so as to permit unimpaired associates to display how
well they care. Similarly, if a community’s virtue is
advanced when ill and disabled people are cared for
in it, community members viewed as weak must put
themselves in the hands of those who seem strong
so as to facilitate the community’s collective pro-
gression toward virtue. But surely no one should be
obligated to receive whatever benefits are thrust
upon her. Nor is it liberating to position individuals
whose social options are unusually limited so that
their choosing to disconnect from someone else is
condemned as disruptive because it obstructs the so-
ciety’s prospects for being virtuous.
Interdependence and Self-Determination
Those who would benefit from assistance should
not lose this autonomy. Immanuel KANT (1724–
1804) advises any prospective benefactor to “show
that he is himself put under the obligation by the
other’s acceptance or honored by it” so as to fore-
bear from placing the recipient of help in an inferior
position. Kant’s example illustrates how, in the con-
text of reciprocally constraining practice, individuals
can be interdependent, yet self-determining. Inter-
dependence thus can be accepted as integral to hu-

man life without being magnified into a social ideal
that imposes heteronomy on people whose physical
or cognitive functioning is not species-typical.
As Kant suggests, drawing individuals of differ-
ent powers together in a mutually binding moral
space is facilitated when, regardless of how needy
one is for assistance by the other, social practice
maintains RECIPROCITY between them. Of course,
where practice divides humanity into the weak and
the strong—those who can’t climb a flight of stairs
and those who can, those who can’t see printed text
and those who can, those who can’t hear a telephone
and those who can—such mutuality either does not
happen or is curtailed. This indicates why inflating
their dependency, and discounting their agency, at-
tenuates the moral connectedness people with dis-
abilities can achieve.
Moral Status
Some people question assigning full moral status
to individuals incapable of agency as, for instance,
the most severely retarded and demented humans
seem to be. Peter Singer, for one, draws the moral
line at sentience, arguing that anencephalic neonates
are of lower moral rank than smart nonhuman ani-
mals. Singer assigns similar moral standing to hu-
mans and any other animals positioned alike in re-
spect to the line established by the capacity for
responsiveness.
Doubting whether very severely impaired hu-
mans have full moral status may appear to run
counter to our strong intuition that we have a higher
duty to safeguard humans, whatever their deficits
may be, than to protect the cleverest nonhuman ani-
mals. But one need not be obligated to an individual
to be obligated in regard to that individual. Human
neonates lack agency but are linked by history and
affection to adults on whom they are dependent.
When an individual’s extended dependency imposes
an unfairly heavy burden of care giving on which-
ever capable agent is closest, our duty to distribute
burdens as well as benefits equitably obligates us to
provide relief to the unfairly encumbered care
givers. Discharging this duty to care givers is imple-
mented through taking positive action toward those
for whom they care. Hence, our duty to care for hu-
mans incapable of agency exhibits the character of
an obligation to persons with full moral status, but
it is with their care givers rather than themselves
39
agency and disability
that the relevant mutuality has been achieved. Safe-
guarding humans with disabilities because they are
human entails no duties to extend moral respect or
social inclusion to them.
Whether individuals whose execution of major
life activities is compromised can command these
latter duties (as distinct from being the objects of
duty) turns on whether social practice permits them
to be perceived as mutually engaged with others in
morally important enterprises. Charles TAYLOR sees
the development of liberal morality as being an ex-
pansion of our views about who can do so and in-
terprets the claim to equal status as having been
extended even to “people who through some circum-
stance that has befallen them are incapable of real-
izing their potential in the normal way—handi-
capped people . . . for instance.” Unfortunately, this
way of putting things deconstructs the egalitarian
project by intimating that all “handicapped” people
are equal only derivatively or fictionally because they
do not function normally.
According to data collected in 1994/95 by the
United States Department of Commerce for the Sur-
vey of Income and Program Participation, more than
50 million Americans reported being so seriously
impaired as to be precluded from one or more nor-
mal modes of functioning. So centering agency, or
the potential for it, on normal performance of social
activities forestalls acknowledging the DIGNITY of a
vastly greater number of people than just the most
profoundly intellectually impaired. For this reason,
advocates for individuals with physical, sensory, or
cognitive impairments now adopt strategies reminis-
cent of the previous liberatory movements that ad-
vanced women and people of color. They declare
that equating competent agency with modes of per-
formance typical of or familiar to the current socially
dominant class is itself disabling.
See also: AUTONOMY OF MORAL AGENTS; BENEFI-
CENCE; BENEVOLENCE; CARE; CHARITY; CHILDREN
AND ETHICAL THEORY; CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIC DU-
TIES; COERCION; COMMUNITARIANISM; CONTRACTS;
DIGNITY; DISCRIMINATION; EQUALITY; EUDAIMONIA,
-ISM; EUTHANASIA; FAMILY; FEMINIST ETHICS; GEN-
EROSITY; GRATITUDE; INEQUALITY; INFANTICIDE; IN-
TERESTS; JUSTICE [entries]; NEEDS; PATERNALISM;
PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS; PRIDE; PRIVACY; PUBLIC
AND PRIVATE MORALITY; PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY;
PUBLIC POLICY; RACISM AND RELATED ISSUES; RAWLS;
agency and disability
RECIPROCITY; RESPONSIBILITY; RIGHT HOLDERS;
RIGHTS; SELF AND SOCIAL SELF; SELF-OWNERSHIP;
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; SUICIDE; THE-
ORY AND PRACTICE; WELFARE RIGHTS AND SOCIAL
POLICY.
Bibliography
Baier, Annette. “The Need for More than Justice.” In Sci-
ence, Morality and Feminist Theory, edited by Marsha
Hanen and Kai Nielson. Calgary: University of Calgary
Press, 1987. Why the concept of justice doesn’t do jus-
tice to the nuances of moral connectedness.
Baynton, Douglas. Forbidden Signs: American Culture
and the Campaign against Sign Language. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Becker, Lawrence C. “The Good of Agency.” In Americans
with Disabilities: Exploring Implications of the Law for
Individuals and Institutions, edited by Leslie Francis
and Anita Silvers. New York: Routledge, 2000. Argues
that disability rights are implicit in long-held, funda-
mental commitments about the value of human life,
especially our acknowledgment of the value of human
agency.
Benhabib, Seyla. “In the Shadow of Aristotle and Hegel:
Communicative Ethics and Current Controversies in
Practical Philosophy.” Philosophical Forum 21 (1989):
77–95. Moral agency and its applications in the con-
text of dialogical theory.
Francis, Leslie Pickering, and Anita Silvers, eds. Ameri-
cans with Disabilities: Exploring Implications of the
Law for Individuals and Institutions. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2000.
Funk, Robert. “Disability Rights: From Caste to Class in
the Context of Civil Rights.” In Images of the Disabled,
Disabling Images, edited by Alan Gartner and Tom Joe,
7–30. New York: Praeger, 1987. Emergence of social
model of disability in United States case law and im-
plications for jurisprudence, especially civil rights.
Hull, John. On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World
of Blindness. Oxford: One-World Publications, 1997.
Quoted from p. 107.
Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. Part 2, The
Doctrine of Virtue. Translated and edited by Mary
Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991
[1797]. See sections 31 and 32.
Morris, Jenny. Pride Against Prejudice. Philadelphia: New
Society Publishers, 1991. Introduces feminist perspec-
tives to disability studies.
Putnam, Ruth Anna. “Why Not a Feminist Theory of
Justice?” In Women, Culture and Development: A
Study of Human Capabilities, edited by Martha Nuss-
baum and Jonathan Glover. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995. Pp. 298–331. Quoted from p. 304.
Rawls, John. “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphys-
40
ical.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223–
51. Quotation from pp. 233–34.
Silvers, Anita. “Disability Rights.” In The Encyclopedia of
Applied Ethics, edited by Ruth Chadwick. San Diego:
Academic Press, 1997.
———. “Reconciling Equality to Difference: Caring (F)or
Justice for People with Disabilities.” Hypatia 10, no. 1
(1995): 30–55. Argues that substituting care ethics for
justice ethics marginalizes people with disabilities;
shows how justice ethics should respond to people with
physical, sensory, and cognitive differences.
———. “Rights of People with Disabilities.” In The Ox-
ford Handbook of Practical Ethics, edited by Hugh
LaFollette. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcom-
ing. Reviews and evaluates various philosophical ap-
proaches to justice for people with disabilities.
Silvers, Anita, David Wasserman, and Mary Mahowald.
Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on
Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy. Point/Counter-
point. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.
Explores how formal, distributive, and feminist ap-
proaches to justice address issues raised by disability
in the fields of bioethics and public policy. Afterword
by Lawrence C. Becker.
Singer, Peter. Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of
Our Traditional Ethics. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
A bio-utilitarian approach to disability, focusing on suf-
fering and other quality of life issues.
Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and “The Politics of
Recognition”: An Essay by Charles Taylor with Com-
mentary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Commentary by Amy Gutmann (editor), Stephen
Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf.
United States Department of Commerce, Census Bureau.
“Americans with Disabilities: 1994–95,” by John
McNeil. Household Economic Studies. Current Popu-
lation Reports, P70–61, August 1997.
Veatch, Robert. The Foundation of Justice: Why the Re-
tarded and the Rest of Us Have Claims to Equality.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosoph-
ical Reflections on Disability. London: Routledge,
1996. Introduces disability perspective to feminist
theory.
Anita Silvers
agent-centered morality
Morality is called agent-centered, or agent-relative,
insofar as it appeals to moral considerations whose
force is tied to the projects, values, relationships, or
perspectives of the moral agent. Commonsense
moral practice is often thought to embody agent-

relative considerations, though much traditional
moral theory has required agents to (try to) act from
a purely impartial, even impersonal, point of view.
“I would have the dearest friend I have to know,”
said Jeremy BENTHAM (1748–1832), the architect of
classical UTILITARIANISM, “that his interests, if they
come in competition with that of the public, are as
nothing to me.” Though such a remark would speak
well for the integrity of a public official, it might call
into question the speaker’s INTEGRITY as a friend.
Some philosophers, most influentially Bernard WIL-
LIAMS, have attacked the adequacy of utilitarianism
precisely because it seems to compromise the integ-
rity of the moral agent’s CHARACTER in regard to
PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS and to other values and
projects which give the agent’s life meaning. Wil-
liams’s sustained critique began in the early 1970s,
shortly after John RAWLS had argued that utilitari-
anism fails to take the difference between people se-
riously, and shortly before Robert NOZICK was to
introduce the notion of nonutilitarian “side con-
straints,” suggesting that though utilitarianism might
be a good enough moral theory for nonhuman ani-
mals, people require some form of DEONTOLOGY.
Varieties of Agent-Relativity
How are such agent-relative considerations to be
characterized? A variety of ordinary intuitions have
appeared to be in tension with the demands of agent-
neutral morality. Thomas Nagel, for example, iden-
tifies three kinds of agent-relativity: “Common sense
suggests that each of us should live his own life (au-
tonomy), give special consideration to certain others
(obligation), have some significant concern for the
general good (neutral values), and treat the people he
deals with decently (deontology).” Amartya Sen—
distinguishing among “doer-relativity”, “viewer-
relativity”, and “self-evaluation-relativity”—argues
that deontological values can be accommodated by
some forms of consequence-based evaluation
(though not by utilitarianism). Sen has gone on to
develop his concept of “positional objectivity,” in
terms of which he sees “no basic conflict between
consequential ethics and agent-relativity.”
But how is the force of agent-relative considera-
tions to be understood? Three questions can be
distinguished.
41
agent-centered morality
Intrinsic versus Instrumental Relativity
Are agent-relative considerations intrinsically
relative, or are they to be taken as instrumentally
subordinate to higher-level agent-neutral consider-
ations? An instrumentalist analysis, as found in con-
sequentialist apologists such as R. M. HARE, deflates
the significance of agent-relative moral considera-
tions as objections to CONSEQUENTIALISM —which is
of course the point of such an analysis.
Prerogatives versus Restrictions
Do agent-relative considerations merely permit
moral agents, under certain circumstances, to ignore
the impersonal demands of morality? Or do they re-
quire that such demands be ignored? Samuel Schef-
fler has defended a “hybrid view” which recognizes
an agent-centered prerogative—permitting agents,
within limits, to pursue their own projects even
when this would not produce the best overall out-
come (as defined by impersonal considerations)—
but resists recognizing agent-centered restrictions
which would require agents to act on agent-centered
considerations rather than produce the best state of
affairs. Scheffler’s critics have questioned the via-
bility of this “hybrid,” wondering whether the pre-
rogatives and the restrictions do not stand or fall
together.
Alternatives to Agent-Relativity
Which moral views do agent-relative considera-
tions call into question? Bernard Williams’s original
target was utilitarianism. But he, and others, have
gone on to question the impersonal demands of Kan-
tian theories of moral duty as well. Thus, the issues
about agent-centered morality may be deeper than
the debate between consequentialism and deontol-
ogy. Samuel Freeman has proposed that the idea of
agent-neutral reasons presupposes the (teleological)
notion of a single ultimate good, as against the (de-
ontological) recognition of an irreducible plurality
of intrinsic goods.
The problem of determining the limits of moral-
ity’s claims remains. The flourishing of an individual
life in its necessary social context (what ARISTOTLE
[384–322 B.C.E.] called eudaimonia) may be viewed
either (1) as requiring virtue-or-excellence (arete),
agent-centered morality
as EUDAIMONISM suggests; or (2) as setting a limit
to the impersonal demands the morally responsive
agent must endure. On the latter view, a morality
which precluded all possibility of personal fulfill-
ment in the agent’s life would simply demand too
much. If moral virtue goes with human flourishing,
then how can agents be called upon to sacrifice what
is vital to that flourishing? On the other hand, if
flourishing is not possible apart from the life of vir-
tue, how can even the most stringent demand of mo-
rality be subverted in the name of self-interest?
Scheffler has argued (against the view that mo-
rality is “stringent” and against the opposed view
that it is merely coincident with self-interest) that
morality is in fact “moderate”—an attempt to do
justice both to the idea that all INTERESTS have equal
intrinsic importance and to the idea that each per-
son’s interests have a personal significance “out of
proportion to their importance from an impersonal
standpoint.” On his version of agent-relativity, mo-
rality takes our partialities seriously, but also forms
part of a complex social and psychological reality in
which it becomes possible for moral considerations
to acquire a motivating force independent of our
personal desires. “Not only does morality itself aim
in part to accommodate the interests of the agent,
but at the same time agents who acquire moral mo-
tives try, in effect, to shape their own interests in
such a way as to avoid conflict with morality.” This
subtle and perceptive account of, as Scheffler puts
it, human morality deserves better than the disdain-
ful sniff it would doubtless receive from Bentham.
See also: AUTONOMY OF ETHICS; AUTONOMY OF
MORAL AGENTS; CHARACTER; CONSEQUENTIALISM;
DEONTOLOGY; DESIRE; DUTY AND OBLIGATION;
EQUALITY; EUDAIMONIA, -ISM; FEMINIST ETHICS; IM-
PARTIALITY; INTEGRITY; INTUITIONISM; KANTIAN
ETHICS; MORAL POINT OF VIEW; MORAL RELATIVISM;
MOTIVES; PARTIALITY; PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORAL-
ITY; REASONS FOR ACTION; RESPONSIBILITY; SELF
AND SOCIAL SELF; SUBJECTIVISM; UTILITARIANISM;
WILLIAMS.
Bibliography
Brink, David O. Moral Realism and the Foundations of
Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Includes critique of Scheffler.
Brook, Richard. “Agency and Morality.” Journal of Phi-
losophy 88 (1991): 190–212. Critique of Scheffler.
42
Buchanan, Allen. “Justice as Reciprocity versus Subject-
Centered Justice.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19
(1990): 227 – 52. Unusual in applying “subject-
centered” (and, more narrowly, “agent-centered”) to
theories which make moral status depend on features
of the subject other than power to affect the well-being
of others. This engages a set of issues different from
those discussed here.
Darwall, Stephen. “Agent-Centered Restrictions from the
Inside Out.” Philosophical Studies 50 (1986): 291–
319.
Freeman, Samuel. “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the
Priority of Right.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 23
(1994): 313–49.
Hare, R. M. Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and
Point. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Utilitar-
ianism defended.
Harris, John. Violence and Responsibility. London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Consequentialist negative
responsibility defended.
Hurley, Paul. “Agent-Centered Restrictions: Clearing the
Air of Paradox.” Ethics 108 (1997): 120–46.
Kagan, Shelly. The Limits of Morality. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989. Consequentialism defended.
Kamm, F. M. “Non-Consequentialism, The Person as an
End-in-Itself, and the Significance of Status.” Philoso-
phy and Public Affairs 21 (1992): 354–89.
Korsgaard, Christine M. “The Reasons We Can Share: An
Attack on the Distinction between Agent-Relative and
Agent-Neutral Values.” Social Philosophy and Policy
10 (January 1993): 24–51. Reprinted in her Creating
the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press,
1996), chapter 10.
Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper. “Moral Status and the Im-
possibility of Minimizing Violations.” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 25 (1996): 333–51.
Mack, Eric. “Personal Integrity, Practical Recognition, and
Rights.” Monist 76 (1993): 101–18. See also other ar-
ticles by Mack cited therein.
McNaughton, David, and Piers Rawling. “Deontology and
Agency.” Monist 76 (1993): 81–100.
Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986. Chapter 9 discusses three kinds
of agent-relativity. Reprinted in Scheffler.
———. Equality and Partiality. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1991.
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York:
Basic Books, 1974. Chapter 3 introduces nonutilitarian
“side constraints.” Extracted in Scheffler.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1984. Argues that our reasons for acting
should become more impersonal.
Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
Scheffler, Samuel. The Rejection of Consequentialism.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. The “hybrid”
theory.
———. Human Morality. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992. A subtle, humane discussion.
———. “Relationships and Responsibilities.” Philosophy
and Public Affairs 26 (1997): 189–209.
———, ed. Consequentialism and Its Critics. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1988. Invaluable anthology.
Sen, Amartya. “Rights and Agency.” Philosophy and Pub-
lic Affairs 11 (1982): 3–39. Especially Sections 5–7.
Reprinted in Scheffler.
———. “Positional Objectivity.” Philosophy and Public
Affairs 22 (1993): 126–45. Especially Section 9.
Slote, Michael. Common-Sense Morality and Consequen-
tialism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
Stewart, Robert M. “Agent-Relativity, Reason, and Value.”
Monist 76 (1993): 66–80. Critique of Scheffler and
Nagel.
Unger, Peter. Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of
Innocence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Williams, Bernard. “A Critique of Utilitarianism.” In Util-
itarianism: For and Against, by J. J. C. Smart and Ber-
nard Williams, 75–150. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1973. The place to start. Extracted in
Scheffler.
———. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981. Especially chapters 1 and 3, which elab-
orate and extend the attack on impersonal morality.
———. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1985.
———. Making Sense of Humanity. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995.
Wilson, Catherine. “On Some Alleged Limitations to
Moral Endeavor.” Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993):
275–89.
Edward Johnson
agents
See autonomy of moral agents; idealized agents.
agnosticism
The term ‘agnosticism’ was coined by the English
biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
around 1869, but the position itself is far more an-
cient: there have doubtless been agnostics ever since
people first began to think seriously about the gods.
The agnostic is a sort of partial or limited sceptic.
He or she is quite happy to accept that we have
knowledge of the world of phenomena, obtained
first by ordinary sense experience and then extended
43
agnosticism
by the methods of the sciences. Any attempt to ex-
tend this knowledge beyond the phenomena, and to
make claims about a God or gods is, however, dis-
missed as presumptuous. With regard to the exis-
tence and properties of a God or gods, the agnostic’s
creed is not just the modest and unassuming “I don’t
know” but the much more challenging “we can’t
know,” i.e., there is some reason of principle why
such knowledge is unattainable for us.
Agnosticism became a widely accepted doctrine
among the intellectuals of late Victorian Britain, as
the implications for epistemology of the work of
HUME (1711–1776) and KANT (1724–1804) be-
came assimilated. Although their philosophies differ
in fundamental respects, both Hume and Kant pro-
duced accounts of human knowledge which saw it
as necessarily confined to the realm of appearances
or phenomena. For Kant, there is a noumenal realm
of things-in-themselves behind the phenomena, but
we can say nothing positive about this realm; for
Hume, it is a real possibility that there are only the
appearances. Both men rejected the traditional ar-
guments for the existence of God, whether a priori
or empirical, as inconclusive. The traditional argu-
ment to design, however, survived their critique, and
was widely employed in the first half of the nine-
teenth century as a proof of a wise and benevolent
designer God. It was only after the publication of
DARWIN’s (1809–1882) Origin of Species (1859)
that atheists and agnostics could give a convincing
reply to this argument, citing Darwin’s theory as
proof that the functional adaptation of the parts of
plants and animals need not be taken as evidence of
intelligent design.
The main agnostic writers—Spencer, Tyndall,
Huxley, Stephen, and Clifford—never formed a
closed group with an agreed body of doctrine. One
crucial question which divided them was whether
agnosticism was essentially a positive or a negative
doctrine. For Herbert SPENCER (1820–1903), the
agnostic has a positive belief in ‘The Unknowable’,
and should even redirect his or her religious emo-
tions toward it. Religion, he argues, spontaneously
evolves into agnosticism as it replaces more primi-
tive and anthropomorphic conceptions of God with
more sophisticated and abstract ones. The Irish
physicist John Tyndall (1820–1893) shared this
view, arguing that agnosticism is hostile only to dog-
matic theology, not to RELIGION as such. For Huxley,
however, agnosticism is a much more negative doc-
agnosticism
trine: in his article “Agnosticism,” he characterizes
it simply in terms of adoption of a critical, sceptical
attitude toward religious and metaphysical claims,
and dismisses with some scorn the suggestion that
it could become itself a sort of surrogate religion
with its own creed. The great Victorian man of let-
ters Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), and the mathe-
matician William Kingdom Clifford (1845–1879),
shared this negative, more Humean conception of
agnosticism.
The implications of agnosticism for ethics are ba-
sically the same as those of ATHEISM. Even if there
is a God or a pantheon of gods, if we can know
nothing about him, her, it, or them, it follows that
we can know nothing about whatever moral prop-
erties the God or gods may possess, or what sorts of
conduct he, she, it, or they may command or pro-
hibit. In practice, therefore, the agnostic must adopt
a purely secular view of ethics. He or she might con-
sistently adopt a utilitarian moral theory, or a Kan-
tian one. In point of historical fact, however, several
prominent agnostics adopted the evolutionary-
naturalist account of ethics championed by Herbert
Spencer in his Data of Ethics. On this account,
MORAL RULES seem intuitive and a priori to the in-
dividual, but have been ‘learned’ by the race, in the
sense that communities of humans with such moral
intuitions have tended, over the course of evolution-
ary history, to flourish at the expense of others. On
this theory, the PHENOMENOLOGY of individual
moral experience and moral judgment is intuition-
istic, but the theory of EVOLUTION explains how we
came to be the sort of beings who have such moral
‘intuitions.’
A distinctive feature of the controversy over ag-
nosticism was the issue of the ethics of belief. Over
the centuries, the defenders of established religions
have sought to represent faith as a virtue and doubt
as a vice. For agnostics like Huxley, Stephen, and
Clifford, exactly the opposite is the case. They ap-
peal explicitly to such moral VIRTUES as frankness,
honesty, and humility in their defence against cleri-
cal opponents. If there are some things we humans
simply can’t know, they argue, surely it is better
freely to admit as much, rather than to try to defend
old exploded creeds by increasingly sophistical ar-
guments? This argument is most forcefully ex-
pressed in Clifford’s famous essay, “The Ethics of
Belief,” which portrays honest doubt as a moral duty
and blind faith as a dangerous and anti-social vice:
44
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to
believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” A per-
son who believes something without adequate evi-
dence is, for Clifford, like the carrier of a plague
virus—an argument that has been repeated in our
own time by Richard Dawkins. This seizing of the
moral high ground by the anti-clerical party repre-
sents a turning point in intellectual history. Until this
point, the high ground had always seemed to belong,
as if by divine right, to the clerics, who never ceased
to portray the freethinkers as dangerous and im-
moral rogues. Now the freethinkers could turn the
tables, claiming that they at least were honest and
sincere searchers after truth, willing to confess their
ignorance where evidence is lacking, and portraying
their clerical opponents as standing for little more
than pride and prejudice.
Opponents of agnosticism were thus faced with
a simple choice. They could either insist that the ag-
nostics were wrong about the epistemology—that
there was evidence, after all, for the existence of a
God with some knowable properties. Or they could
take issue with the agnostics about the ethics of be-
lief and defend faith against Clifford’s attack. It is
not hard to find champions of each of these ap-
proaches. The Jesuit Charles Coupe (1853–1910),
for example, argues, against Huxley, that God “has
not left Himself without witness” in the world, and
that the agnostics’ profession of ignorance is disin-
genuous and therefore culpable. Another Catholic
priest, William Barry (1849–1930), argues that Dar-
winism only overthrows the crudest versions of the
argument to design, and that more sophisticated ver-
sions are still defensible. A disciple of Newman
(1801–1890), John Bernard Dalgairns (1818–
1876), argues that even if the natural world shows
no evidence of God, human moral and spiritual ex-
perience furnishes all the evidence we require. De-
fenders of the virtue of faith include W. H. Mallock
(1849–1923) and the American pragmatist William
JAMES (1842–1910), whose famous essay “The Will
to Believe” is in large part a reply to Clifford.
See also: ABSURD, THE; ATHEISM; EVOLUTION; HU-
MANISM; INTUITIONISM; METAPHYSICS AND EPISTE-
MOLOGY; MORAL RULES; NATURALISM; PHENOME-
NOLOGY; PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION; RELIGION;
SKEPTICISM IN ETHICS; SPENCER; THEISM; THEOLOG-
ICAL ETHICS.

Bibliography
Clifford, William Kingdom. Lectures and Essays. Edited
by L. Stephen and F. Pollock. London: Macmillan,
1879. Contains the famous essay “The Ethics of
Belief.”
Flint, Robert. Agnosticism. Edinburgh: Blackwoods,
1903. A weighty and substantial account of Victorian
agnosticism. Very thorough, but tends to assimilate ag-
nosticism too closely to scepticism in general.
Huxley, Thomas Henry. Science and the Christian Tradi-
tion. London: Macmillan, 1897. This volume, number
six of Huxley’s collected essays, contains the famous
article “Agnosticism” (first published in The Nine-
teenth Century in 1889) and other relevant essays.
Lightman, Bernard. The Origins of Agnosticism. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. The best
modern study, stressing the positive aspect of Victorian
agnosticism.
Pyle, Andrew, ed. Agnosticism: Contemporary Reactions
to Spencer and Huxley. Bristol: Thoemmes Press,
1995. Valuable collection of essays by the agnostics
and their critics.
Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. London: Williams and
Norgate, 1862. The classic statement of ‘positive’ ag-
nosticism, with ‘the Unknowable’ coming to take the
place of God.
———. The Data of Ethics. London: Williams and Nor-
gate, 1879. The classic statement of evolutionary
ethics.
Stephen, Leslie. An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays.
London: Smith, Elder, 1893. Contains the famous es-
say, “An Agnostic’s Apology,” first published in The
Fortnightly Review in 1876.
———. The Science of Ethics. London: Smith, Elder,
1882. Reprinted Bristol: Thoemmes, 1991. Another
important statement of the evolutionary-naturalist
ethics favoured by the agnostics.
A. J. Pyle
agricultural ethics
Almost all persons have benefited from “the green
revolution,” from agricultural progress that has cre-
ated high-yield hybrids, fertilizers, pesticides, and
preservatives for our food. In the United States, ag-
riculture has been so successful that fewer than 4
percent of us are able to grow enough food both to
feed the other 96 percent and to export significant
surpluses.
Responses to “the green revolution,” to the luxury
of abundant, inexpensive food created by technolog-
ical and economic advances, however, have been
mixed. Nostalgic romantics and persons concerned
45
agricultural ethics
about health yearn for home-grown, chemical-free
food, while representatives of the agribusiness and
chemicals industries boast that their technical ad-
vances have helped reduce hunger and starvation.
The debate over agricultural ethics focuses on at
least six issues. These concern (1) agricultural
threats to public health and safety (e.g., pesticides);
(2) government RESPONSIBILITY for controlling ag-
ricultural resource depletion (e.g., loss of prime crop
land to developers); (3) agricultural contributions to
ecological disturbance (e.g., topsoil losses); (4) gov-
ernment responsibility for preserving the family,
rather than the corporate, farm (e.g., on the grounds
that it contributes to DEMOCRACY, self-reliance, and
environmental stewardship); (5) problems with fac-
tory farming and animal husbandry (e.g., subjecting
animals to unnecessary suffering); and (6) monop-
olistic control of food production by agribusiness in-
dustries (e.g., petrochemical industries’ thwarting
the development of safer biological means of pest
control). We shall discuss each of these issues in
order.
Agricultural Threats to Public Health
and Safety
Modern agriculture has increased the use of food
preservatives, fertilizers, and pesticides. Many phi-
losophers have questioned the ethical justifiability of
employing these chemicals. Claiming that use of ag-
ricultural toxins violates citizens’ rights to bodily
security, equal protection, and due process, philos-
ophers such as Alan GEWIRTH and Kristin Shrader-
Frechette use deontological arguments to show that
farmers are ethically wrong to employ chemicals that
cause cancer and genetic damage.
Representatives of the agriculture industry re-
spond, however, that use of chemical pesticides, fer-
tilizers, and preservatives lowers the price of food
and hence makes good nutrition more widely avail-
able. Pesticide promoters claim that, on a utilitarian
balance, agricultural chemicals create more benefit
than harm. Moreover, they point out that use of pes-
ticides and fertilizers is necessary because per capita
amounts of crop land are decreasing worldwide. The
only way to increase crop yields and decrease crop
acreage is with chemical assistance. But this raises
the issue of whether government ought to protect
valuable agricultural lands.
agricultural ethics
Ought Government to Prevent Agricultural
Resource Depletion?
Proponents of regulation to protect agricultural
land, like Lester Brown, argue that the United States
annually loses 3 million acres of prime crop land to
other uses. This is a loss, they claim, that will even-
tually interfere with our ability to feed ourselves.
They argue that, for the sake of the common good,
government ought to restrict PROPERTY rights to
crop land so as to protect agricultural acreage and
prevent resource depletion.
Opponents of using zoning, regulation, and tax-
ation to protect agricultural land claim that such
practices amount to a “taking” without just compen-
sation since they typically cause a reduction in the
market value of land and hence unjustly restrict
property rights. Opponents of protecting farmland
also say that agricultural zoning is exclusionary.
They claim that it violates the equal-protection and
due-process rights of low-income people who need
land for housing.
Sustainable Agriculture and Ecologically
Sound Farming
Farmland is not threatened, however, merely by
developers who want acreage for other purposes,
like housing. As Wendell Berry shows, it is also jeop-
ardized by ecologically unsound agricultural man-
agement. Brown estimates that the world annually
loses 23 billion tons of soil from crop lands in ex-
cess of new soil formation. Many agricultural tech-
niques encourage topsoil loss (e.g., failure to ter-
race, maximum-till practices, overgrazing). Some
moral philosophers, like William Aiken, argue for
a government duty to regulate this commons (soil)
in a way that will not bankrupt members of FUTURE
GENERATIONS.
Opponents of government regulation of agricul-
tural land claim that markets, not governments, are
better regulators of resources. They say that when
erosion and use of pesticides become so destructive
that farmers are hurt financially, they will change
their ecologically unsound practices. They also argue
that the countries with the most government control
of farming, e.g., the former Soviet Union, have the
worst record of agricultural abuse of the land. Hence
they claim that strengthening property rights to
land, not increasing government constraints on
46
those rights, is the best way to provide economically
and ecologically sustainable agriculture. Debates
among proponents of government-regulated, versus
private, agriculture also focus on (a) acceptable
levels of environmental degradation; (b) the cost-
benefit trade-off between ecological disturbance and
agricultural productivity; and (c) whether coercive,
versus incentive, regulatory programs are more ac-
ceptable from an ethical point of view.
The Ethical and Political Desirability of the
Family Farm
One proposed solution to the problem of agri-
cultural degradation is to provide government sup-
port for the family farm, on the grounds that owners
of small, private farms exercise more stewardship
over land resources than do hired workers on large
corporate farms. Proponents of family farms argue
that, in addition to conserving the soil, family farms
have higher yields per acre. They also provide a
strong foundation for self-reliance and for a Jeffer-
sonian notion of democracy based on economically
independent, and therefore politically free, farmers.
Opponents of government incentives for family
farming maintain that these farms are inefficient, be-
cause they do not have the advantage of economies
of scale. They also claim that a Jeffersonian agrarian
society is excessively idealistic. Belief in “antiquated
farming methods” is unrealistic, says Keith Camp-
bell, because chemically intensive, highly technolog-
ical, and automated agriculture is necessary if food
prices are to remain low enough to enable the poor
to have access to adequate food. Hence, on balance,
they claim that the benefits of corporate farming out-
weigh those of family farming.
Factory Farming and Animal Rights
One of the main components of corporate farm-
ing is an animal husbandry designed to maximize
milk, meat, or egg yield. In the name of economic
efficiency, factory farmers often keep animals in
darkness or cage them so closely that they cannot
move. They defend their procedures, as Campbell
and R. G. Frey do, by claiming that their efficiencies
are able to make meat available to virtually everyone
and at low prices. For them, factory farming pro-
duces the greatest good for the greatest number of
people. Other moral philosophers, like Hugh Leh-

man, argue that there are cases in which, even if
animals have RIGHTS, it is morally acceptable to kill
them for food or scientific experimentation.
Philosopher critics of factory farming fall into
two categories. Whether utility-oriented, like Peter
Singer, or rights-oriented, like Tom Regan, they ar-
gue that because animals feel pain, they deserve to
have their INTERESTS taken into account. Singer
claims that there is an ethical imperative to be a veg-
etarian because of the necessity to recognize the in-
terests of animals normally eaten as food. Other
philosophers do not go so far as promoting vegetar-
ianism, but they argue that causing animals any un-
necessary suffering is ethically indefensible.
Oligopoly and Agribusiness
For proponents of factory farming, however,
causing animal suffering is a small price to pay for
meeting human needs. Accepting the proposition
that humans are superior to other animals, they con-
clude that factory farming is not unethical in any
important sense. Indeed, agriculturalists like Camp-
bell claim that factory farming is ethical in that it
uses economies of scale to provide inexpensive meat
to a great many people. In other words, “big” agri-
culture, accounting for one-fourth of the gross na-
tional product in the United States by means of food
production, processing, and merchandising, is able
to democratize nutrition by making inexpensive pro-
tein widely available.
Not everyone agrees that “big” agriculture is good
agriculture, however. Just as it produces the abuses
of factory farming, big agriculture allegedly exem-
plifies other ethical and social problems typical of
any industry that has monopolistic control of the
economy in a given area. Robert van den Bosch ar-
gues, for example, that because agribusiness is so
powerful, it is able to subvert and manipulate even
attempted pesticide regulation done on behalf of the
COMMON GOOD. The result, he argues, is that ordi-
nary citizens, in practice, lose their equal-protection
and due-process rights, as well as their rights to con-
sent to agricultural risks affecting them. To the de-
gree that agriculture is agribusiness, accomplished
through large corporate farms that exercise monop-
olistic control over certain crops and oligopolistic
control over government, agricultural ethics deals
with some of the same issues as BUSINESS ETHICS.
47
agricultural ethics
See also: ANIMALS, TREATMENT OF; APPLIED ETHICS;
BIOETHICS; BUSINESS ETHICS; COMMON GOOD; CON-
SENT; CONSERVATION ETHICS; COOPERATIVE SUR-
PLUS; COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS; ECONOMIC ANALYSIS;
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS; EQUALITY; FUTURE GEN-
ERATIONS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GOVERNMENT,
ETHICS IN; JUSTICE, DISTRIBUTIVE; LAND ETHICS; LE-
GAL ETHICS; LIBERTARIANISM; LIBERTY, ECONOMIC;
NATURE AND ETHICS; PROPERTY; PUBLIC HEALTH
POLICY; PUBLIC POLICY; RISK; TECHNOLOGY; TECH-
NOLOGY AND NATURE.
Bibliography
Aiken, William. “Ethical Issues in Agriculture.” In Earth-
bound, edited by Tom Regan, 247–88. New York: Ran-
dom House, 1984. Excellent overview of issues.
Aiken, William, and Hugh LaFollette, eds. World Hunger
and Moral Obligation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1977. Ethical obligations regarding hunger.
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America. San Francisco:
Sierra Club, 1977. Argues for sustainable agriculture.
Blatz, Charles, ed. Ethics and Agriculture. Moscow, ID:
University of Idaho Press, 1991. Collected essays on
ethical issues in agriculture.
Brown, Lester, ed. State of the World 1985; . . . 1986. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1985; 1986. See his articles: “Re-
ducing Hunger,” pp. 53–73 of the 1985 volume (sur-
veys agricultural reforms needed to reduce hunger);
and “Conserving Soils,” pp. 23–41 of the 1986 volume
(surveys agricultural reforms to reduce topsoil losses).
Burkhardt, Jeffrey. “Agribusiness Ethics.” Journal of Busi-
ness Ethics 5 (1986): 333–45. Reviews the major busi-
ness ethics issues applicable to agriculture.
Busch, Lawrence, and William Lacy, eds. The Agricultural
Scientific Enterprise. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986. Is
agricultural research ethically biased?
Campbell, Keith. Food for the Future. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1979. Defends progressive, large-
scale, high-technology, chemical-intensive agriculture.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Cambridge, MA: Riverside,
1962. Classic analysis of the hazards of pesticide use.
Frey, R. G. Rights, Killing, and Suffering. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1983. Ethical defense of meat eating and
animal husbandry.
Gewirth, Alan. “Human Rights and the Prevention of Can-
cer.” American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1980):
117–26.
Hurnik, J., and Hugh Lehman. “Ethics and Farm Animal
Welfare.” Journal of Agricultural Ethics 1, no. 4
(1988): 305–18. Ethical obligations in animal hus-
bandry.
Kunkel, H. “Agricultural Ethics.” Agriculture and Human
Values 1 (1984): 20–23. Survey of issues in agricul-
tural ethics.
agricultural ethics
Lehman, Hugh. “On the Moral Acceptability of Killing
Animals.” Journal of Agricultural Ethics 1, no. 2
(1988): 155–62. Analysis of situations in which it is
ethically defensible to kill animals.
Regan, Tom, and Peter Singer, eds. Animal Rights and
Human Obligations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1976. Classic anthology on ethical arguments re-
garding animal treatment and factory farming.
Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. “Agriculture, Ethics, and Re-
strictions on Property Rights.” Journal of Agricultural
Ethics 1, no. 1 (1988): 21–40. Arguments for restrict-
ing property rights in order to promote the family farm,
ensure equal opportunity, and discourage agribusiness
monopolies.
———. Environmental Ethics. Second edition. Pacific
Grove, CA: Boxwood, 1991. “Pesticide Toxicity: An
Ethical Perspective” argues that use of broad-spectrum
pesticides is ethically indefensible.
Steiner, Frederick, and John E. Theilacker, eds. Protecting
Farmlands. Westport, CT: AVI, 1984. Discussion of ar-
guments for protecting farmland.
Thompson, Paul. “Ethics in Agriculture Research.” Jour-
nal of Agricultural Ethics 1, no. 1 (1988): 11–20. Sur-
vey and an analysis of key ethical issues in agricultural
research.
van den Bosch, Robert. The Pesticide Conspiracy. New
York: Doubleday, 1978. Reprinted, Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1989.
Kristin Shrader-Frechette
akrasia
See weakness of will.
al-Fārābı̄
See Fārābı̄, al-.
alienation
The English term “alienation,” like its French and
German counterparts, has long had a number of
uses. Prior to HEGEL (1770–1831), however, these
terms had no significant employment in philosophy.
Hegel made important use of the concept of alien-
ation (Entfremdung), in ways that were seized upon
and adapted by Karl MARX (1818–1883); but little
notice was taken of any of this until Marx’s early
writings were published and began to attract atten-
tion in the 1930s.
This led both to the rediscovery of Hegel’s dis-
48
cussion and to a wide variety of further adaptations
and applications of the notion, not only within
Marxist circles but also in existential philosophy and
theology, in SOCIOLOGY and social psychology, and
in critiques of modern life and society. Consequently,
while one may speak of “the phenomenon of alien-
ation” in Hegel, and of “the alienation syndrome” in
Marx, the term today no more designates anything
specific than does the term “separation,” with which
it is now roughly synonymous.
Alienation in Hegel and Marx
Hegel introduced the notions of alienation and
self-alienation in the context of his scheme of the
self-actualizing development of Geist (spirit). This
process, as he conceived of it, involves a repeated
three-stage pattern in which some form of objectiv-
ity is established, and with it an associated form of
consciousness that is initially at one with it. This
gives way to a stage in which consciousness comes
to experience that objectivity as an alien reality, with
which it ceases to identify. The third stage involves
the overcoming of this separation, as consciousness
discovers the objectivity to be an expression (or ob-
jectification and realization) of its own nature, and
so reidentifies itself with it. Hegel characterized the
second-stage withdrawal or absence of identification
in terms of alienation. He further took it to have the
significance of self-alienation, by which he meant
both that, in the absence of such identification,
something with which one’s self is bound up has
become alien to one, and that an essential element
of one’s full self-realization as Geist is thus lacking.
The most salient instance of such alienation and self-
alienation in Hegel is that associated with the ex-
perience of the “substance” of one’s society as an
alien reality.
Inspired in part by Ludwig FEUERBACH (1804–
1872) and his critique of Hegel, Marx appropriated
these Hegelian notions and gave them a different
application and explication. For Marx, “alienation”
retained its basic Hegelian meaning and use in con-
nection with our relation to our self-objectifying and
self-developing activity. However, he made its focus
the concrete practical activity of productive labor,
and took the inability to identify with one’s labor
and the products of one’s labor (under the condi-
tions prevailing in capitalist society) to be the fun-
damental forms of alienation. While Marx also ex-

tended the application of the notion to encompass
several associated forms of separation of human be-
ings from each other, he curiously made no use of it
(as Hegel and many others have) in connection with
our relation to social and cultural formations. He
did, however, follow Hegel in employing the notion
of “self-alienation” to refer to human existence that
falls short of full human self-realization, as he
(rather differently from Hegel) understood it, and
likewise considered such self-alienation to be linked
to the specific forms of alienation he discusses.
Subsequent Uses of “Alienation”
The ways in which these notions have subse-
quently been construed and applied are legion.
While some of the phenomena specified may be re-
lated to each other, all of them cannot possibly be
supposed to be connected in any significant way. In-
terpersonal relationships admit of various sorts of
separations to which the term has been applied, as
do one’s relations to God, nature, one’s own prod-
ucts, the products of others, social structures, po-
litical INSTITUTIONS, cultural formations, prevailing
NORMS and values, events one does not comprehend,
processes one does not control, and one’s own labor,
actions, and body. Such “forms” of alienation have
in common only that they may be characterized as
separations of some sort, in contrast to some prior,
possible, or merely conceivable forms of unity.
Generally speaking, forms or conceptions of
alienation pertain to relations in which one may
stand to something other than oneself, while self-
alienation has to do with one’s relation to one’s own
(true) self or nature. In some conceptions of alien-
ation, the basic idea is that of the experience of the
radical otherness of something, in contrast to a feel-
ing of identification or unity with it. In others, the
basic idea is that of a condition of the absence of
unity with these things, regardless of how (if at all)
one regards or experiences them. The notion of self-
alienation, conceived in terms of a disparity between
one’s actual condition and one’s true (or truly hu-
man) nature, is a special case of this sort.
Normative-Evaluative Import
The idea of alienation owes much of its contem-
porary appeal to the normative-evaluative force it is
commonly understood to convey. It is often sup-
49
alienation
posed to signify not merely that a separation of some
sort has come to obtain, but moreover that some-
thing is wrong with the separation, which therefore
should be overcome if it can be, and is to be la-
mented if it cannot. The most interesting of such
conceptions of alienation designate certain relations
of separation in which one may stand to aspects of
one’s society (social, cultural, and political alien-
ation), the world of nature and things (world alien-
ation), God (religious alienation), other people (in-
terpersonal alienation), one’s labor and products
(WORK alienation), and one’s “self” or true nature
(self-alienation).
Not all such separations, however, are intrinsi-
cally and indisputably undesirable. Indeed, in some
contexts certain of them may actually have positive
rather than negative significance. If it is possible for
individuals to preserve or achieve relations of iden-
tification, harmony, community, integration or ac-
cordance with something they confront, produce,
do, or are, and if such relations do not obtain, the
contrasting separations may be described in terms
of “alienation.” Further argument is needed, how-
ever, to determine whether and why any of these re-
lations are objectionable. The fact that such sepa-
rations may be termed forms of alienation by itself
neither establishes that something is wrong with
them, nor indicates what it is that is wrong with
them, nor implies anything about what would be
preferable to them. The burden of doing so falls on
the interpretive-evaluative theory in the context of
which the notion is thus employed.
See also: ATHEISM; AUTHENTICITY; CAMUS; COMMU-
NITARIANISM; CRITICAL THEORY; CULTURAL STUDIES;
EXISTENTIAL ETHICS;FEUERBACH; HEGEL; HEIDEG-
GER; INTEGRITY; INTERESTS;
MARX; MARXISM;
NEEDS; PERSON, CONCEPT OF; PERSONAL RELATION-
SHIPS; POSTMODERNISM; PRAXIS; SARTRE; SELF-
KNOWLEDGE; SOCIOLOGY; WORK.
Bibliography
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin
O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1959 [1942]. A classic of
the alienation literature that does not use the word, by
the author of The Stranger.
Feuer, Lewis. “What Is Alienation? The Career of a Con-
cept.” New Politics 1, no. 3 (1962): 116–34. A critique
and lament.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. Principles of the Philosophy of the
Future. Translated by Manfred H. Vogel. Indianapolis,
alienation
IN: Hackett, 1986. Criticism of Hegel, on alienation
and more generally.
Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon,
1941. Along with his The Sane Society (London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), the book that popular-
ized the concept of alienation.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by
A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977 [1807].
Especially chapter 6B. Where it all began.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper
and Row, 1962 [1927]. See especially sections 38, 51,
and 68. The book that launched existential philosophy,
featuring alienation in connection with inauthenticity.
Josephson, Eric, and Mary Josephson, eds. Man Alone:
Alienation in Modern Society. New York: Dell, 1962.
Anthology of alienation literature.
Keniston, Kenneth. The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in
American Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1965. Why Johnny drops out.
Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert
Tucker. 2d edition, 66–125. New York: W. W. Norton,
1978. After Hegel, the locus classicus. Also see other
early writings of Marx in this volume.
Petrovic, Gajo. Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century. Gar-
den City, NY: Doubleday, 1967. Especially part 2. A
Marxist-humanist’s interpretation. Alienation as
dehumanization.
Schacht, Richard. Alienation. Garden City, NY: Double-
day, 1970. A critical analysis of the literature from He-
gel onward.
———. The Future of Alienation. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1994. A reconsideration of
these central themes.
Seeman, Melvin. “On the Meaning of Alienation.” Amer-
ican Sociological Review 24, no. 6 (1959): 783–91. A
useful survey of sociological uses.
Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, vol. II. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1957. Self-alienation in exis-
tentialist theology.
Richard Schacht
altruism
In some form altruism has been a perennial concern
of moral philosophy, and more recently of PSYCHOL-
OGY, economics, SOCIOLOGY, and biology as well. Is
altruism possible, and if it is, is it a good or a bad
thing, are questions familiar from the time of PLATO
(c. 430–347 B.C.E.). Yet the assessment of altruism
depends on its definition; and in this area much con-
fusion still remains.
50
Definition
Some social psychologists tend to define altruism
in terms of action intentionally aimed at helping oth-
ers. But since such action could be engaged in for
purely self-interested reasons, philosophers have
wanted to define altruism as involving in addition
some other-directed motivation—a regard for the
well-being of others for its own sake. Even so, con-
fusion remains about the definition of altruism. Some
use it implicitly or explicitly to refer to any such re-
gard for others; some restrict it to a placing of the
INTERESTS of others ahead of those of oneself. The
latter seems to correspond more to ordinary usage,
while the former has become the definition of choice
for most philosophers and many psychologists.
A further definitional issue concerns unconscious
motivation. Anna Freud (1895–1982) describes a
patient—a governess—who seems to care genuinely
and selflessly for her friends and the children in her
charge; but Freud diagnoses her as being animated
on an unconscious level by a vicarious living out of
long-suppressed self-centered desires for affection,
romance, and success. Standard philosophic defini-
tions of altruism would seem unproblematically to
count this as altruism, since there does seem to be
some conscious level on which Freud’s patient cares
for others and acts on their behalf. Nevertheless, one
might at least provisionally want to distinguish dif-
ferent levels of altruism, saying that someone can be
consciously altruistic but unconsciously egoistic.
One might also take a step further to inquire
whether the governess’s concern manifests a genu-
ine understanding of the other person, or whether,
by contrast, she seems to be attributing to her
friends and the children desires and NEEDS they do
not have, desires and needs which the governess her-
self has but cannot acknowledge. The latter situation
might make us more hesitant to say flatly that the
woman is altruistic, on any level, at least without
some of the qualifications discussed below. In any
case, these issues of unconscious motivation, largely
ignored by philosophers, cannot be avoided in a dis-
cussion of altruism.
This motivational question is raised also by the
contribution of sociobiology to an understanding of
altruism. Sociobiology sees the risk-taking or self-
sacrificing behavior of various animal and even in-
sect species—for example, birds giving warning

cries at the appearance of a predator, and in doing
so risking revealing their own location—as contrib-
uting to the survivability of that species. Thus socio-
biologists see what they call “altruism” as having
evolutionary significance for natural selection. Some
adherents of this perspective, most notably E. O.
Wilson and Richard Dawkins, draw the inference
that the behavior in question is not in fact altruistic
since it is simply the species’ gene pool’s—or even
the individual agent’s genes’—way of perpetuating
itself. As with unconscious motivation, deep prob-
lems arise here concerning the level of analysis on
which altruism is being defined. But critics, such as
Mary Midgley, point out that showing the evolution-
ary origins of human altruistic concern in animals
hardly shows it not actually to be altruism.
Whether altruism really exists, or whether all
seemingly altruistic acts are really motivated by self-
interest, has been a matter of great controversy
within the history of moral philosophy. Bishop Jo-
seph BUTLER (1692–1752) demonstrated to the sat-
isfaction of many that concern for the well-being of
particular other persons cannot be assimilated to
concern for one’s own well-being. But the contro-
versy continues, and the assumption that all human
motivation is egoistic still animates important
strands within psychoanalytic and empirical psy-
chology, as well as moral philosophy.
Value of Altruism
Some commentators, such as Arthur SCHOPEN-
HAUER (1788–1860), regard altruism as the corner-
stone of ethics; and some Christian ethical thought,
such as that elaborated by Søren KIERKEGAARD
(1813–1855) in Works of Love, lends support to
this position. Yet the ethical views of Plato and AR-
ISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.E.) entirely lack a concept of
altruism, and others see altruism as only one among
many equally important virtues. Friedrich NIE-
TZSCHE (1844–1900) even condemned altruism,
seeing it as grounded in RESENTMENT and in escape
from the self and from those higher values (such as
COURAGE and spiritual strength) which only the self
can create.
Altruism and Self-Negation
Some of these differences on the centrality of al-
truism to ethics are the product of confusions in the
51
altruism
definition of altruism, as mentioned earlier. If altru-
ism is defined as requiring suppression, negation, or
belittling of the self—as involved in valuing of the
other above the self—it is more open to Nietzsche’s
criticisms than if it merely means concern for others.
SCHELER (1874–1928), while affirming Nietzsche’s
view that concern for others can be a product of self-
disvalue and self-escape, pointed out that a concern
for others can also be rooted in a strong and confi-
dent self, one which can attend to the plight of oth-
ers and react with fellow feeling or compassion pre-
cisely because it is able to take care of its own needs
without great self-absorption and continual bolster-
ing of its sense of self-worth.
Many philosophers have understood human mo-
tivation in such a way that any altruistic action is
always at the expense of the self; the thought is that
in every situation one must choose between the good
of others or of oneself (except when they fortunately
coincide). This mistaken view lends support to the
definition of altruism as always involving self-
negation, and thereby leaves it open to Nietzsche’s
criticisms. Butler preceded Scheler in seeing that al-
truistic action need entail no loss to the self, and the
development of depth psychology in the twentieth
century has supported the view that a healthy atten-
tion to self and a healthy concern for others, far from
being at odds, often tend to reinforce one another.
This is not to deny that altruism can involve great
personal RISK or sacrifice, as seen, for example,
among Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust (non-
Jewish rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe), studied in
depth by Samuel and Pearl Oliner. Nevertheless,
even in many of these cases it is psychic health and
SELF-ESTEEM which enable these individuals to en-
gage in such risk.
Yet questions about the value of altruism still re-
main. Certainly one basis on which to assess altru-
ism as good or bad (whether this is strictly a moral
basis is unclear) has to do with whether the altruism
is healthy for the agent herself. Following on Nie-
tzsche’s, Scheler’s, and Anna Freud’s insight, one
may say that if the agent’s altruism (toward some
individual, or even in general) helps maintain an un-
healthy (e.g., dependent, un-self-knowing) structure
of CHARACTER or mode of life, then even if it is per-
fectly genuine the altruism is unhealthy and in that
respect bad.
altruism
Altruism and the Good of the Other
A second basis has to do with the effect of the
altruism on the good of the other person. If altruism
is defined solely in terms of a desire for another’s
good, there is no guarantee that the good of the
other is actually served by the altruism. Perhaps the
agent has no understanding of the other’s good, and
his action subverts that good rather than furthering
it. Iris MURDOCH rightly notes that understanding a
(specific) other person is often a difficult task and a
morally significant one. Perhaps one could build in
such an understanding as part of the definition of
altruism. For it could be argued that if the agent is
truly concerned with the other’s good, then she must
be concerned to understand that good; if she does
not, this is evidence that she is not really concerned,
and hence not truly altruistic.
Yet in many cases we acknowledge altruistic con-
cern as itself genuine and authentic even when the
agent shows little understanding of the other. If we
adhere to a definition of altruism which makes it
distinct from understanding of the other, then we
can at least say that altruism combined with under-
standing is more clearly a good than mere altruism
per se. A seemingly more systematic problem with
altruism, related to the issue of the good of the other
(and often associated particularly with CHARITY), is
that while one can genuinely care about the other
and succeed in meeting that person’s need, some-
times it can be better not to help but to allow the
person to meet his or her own need. Too much help
can cause or reinforce a sense of dependency, which
undermines the other’s capacities for self-help and
autonomous need satisfaction. Nevertheless, this
worry can be overstated, as, for example, SIDGWICK
(1838–1900) does in affirming that it is better that
each adult have the general expectation that he him-
self rather than others will meet his needs. As KANT
(1724–1804) said, we are dependent beings and
need to rely on one another for all sorts of things;
needing to receive from others is not as a general
rule something to seek to avoid.
Still, meeting an individual’s needs at the expense
of her autonomy could turn out to be on the whole
a bad rather than a good thing for her; and, in some
situations, letting others remain in distress or sink
into a personal morass can be the best thing to do
for them. Regard for the autonomy of others can
perhaps be included as part of the overall good for
52
which an agent can have altruistic concern, though
the agent may recognize this need for autonomy
while having no genuine (altruistic) concern for the
other person at all. Thus we need not accept ordi-
nary language’s seeming association (present in
much philosophical usage as well) of altruism with
active intervention in another person’s situation. We
can rather accept Milton Mayeroff’s and Nel Nod-
dings’s concept of an active enabling—a giving to
the other of space to find her own way to knowing
and meeting her own needs—as a way of picturing
an altruism which takes seriously the other’s auton-
omy as part of her overall good.
Types of Altruism
Even without the implication of self-sacrifice, and
with autonomy and the knowledge of others built
into the definition of altruism itself, the notion of
altruism as concern for others is not a unified phe-
nomenon but encompasses distinct phenomena,
which might be differently evaluated. The definition,
for example, would seem to include LOVE for one’s
relations (either kin or friends), since presumably
one cares for them for their own sakes. But this is a
very different phenomenon from being concerned
about a stranger. One difference is that one’s own
specific good is bound up with one’s relations in a
way it is not with strangers; so acting on one’s
friend’s behalf, out of concern, is inevitably bound
up with the good of that relationship to oneself (even
if not done with the goal of sustaining that good).
For this reason some are reluctant to call such action
“altruistic” at all, insofar as they take altruism en-
tirely to exclude intrinsic connection to a good to
the self.
Consider also cooperation, construing it here as
meaning more than merely adhering to rules of mu-
tual self-protection and self-interest. Let us assume
it to include a valuing of the cooperative endeavor
for its own sake and to include TRUST in the other
person or persons involved in the endeavor. One im-
plication of this trust is that one restrains the pursuit
of one’s own interest out of regard for that of the
other with whom one is cooperating. But this is far
from the active concern for the other’s good which
is more generally associated with the concept of al-
truism; in fact, trust and cooperation can be seen as
having their own specific kind of value precisely be-
cause they do not require active concern for the good

of others. They require only a limited regard, which
is internal to and bounded by the cooperative en-
deavor itself, while that endeavor as a whole (though
not each individual act within it) is seen as a good
to the individual participant. Yet, as in the analogous
case of FRIENDSHIP mentioned above, this motiva-
tion is covered by the general definition of altruism
as including action taken out of regard for another’s
good.
Thus while concern for strangers, concern for
friends, and cooperative activity all fall within the
general rubric of altruism, they are significantly dis-
tinct psychic and moral phenomena.
Is Altruism Rational?
A further issue also related to the value of altru-
ism—one which has particularly engaged the atten-
tion of Anglo-American philosophers in the last sev-
eral decades—is whether altruism is rational, that
is, whether the good of another itself supplies a rea-
son for an agent to further that good. Some affirm
the traditional “ethical egoist” position that ration-
ality involves taking only one’s own interests as REA-
SONS FOR ACTION (though one may happen to take
such an interest in another person’s interests).
Others, such as Thomas Nagel, affirm the ration-
ality of altruism on the grounds that reason requires
us to recognize that we are only one person among
others, and that this recognition must be reflected in
‘agent-neutral’ reasons for action. It is not entirely
clear whether this view rationally requires altruism,
or only declares it (contrary to some versions of eth-
ical EGOISM) rationally intelligible. This ambiguity in
turn yields an ambiguity in the view’s implications
for the moral status—and more generally the moral
value—of altruism.
In either case, little attention has been given to
the connection between this rational altruism and
altruism as a psychological phenomenon. For ex-
ample, does rational altruism supply its own moti-
vational force, and how motivationally efficacious is
that force? Nor has rational altruism been placed
within the wider context of value within which al-
truism as a whole must be evaluated.
See also: AUTONOMY OF MORAL AGENTS; BENEVO-
LENCE; BIOETHICS; BIOLOGICAL THEORY; BUTLER;
CARE; CHARITY; COOPERATION, CONFLICT AND CO-
ORDINATION; EGOISM; EVOLUTION; FAMILY; FRIEND-
53
altruism
SHIP; INTERESTS; MOTIVES; NEEDS; PERSONAL RE-
LATIONSHIPS; PSYCHOLOGY; RATIONALITY VS.
REASONABLENESS; REASONS FOR ACTION; RECIPROC-
ITY; RISK; SCHOPENHAUER; SELF AND SOCIAL SELF;
SELF-ESTEEM; SELF-KNOWLEDGE; SOCIAL PSYCHOL-
OGY; SOCIOLOGY; SYMPATHY.
Bibliography
Blum, Lawrence. Friendship, Altruism, and Morality. Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Discussion of
nature of altruism as emotion-based phenomenon, and
its importance for morality.
Butler, Joseph. Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983 [1726]. Classic defense of
possibility of altruism against Hobbes’s version of psy-
chological egoism.
Freud, Anna. “A Form of Altruism.” Chapter 10 in her
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Rev. ed. New
York: International Universities Press, 1966 [1936].
Important discussion in psychoanalytic tradition.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. Translated by Howard
and Edna Hong. New York: Harper and Row, 1962
[1847]. Important disquisition on nature of Christian
love.
Mayeroff, Milton. On Caring. New York: Harper and Row,
1971. Discussion of connection between altruism and
understanding of the other person’s good.
Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Na-
ture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Good
discussion of implications of sociobiology, and biology
more generally, for understanding of altruism.
Monroe, Kristen Renwick. The Heart of Altruism: Percep-
tion of a Common Humanity. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996. General theory of altruism and
critique of self-interest models of behavior based on
study of Holocaust rescuers.
Nagel, Thomas. The Possibility of Altruism. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1970. Argues that altruism is rational.
Oliner, Samuel P., and Pearl M. Oliner. The Altruistic Per-
sonality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York:
The Free Press, 1988. Important empirical-theoretical
study of altruism, especially in extreme situations.
Scheler, Max. The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Pe-
ter Heath. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954
[1913]. Important discussion of relation of altruism to
self-worth and self-negation.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. On the Basis of Morality. Trans-
lated by E. F. J. Payne. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1965 [1842]. Argues that altruism in the form of com-
passion is the basis of morality.
Thomas, Lawrence. Living Morally: A Psychology of
Moral Character. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1989. A theory of moral character built around
altruism—its biological substratum, what it sustains
altruism
intrapersonally and socially, and how it is bound up
with individual flourishing.
Williams, Bernard. “Egoism and Altruism.” In his Prob-
lems of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1973.
Lawrence Blum
American moral philosophy
National designations can function only as short-
hand for characteristics that are pervasive but nei-
ther universal nor unique. We may speak of German
idealism and French positivism so long as we re-
member that there are German positivists and
French idealists, and that Germans who lose their
idealism do not forfeit their national identity.
This is the only sensible spirit in which we can
discuss American moral philosophy. For every major
position in ethics is well represented in American
thought, and none can be dignified as uniquely ex-
pressive of the American psyche. Yet certain themes
and approaches appear prevalent in the works of
major thinkers, and we find surprising similarities in
ethics among philosophers whose positions in other
fields lead us to expect differences.
A general characterization of American moral
philosophy is most easily developed by considering
the views of such major thinkers of the classical pe-
riod as William JAMES (1842–1910), John DEWEY
(1859–1952), and George SANTAYANA (1863–
1952). When Ralph Waldo EMERSON (1803–1882)
called on American scholars to develop and cele-
brate “an original relation” to the world, he set ex-
perience as the standard of philosophical thought
and gave voice to the significance of immediacy.
He and such other powerful representatives of the
American spirit as Walt Whitman desired to over-
come what they believed were the artificial dichot-
omies of their European forebears. They refused to
acknowledge an ultimate difference between the in-
terests of individuals and those of their communi-
ties. They rejected a sharp distinction between hu-
mans and the natural world. They embraced a view
of human nature that depicted mind, will, emotions,
and spirit as continuous with the body.
These articles of faith made a profound impres-
sion on the great philosophers who flourished be-
tween 1880 and 1950. Their moral views focused
on the good as it is derived from DESIRE and need,
54
and on individuals who can attain fulfillment only in
community. They stressed the significance of dem-
ocratic processes, affirmed the possibility of moral
progress, and celebrated the multiplicity of values
that coexist in a pluralist society.
William James’s “The Moral Philosopher and the
Moral Life” (1891) is a classical statement of plu-
ralist DEMOCRACY in the world of moral values. He
insists that nothing can be good without some con-
scious being demanding or desiring it. All such de-
mands are legitimate, all must be considered, and all
impose obligations on everyone who can help. In the
final analysis, of course, some claims may have to
remain unmet, but only because they get in the way
of attaining greater satisfactions.
James adopted from C. S. PEIRCE (1839–1914)
the idea of an open future that invites experimen-
tation. He laments “a certain blindness” in human
beings that prevents them from appreciating the
commitments and enjoyments of others. He believes
that we cannot determine what is truly good “until
the last man has had his say.” In the meantime, how-
ever, we can improve life by channeling human ag-
gressive energies into “moral equivalents” to war.
The 1910 essay introducing this idea served as an
inspiration for founding the Peace Corps (estab-
lished 1961). James’s is a morality of caring whose
aim is to contribute to the maximization of valuable
experiences.
Josiah ROYCE (1855–1916), though an idealist,
is no less experimental and empirical in ethics than
his Harvard colleague James. His eloquent book,
The Philosophy of Loyalty, depicts individuals as ca-
pable of achieving fulfillment only by wholehearted
devotion to their chosen causes. The cause must
reach beyond the individual and encompass the
community, but it always remains a matter of revok-
able choice open to improvement through consci-
entious experimentation.
Loyalty to LOYALTY, Royce thinks, is the highest
principle of morality and captures the truth of both
the GOLDEN RULE and KANT’s (1724–1804) cate-
gorical imperative. It amounts to the tolerant and
democratic value of choosing only those causes that
enable others to pursue their own. Royce did not
draw a sharp line between the consequentialist bene-
fits that flow from energetic pursuit of worthy goals
and the soul-making value of persons attaining vir-
tue through resolve and sacrifice.
A disagreement between James and Royce sheds

interesting light on a certain ambivalence in the
American psyche. An unfailing advocate of the Prot-
estant ethic, Royce believes that we can never do
enough to meet our obligations. “Woe unto them
that are at ease in Zion,” he thunders, calling for the
greatest exertions in pursuit of the right and the
good.
James, by contrast, argues for the legitimacy of
“moral holidays,” suggesting that we must allow
ourselves the luxury of taking care of our own affairs
or of occasionally enjoying a break from doing good.
Though by no means self-indulgent, James’s attitude
affirms the virtue of respite from the cares of the
world. But, revealingly, even James believes that
such moral holidays must support our “strenuous
mood.” They ought not to be more than breaks in
the necessary activities of helping others and devel-
oping ourselves.
Santayana and Dewey present a similarly inter-
esting contrast. Both view the good as connected to
the natures of those who seek it, but Santayana
thinks that such natures can be understood by ref-
erence to individuals alone. So the good is whatever
truly satisfies the cravings of the private soul, leaving
the social maximization of satisfactions as an op-
tional community goal. His stress on the insular in-
dividual brings Santayana close to being an Ameri-
can existentialist, though his appreciation of a
disinterested spectatorial stance points to a connec-
tion with SCHOPENHAUER’s (1788–1860) aesthetic
transcendence and to Stoic thought.
For Dewey, by contrast, individuals cannot be un-
derstood apart from their social context. Borrowing
from Aristotle, he maintains that morality must be
built on a platform of habits that render life in a
community rich and satisfying. The only reliable
means of constructing such habits is education de-
signed to enhance intelligence. The function of in-
telligence is to assess the conditions and conse-
quences of our actions, so that we may attain our
ends more effectively or reconstruct our desires to
accord with what is possible.
Both means and ends are, therefore, open to ra-
tional examination. We assess means by reference to
their tendency to conduct us to our ends, and ends
in relation to other objectives whose attainment they
advance or impede. Resisting an absolute distinction
between means and ends, Dewey calls attention to
those remarkable times in life when every experience
is both useful and delightful.
55
American moral philosophy
This union of the “instrumental” and the “con-
summatory” constitutes moments of human control
and satisfaction that make existence glow. Dewey’s
ultimate ideal of growth must be understood as the
concurrent expansion of means and ends by which
human satisfactions become more widely shared,
more diversified, and more secure.
Although Dewey’s position appears similar to
UTILITARIANISM, he is anxious to distance himself
from that view. He argues that the utilitarian tradi-
tion is burdened with a monistic conception of the
good, a simplistic idea of motivation, and too sharp
a distinction between means and ends. He main-
tains, instead, that the good is constructed in the
process of converting the satisfying into the
satisfactory.
Satisfaction is a mere fact of nature. It becomes
normative when we direct human effort to sustain-
ing it and find that it continues to satisfy over time
in a broad social context of experience. The future,
the community, and the critical balancing of values
become, in this way, inseparably involved in the
good life of any individual. DESIRE, intelligent effort,
control over consequences, and sustained fulfillment
are thus the socially conditioned elements that,
properly related, constitute the good.
Though lacking elaborate technical details,
Dewey’s moral thought presents a fully worked out
naturalistic ethics. He has little sympathy for
RIGHTS, but his commitment to democratic EQUAL-
ITY makes him take the demands of justice seriously.
His view is a celebration of social intelligence and
cooperation as they lead to the gradual improvement
of human life. Although critical of the dehumanizing
aspects of industrial life, Dewey is in full agreement
with the energetic optimism of the American spirit.
He thinks our efforts can move us in the direction
of what Santayana calls “a life of reason” by estab-
lishing salutary habits, harmonizing desires, and in-
creasing the satisfactions of as many persons as
possible.
American moral philosophy has too many varie-
ties to be reduced to a single type. Yet Dewey’s
thought comes near to serving as its paradigm. R. B.
PERRY’s (1876–1957) general theory of value, C. I.
LEWIS’ (1883–1964) work in ethics, and many cur-
rent versions of American naturalism reflect
Dewey’s influence or display striking similarities to
his views. Even John RAWLS shares his love of LIB-
ERTY and concern for the disadvantaged, though
American moral philosophy
Dewey would have profound misgivings about the
individualistic foundations of Rawls’s system and
about the role rights and intuitions play in his
thought.
Much that goes by the name of “neo-pragma-
tism,” however, appears to have lost contact with the
vital impulse to improve the human condition. Rich-
ard Rorty’s solidarity is anemic by comparison with
James’s stress on enriching life and Dewey’s efforts
at public critique and reform. The true heirs of the
American tradition of moral philosophy are think-
ers, such as John McDermott, who continue to ex-
plore the crisis points of life in industrial society and
philosophers who bring the insights of PRAGMATISM
to bear on environmental problems and difficult is-
sues in health care.
See also: ADLER; BRANDT; DEWEY; DWORKIN; ED-
WARDS; EMERSON; FRANKENA; FULLER; GERT; GE-
WIRTH; JAMES; JEFFERSON; KING; LEOPOLD; LEWIS;
MACINTYRE; MEAD; MURPHY; NOZICK; PAINE;
PEIRCE; PERRY; RAND; RAWLS; ROYCE; SANTAYANA;
SINGER; STEVENSON; TAYLOR; THOMSON; THO-
REAU; TUFTS; WALZER. Also see: BIOETHICS; COM-
MUNITARIANISM; DEMOCRACY; ENVIRONMENTAL
ETHICS; EQUALITY; EXISTENTIAL ETHICS; GOLDEN
RULE; INDIVIDUALISM; INTUITIONISM; LIBERTY; LOY-
ALTY; MORAL PLURALISM; MULTICULTURALISM; NAT-
URALISM; NEO-STOICISM; PRAGMATISM.
Bibliography
Dewey, John. The Middle Works of John Dewey. See De-
mocracy and Education, vol. 8, and Human Nature
and Conduct, vol. 14. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1976.
———. The Later Works of John Dewey. See Experience
and Nature, vol. 1, and The Quest for Certainty, vol.
4. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1988.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In his
Essays, First and Second Series. Franklin Center, PA:
Franklin Library, 1981 [1837].
Gouinlock, James. Rediscovering the Moral Life. Buffalo,
NY: Prometheus Books, 1993.
James, William. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral
Life,” “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” and
“The Moral Equivalent of War.” In The Writings of Wil-
liam James, edited by John J. McDermott. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977 [1891; 1899; 1910].
Lewis, C. I. The Ground and Nature of the Right. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1955.
56
———. Values and Imperatives. Edited by John Lange.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969.
McDermott, John. The Culture of Experience. New York:
New York University Press, 1976.
———. Streams of Experience. Amherst, MA: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
McGee, Glenn. Pragmatic Bioethics. Nashville, TN: Van-
derbilt University Press, 1999.
Perry, Ralph B. General Theory of Value. New York: Long-
mans Green, 1926.
Royce, Josiah. The Philosophy of Loyalty. Nashville, TN:
Vanderbilt University Press, 1997.
———. The World and the Individual. Gloucester: Peter
Smith, 1976.
Santayana, George. Reason in Common Sense. New York:
Dover, 1980.
———. Winds of Doctrine. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons,
1926.
John Lachs
amnesty and pardon
Amnesty and pardon are official acts of clemency
that exempt a person from some or all of the punitive
consequences of a criminal conviction. Granting
amnesty or pardon ensures that the person to whom
it is given will not suffer all the PUNISHMENT the law
inflicts for the crime charged.
Although the distinction between amnesty and
pardon can be difficult to draw in practice, amnesty
has been defined as an act of oblivion, by which an
offender is granted immunity to prosecution. Usu-
ally granted before a trial takes place and often be-
fore offenders have been charged with specific
crimes, amnesties are usually granted to groups of
people, often unnamed members of a class defined
by a particular, often political, offense. However,
amnesty can also be granted to individuals, usually
as a step toward reconciliation after a war or politi-
cal upheaval.
Like amnesty, the pardon can take many forms.
Pardons can be full or partial, absolute or condi-
tional. They can be individual or general—a fact that
complicates the distinction between amnesty and
pardon. Although there are famous exceptions, in
typical cases in the United States the pardon is
granted only after an offender has been convicted
and sentenced, in which case it prevents further pun-
ishment; most often, the pardon is granted only after
the offender has completed the sentence and a sub-
sequent waiting period, when a pardon helps the of-

fender regain civil rights lost as a consequence of a
criminal conviction.
The Exercise of Clemency Powers
Amnesty and pardon are common to all cultures
and all periods of history. With the exception of
China, all nations claim a pardoning power of some
sort. Under Article II, Section 2 of the United States
Constitution, the president has the “Power to grant
Reprieves and Pardons for offenses against the
United States, except in cases of impeachment.” For
violations of state law—the bulk of all offenses, in-
cluding murder—the power to pardon rests with the
governor or an executive pardoning board. In most
nations, pardon and amnesty powers are not subject
to legal restriction or review.
The exercise of clemency powers has historically
been justified by considerations of public interest,
justice, and MERCY. The authors of the U.S. Consti-
tution, for example, recognized that the public in-
terest is sometimes better served by forgoing pun-
ishment than by exacting the full measure of
punishment allowed by law. Alexander Hamilton
(1755–1804) wrote, “In seasons of insurrection or
rebellion, there are often critical moments when a
well-timed offer of pardon . . . may restore the tran-
quility of the commonwealth,” a tranquility that
President Gerald Ford also cited in defending his
pardon (1974) of Richard Nixon (1913–1994).
In addition to advancing the public interest, clem-
ency powers can be justified by considerations of
justice. A pardon may correct an injustice done by
the courts, as when evidence indicates that a con-
victed person is innocent or, while not legally inno-
cent, morally blameless or morally justified. Legal
systems make mistakes, and the clemency powers
offer a last chance to ensure that only those who
deserve punishment are punished and only so much
as they deserve.
Pardon and amnesty also serve to soften the
harshness of the law. “The criminal code of every
country partakes so much of necessary severity that
without an easy access to exceptions in favor of un-
fortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance
too sanguinary and cruel,” Hamilton wrote. FOR-
GIVENESS is, after all, a virtue, and the pardoning
power is a way to respond to pain with a simple act
of kindness.
57
amnesty and pardon
Amnesty and Pardon in Western History
The history of amnesty and pardon is as old as
the history of punishment. In Genesis, God granted
what amounts to a conditional pardon to Cain, the
world’s first murderer, banishing him to the Land of
Nod. Ancient Athens granted pardons on the vote
of 6,000 citizens, and the Romans had a detailed and
sophisticated system of pardoning. The practice of
decimation, for example, was a form of clemency:
rather than execute an entire army after a mutiny,
the commander would order his men to count off,
pardoning the first nine and killing each tenth sol-
dier. Probably the most famous Roman pardon was
granted by Pontius Pilate who, following Passover
custom, released a murderer named Barabbas rather
than the prisoner named Jesus.
From the end of the Roman Empire to the En-
lightenment, rival authorities struggled for the
power to pardon, a power correctly recognized as at
least as great as the power to punish. The right to
pardon was claimed by everyone who claimed a right
to punish—earls, kings, archbishops, clan chiefs,
priests, mobs, legislatures, and courts. In the harsh
penal systems of the time, there was good reason for
the liberal use of the pardon power; but many par-
dons were granted instead for military, political, per-
sonal, and financial reasons. Selling pardons (or in-
dulgences, in the case of the church) became a
dependable source of income for church and state.
Frequent use and abuse of the pardoning power
met harsh criticism: Since all government was pre-
sumed to come from God, all crimes were crimes
against God. God can forgive offenses against Him-
self, critics argued, but civil governments should not
usurp the divine prerogative. Eighteenth-century at-
tacks on the abuses of the great monarchies brought
a parallel argument: In a DEMOCRACY, a crime
against the state is a crime against the people, and
only the people have a right to forgive offenses
against them. English jurist Sir William Blackstone
(1723–1780) declared that in democracies, “this
power of pardon can never subsist,” and the par-
doning power was swept away by the French Rev-
olution in 1789.
In 1795, Immanuel KANT (1724–1804) pub-
lished, in The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, a
powerful polemic against pardon. “The law concern-
ing punishment is a categorical imperative, and woe
to him who rummages around in the winding paths
amnesty and pardon
of a theory of happiness looking for some advantage
to be gained by releasing the criminal from punish-
ment or reducing the amount of it.” People who dis-
obey the law do the other members of the commu-
nity a comparative injustice by exercising freedoms
they are not willing to grant to others, Kant argued.
Punishment limits the freedom of the offender and,
by that means, removes the injustice of the act.
Nothing less than like for like will restore EQUALITY.
If a state is to act justly, it has not only the right, but
the duty, to punish.
Jeremy BENTHAM (1748–1832), the utilitarian re-
former, also argued against the unrestrained use of
pardons, but on very different grounds. Following
the Principle of Utility, he argued, punishment
should be imposed when it bestows some benefit
that outweighs its harm. In Bentham’s view, the
overriding benefit of punishment is deterrence, and
a penal system that hopes to deter crimes cannot
tolerate exceptions. So mercy is seldom beneficial on
balance, and punishment should always be imposed,
unless it is “inefficacious . . . , groundless . . . , need-
less . . . or too expensive”—the limited circum-
stances that call for clemency.
Contemporary Debates about
Amnesty and Pardon
Debates about pardon and amnesty faded from
philosophical discussions during much of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, and pardons them-
selves gradually became less and less common in the
United States, to be replaced to some extent first by
the indeterminate sentence and then by a rigid get-
tough-on-crime stance. But in the later half of the
twentieth century, the unpopular pardon of Richard
Nixon, controversial amnesties granted to Vietnam
War draft evaders, and the process of truth and rec-
onciliation taking place following radical changes of
government in South Africa, Latin America, and
elsewhere have reopened discussion of amnesty and
pardons and revealed just how morally complicated
clemency is.
The pardoning power in the United States is a
direct descendent of English pardoning practices,
which were reputedly patterned after God’s. Ac-
cordingly, pardons have long been thought of as acts
of mercy akin to divine grace, a view affirmed by the
Supreme Court in United States v. Wilson (1833).
This view makes pardons supererogatory; pardons
58
are gifts that are undeserved, unfathomable, and not
subject to examination or critique. They are rooted
in the virtues of BENEVOLENCE and a forgiving spirit.
However, philosophers and jurists alike point out
that mercy without good reason is a kind of immor-
ality. In any given case, if a court has mandated a
sentence that is, in fact, just, then exacting less than
the deserved sentence works a retributive injustice,
since the offender does not receive the punishment
deserved; and it works an additional comparative
injustice, since the reduced punishment will be less
than that imposed on other, similar offenders. It
would seem that the merciful act of granting relief
from a just sentence is virtuous and unjust at the
same time. As the twentieth century draws to a
close, the paradox plays out on an international
stage, as nations attempting to use amnesty and par-
dons as means of national reconciliation find that the
competing claims of mercy and justice make clem-
ency decisions painful and complex.
See also: BENEVOLENCE; CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE; COR-
RECTIONAL ETHICS; DETERRENCE, THREATS AND RE-
TALIATION; EQUALITY;
FAIRNESS; FORGIVENESS;
GUILT AND SHAME;HART; INNOCENCE; JUSTICE, CIR-
CUMSTANCES OF; JUSTICE, RECTIFICATORY; LEGAL
PHILOSOPHY; MERCY; OBEDIENCE TO LAW; POLICE
ETHICS; PUNISHMENT; REVOLUTION; SYMPATHY;
UTILITARIANISM.
Bibliography
Barnett, J. “The Grounds of Pardon.” Journal of Criminal
Law, Criminology, and Political Science 17 (1926):
490–530. A thorough discussion of the grounds on
which pardons may properly be granted.
Bentham, Jeremy. The Principles of Morals and Legisla-
tion. Darien, CT: Hafner, 1948 [1780]. See especially
pages 171–77. A utilitarian justification for pardon un-
der specified conditions.
Card, Claudia. “On Mercy.” Philosophical Review 81
(1972): 182–207. A careful argument about the rela-
tion between justice and mercy.
“Clemency and Pardons Symposium.” University of Rich-
mond Law Review 27 (1993). A symposium on clem-
ency which includes articles by Anaya, Bedau, Kobil,
Ledewitz and Staples, MacFarlane, Moore, Radelet
and Zsembik, and Vandiver.
Humbert, W. H. The Pardoning Power of the President.
Washington, DC: The American Council on Public Af-
fairs, 1941. A fascinating compilation of information
about the pardons presidents have granted and the rea-
sons they have given.

Kalt, Brian C. “Pardon Me?: The Constitutional Case
against Presidential Self-Pardons.” The Yale Law Jour-
nal 106 (1996): 779–809. An argument that presi-
dents cannot pardon themselves.
Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysical Elements of Justice.
New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965 [1797]. See especially
page 100. Kant’s famous argument against the abuse
of the pardoning power.
Kobil, Daniel T. “The Quality of Mercy Strained: Wresting
the Pardoning Power from the King.” Texas Law Re-
view 64 (1991): 569–641. A consideration of the
proper rules of clemency in the American justice
system.
Moore, Kathleen Dean. Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the
Public Interest. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989. A history and analysis of the moral justification
for pardoning.
Murphy, Jeffrie. “Mercy and Legal Justice.” Social Philos-
ophy and Policy 4 (1986): 1–14. An attempt to address
the paradox of mercy, i.e., to be merciful is, perhaps,
to be unjust.
Roberts, H. R. T. “Mercy.” Philosophy 66 (1971): 352–
53. A paper that proposes that merciful acts are either
unjust or they are a kind of justice.
Sebba, L. “The Pardoning Power: A World Survey.” Jour-
nal of Criminal Law 78 (1977): 83–121. A survey of
pardoning practices around the world.
Smart, Alwynne. “Mercy.” Philosophy 43 (1968): 345–
59. The first essay in the contemporary debate about
when pardon can be justified.
U.S. Presidential Clemency Board. Report to the Presi-
dent. Washington, DC: GPO, 1975. A history of the
Anglo-American heritage of amnesty and pardon.
Legal Cases
Biddle v. Perovich, 274 U.S. 480 (1926). Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s opinion, defending the view that a pardon is
not an act of grace, but a tool for the public good.
United States v. Wilson, 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 150 (1833).
Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion that a pardon is
an act of grace.
Kathleen Dean Moore
analogical argument
Analogical thinking is perhaps the most basic and
common rational process. It is so frequently em-
ployed in everyday thought that we scarcely notice
it, until something goes wrong. We routinely use and
encounter it in law and morality as well as in science.
Perhaps the best-known case of analogical thinking
in science is the discovery of the structure of DNA,
as told by James D. Watson in The Double Helix
(1968). It is the story of how analogies were drawn
59
analogical argument
between the observed structure of things like spiral
staircases and the unobserved structure of DNA, the
fundamental genetic material; and how inferences
were made based on such analogies. This article will
focus on analogical thinking in law and morality, but
models developed in one area of employment should
fit others as well.
A characteristic feature of our legal system is its
dependence on PRECEDENT. The requirement of pre-
cedent calls for deciding similar cases similarly.
Much legal reasoning, especially in appellate courts,
is devoted to showing that the case in question is (or
is not) analogous to some earlier case which was
decided in a favorable way. An excellent case of
analogical reasoning in both law and morality is
Kenneth F. Schaffner’s “Philosophical, Ethical, and
Legal Aspects of Resuscitation Medicine. II: Rec-
ognizing the Tragic Choice: Food, Water, and the
Right to Assisted Suicide.”
In “Tragic Choice,” a paper on physician-assisted
SUICIDE, Schaffner reviews the moral foundations of
decisions to suspend life-sustaining medically sup-
plied nutrition and hydration for seriously ill and
permanently comatose patients. He also examines
three crucial legal cases in this area: Barber, Bouvie,
and Brophy. As a philosopher of science, Schaffner
is interested in causation, and he finds that the cause
of such patients’ deaths, according to the consensus
at the time (1988), is the underlying illness. He criti-
cizes that view, and argues that the “responsible
cause” in such cases is typically the physician’s de-
cision to suspend medical nutrition and hydration,
a decision made with the deliberate authorization of
the patients, families, and sometimes the courts. The
most challenging analogical argument in his paper
is that, with proper safeguards, this is both a morally
justifiable policy and one that ought to be inter-
preted as “a general surrogate” for rational, medi-
cally assisted suicide. This essay is already a central
part of the literature of BIOETHICS on the issue, and
it should become a standard case for reflection on
analogical thinking. It will be so used here, as far as
constraints allow.
Another good case for analysis of analogical rea-
soning is found in “Genetic Encores: The Ethics of
Human Cloning” by Robert Wachbroit. Molecular
biologists took over from botanists the term
“clone”—which meant, as a noun, the multiple iden-
tical descendants of a single cell—to describe a cul-
ture of bacteria grown up to multiply transplanted
analogical argument
genes. They speak of making copies of a gene in or-
der to have enough to study. The term is also used
as a verb to refer to the process of copying genes,
cells, or now biological individuals. Dr. Ian Wilmut,
a Scottish scientist, reported the successful cloning
in 1997 of an adult sheep from its somatic (rather
than germ) cells. Since then clones of adult cows
(several calves) have been born, produced by a tech-
nique similar to that used to produce Dolly, the
sheep. Many articles in the scientific as well as pop-
ular media are claiming that the cloning of humans
is now not only technologically possible but practi-
cally inevitable. The question of its ethics is open for
discussion, and Wachbroit does a good job of ori-
enting the discussion.
First of all, there is room for serious misconcep-
tions in using the term “human cloning.” The pro-
cess (cloning) is a kind of “copying”; but the product
(the clone) is from the somatic cells of an adult and
is not initially an adult human being: it is an embryo,
fetus, infant, and so on. If it grows into a human
adult, its growth takes the same length of time as
normal human development (unlike what happened
in the 1996 film Multiplicity, in which several iden-
tical grown men were produced almost at the same
time).
Wachbroit does a good job of clarifying the con-
cepts as well as the facts of cloning. If adult humans
are cloned, the genetic material of the donor and
resulting individual will be identical. They will have
the same genome. Will the new individual be a “car-
bon copy” (perhaps we need to recognize another
technological change and begin to call it a “photo
copy”) of the earlier individual? Only if we accept
genetic determinism, and there is an overwhelming
scientific consensus that such a theory is false. The
clone will be an exact copy of the cloned only to the
extent that identical twins are. They have the same
DNA but become distinct individuals. Here we en-
counter a key analogy in this discussion. Is the clone
an “offspring” or a “sibling” of the adult from whom
it was cloned? Does it have one biological parent
(the adult from which it was cloned), or two (the
same two as the donor of its DNA)? Much of the
moral debate turns on inferences made from the
analogies given in answer to these questions. A
closely related set of analogies tries to identify clon-
ing with either REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES (such
as in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination) or
GENETIC ENGINEERING technologies (such as genetic
60
enhancement through genetic surgery). If there were
a moral consensus in favor of the use of reproductive
technologies but against the use of genetic engineer-
ing, the result of seeing cloning as analogous with
one rather than the other is obvious. However,
which analogy we should draw, and how we can jus-
tify inferences from it, are not so obvious. That is
the focus of the rest of this article.
We draw analogies and make inferences based on
them in law, morality, science, and everyday life.
Most of us do these things very well. That is not to
say, however, that we understand how we do it or
know explicitly the criteria we use to judge whether
it has been done well or not. According to a stock
example of this sort of thing, it is fairly easy to ride
a bicycle, but rather difficult to describe how it is
done. So it is with analogical inference. There is both
a problem of description and a problem of justifi-
cation concerning this common practice. Setting
aside for this article questions concerning the draw-
ing of analogies, how should we describe our prac-
tice of making analogical inferences? What are the
conditions under which they are reliable?
First, let us try to solve the problem of describing
analogical inferences. Their content is a clue: they
are all based on analogies. One entity, A, is known
to have attributes a, b, c, and d. Another entity, B,
is known to have attributes a, b, and c, but it is not
known whether it also has attribute d. On the basis
of the known similarity or analogy, it is inferred that
B also probably has attribute d. Entities A and B, in
this abstract and idealized model of analogical in-
ference, might be forgoing medically supplied nutri-
tion and hydration on the one hand, and medically
assisted rational suicide, on the other, as in the
Schaffner article cited above; and attribute d then
would be recognizing a moral and legal right to both.
Likewise, the model fits the Wachbroit case of ar-
guments about cloning humans and the birth of
identical twins. The moral LEGITIMACY of the former
based on acceptance of the latter is attributed.
Arguing by analogy may be based on a compari-
son of attributes of more than two entities, so a vari-
ation on the above model would be:
Entities A, B, C, and D all have attributes a,
b, and c.
Entities A, B, and C also have attribute d.
Therefore, entity D probably has attribute d
as well.

In recent arguments about cloning humans, the
technology for cloning is sometimes said to be anal-
ogous to either reproduction technologies (artificial
insemination, semen donation, ova donation, in
vitro fertilization, etc.) or genetic engineering tech-
nologies (genetic surgery, control of gene expression
by the use of anti-sense nucleic acids, and other ge-
netic therapies). The various technologies are
known to be alike in several aspects, and claimed to
be alike in crucial moral respects, such as being mor-
ally permissible.
A slight modification of this model results in a
statistical one.
N percent of type I entities having attributes
a, b, and c also have attribute d.
A is a Type I entity having attributes a, b,
and c.
Therefore, the probability is N percent that A
has attribute d as well.
Analogical arguments of each of these three
forms are common. The content is the same gener-
ally, in each form: an analogy is the basis of the in-
ference. The difference is between an inference
based on similarities known to hold between two
entities or between more than two. Does basing the
inference on more than two instances increase its
reliability? It might seem to, in view of common
sense and logical theory concerning inductive or
nondeductive inferences. Analogical arguments are
not purely deductive. The premises are not said to
support the conclusion in such a way that it is im-
possible for the premises to be true and the conclu-
sion to be false. When this deductive feature of an
argument form is absent, let us call that sort of ar-
gument nondeductive. Surely, the premises of an an-
alogical argument could all be true and yet the con-
clusion could be false.
An interesting question concerning the form of
analogical arguments, raised by ARISTOTLE (384–
322 B.C.E.) and C. S. PEIRCE (1839–1914), as well
as by such recent logicians as David Kelley and Pat-
rick Hurley, asks whether they are purely nonde-
ductive. Kelley joins Aristotle and Peirce in consid-
ering them to be a mixed form, while Hurley sees
them as purely nondeductive. In this brief article we
cannot consider the details on which their decisions
are based to a great extent, but we can grasp the
issue.
61
analogical argument
In Book II, Chapter 24, of Prior Analytics, Aris-
totle discusses argument by “example” in a way
which connects more directly with our arguments by
analogy than with what is today often called “induc-
tive generalization,” or argument based on a sample.
His case has to do with “making war against neigh-
bors.” If we wish to argue that war by Athenians
against Thebans is an evil, we use the analogy with
war by Thebans against Phoenicians. It was a war
between neighbors, and an evil. War between Athe-
nians and Thebans is also a war between neighbors,
and probably evil as well. Aristotle’s remark,
“Clearly then an example stands neither as part to
whole, nor as whole to part, but rather as part to
part, when both are subordinate to the same term,
and one of them is familiar,” is in need of extensive
interpretation. Aristotle seems to characterize ar-
gument by example or analogy as a mixture of in-
duction (war A was between neighbors, and was an
evil; therefore all wars between neighbors are prob-
ably evils) and deduction (all wars between neigh-
bors are probably evils, and this war is between
neighbors; therefore it is probably an evil).
Peirce’s model of analogical argument is also a
mixture of deduction and induction. His general for-
mula for analogy is
t is P⬘, P⬙, and P⵮
S⬘, S⬙, and S⵮ are q;
Therefore t is q. (1932, 2.512)
We might interpret this form, according to Schaff-
ner’s argument, to the moral permissibility of med-
ically assisted suicide as
t ⳱ medically assisted suicide
S⬘ ⳱ Barber
S⬙ ⳱ Bouvie
S⵮ ⳱ Brophy
P⬘ ⳱ deaths due to removal of life support in
S⬘
P⬙ ⳱ deaths due to removal of life support in
S⬙
P⵮ ⳱ deaths due to removal of life support
in S⵮
q ⳱ legally and morally acceptable or
permissible.
Peirce says that such an argument is “double,” as it
contains both of these arguments:
analogical argument
(1)
S⬘, S⬙, S⵮ are taken as being P⬘, P⬙, P⵮,
S⬘, S⬙, S⵮ are q;
Therefore (inductively) P⬘, P⬙, P⵮ is q.
t is P⬘, P⬙, P⵮;
Therefore (deductively) t is q.
(2)
S⬘, S⬙, S⵮ are, for instance, P⬘, P⬙, P⵮,
t is P⬘, P⬙, P⵮;
Therefore (by hypothesis) t has the common
characteristics of S⬘, S⬙, S⵮,
S⬘, S⬙, S⵮ are q;
Therefore (deductively) t is q.
He further comments that “Owning to its double
character, analogy is very strong with only a mod-
erate number of instances.”
This mixed model is opposed by most recent lo-
gicians, represented by Hurley. He considers analog-
ical reasoning to depend on a comparison of in-
stances, as in my first version of the model of
analogical arguments given above, and further con-
siders them as closely related to generalizations. He
reverses the way Aristotle and Peirce represent these
two forms of argument. In generalization, Hurley
thinks the arguer begins with one or more instances
and then draws a conclusion about all of the mem-
bers of a class. He may then apply the generalization
to one or more members of this class that were not
noted earlier. Thus there is an initial inductive stage,
and a second deductive one. In contrast, he thinks
that in a argument from analogy, the arguer moves
directly from one or more individual instances to a
conclusion about another individual instance with-
out appealing to an intermediate generalization.
Thus, analogical argument is purely inductive, or
nondeductive.
Among contemporary logicians, Kelley seems to
be the lone continuer of the Aristotle-Peirce tradi-
tion. His provisional description of analogical infer-
ence is similar to Hurley’s:
A and B have property S.
A has property P.
Therefore, B has property P.
Interpret this according to the above arguments con-
cerning medically assisted suicide or cloning hu-
mans. The question arises: What is the relationship
62
between S and P? Of course, it involves analogy, but
more needs to be said in order to see why such rea-
soning is reliable and under what conditions. The
premises in an analogical argument assert that some
similarity exists between the data objects and the
inference object, but why should similarity in one
respect give us reason to infer similarity in another?
After all, everything is similar to everything in some
respect. Kelley’s insight, in the tradition of Aristotle
and Peirce, is that the connection between the ob-
served similarity and the inferred similarity should
be made explicit. He does this by modeling it as rest-
ing on an implicit generalization. Perhaps this re-
construction of one argument for human cloning ex-
presses the point:
IVF (in vitro fertilization) is a reproductive
technology.
IVF is morally acceptable.
Therefore all reproductive technologies are
morally acceptable.
Cloning humans is a reproductive technology.
Therefore cloning humans is morally
acceptable.
The first step, Kelley says, is inductive: a gener-
alization. The second is deductive, a categorical syl-
logism. Any argument by analogy can, he claims, be
described in this way, once we have identified the
common property (S) which makes A and B similar.
Thus his model is:
A is S Ⳮ A is/is not P
f
All/no S is P (inductive generalization)
B is S
B is/is not P (categorical syllogism)
To describe the practice this way makes the criti-
cal analysis of such an argument mainly a matter of
finding the common property S which functions as
a middle term in the deductive step. To evaluate the
argument, the main task is to evaluate the inductive
step. The deductive step will always be valid.
As it turns out, evaluation on Kelley’s model is
not very different from evaluation on Hurley’s. The
step Kelley calls inductive in his model seems to be
as suspect as the inference in Hurley’s model.
Let us turn to the problem of justifying analogical
inferences. Under what conditions are we justified

in relying on analogical arguments? There are two
basic conditions, which need to be further specified
to be useful in evaluating inferences. The degree of
analogy on which the inference is based must be suf-
ficient, and the relevance of the analogy mentioned
in the premises to the conclusion must also be suf-
ficient. Since the reliability of nondeductive argu-
ments is a matter of degree, the criterion of suffi-
ciency cannot be quantified precisely. The measure
will vary, depending on such pragmatic considera-
tions as the seriousness of the consequences of re-
lying on the conclusion.
First, the degree of analogy must be high. Can we
be more specific about the degree of analogy be-
tween cloning humans and reproductive technolo-
gies such as in vitro fertilization? Yes. The number
of similarities is a specification of degree of analo-
gies. Both technologies can be seen as ways of pro-
viding a couple with a biological child which they
might otherwise be unable to have. That seems to
be an important similarity, but alone it does not seem
to be sufficient to support the inference to the moral
acceptability of cloning humans. Are there other
similarities? The child produced in each of these
ways will become a unique individual, if genetic de-
terminism is rejected (as scientific consensus today
says it should be). The liabilities to harm seem to be
about the same for children produced in these ways.
A case can be made for a high degree of analogy in
the sense of a large number of similarities between
the two technologies.
A second specification involves the nature and
number of dis-analogies. In vitro fertilization, when
sperm and ova come from the couple who will raise
the child, is clearly a technology which produces an
“offspring” with two parents. But a clone is the prod-
uct of one of the couple, probably the female. The
child is not clearly her “offspring,” but may better
be considered her “sibling.” Cloning, in this per-
spective, is a sort of “delayed twinning.” This seems
to weaken the analogy. However, the child produced
by cloning does have, arguably, two parents: the
same two as the woman from whom she was cloned.
The importance of this has to do with lineage iden-
tified responsibilities, as Wachbroit points out. The
analogy is strengthened again when we are told that
some assisted reproductive technologies raise simi-
lar questions about lineage and identity.
The number of similarities can be further speci-
fied. Call assisted reproductive technologies the
63
analogical argument
“data instances,” or “primary analogates” (Hurley).
The greater the number of them, the higher the de-
gree of analogy, roughly. There seem to be enough
different technologies of this sort to make the degree
of analogy fairly high. They are also rather diverse
within the type. Some, like IVF, involve genetic ma-
terial from both nurturing parents, while others, like
sperm or ova donation, involve material from only
one. Thus, number and diversity of data instances
are added conditions specifying number of similar-
ities, which specifies degree of analogy.
The second main condition for reliable analogical
inferences is the relevance of the analogies men-
tioned in the premises to the one in the conclusion.
The similarities mentioned in the premises of some
arguments for cloning humans include the purpose
of providing a couple with a biological child which
they would otherwise be unable to have. How is that
relevant to the conclusion that it is morally accept-
able? The ends are the same, to be sure, but are the
means? One could argue that they are properly de-
scribed as being very different. IVF is more closely
analogous to the more common fertilization of an
ovum by sperm as a result of a couple’s sexual in-
tercourse than cloning is, since cloning does not in-
volve sperm or ova at all, but uses somatic cells.
Many people think that common ends do not nec-
essarily justify diverse means. Thus, the condition of
relevance in this sort of argument is open for dis-
cussion. The same is true of the relevance of simi-
larities between cases of withdrawing medical nu-
trition and hydration, on the one hand, and cases of
medically assisted suicide on the other, to a conclu-
sion about the moral and legal acceptability of the
latter based on that of the former.
This condition of relevance has been discussed so
far in terms of the purely nondeductive model of
analogical arguments (Hurley). In terms of the
mixed model (Kelley), it can be restated in terms of
the relevance of the connection between S and P. I
leave this to the reader.
In this article we have considered the problems
of describing and justifying our common practice of
making inferences based on analogies. The inconclu-
siveness of these considerations should show that—
contrary to claims that in logic things are “cut and
dried” (as is tobacco raising!)—there is much left to
be thought through about analogical argument.
See also: BIOETHICS; CASUISTRY; GENETIC ENGINEER-
ING; LEGAL PHILOSOPHY; LEGITIMACY; LITERATURE
analogical argument
AND ETHICS; LOGIC AND ETHICS; MEDICAL ETHICS;
MORAL REASONING; NARRATIVE ETHICS; PERSON,
CONCEPT OF; PRECEDENT; RATIONAL CHOICE; REPRO-
DUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES; UNIVERSALIZABILITY.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Prior Analytics. In The Complete Works of Ar-
istotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, vol. l. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984. A classic work in
logic, which treats argument by “example” (analogy)
as a mixture of deduction and induction.
Churchill, Robert Paul. Logic: An Introduction. 2d ed.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. A widely used contem-
porary textbook, discussed in the Klein and Wertz ar-
ticle. Includes a good discussion of legal and moral
reasoning.
Conway, David A., and Ronald Munson. The Elements of
Reasoning. 2d ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1997. A
recent elementary textbook, which offers two main
conditions for the reliability of analogical arguments:
degree and relevance of analogy.
Hurley, Patrick J. A Concise Introduction to Logic. 6th ed.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1997. A widely used con-
temporary textbook, which treats analogical argument
as purely nondeductive, but generalization as a mixture
of deduction and induction.
Kelley, David. The Art of Reasoning. 2d, expanded ed.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. A contemporary text-
book which differs from the majority in interesting
ways, including treating analogical argument as a mix-
ture of induction and deduction.
Klein, Ted, and S. K. Wertz. “Legal Reasoning and Ana-
logical Argument: Two Models.” Contemporary Philos-
ophy 13, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1990): 3–6. An article dis-
cussing the conflict of interpretation of analogical
argument between Churchill and Kelley.
Peirce, Charles Sanders, Elements of Logic. In The Col-
lected Works of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 2. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1960. The logical writings of
the great American pragmatist, in which he gives a
model for analogical argument with both inductive and
deductive stages.
Salmon, Merrilee H. Introduction to Logic and Critical
Thinking. 3d ed. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace,
1995. A widely used textbook which offers a model of
induction and set of conditions of reliability similar to
those in this article.
Schaffner, Kenneth F. “Philosophical, Ethical and Legal
Aspects of Resuscitation Medicine. II: Recognizing the
Tragic Choice: Food, Water and the Right to Assisted
Suicide.” Critical Care Medicine 16, no. 10 (Oct.
1988): 1063–68. An article which uses analogical ar-
gument in law and morality on the issue of medically
assisted suicide.
64
Wachbroit, Robert. “Genetic Encores: The Ethics of Hu-
man Cloning.” Report from the Institute for Philosophy
and Public Policy 17, no. 21 (Fall 1997): 1–7. An ar-
ticle on cloning humans which makes clear many of the
analogies, and inferences based on them, involved in
this issue.
Ted Klein
analytic philosophy and ethics
It has been claimed that SOCRATES (c. 470–399
B.C.E.) practiced analytic philosophy, and certainly
he was interested in ethics; but for the purposes of
this article analytic philosophy in relationship to
ethics begins with G. E. MOORE’s (1873–1958)
Principia Ethica (1903) and ends fifty-five years
later with Kurt BAIER’s The Moral Point of View
(1958). It was only during this period that there was
a distinctive approach to ethics that deserves to be
marked off and given special attention.
Although there is a direct line from JOHN STUART
MILL (1806–1873) through Henry SIDGWICK
(1838–1900) to G. E. Moore, Moore spent much
more time than did his predecessors explicitly ex-
amining the meaning of the terms we use when mak-
ing moral judgments. Even more important, Moore
was the catalyst for those who, unlike Moore him-
self, were primarily interested in the meaning of
MORAL TERMS rather than in substantive moral
questions.
Although analytic philosophy has continued since
the publication of Baier’s book, there is no longer
any clear movement in ethics which can labeled as
analytic. Analytic philosophers are now more likely
to put forward substantive ethical views (e.g.,
Hobbesian, Kantian, or utilitarian) than they are to
view their analyses of ethical terms as having no nor-
mative implications. The distinction between con-
cern with analyzing the terms or concepts involved
in moral discourse and concern with substantive
moral problems has largely disappeared. It is now
generally held that analysis of moral concepts will
yield substantive moral conclusions, even by many
of those who earlier thought that analyses of ethical
concepts had no normative implications whatsoever.
In the very first paragraph of Principia Ethica,
Moore says, “In the vast majority of cases, where we
make statements involving any of the terms ‘virtue,’
‘vice,’ ‘duty,’ ‘right,’ ‘ought,’ ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ we are
making ethical judgments; and if we wish to discuss

their truth, we shall be discussing a point of Ethics.”
Although any reasonably close examination of news-
papers and magazines, or even reflection on what
we ourselves say, shows Moore to be completely
mistaken about the majority of cases in which we
use these terms, the philosophers who criticized
Moore’s account of the meaning of these terms never
challenged his claim that statements involving their
use are moral judgments. Moore and his critics seem
to have forgotten that they themselves recom-
mended, condemned, and praised music, novels,
wines, meals, athletes, or moves in games, and did
not use the terms “right,” “ought,” “good,” and
“bad” only when making ethical judgments.
Whatever the explanation, analytic philosophers
in the first half of the twentieth century took ethics
to be the study of moral judgments, and they re-
garded as paradigm cases of moral judgments those
which used the terms “good,” “bad,” “right,”
“wrong,” and “ought.” Moore claimed that the
“question, how ‘good’ is to be defined is the most
fundamental question in all Ethics.” And much of
analytic philosophy for the next fifty-five years con-
sisted in refutations of Moore’s account of the mean-
ing of “good” and attempts to provide alternatives.
Moore was regarded by many as having already
shown the inadequacy of the several naturalistic def-
initions of “good,” including a utilitarian definition,
i.e., “good” means “pleasure” and various subjectiv-
ist definitions, i.e., “good” means “I approve of this,”
or “My society approves of this.” He did this by
means of what is called the open-question argument.
Moore claimed that if we ask, “Is pleasure good?”
or “Is what I (my society) approve(s) of good?”, we
will immediately see that these are genuine or open
questions, not ones that can be answered simply by
looking at the meaning of the words involved.
Moore concluded that “good” is indefinable and
claimed that “good” refers to a simple property just
as “yellow” does, although in all other respects good-
ness is quite a different kind of property than
yellowness.
On the basis of his examination of the meaning
of the word “good,” Moore put forward what he
himself called a “nonnatural” property of goodness.
Although Moore was not the last nonnaturalist, an-
alytic philosophers universally rejected nonnatural-
ism. (ARISTOTLE’s [384–322 B.C.E.] rejection of
PLATO’s [c. 430–347 B.C.E.] account of goodness as
involving the Form of the Good provides an inter-
65
analytic philosophy and ethics
esting parallel.) Most agreed with Moore that
“good” did not refer to any complex property as pro-
posed by the subjectivists, but all denied that it re-
ferred to some simple nonnatural property as pro-
posed by Moore. One result was that many denied
that “good” referred to anything, claiming that
“good” was not a referring word. This led to the rec-
ognition that language is not always used to describe
the world, but it has many other uses (a fact that
HOBBES [1588–1679], sometimes regarded as a
founder of analytic philosophy, had explicitly
pointed out three centuries earlier).
The first account offered by those who rejected
the view that “good” refers came to be known as
“emotivism” or the emotive theory of ethics. There
is some dispute as to who put this theory forward
first: Some claim that it was Ogden and Richards in
The Meaning of Meaning (1923), but clearly the
most influential early statement of this view was pre-
sented by A. J. AYER (1910–1989) in his classic,
Language, Truth and Logic (1935). In the sixth
chapter of that book Ayer claimed, “in every case in
which one would commonly be said to be making
an ethical judgment, the function of the relevant eth-
ical word is purely ‘emotive.’ It is used to express
feeling about certain objects, but not to make any
assertion about them.” Ayer goes on to claim that
“ethical terms do not serve only to express feeling.
They are calculated also to arouse feeling, and so to
stimulate action.”
Ayer’s points were developed in much greater de-
tail by Charles STEVENSON (1908–1979) in Ethics
and Language (1944). Stevenson and others recog-
nized that ethical judgments are primarily made in
order to influence others, so that what came to be
known as “prescriptivism” or the imperative theory
replaced the emotive theory. However, these theories
were often regarded as complementary rather than
conflicting, it being recognized that the same judg-
ment can be used both to express one’s feelings and
to prescribe actions to others. PRESCRIPTIVISM was
developed in great detail by R. M. HARE in a number
of books, including The Language of Morals (1952)
and Freedom and Reason (1963). Hare pointed out
that there can be logical relationships between im-
peratives. Much of his moral philosophy involved an
examination of MORAL REASONING. Thus, although
prescriptivism and EMOTIVISM both denied that eth-
ical terms refer to any properties and that ethical
judgments describe any facts, there were important
analytic philosophy and ethics
differences between the two views. According to
prescriptivism, the primary subject matter of ethical
judgments had to be behavior, whereas according to
emotivism, there was no limit on the content of
moral judgments.
Although Hare shared the common assumption
that moral judgments were to be identified by their
containing words like “good,” “bad,” and “ought,”
he recognized that not all judgments using these
words were moral judgments. Hare claimed that
moral judgments were prescriptive judgments that
were both universalizable and overriding. But, like
most analytic philosophers who did what was called
“metaethics,” Hare denied that there was any limit
to the content of moral judgments; any prescriptive
judgment that any person was prepared to univer-
salize and accept as overriding was a moral judg-
ment. Hare also denied that there was any way to
show that the moral judgments of such a person
were mistaken. (In his most recent books, e.g.,
Moral Thinking [1981], Hare seems to have
changed some of his views.)
During the 1950s the analyses of moral judg-
ments became more sophisticated; philosophers
pointed out that judgments containing the ethical
terms were used in many different ways—some-
times to express and arouse emotions; sometimes to
advise, commend, or prescribe ways of acting; and,
surprisingly, sometimes even to describe. Much
more attention was paid both to the different con-
texts in which judgments were made and to the dif-
ferent functions that they perform. However, it also
came to be realized that this linguistic analysis of
moral judgments left out much of what had been
discussed by moral philosophers prior to the twen-
tieth century.
Stephen Toulmin, for example, in The Place of
Reason in Ethics (1950), explicitly tried to get away
from examination of the so-called ethical terms and
to replace it with an examination of moral reasoning,
but he did not emphasize the difference between
moral judgments and other kinds of value judg-
ments. Kurt Baier, in The Moral Point of View
(1958), made the distinction between moral judg-
ments and other value judgments a central part of
his account of morality. He tried to show that moral
judgments were supported by reasons that involved
taking an impartial point of view. Baier’s attempt to
use his analyses of rationality, IMPARTIALITY, and
morality to arrive at substantive moral conclusions
66
marked the end of a distinctive analytic approach to
ethics. By making clear that the terms “right,”
“ought,” “good,” and “bad” were primarily related
to rationality, not morality, e.g., that we offer reasons
for choosing and doing many things in addition to
those related to morality, Baier convinced many that
concentration solely on the use of these terms could
not reveal much of significance about ethics. Anal-
yses of those concepts and others peculiar to ethics
came to be routinely combined with substantive dis-
cussion of moral issues.
Of course, the present discussion vastly oversim-
plifies what actually went on in the first half of this
century. However, there is no question that the pri-
mary effect of analytic philosophy on ethics was to
divert attention away from substantive moral prob-
lems. The analytic philosophers were primarily in-
terested in the uses of language or in the analyses of
concepts. Insofar as they thought they could have
any practical effect, it was simply the effect of help-
ing people become clear about what they were say-
ing and the implications of what they said. It some-
times seems as though the analytic philosophers
thought that all they were doing was what is now
called values clarification.
In ethics, as in all other fields of philosophy, an-
alytic philosophers thought of themselves as sharp-
ening the tools of thought. Their sole task was to
make our concepts as clear and precise as possible;
they wanted to have nothing to do with using these
concepts to arrive at substantive conclusions. How-
ever, as the tools of thought became sharper, the
temptation to use them became almost irresistible.
Analytic philosophers, benefiting from work in other
areas of philosophy, especially philosophy of lan-
guage, clarified many ethical concepts and did sig-
nificantly raise the level of moral philosophy. But af-
ter two world wars and fifty-five years of analysis of
concepts, most moral philosophers went back to
their traditional task, trying to use their new under-
standing of the concepts related to morality to per-
suade their readers to act morally.
See also: AYER; BAIER; EMOTIVISM; GOOD, THEORIES
OF THE; HARE; HISTORY OF WESTERN ETHICS,
TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANGLO-AMERICAN; HOBBES;
IMPARTIALITY; LOGIC AND ETHICS; METAETHICS;
JOHN STUART MILL; MOORE; MORAL REASONING;
MORAL TERMS; NATURALISM; NORMS; PRACTICAL
REASON[ING]; PRESCRIPTIVISM; RATIONALITY VS.

REASONABLENESS; RUSSELL; STEVENSON; SUBJECTIV-
ISM; THEORY AND PRACTICE; UNIVERSALIZABILITY;
UTILITARIANISM; WITTGENSTEINIAN ETHICS.
Bibliography
Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Dover,
1936. See Chapter 6.
Baier, Kurt. The Moral Point of View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1958. Abridged under same title,
New York: Random House, 1965.
Hare, R. M. The Language of Morals. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1952.
Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1903.
Schlick, Moritz. The Problem of Ethics. New York, Pren-
tice Hall, 1938.
Stevenson, Charles L. Ethics and Language. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1944.
Toulmin, Stephen Edelston. The Place of Reason in
Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950.
Bernard Gert
anger
Philosophy has always been concerned with human
nature. Since emotions play a large role in human
experience, philosophers have devoted a consider-
able amount of attention to answering three key
questions about them: What is an emotion? How do
we distinguish between different emotions? And
what is the relationship between emotions and a
morally good life? These queries may also be used
to structure an investigation into specific emotions
such as anger, which is the purview of this article.
Although there is disagreement about how to
conceive of emotions (are emotions feelings, sensa-
tions, cognitions, physiological conditions, behav-
ioral patterns, tendencies, or some combination of
these?), I shall assume for the sake of this article
both that emotions inhere in agents (contrary to the
view in some cultures that emotions occur not in but
between agents), and that many emotions linked to
morality (e.g., guilt, PRIDE, and RESENTMENT) are
combinations of feelings and cognitions. This latter
view I shall label “cognitivism,” which in one form
or another is the prevailing paradigm among con-
temporary theorists of emotions. Cognitivism is
(generally) the view that beliefs, evaluations, prop-
ositional attitudes, or other such cognitions are par-
67
anger
tially constitutive of complex emotions like shame,
regret, and ENVY, and that such emotions are rec-
ognizable on the basis of the different cognitions in-
volved in their production. So, angry emotions such
as indignation, scorn, and contempt are distinguish-
able in virtue of the cognitions that partially consti-
tute them. Though not without its problems, this
cognitivist framework offers a useful and straight-
forward way of delineating the angry emotions and
their relation to morality. In the remainder of this
article I shall use “beliefs” as the cognitions which
combine with feelings to produce such emotions.
Anger admits of three forms, the first of which
corresponds to what Joseph BUTLER (1692–1752)
has called “hasty and sudden” anger, a kind of anger
connected to the impulse for self-preservation. This
is the sort of anger persons and animals may expe-
rience when feeling tormented or trapped. The sec-
ond sense, “settled and deliberate” anger, is anger
constituted in part by an agent’s beliefs about how
she is perceived and treated by others. P. F. Straw-
son’s notion of a “reactive attitude” helps amplify
this sense of anger. For Strawson, reactive attitudes
involve personal feelings which “depend upon, or
involve” our beliefs about the attitudes, intentions,
and actions of others toward us. Thus, for example,
resentment is a reactive attitude typically felt toward
another you believe intended to wrong you. Indeed,
resentment is ordinarily defined as taking offense,
umbrage, or exception to the perceptions or deeds
of others, and such notions as “taking umbrage” or
“offense” presuppose moral judgments (i.e., moral
beliefs). By contrast, resentment is not typically felt
toward those who harm you accidentally or inadver-
tently, for such harms do not reveal another’s wrong-
ful feelings, intentions, or actions toward you. Con-
sequently, resentment is a paradigm of moral anger
because of the nature of the beliefs involved in it.
Instinctive anger and anger as a reactive attitude are
typically episodic, whereas some forms of anger are
relatively fixed dispositions. This third form of an-
ger, of which such postures as irritability, sullenness,
or churlishness are examples, link anger more to
character traits than to instincts or cognitions. Of
these general types of anger, episodic anger involv-
ing cognitions and dispositional anger are clearly re-
lated to morality, though in different ways. The two
main ways in which angry emotions connect with
moral concerns are that, on the one hand, some an-
gry emotions are “moral” by their very nature, in-
anger
sofar as they are partially constituted by moral be-
liefs. On the other hand, we can inquire about the
moral status of the presence and expression of epi-
sodic and dispositional anger in a person’s life. I
shall discuss these in turn.
Using resentment as a model, we can clarify the
way in which some angry emotions are moral by
their very nature. As noted, resentment ordinarily
involves the belief that you have been wronged, and
this is a moral belief. This belief, in turn, implies
both that the object of resentment must be perceived
as a moral agent, for only moral agents can commit
wrongs, and that the subject of resentment (i.e.,
those on whose behalf such anger is stimulated) be
a moral subject. Since resentment is a paradigmatic
instance of moral anger, we may conjecture that the
belief that oneself or some other moral subject has
been wronged will be characteristic of all forms of
moral anger, and so moral anger of any sort is a re-
active attitude felt toward another you believe has
wronged a moral subject. To refer to anger as
“moral” in this sense is to describe the moral content
of such feelings, not to judge them as praiseworthy
or blameworthy, virtuous or vicious.
Since moral anger can be aroused only on behalf
of a moral subject, and a moral subject is anything
that has moral standing (i.e., anything that is vested
with moral RIGHTS, INTERESTS, or claims to respect),
then persons, individually and collectively, animals,
and perhaps other parts of the natural environment,
are appropriate subjects of moral anger. We might
then say that when moral anger is generated pri-
marily on behalf of oneself, it is personal moral an-
ger; when aroused primarily for the sake of other
moral subjects, it is vicarious moral anger. The dis-
tinction between personal and vicarious moral anger
further enables us to classify the various forms of
moral anger such as resentment, indignation, scorn,
and contempt based on the beliefs typical of those
emotions. For instance, if I react with anger over an
injustice done to a stranger, then since the consti-
tutive belief of my anger is that a moral subject other
than myself has been wronged, my anger is more
plausibly regarded as indignation or some other
form of moral anger other than resentment, which
is personal moral anger.
Beyond personal and vicarious moral anger we
need to acknowledge the reality of collective anger,
for it is important to note that anger may reside
within and across persons simultaneously, often mo-
68
tivating group action such as riots, revolutions, and
political boycotts. MARX’s (1818–1883) effort to in-
spire the violent overthrow of capitalism by appeal-
ing to the anger of the working class is an example,
as is the late-twentieth-century feminist claim to
have “appropriated” anger (heretofore an essentially
male emotion) as the emotion of choice for fueling
the struggle against sexism. Many other ongoing po-
litical and moral struggles (e.g., anti-abortion ef-
forts, the fight for animal rights, etc.) are also
grounded, at least in part, in moral outrage. And
collective anger takes formal institutional expres-
sions as well, as when a society imposes sanctions
for the violation of its legal rules.
In addition to questions regarding the nature of
different forms of anger, and the manner in which
we distinguish between varieties of moral anger,
such as resentment, indignation, and scorn, is the
general concern about the place of anger in a morally
good life. What relation does anger bear to such cen-
tral ethical concerns as SELF-RESPECT, RESPONSIBIL-
ITY, LOVE, and FORGIVENESS, and virtue and vice in
general? Though a brief essay cannot adequately
summarize all the views related to these concerns, I
will close with a selective overview of some of the
more important general positions on the moral
status of the presence and expression of various
forms of anger.
The ancient Greek view of demonstrations of an-
ger was that, in general, such expressions were man-
ifestations of intemperance, which is a vice. PLATO’s
(428–348 B.C.E.) tripartite division of the soul into
reason, PASSION, and thumos, with passion (and
thus anger) requiring the control of reason in order
for a person to be just, is echoed in more recent
views such as that of Freud (1856–1939), who
viewed the strong emotions as explosive, volatile,
and dangerous. Common sense supports this view,
regarding those who are consumed by REVENGE or
who wallow in an ecstasy of rage as being in the grip
of a morally dubious emotional state. This is consis-
tent with ARISTOTLE’s (384–322 B.C.E.) contention
that the person who is angry “at the right things and
towards the right people, and also in the right way,
at the right time and for the right length of time” is
morally praiseworthy. Aristotle’s view implies that
anger is rationally assessable, and thus that it makes
sense to evaluate anger as reasonable or unreason-
able, justified or unjustified.
That anger and its expression can and should be

controlled by reason is a view supported by KANT
(1724–1804), who contends that vengeance is vi-
cious because it is “excessive anger,” that is, anger
disproportionate to the adequate defense of one’s
DIGNITY. Kant’s view of vengeance occurs in a con-
text in which he argues that the person who fails to
become angry at injustices done to him is one who
lacks dignity or “manhood,” a view reminiscent of
HUME’s (1711–1776) claim that since anger and ha-
tred are passions “inherent in our very frame and
constitution,” the lack of them is sometimes evi-
dence of “weakness and imbecility.” Resentment,
our paradigm of moral anger, also asserts the value
of self-respect, since its focus is, directly or indi-
rectly, the self. Thus, expressions of anger controlled
by or at least prominently involving reason have
come to be seen as manifesting virtue, while the lack
of anger, or the absence of the governing influence
of rationality in expressing it, have come to be
viewed as morally unacceptable.
But three contrary views should be mentioned.
First, NIETZSCHE’s (1844–1900) conception of “res-
sentiment” as sublimated anger/envy directed at the
noble man suggests the interesting idea that at least
some forms of dispositional anger such as irascibility
or bitterness may be manifestations of weakness, not
strength. More interesting still is the idea that even
episodic resentment or indignation may be ignoble,
insofar as such emotions implicitly concede power
to others by revealing one’s vulnerability to injury.
But the truly noble are thought to have, in some
sense, no such vulnerabilities.
Second, some late-twentieth-century popular
views suggest that the uninhibited expression of
even rage is a good thing, insofar as such venting is
cathartic. But on consequentialist grounds alone it
seems clear that controlling intense anger rather
than its unfettered venting is closer to what a good
life requires, for though anger may sometimes be
enabling (e.g., in motivating changes to unjust or
otherwise unhappy circumstances), its indiscrimi-
nate expression is more likely to be disabling, both
for those expressing it and for those around them.
The difference between anger and rage has often
been remarked on by psychologists and (less so) by
philosophers, with the latter emotion associated
more closely with destructive violence than with mo-
tivating constructive solutions to personal or politi-
cal problems. This is partly because rage tends to
fester and influence a person’s perception of events
69
anger
and others that are essentially unrelated to the
causes of one’s rage. It is well known, for instance,
that enraged people fly off the handle and strike out
at others in ways disproportionate to the severity of
the wrong done them; and enraged persons are more
likely to inflate the importance of minor inconven-
iences or problems (e.g., being cut off in traffic) as
a pretext for venting their rage.
These last remarks echo a third dissenting view,
that of the Stoic SENECA (c. 4 B.C.E.– C.E. 65), which
maintains that all forms of anger are inconsistent
with the good life because they dispose us to CRU-
ELTY and vengeance, which passions encourage us
to see other people as less than fully human. On this
view, the person of virtue is one who strives to ex-
tirpate, mot merely control, anger.
Other questions pertaining to the morality of an-
ger include whether there are any intrinsically good
or evil forms of anger, whether and in what sense
people can be held responsible for their anger or
perhaps even, as SARTRE (1905–1980) suggests,
choose to be angry, and whether some forms of an-
ger are logically or causally necessary for the exis-
tence of certain sorts of goods like forgiveness and
MERCY.
See also: CRUELTY; EMOTION; EMOTIVISM; ENVY;
GUILT AND SHAME; HARM AND OFFENSE; HATE; IN-
TENTION; PASSION; PRIDE; RESENTMENT; REVENGE;
REVOLUTION; SELF-CONTROL; SELF-DEFENSE; VIO-
LENCE AND NON-VIOLENCE.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Ir-
win. Hackett, 1985. A rich source of insight into dif-
ferent types of anger and their relation to personal
character, moral virtue, and vice.
Butler, Joseph. Fifteen Sermons Preached at Rolls Chapel.
(1726) Sermon VII, “Upon Resentment.” Offers an im-
portant distinction between a kind of instinctive non-
moral anger linked to the impulse of self-preservation,
and “settled and deliberate” anger which is connected
to our beliefs about others, much as are the “reactive
attitudes” discussed by P. F. Strawson.
Deigh, John. “Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions.”
Ethics 104 (July 1994): 824–54. A detailed overview
of the origins of contemporary cognitivist theories of
emotion, differences between them, and shortcomings
of various versions.
Goleman, Daniel. “On Rage.” In his Emotional Intelli-
gence. New York: Bantam Books, 1995. Reprinted in
Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Read-
anger
ings in Ethics, 4th ed., edited by Christina Hoff Som-
mers, 445–55. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1997.
Hughes, Paul M. “Moral Anger, Forgiving, and Condon-
ing.” Journal of Social Philosophy 26, no. 1 (Spring
1995): 103–18. Types of moral anger and moral un-
happiness are distinguished and related to forgiveness,
toleration, and condonation.
Jacoby, Susan. Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge.
New York: Harper and Row, 1983.
Murphy, Jeffrie. “Forgiveness, Mercy, and the Retributive
Emotions.” Criminal Justice Ethics 7 (1988): 3–14.
Murphy, Jeffrie, and Jean Hampton. Forgiveness and
Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Discusses such topics as the nature and value of re-
sentment and moral hatred and their relation to moral
responses to wrongdoing such as forgiveness, mercy,
and condonation.
Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and
Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994.
Seneca. Moral Essays. Translated by John W. Basore.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Strawson, Peter F. Freedom and Resentment, and Other
Essays. London: Methuen, 1974. See especially pp.
10–11. Articulates a theory of reactive attitudes, their
nature, and their relation to the attitudes, intentions,
and actions of others toward us.
Woodward, Kathleen. “Anger . . . and Anger: From Freud
to Feminism.” In Freud and the Passions, edited by
John O’Neill, 73–95. University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1996.
Paul M. Hughes
animals, treatment of
How we talk about one another is symptomatic of
the morally precarious position other animals have
occupied in the history of Western thought. To be
called a pig, sloth, snake in the grass, bitch, or vul-
ture, for example, is hardly a compliment. But the
symptoms of moral precariousness go deeper. In our
speech habits “we” are humans while “they”—well,
“they” are animals. That we humans are animals, it
seems, is something we would like to forget.
Certainly this is true of most of our major ethical
theorists. Intent, as they are, in finding an unbridge-
able gulf between the moral principles that prescribe
how we must treat human beings and how we may
treat (mere) animals, these thinkers tend either to
ignore or to underestimate the importance of the
biological and other ties that bind all animals
together.
Pre-Darwinian moralists may be forgiven for not
70
knowing the common themes (chance variation and
adaptation to an ever-changing environment, for ex-
ample) that characterize the EVOLUTION of all spe-
cies of animals, our own included. Yet some of these
thinkers display at least a partial understanding of
our animality. ARISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.E.) is one.
Along with plants, in his view, humans and other
animals seek nourishment and reproduce. But unlike
plants, humans and other animals share additional
capacities: sensation, DESIRE, memory, and imagi-
nation, for example. On Aristotle’s account, only
when we consider the ability to reason do we find a
capacity that distinguishes humans from the rest of
the animal kingdom. For it is “man” (and “man”
alone) among all the animals who is said to be
rational.
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance Aris-
totle and legions of other Western moralists attach
to rationality. As different as Aristotle’s ethic is from
Immanuel KANT’s (1724–1804), or THOMAS AQUI-
NAS’s (1225?–1274) from John RAWLS’s, they are
in one respect the same: the possession of this par-
ticular capacity—reason—affords its possessor a
morally exalted status. Why this is so, and what it
implies, can be explained by distinguishing between
direct and indirect duties.
Direct and Indirect Duties
Duties of the former (the direct) kind are duties
owed to identifiable individuals, and those to whom
they are owed are prima facie entitled to demand
compliance. If, as is commonly thought, direct du-
ties have correlative RIGHTS, then this entitlement
can be expressed in terms of individual rights. That
Antony has a duty to speak the truth to Cleopatra,
for example, goes hand-in-glove with Cleopatra’s
having a right to demand truthfulness from Antony.
Indirect duties differ. These duties involve certain
individuals or things, but they are not duties owed
to them. The duty to respect another’s PROPERTY is
a duty of this kind. For we have no duty to the prop-
erty in question; rather, the duty involves the prop-
erty, but the duty is owed to the owner, not to the
thing owned.
This distinction—between direct and indirect du-
ties—can be used to define the moral community.
On this account the moral community consists of all
and only those individuals (a) who have direct duties
or (b) to whom direct duties are owed. Anything or

anyone standing outside the moral community at
most can be involved in duties owed to individuals
belonging to this community (and thus figure in
some indirect duty), but nothing and no one outside
the community either can be owed a direct duty or
can possess a correlative right.
The Rationalist Tradition
The question “Who belongs to the moral com-
munity?” is therefore fraught with both theoretical
and practical significance, and it is hardly unimpor-
tant that Aristotle and the many other thinkers who
are part of what we might term the “rationalist tra-
dition” answer this question by insisting that the ca-
pacity to reason is decisive. Given this answer, and
given the further thesis that it is humans and humans
alone (among terrestrial creatures) who have this ca-
pacity, the theoretical exclusion of other animals
from the moral community is guaranteed.
We have, then, according to the rationalist tra-
dition, no direct duties to other animals. There is
nothing we owe them, no wrong we can do to them.
At the very most we can be prohibited from treating
other animals in certain ways because of what we
owe to rational beings, ourselves or others. A venge-
ful person, who sets fire to a neighbor’s dog in order
to get even, does nothing wrong to the dog; it is the
harm done to the neighbor’s property, or the neigh-
bor’s psyche, or the agent’s moral CHARACTER that
explicates what is wrong. As strange as it may seem,
the wrong done in a case like this, given the ration-
alist tradition, differs in no essential respect from the
wrong done if the person bent on revenge sets fire
to the neighbor’s car or shrubbery.
Not a few moralists find this more than strange;
they find it plainly false. For there are important dif-
ferences between burning a dog and burning a car
or a bush. A car feels nothing, while a dog is capable
of experiencing not only pain but also fear, and
whereas the destruction of a plant ends the plant’s
life, there is no reason to believe either that the plant
is aware of anything or that its death is something
that matters to the plant. True, some philosophers—
René DESCARTES (1596–1650) in particular—
maintain that nonhuman animals are totally devoid
of mind. On this (astonishing) view, gorillas and cats
are just as psychologically impoverished as BMWs
and holly bushes. Few people are even momentarily
tempted to side with Descartes, a reassuring sign of
71
animals, treatment of
the capacity of common sense to withstand the ex-
cesses of philosophical theory.
The Sentientist Tradition
In view of the morally relevant differences that
separate cabbages and garter belts from sparrows
and mice, critics of the rationalist tradition seek an
alternative to the capacity to reason as the criterion
for admission to the moral community. Jeremy BEN-
THAM (1748–1832), JOHN STUART MILL (1806–
1873) and, among contemporary utilitarians, Peter
Singer argue forcefully for the inclusion of other ani-
mals in the moral community. It is, they think, sen-
tiency (that is, the capacity to experience PLEASURE
and pain) that determines who does, and who does
not, belong. As Bentham writes, in an oft-quoted
passage, “The question is not, can they [that is, non-
human animals] reason? Nor, can they talk? But can
they suffer?”
If sentiency serves as the test for admission, then
the moral landscape is radically transformed. At
least some of our duties regarding nonhuman ani-
mals emerge as direct duties—duties we owe to
these animals themselves, not to some human being
who happens to be an interested third party. In par-
ticular, the general duty of nonmaleficence applies
directly to our dealings with sentient beings if, as is
generally assumed, pain is intrinsically evil. Prima
facie, that is, we have a direct duty not to cause any
sentient being pain, regardless of the species to
which the individual belongs.
To resist this extension of direct duties to animals
other than human beings, on the ground that non-
human animals do not belong to the species Homo
sapiens, thus emerges as a moral prejudice cut from
the same defective moral cloth as racism and sexism.
Like these latter prejudices this newly recognized
one—speciesism, as it is commonly called—at-
tempts to justify moral differences simply on the ba-
sis of biological differences. However, just as the
color of one’s skin and the gender of one’s sex
should not determine one’s membership in the
moral community, so the classification of one’s spe-
cies should be similarly impotent. At the most fun-
damental moral level, all sentient animals are equal.
The egalitarianism central to what might be called
“the sentientist tradition,” when coupled (as it cus-
tomarily is) with utilitarian theory, gives rise to re-
sults many find counterintuitive. For example, the
animals, treatment of
murder of innocent human beings seems to be per-
mitted by the theory, if the aggregate balance of good
mental states over bad mental states is thereby
achieved—as well it may be in particular cases. Such
an outcome cannot bode well for the protection non-
human animals are afforded by utilitarians operating
within the sentientist tradition. Given this approach
there is nothing wrong with a matador’s painfully
draining the life from a bull, for example, provided
only that enough people find the spectacle suffi-
ciently pleasant. To protest that it is immoral to take
pleasure in such a barbarous custom is an objection
that is unavailable to utilitarians since whether this
is immoral is itself an open question, given utilitar-
ian theory. In short, when it comes to how humans
treat other animals, utilitarian theory seems better
suited to defending rather than reforming the sta-
tus quo.
Utilitarians offer a variety of replies to these and
other objections, and it must be said that, whatever
the shortcomings of the theory, its champions are
exceptional for their resourcefulness and tenacity.
Nevertheless, many thinkers find the position inade-
quate, some because of the meager protection it af-
fords nonhuman animals. While acknowledging the
improvement sentiency represents over rationality
as a criterion of membership in the moral commu-
nity, and while agreeing that, as the sentientist tra-
dition implies, humans have some direct duties to
nonhuman animals, these latter critics of UTILITAR-
IANISM seek a moral theory that retains the strengths
of the sentientist tradition while shedding its
weaknesses.
Inherentism
Inherentism is one form such a theory can take.
Like the sentientist tradition, inherentism is egali-
tarian in spirit. But unlike this former tradition, in-
herentism identifies individuals, not mental states as
the locus of ultimate value. The kind of value indi-
viduals possess is modeled after Kant’s idea of “end
in itself.” Individuals who have inherent value have
a morally significant value in themselves, apart from
their possible usefulness to others and indepen-
dently of the episodic or overall value of their mental
states.
But inherentism differs from the position of Kant
and his followers in a fundamental respect. Whereas
Kantians deny that nonhuman animals exist as ends
72
in themselves (or have inherent value), inherentists
maintain that other animals have this same moral
status. Moreover, inherentism’s advocates see them-
selves as offering a philosophical foundation of hu-
man and animal rights, arguing that those individ-
uals who have inherent value, whether humans or
not, also possess the basic moral right to be treated
with respect (or, alternatively, to be treated as ends
in themselves).
Thus, to the extent that the equal value of the
individual plays a dominant role in the rationalist
tradition, inherentism makes use of an important
idea from this tradition. And to the extent that non-
speciesism plays a dominant role in the sentientist
tradition, inherentism makes use of an important
idea from this tradition, too. In view of the key
points of resemblance between inherentism, on the
one hand, and the rationalist and sentientist tradi-
tions, on the other, it is reasonable to say that inher-
entism is the attempt to synthesize what, according
to its advocates, are the best features of these two
widely divergent philosophical traditions.
How successful inherentism is in this regard is
very much open to debate. At least some of the dis-
agreement is occasioned, not by the logic of the po-
sition, but by what many view as its “radical” impli-
cations. And it is true that, when compared with the
status quo, inherentism’s practical implications do
seem “radical.” For example, inherentism categori-
cally prohibits not only such blood sports as bull-
fighting and recreational hunting, it takes a similar
stance against using nonhuman animals in science
or raising them for purposes of human commerce or
gustatory delight. In all these instances (and more),
inherentism sees some individuals being treated as
mere means by other individuals, something the the-
ory’s most basic principle condemns uncondition-
ally. At the level of practice, therefore, inherentism
is an abolitionist philosophy.
Not a few people are anxious to refute this “ex-
treme” view, often for the worst of reasons. Surpris-
ingly—perhaps—even otherwise astute philoso-
phers commit fallacies worthy of the most unbridled
sophomore, arguing, for example, that the very idea
of “animal rights” is absurd because dogs and cats
cannot vote (and so cannot have a right to vote),
cannot learn calculus and geography (and so cannot
have a right to an education), and so on. However,
it is implausible to assume that an individual must
have every right in order to have any right. This is

not a standard we insist on in the case of human
beings. We do not, for example, maintain that a re-
tarded child who cannot learn calculus or geometry
has no right to medical care or, more basically, can-
not have a right to be treated respectfully. This much
granted, it cannot be logical to deny all rights to non-
human animals because, like this child, they cannot
have every right.
Similarly deficient, and for similar reasons, is the
attempt to deny all rights to these animals on the
grounds that they cannot understand what a right is
or, alternatively, that they themselves cannot claim,
waive, exercise, etc. their rights. Many humans are
similarly disadvantaged yet do not for this reason
necessarily lack every right. And as for certain theo-
logical bases for attributing rights to all humans
while denying them to every other animal (for ex-
ample, the view that all and only human beings have
souls), these turn out to be more controversial in
their major assumptions than the ideas they are en-
listed to combat.
However, even if inherentism is able to defend
itself against these sorts of criticism, its own major
teachings are far from settled. Among the questions
it must address, one concerns the criteria for pos-
sessing inherent value. Because inherentists are in-
clined to answer this question by making reference
to possessing a fairly rich psychology, a psychology
that includes not only beliefs and desires but also
the ability to act intentionally, proponents of this
view are faced with daunting challenges in the phi-
losophy of mind. Moreover, difficult line-drawing
problems arise concerning which animals actually
are as psychologically rich as inherentists require,
even assuming that some are. And there are, finally,
vexing questions posed by some environmental phi-
losophers about inherentism’s difficulties in ac-
counting for the value of nonanimate nature gener-
ally and of species in particular, and still other
challenges emanating from feminist thinkers who
discern a patriarchal bias in the rights/duties tradi-
tion at the heart not only of inherentism but of West-
ern moral theory generally. Clearly, even if animals
are not part of their daily bread, the inherentist’s
plate is loaded with difficult questions.
Beyond Ridicule
Whether or not inherentists have the wherewithal
to defend their abolitionist philosophy, one thing is
73
animals, treatment of
certain: The question of the moral status of nonhu-
man animals has attained a respectability and stay-
ing power few people would have thought possible
even as recently as twenty years ago. When Mill
writes that “all great movements go through three
stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption,” those who
are active in the animal rights movement under-
standably hope he speaks prophetically of their
cause. How far this movement will advance, no one
can know. What is known, is that philosophers have
forced the issue of animal rights beyond the stage of
ridicule to that of serious discussion. In this respect,
and for this reason, all moral philosophers can take
comfort in knowing that moral philosophy some-
times does make a difference.
See also: ABORTION; ARISTOTLE; BENTHAM; BIOETH-
ICS; BIOLOGICAL THEORY; DUTY AND OBLIGATION;
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS; EUTHANASIA; EVOLUTION;
EXPLOITATION; FEMINIST ETHICS; GOOD, THEORIES
OF THE; HARM AND OFFENSE; HUMANISM; INFANTI-
CIDE; KANT; JOHN STUART MILL; MORAL COMMU-
NITY, BOUNDARIES OF; NATURE AND ETHICS; PAIN
AND SUFFERING; PLEASURE; RIGHT HOLDERS; RIGHTS;
SOCIAL CONTRACT; SPORT; UTILITARIANISM; VALUE,
THEORY OF.
Bibliography
Callicott, J. Baird. In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in
Environmental Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988.
Clark, Stephen. The Moral Status of Animals. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977.
———. The Nature of the Beast. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1983.
Fox, Michael Allen. The Case for Animal Experimenta-
tion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Frey, R. G. Interests and Rights: The Case against Ani-
mals. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
———. Rights, Killing and Suffering: Moral Vegetarian-
ism and Applied Ethics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
Godlovich, Stanley, Roslind Godlovich, and John Harris,
eds. Animals, Men and Morals. London: Gollancz,
1972.
Linzey, Andrew. Animal Rights: A Christian Assessment.
London: SCM Press, 1976.
———. Christianity and the Rights of Animals. London:
SPCK; New York: Crossroad, 1988.
Magel, Charles. A Bibliography on Animal Rights and Re-
lated Matters. Washington, D.C.: University Press of
America, 1981.
———. Keyguide to Information Sources on Animal
Rights. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1989.
animals, treatment of
Midgley, Mary. Animals and Why They Matter: A Journey
Around the Species Barrier. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1984.
———. Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature. Ith-
aca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Miller, Harlan, and William Williams, eds. Ethics and Ani-
mals. Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1983.
Paterson, David, and Richard Ryder, eds. Animals’ Rights:
A Symposium. Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur, 1979.
Regan, Tom. All Who Dwell Therein: Essays on Animal
Rights and Environmental Ethics. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1982.
———. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1983.
———. Defending Animal Rights. Champaign: University
of Illinois Press, 2001.
Regan, Tom, and Peter Singer, eds. Animal Rights and
Human Obligations. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1989 [1976].
Regan, Tom, and Carl Cohen. The Animal Rights Debate.
Towata, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
Rollin, Bernard. Animal Rights and Human Morality. Buf-
falo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1981.
Salt, Henry. Animal Rights. Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur,
1980 [1892].
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. 1983 [1975]. Various
publishers.
———. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1979.
———, ed. In Defence of Animals. Oxford: Basil Black-
well, 1985.
Tom Regan
Anscombe, G[ertrude]
E[lizabeth] M[argaret]
(1919–2001)
Anscombe made significant contributions not only
to ethics but also to philosophy of mind, metaphys-
ics, philosophy of logic and language, and the history
of philosophy. She studied at Cambridge with Lud-
wig Wittgenstein after taking a degree at Oxford.
ARISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.E.) and WITTGENSTEIN
(1889–1951) are the most important philosophical
influences on her thought, which has also been
shaped by the Roman Catholicism which she ac-
cepted while in her teens.
Anscombe’s work on ethics has from the start
been distinguished by its critical distance from the
dominant modes of thought of the age. She called to
74
attention deeply questionable assumptions charac-
terizing moral philosophy as it has been taught and
thought about; she also criticized prominent fea-
tures of nonacademic thought about ethics, Catholic
as well as non-Catholic. This distance from the
modes of thought of the age distinguishes also her
writings on metaphysics; here too she brings to at-
tention and criticizes the “cast of mind . . . charac-
teristic of our whole culture.” Cultural criticism and
philosophical criticism are joined in her work, which
is thus set apart from most analytic philosophy. (The
philosopher most clearly influenced by her way of
bringing together cultural and philosophical criti-
cism is Alasdair MACINTYRE.)
Her most influential contribution to ethics has
been “Modern Moral Philosophy” (in Anscombe
1981; originally published in 1958), a principal aim
of which was to let people see modern moral phi-
losophy as not the only, the obvious, the self-evident
way in which the subject might be done. She wanted
to reveal the state of moral philosophy to be thor-
oughly unsatisfactory, dependent on incoherent con-
cepts and unrecognized assumptions; and she ar-
gued that, in the form in which it was then practiced,
it should be given up. In the course of her argument
she stated and defended three theses, each of which
has been important in the subsequent development
of philosophical ethics.
The first of her theses was that moral philosophy
could not profitably be done without an adequate
philosophy of PSYCHOLOGY, and that it should be
put aside in the meantime. Thus, for example,
HUME’s (1711–1776) famous argument about the
relation between “is” and “ought” concerns the kind
of influence on action which various sorts of consid-
eration are capable of having, but the discussion of
that issue in Hume’s own writings and in post-
Humean philosophy reflects great unclarity about
how NEEDS and wants are related to other sorts of
facts and to reasoning about what to do. An-
scombe’s argument for the importance to moral phi-
losophy of philosophical psychology stimulated a re-
vival of interest in such topics as ACTION, INTENTION,
PRACTICAL REASON, MOTIVES, and DESIRE. But her
thesis concerning the importance to moral philoso-
phy of such discussion is still controversial. While
the acceptance of her idea is reflected in the orga-
nization of this encyclopedia (see, for example, the
entries on action; character; deliberation and choice;
emotion; motives; pleasure; practical reason[ing];

voluntary acts; weakness of will), its rejection is
plain in the organization of the Blackwell Compan-
ion to Ethics, which contains no article on any topic
in philosophical psychology, even those of obvious
relevance to moral philosophy. Anscombe’s own
contributions to philosophical psychology include
her monograph, Intention (1957). In it she discusses
questions about intention, action, and practical
thought (practical reasoning and practical knowl-
edge). She rejected the prevalent philosophical idea
of intention as a kind of mental state or event, and
developed instead an account of intentional action
in terms of the applicability to such action of a kind
of question asking for the agent’s reason. She was
thus able to show the importance of conceptions of
good in practical thought. Her later writings take
further the question how practical thinking and
goodness are related, and thus bear closely on the
question how actions may be evaluated as good or
bad. (See especially her “Von Wright and Practical
Inference,” 1989.)
Anscombe’s second thesis was that the concepts
of moral duty, moral obligation, and the moral
“ought” should, if possible, be abandoned; they were
survivals of a divine law conception of ethics that
had been given up and were unintelligible outside
that framework of thought. Anscombe has been ac-
cused of failing to recognize the distinction between
moral obligation and requirements established
through some sort of convention, the idea being that
only in the latter sort of case might an authoritative
source of the obligation be necessary (see Baier). But
she does herself distinguish between obligations de-
pendent and those not dependent on convention.
The idea that the distinction undercuts her argument
may rest on some confusion about what she was ar-
guing; she has not held that whether an act is good
or bad, just or unjust, is a matter of the promulga-
tion of a divine law. She has held that the idea of a
supposed moral sense of “ought” can lead to cor-
ruptions of thought, as when we wonder whether, in
some difficult circumstances, we “morally ought” to
do some admittedly unjust act.
Anscombe’s discussion of her second thesis has
been more influential than the thesis itself, which
has not been widely accepted. In arguing for the the-
sis, she made a contrast between forms of ethics de-
pendent on the suspect concepts and Aristotle’s
ethics, in which those concepts have no role. Her
account of the contrast, and of the role of the notion
75
Anscombe, G. E. M.
of a virtue in Aristotle’s thought, helped to turn the
attention of philosophers to the VIRTUES and to the
possibility of forms of moral thought in which the
concept of a virtue is central.
The third thesis was that English moral philoso-
phers from Sidgwick on differ only in superficial
ways. However different the details of their theories,
such moral thinkers as SIDGWICK (1838–1900),
MOORE (1873–1958), ROSS (1877–1971), Nowell-
Smith, and HARE all hold that that action is right
which produces the best possible consequences, in-
cluding among consequences the intrinsic values
which theorists like Ross believe we should pro-
mote. Anscombe introduced the term CONSEQUEN-
TIALISM for the shared view; what consequentialists
deny is that there is anything prohibited simply in
virtue of its being describable as such-and-such kind
of action, like murder, say, or adultery. It is this de-
nial that is central to the similarity averred in her
thesis. (That is, someone who held that the motive
of duty had supreme value might argue that murder
would not be prohibited if done from duty; this view,
though not explicitly consequentialist, would fall
into the group of views which Anscombe was ar-
guing were only superficially different from each
other.) The third thesis has been very influential in
one regard, but much less so in another. That is, the
term “consequentialism” has entered the general
philosophical vocabulary; the debate between con-
sequentialists and anti-consequentialists is now part
of philosophical curricula, a topic for anthologies
and symposia. But the third thesis itself—the thesis
of superficial differences—has not had much seri-
ous attention. The question she wanted her audi-
ence to think about concerned the cast of mind of
a culture—the philosophical culture and the larger
culture. But, with few exceptions, analytic philos-
ophers have not followed Anscombe in reflecting
on such issues. It seems, indeed, that the sting of
Anscombe’s third criticism has been drawn by the
transformation of her issue into a debate which
could be integrated into the academic culture
which she was criticizing. What suggests this most
clearly is the regular use, in the debate, of a type of
argument in which we are asked, for example,
whether it would not be our duty to boil one baby
if by doing so a thousand deaths could be averted
(see 1981, III, 65); but the use of such examples is
itself an expression of the cast of mind with which
the third thesis was concerned.
Anscombe, G. E. M.
Throughout her life, Anscombe was greatly inter-
ested in particular moral questions, like those con-
cerning EUTHANASIA, war, and contraception. Her
approach to these issues and her concerns are well
illustrated by the three essays on war in Anscombe
1981 (“The Justice of the Present War Examined,”
“Mr Truman’s Degree,” “War and Murder,” origi-
nally dating, respectively, from 1939, 1957, and
1961). All three essays reflect her understanding of
the importance for ethics of clarity about the con-
cepts of action and intention; in all three An-
scombe’s reasoning depends on the principle of
DOUBLE EFFECT, which is explicitly discussed in two
of the essays; all three are concerned with ways in
which moral thought may be corrupted. The second
and third essays treat the conception of murder as
central. Both these essays attack PACIFISM as a doc-
trine which is both false and harmful, harmful in
that it contributes to a loss of understanding in con-
temporary thought of what murder is; both these
essays discuss also the AUTHORITY of the state. An-
scombe’s essays on war thus lead into some wider
topics, to each of which she devoted further atten-
tion: murder, the authority of the state, and the prin-
ciple of double effect. Much of this work is not in-
cluded in Anscombe 1981 and is not widely known;
the most significant essays are “Prolegomenon to a
Pursuit of the Definition of Murder: The Illegal and
the Unlawful” (1979), “Action, Intention and ‘Dou-
ble Effect’”(1982), and “Murder and the Morality of
Euthanasia: Some Philosophical Considerations”
(1994). These essays develop her earlier views (for
example, on double effect); they constitute together
a powerful argument for the importance in moral
thought of the concept of murder, and an incisive
criticism of contemporary thought about LIFE AND
DEATH.
See also: ACTION; ARISTOTLE; CHARACTER; COMPAR-
ATIVE ETHICS; CONSEQUENTIALISM; CONVENTIONS;
DELIBERATION AND CHOICE; DESIRE; DOUBLE EFFECT;
DUTY AND OBLIGATION; EMOTION; EUTHANASIA;
HARE; HOMICIDE; HUME; INTENTION; LIFE AND
DEATH; MACINTYRE; METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOL-
OGY; MOORE; MORAL PSYCHOLOGY; MOTIVES;
OUGHT IMPLIES CAN; PACIFISM; PLEASURE; PRACTICAL
REASON[ING]; PRACTICAL WISDOM; ROSS; SIDGWICK;
VIRTUE ETHICS; VIRTUES; VOLUNTARY ACTS; WAR AND
PEACE; WEAKNESS OF WILL; WITTGENSTEIN.
76
Bibliography
Works by Anscombe
Intention. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.
“Prolegomenon to a Pursuit of the Definition of Murder:
The Illegal and the Unlawful.” Dialectics and Human-
ism no. 4 (1979): 73–77.
Collected Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981;
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Vol.
III, Ethics, Religion and Politics, contains most of An-
scombe’s pre-1979 writings on ethics.
“Action, Intention and ‘Double Effect.’” Medalist’s Ad-
dress. In Proceedings of the ACPA, 1982, 12–25. Im-
portant discussion of action; clarification of issues con-
cerning intended and unintended killing.
“Von Wright and Practical Inference.” In The Philosophy
of Georg Henrik von Wright, edited by Paul Arthur
Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 377–404. La Salle,
IL: Open Court, 1989. Reprinted under the title “Prac-
tical Inference,” in Virtues and Reasons, edited by Ros-
alind Hursthouse et al., 1–34. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995.
“Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia: Some Philo-
sophical Considerations.” In Euthanasia, Clinical
Practice and the Law, edited by Luke Gormally, 37–
51. London: Linacre Centre for Health Care Ethics,
1994.
“Who is Wronged?” Oxford Review 1967: 16–17. Con-
troversial discussion of whether a person acts badly in
choosing to save a smaller rather than a larger number
of people.
Works about Anscombe
Baier, Kurt. “Radical Virtue Ethics.” In Midwest Studies
in Philosophy, vol. XIII, 126–35. Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Criticism of the
second thesis of “Modern Moral Philosophy.”
Conant, James. “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe
on Moral Unintelligibility.” In Religion and Morality,
edited by D. Z. Phillips, 250–98. New York: St. Mar-
tin’s Press, 1996. Discussion of the second thesis of
“Modern Moral Philosophy.”
Diamond, Cora. “The Dog that Gave Himself the Moral
Law.” In Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIII,
161–79. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1988. On the second thesis of “Modern Moral
Philosophy.”
Diamond, Cora, and Jenny Teichman, eds. Intention and
Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G. E. M. An-
scombe. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979; Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1979. Contains essays on An-
scombe’s discussions of intention in war and in sex,
and of topics from her Intention.
Haber, Joram Graf, ed. Absolutism and its Consequen-
tialist Critics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,

1994. On questions connected with the third thesis of
“Modern Moral Philosophy.”
Richter, Duncan. Ethics after Anscombe: Post “Modern
Moral Philosophy.” Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1999.
Winch, Peter. “Professor Anscombe’s Moral Philosophy.”
In Commonality and Particularity in Ethics, edited by
Lilli Alanen, et al., 177–96. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1997. Critical discussion of “Modern Moral Phi-
losophy” in relation to two of Anscombe’s later papers.
Cora Diamond
Anselm, Saint (1033–1109)
Abbot of the monastery at Bec-Hellouin in Nor-
mandy; Archbishop of Canterbury. In his first phil-
osophical work, the Monologion, Anselm indicates
that the ability to make value judgments is the very
essence of rationality: “for a rational nature to be
rational is nothing other than for it to be able to
discriminate what is just from what is not just, what
is true from what is not true, what is good from what
is not good, what is more good from what is less
good” (chap. 68). Anselm’s emphasis on rationality
is so strong that one would expect him to present a
theory of natural-law ethics. Yet he never explicitly
moves in that direction—except for stating, in Cur
Deus homo I, 20, that “[human] nature teaches you
to deal with your fellow-servant . . . as you would
want to be dealt with by him and teaches that anyone
who is unwilling to give of what he has ought not to
receive what he does not have.”
A major task of Anselm’s ethical theory, generally,
is to ascertain the relationship that obtains between
reason and will. Anselm has no doubt about the fact
that all rational beings are motivated in terms of an
inalienable inclination toward HAPPINESS. In Adam
this inclination was accompanied by an inclination
toward iustitia—i.e., justice, in the sense of right-
eousness—so that originally Adam took delight
both in doing the right thing and in doing it for the
right reason, viz., because it is right. With an eye to
Adam’s original state Anselm defines a just will as
one that adheres to moral rectitude for its own sake;
and he makes clear, in De veritate 12, that he means
adhering to moral rectitude for its own sake only and
not in order to procure, or to increase, happiness. In
Cur Deus homo I, 21, Anselm implies that each hu-
man being has an obligation to act virtuously and in
accordance with God’s will even if doing so were to
77
Anselm, Saint
conduce to external conditions that did not promote
happiness—indeed, even if doing so were to result
in the destruction of the present world. Similarly,
both in De libertate arbitrii 5–6 and in De concordia
I, 6, in which he alludes hypothetically to someone’s
choice between telling a lie or being killed, he inti-
mates that the lie ought not to be told. Cur Deus
homo II, 18–19, cites the instance of Christ, who,
according to Anselm’s point of view, allowed him-
self to be put to death rather than mendaciously
deny that he was the Son of God. Such commitment
to truth Anselm views as both exemplary and
meritorious.
Anselm conceives of morally upright actions as
actions approved by God. But he presumes that we
can determine which actions are moral and which
are immoral other than by direct insight, as it were,
into the mind of God. Although God’s will is always
ultimately determinative of moral rightness and
wrongness, God’s will is never arbitrary; rather,
whatever God wills he wills for a reason; and in
discerning something of these reasons we are able
to appeal to them as the basis for our moral obli-
gations (Cf. Cur Deus homo I, 8).
Clearly, Anselm’s conception of morality is fun-
damentally related to his theological position. In ac-
cordance with his theology he points out that as a
result of the Fall human beings have lost the original
inclination for justice. Accordingly, the relationship
between intellect and will has become distorted, so
that within the moral domain there is now a ten-
dency for fallen human beings to will that which ex-
ceeds the moderating requirements of iustitia. Even
when fallen human beings will that which is objec-
tively right, they do not (apart from the special as-
sistance of grace) successfully do so for the right
reason. This theological consideration leads Anselm
to refer to moral EVIL as itself a privation, for it is
the absence of justice where justice should be pres-
ent—viz., in the will. Anselm distinguishes evil-that-
is-injustice from evil-that-is-detriment (e.g., pain),
and he claims that only the former evil is privation.
His use of the term “privation” gives emphasis both
to his belief that moral evil results from the lack of
uprightness in the will and to his belief that only
such a deficiency is evil per se.
The moral basis articulated by Anselm vis-à-vis
his theory of the Atonement has often been studied.
Central to it are the notions of satisfaction, compen-
sation, and HONOR —as well as the presuppositions
Anselm, Saint
that only a service performed by a descendant of
Adam could make satisfaction for the wrongdoings
of Adam and his race, and that apart from such a
meritorious service God’s honor could be preserved
only by punishing, and not by forgiving, members of
the human race. In De conceptu virginali Anselm
insists that no descendants of Adam will be held ac-
countable for Adam’s sin but only for their own sins,
even though because of Adam’s personal sin his nat-
ural descendants inherit a sinful nature that predis-
poses them to sin personally. Anselm’s moral and
theological perspectives require the metaphysical
view that just as Adam’s personal action contami-
nated his nature, so his descendants’ respective na-
ture contaminates their respective persons, even be-
fore they sin personally.
Though Anselm teaches that fallen human beings
who reach the age of accountability inevitably
choose at some time to do evil, he nowhere supposes
that their choice is other than free. Yet his intriguing
view of freedom is problematical since it depends on
an objectionable construal of the claim that people
have FREE WILL insofar as they cannot be compelled
to will anything against their will—i.e., insofar as
their will cannot be forced: “A man can be bound
against his will, because he can be bound when he
is unwilling to be bound. . . . But a man cannot will
against his will, because he cannot will if he is un-
willing to will. For everyone-who-wills wills that he
will” (De libertate arbitrii 5). Insofar as Anselm con-
ceives of willing something against one’s will as will-
ing it unwillingly, and conceives of this latter as self-
contradictory, he makes compulsion of the will
logically impossible and freedom of the will logically
necessary. In the end, then, his theory of freedom
seems question-begging and therefore unconducive
to legitimating the moral practices of blaming and
praising.
In the Proslogion Anselm attempts to show that
there is no conflict between the notions of justice
and of MERCY as they apply to God. His attempted
harmonization consists of the ingenious strategy of
deriving mercy from justice, by way of considera-
tions of goodness. Glimpses of Anselm’s practical
thinking about the VIRTUES may be gathered from
De similitudinibus and from the Vita Anselmi of
Eadmer (1060–1124).
All in all, Anselm’s conception of morality—
though never systematically expounded by him—
commands our respect. Assuredly, it cannot reason-
78
ably be either dismissed as a mere remnant of feudal
thinking or relegated exclusively to the sphere of
theology.
See also: CHRISTIAN ETHICS; EVIL; FORGIVENESS;
FREE WILL; FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM; GOLDEN
RULE; GOOD, THEORIES OF THE; MERCY; METAPHYS-
ICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY; MOTIVES; NATURAL LAW;
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION; PUNISHMENT; RATIONAL
CHOICE; RATIONALITY VS. REASONABLENESS; RELI-
GION; RIGHT, CONCEPTS OF; THEOLOGICAL ETHICS;
VIRTUES.
Bibliography
Works by Anselm
The Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of
Anselm of Canterbury. Translated by Jasper Hopkins
and Herbert Richardson. Minneapolis, Banning Press,
2000.
Memorials of St. Anselm. Edited by R. W. Southern and
F. S. Schmitt. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Contains De similitudinibus.
Opera omnia anselmi. Edited by F. S. Schmitt. 2 vols.
Stuttgart: F. Frommann, 1968.
Works about Anselm
Crouse, Robert. “The Augustinian Background of St. An-
selm’s Concept of Justitia.” Canadian Journal of The-
ology 4 (1958): 111–19.
Eadmer. The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Edited and translated by R. W. Southern. New York:
Thomas Nelson, 1962.
Fairweather, Eugene. “Truth, Justice and Moral Respon-
sibility in the Thought of St. Anselm.” In Actes du pre-
mier congrès international de philosophie médiévale:
L’homme et son destin, 385–91. Louvain: Nauwe-
laerts, 1960.
Gombocz, Wolfgang L. “Anselm von Aosta als Schrecken
der ‘europäischen’ Anthropologie? Anmeldung der
philosophischen Pflicht, ‘Cur Deus Homo’ zu durch-
kreuzen.” In Entwicklungslinien mittelalterlicher Phi-
losophie, edited by Gerhard Leibold and Winfried Löff-
ler. Vorträge des V. Kongresses der Österreichischen
Gesellschaft für Philosophie. Teil 2, 73–86. Vienna:
Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1999.
Heyer, George S., Jr. “St. Anselm on the Harmony between
God’s Mercy and God’s Justice.” In The Heritage of
Christian Thought: Essays in Honor of Robert Lowry
Calhoun, edited by Robert E. Cushman and Egil Gris-
lis. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
Hopkins, Jasper. “Anselm of Canterbury.” In Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward Craig, general ed-

itor. Vol. 1, 283–97. London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 1998.
Hufnagel, Alfons. “Anselm und das Naturrecht.” In Ana-
lecta Anselmiana, edited by Helmut Kohlenberger, vol.
5, 189–94. Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1976.
Kane, G. Stanley. “Elements of Ethical Theory in the
Thought of St. Anselm.” In Studies in Medieval Cul-
ture, vol. 12, 61–71. The Medieval Institute. Kalama-
zoo: Western Michigan University, 1978.
McIntyre, John. St. Anselm and His Critics: A Reinterpre-
tation of the Cur Deus homo. Edinburgh: Oliver and
Boyd, 1954.
Pouchet, Robert. La rectitudo chez saint Anselme: un
itinéraire augustinien de l’âme à Dieu. Paris: Etudes
augustiniennes, 1964.
Sheets, John R. “Justice in the Moral Thought of St. An-
selm.” The Modern Schoolman 25 (January 1948):
132–39.
Torrance, Thomas F. “Ethical Implications of Anselm’s De
veritate.” Theologische Zeitschrift 24 (September–
October 1968): 309–19.
Vuillemin, Jules. “Justice anselmienne et bonne volonté
kantienne: essai de comparison,” pp. 361–75 in D. E.
Luscombe and G. R. Evans, editors, Anselm: Aosta,
Bec and Canterbury. Sheffield, England, Sheffield Ac-
ademic Press, 1996.
Jasper Hopkins
anthropology
The ethical question most frequently raised by an-
thropology is that of relativism, the term “cultural
relativism” having been widely propagated in Amer-
ican cultural anthropology by Melville Herskovits.
But many other ethical issues are raised both in and
by the practice of anthropology.
Information and Informants
Anthropologists often explore topics related to
RELIGION, sexuality, and social POWER —topics that
are extremely sensitive in the societies they write
about. To reveal the sources of information about
these topics—or the information itself—would of-
ten have a catastrophic impact on individuals or on
the community. Such information could be used by
people both within those societies and from outside
to threaten, manipulate, or embarrass; and revealing
a source may put her at risk of anything from ostra-
cism to assault. Not only may the publication of in-
formation have bad consequences, there may also
79
anthropology
be, as many people hold, a general obligation to re-
spect rights to PRIVACY in the human sciences, even
when the resulting harm over and above mere ex-
posure is not great or amounts simply to embar-
rassment.
Anthropology thus often raises a sharp conflict
between the scholarly concern for truth and verifi-
ability and the moral concern for the potential uses
of the information one makes available. Professional
norms rightly require anthropologists to maintain
adequate field notes and to deposit copies of them
in archives—including in the country where the re-
search is carried out—so that later researchers can
examine them for such scholarly, and broadly epi-
stemic, purposes as confirming the anthropologist’s
linguistic competence, honesty, and reliability; ex-
ploring alternative interpretations; and developing
analyses of material not published by the original
researcher. But if, for example, information provided
by an informant is embarrassing to the government
(or some powerful elite) of that informant’s country,
and that government or elite regularly uses force
against individuals who “slander the state,” then it
is clear that such purposes may have to be overrid-
den by the researcher’s obligations to the safety and
well-being of the informant.
Some of these issues are questions of maintaining
professional confidences: if information is provided
to a researcher on the understanding that its source
will not be revealed (or that it will not be revealed
during the informant’s lifetime), there is a very
strong presumption that the researcher ought to
maintain those confidences. Further, since anthro-
pologists are usually outsiders, they ought generally
to seek guidance from their informants as to what
dangers the publication of information might cause.
But just as, in many cases, anthropologists may be
unaware of the risks associated with revealing their
sources, so their informant may be unaware of the
risks. The obligation to one’s informants cannot be
discharged by getting their permission to release in-
formation in circumstances where they have no clear
sense of the risks.
Respect and Autonomy
Such cases raise delicate questions about the
wider issue of respect for the autonomy of peoples
in other cultures and respect for their cognitive and
moral views. Anthropologists very generally do not
anthropology
share the central beliefs—in gods, in witchcraft, or
in oracles, say—of the societies in which they work.
At the same time they make it their business to un-
derstand these views. This makes it possible for
them to manipulate the people whose culture they
are studying; for example, to get them to provide
information under false pretenses of one kind or
another. Manipulation of this kind involves using
people as means rather than ends in the way that
Immanuel KANT (1724–1804) would rule out by re-
spect for their autonomy.
But the differences between what the anthropol-
ogist knows and what people in the culture know
also raise questions of PATERNALISM. What duties,
for example, does an anthropologist, who is working
in a culture not her own, have toward people she
knows are in danger from the practices they engage
in? If an anthropologist fails to persuade such peo-
ple of these dangers, because they have radically dif-
ferent theories of how the world works, does respect
for autonomy require the anthropologist to allow the
people to proceed unhindered? Or does the fact that
these people are not properly informed allow over-
riding their autonomy in ways that seem appropriate
in other cases: for example, with children? That chil-
dren are the obvious model here indicates that mak-
ing these decisions raises substantial risks of eth-
nocentrism. But what if the people in question are
children, and the beliefs that threaten them are those
of their parents?
Anthropologists influenced by Herskovits—un-
like Herskovits himself—have sometimes held that
it is always wrong to intervene in such cases, appar-
ently on the basis of the argument that the truth of
MORAL RELATIVISM requires it. While this seems a
poor argument, it is certainly true that interventions
by outsiders who are insufficiently informed are of-
ten counterproductive—there is an argument here
from epistemic modesty; and that considerations of
respect for autonomy strongly argue against over-
ruling the decisions of any agent in circumstances
where they flow in the normal way from her beliefs
and values.
Exploitation
Finally, there are ethical issues raised by the fact
that anthropologists have by and large come from
rich nations and institutions and worked in poor
nations among poor people. Some of the most press-
80
ing ethical issues in anthropology are those that arise
from the considerable asymmetries of power and
wealth between the individuals and institutions of
the European and American academy and those of
the Third World. Anthropologists may, for example,
find themselves able to take advantage of their rela-
tive wealth to pay informants for information the
informants would not willingly give without pay-
ment. In circumstances of extreme poverty such pay-
ments are plainly exploitative.
It has also been argued recently that anthropol-
ogists have displayed too little sensitivity to issues of
acknowledgment. Failing to acknowledge the con-
tribution of theorists who are members of the cul-
ture under study, when such help would certainly be
acknowledged if it came from a Western student or
colleague, also constitutes a form of EXPLOITATION.
See also: AUTONOMY OF MORAL AGENTS; CULTURAL
STUDIES; EXPLOITATION; MORAL RELATIVISM; PATER-
NALISM; PROFESSIONAL ETHICS; SECRECY AND
CONFIDENTIALITY.
Bibliography
Van Olden, J. F. “Anthropology and Ethics: Annotated
Bibliography.” Sociologische Gids 19, no. 5–6 (Sept.–
Dec. 1972): 404–19.
Kwame A. Appiah
anti-realism
See metaphysics and epistemology; moral realism;
moral relativism.
applied ethics
Conceived broadly, applied ethics is the application
of ethical considerations—reasons, principles, val-
ues, ideals—to any policy or practice—personal or
social—for the purpose of evaluating (and thus en-
dorsing or rejecting) that policy or practice on eth-
ical grounds. Thus, applied ethics is the branch of
PRACTICAL REASONING in which ethical (as opposed
to prudential or selfish) considerations are employed
to guide individual and collective conduct.
Applied ethics is to be contrasted with other phil-
osophical undertakings in ethics, notably META-
ETHICS (the analysis of ethical concepts and ethical

reasoning), normative ethics (the study of the
NORMS used in making ethical judgments), and eth-
ical theory (the comprehensive investigation of eth-
ical problems, concepts, principles, reasoning, and
judgments, their interconnections and justification).
History
Applied ethics has attracted at least the passing
attention of the greatest thinkers, from SOCRATES’
(c. 470–399 B.C.E.) defense of his refusal to escape
from undeserved PUNISHMENT to Bertrand RUS-
SELL’s (1872–1970) defense of CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
to protest deploying atomic weapons. Other exam-
ples include LOCKE (1632–1704) on religious TOL-
ERATION, HUME (1632–1704) on SUICIDE, KANT
(1724–1804) on lying to prevent HARM to the in-
nocent, BENTHAM (1748–1832) on the French Dec-
laration of the Rights of Man, JOHN STUART MILL
(1806–1873) on EQUALITY between the sexes,
NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) on punishment, DEWEY
(1859–1952) on DEMOCRACY in America, and
SARTRE (1905–1980) on GENOCIDE in Vietnam.
As a study of these examples will confirm, no one
style of investigation and argument is practiced by
philosophers in the field of applied ethics. Hetero-
geneity is one of the hallmarks of applied ethics—
its problems, methods, and results. Applied ethics
also offers opportunities for philosophers to apply
theory to concrete cases; Bentham’s attack on the
“anarchical fallacies” of the French Declaration of
1789, for example, is a vivid case study of his posi-
tivistic UTILITARIANISM.
Related Fields
Applied ethics includes traditional CASUISTRY —
the application of ethical reflection to cases of prac-
tical concern. Like casuistry, applied ethics is typi-
cally situational rather than abstract, in the sense
that the reflective task is focused on an actual prob-
lem rather than on any broader issue. However, in-
sofar as casuistry has a distinctive method (“the
method of cases”), is confined to cases where MORAL
RULES apparently conflict, and is designed to assist
some actual agent in deciding what to do, applied
ethics is much broader and less well defined.
Applied ethics also includes PROFESSIONAL
ETHICS, the reflection on the ethical aspects of issues
and problems that arise within particular vocations
81
applied ethics
(medicine, business, JOURNALISM, etc.). Applied
ethics is more inclusive, however, since not all prac-
tical problems requiring ethical reflection fall con-
veniently within the domain of any recognized pro-
fession or vocation.
Applied ethics is a part, perhaps the major part,
of applied philosophy generally; and the terms ‘ap-
plied ethics’ and ‘applied philosophy’ are often used
as synonyms. Taken strictly, however, the two fields
are distinct. Insofar as applied philosophy addresses
problems in art, education, law, politics, etc., and
insofar as these problems are not solely ethical, ap-
plied philosophy is much the broader field.
The Role of Theory
The proper role of ethical theory in applied ethics
is controversial. Indeed, what that role should be
constitutes the principal problem in the theory of
applied ethics.
At the one extreme are those philosophers who
argue, in effect as PLATO (c. 430–347 B.C.E.) does,
that unless applied ethics is clearly and adequately
rooted in ethical theory, it is no better than a re-
sourceful defense of prejudice. The very term ‘ap-
plied ethics’ suggests a top-down application of eth-
ical theory or of an ethical norm to a practical
problem. On this view, a major problem is which
ethical theory or norm to apply, since there is more
than one and the practical dictates of the various
theories and norms are not identical in all cases.
Thus, a utilitarian and a Kantian might agree that it
is wrong to lie, even in a good cause, but their rea-
soning would be quite different. In other cases, e.g.,
whether murderers ought to be punished with death,
both the reasoning and the conclusions reached by
a Kantian and a utilitarian are likely to be different.
At the other extreme are those who argue, as AR-
ISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.E.) in effect does, that—since
no known ethical system is complete and ade-
quate—no independent theoretical fulcrum exists
on which to turn practical arguments one way or the
other. Instead, an ethical theory must itself be tested
for its adequacy by its practical implications and not
the other way around. The main danger here is that
uncriticized moral intuitions (e.g., the principles un-
reflectively accepted that underlie the prevailing so-
cial practices of this or that subculture) may come
to dominate more systematic and principled
thinking.
applied ethics
In recent years, under the influence of John
RAWLS, a third alternative has emerged. On this view,
we should seek a reciprocal interaction between ab-
stract theory (which provides the method for choos-
ing principles; in Rawls’s case they will be principles
chosen in the original position behind a veil of igno-
rance) and considered judgments about actual cases
(which serve as provisional fixed points for our sub-
stantive judgments, e.g., that the murder of innocent
children is a grave wrong), with the aim of obtaining
a wide REFLECTIVE EQUILIBRIUM between the two.
Philosophers have used wide reflective equilibrium
mainly to justify choice of ethical or political princi-
ples, but it can also be used to reach solutions to
practical problems in a manner superior to either the
Platonic or Aristotelian methods described above.
Methods
The simplest method of reasoning in applied
ethics is to give advice or render a judgment based
on the application of an accepted norm to the prob-
lem case: If lying is wrong, and someone is about to
tell a lie, then what that person is about to do is
wrong. This turns applied ethics into an exercise in
deductive reasoning from two premises: one that ex-
presses the sole relevant ethical consideration (rule,
principle, ideal, etc.), and the other that character-
izes the case at hand in such a manner as to enable
the ethical considerations to be applied to it.
A more complex example with these same basic
features appears in the standard argument for phy-
sician assistance in dying: On the assumption that
patient autonomy ought to be protected and re-
spected, and that the patient in question is dying and
wants medical help to ease the passage to death,
medical personnel ought to provide such assistance.
In each of the cases above, simplicity is achieved by
assuming that exactly one norm applies and that it
applies without exceptions.
However, most actual cases—whether of interest
to the ordinary person or to the philosopher, so far
as neither is in the rigid grip of a normative theory—
are much more complex. The diversity of problems
and approaches to them can be illustrated by con-
sidering three very different kinds of examples that
involve ethical decision making.
According to the Bible (I Kings 3:17–28), Solo-
mon had to decide which of two women claimants
was the “real” mother of the infant. Unable in the
82
nature of the case to determine which woman was
the biological parent, he proposed dividing the in-
fant and giving half to each claimant. Immediately
one of the women waived her claim in favor of the
other. Then Solomon in his wisdom awarded the
baby to the first woman; she had provided the best
evidence of a readiness to sacrifice for the welfare
of the infant, as a true mother (whether the biologi-
cal parent or not) would do. Solomon’s genius lay
in adopting a stratagem for discovering which claim-
ant was worthy of maternal responsibility. Modern
GAME THEORY nicely vindicates Solomon’s shrewd
behavior. But rarely do we have such a clear-cut
method to achieve the ethically preferred outcome;
the paradigm case of fair division between two per-
sons, in which one of them cuts and the other
chooses, has few applications or parallels in real life.
Triage during wartime (or other) disaster consti-
tutes a familiar strategy for allocating scarce re-
sources. The task is to classify casualties for appro-
priate treatment, aiming both to conserve medical
resources and preserve the effectiveness of the army
in the field. Sorting casualties into three (not two and
not four or more) categories will suffice: those whose
wounds will cause them to die; those who can be
saved but only by major hospitalization; and those
less seriously wounded. The first group should re-
ceive only pain medication. The second should be
sent to the rear for further attention. For the remain-
der, they should be treated immediately and returned
to their units as quickly as possible. A utilitarian
would see such triage as a strategy to maximize fight-
ing potential and minimize suffering and so the best
thing to do. A Kantian would view triage as giving
equal consideration to each of the wounded soldiers,
followed by treatment fairly apportioned in the cir-
cumstances. Soldiers behind a veil of ignorance ought
to accept the treatment allotted for each category, no
matter into which category they individually might
fall were they to be wounded.
Argument over ABORTION is more complex. First,
it is clear that no one moral rule applies with decisive
consequences. For example, causing the DEATH of a
nonviable human embryo does not obviously violate
the moral rule against murder. On the other hand,
the principle that one may do as one pleases with
one’s own PROPERTY (including the contents of one’s
body) hardly applies with dispositive force, either.
Yet each of these considerations points to relevant
concerns, albeit with opposite effect: respect for hu-

man life and respect for women’s autonomy. Second,
deciding what are the relevant facts to which a prin-
ciple can be attached is controversial: Is it the fact
that the embryo or fetus is alive, or that it is human
progeny, or that it is a potential person (assuming
normal development) that matters? Or is what mat-
ters whatever concerns the impact of the pregnancy
and subsequent responsibilities that would fall to the
woman in question? Several principles and various
facts all seem relevant, and perhaps none is decisive.
Interdisciplinary Tendencies
In actual controversial cases (e.g., Ought CAPITAL
PUNISHMENT be abolished? Was the Gulf War a just
war? Ought affirmative action be abolished? Does
FAIRNESS require a flat tax?), it is often extremely
difficult to obtain an accurate and complete account
of all the relevant facts.
In addition, the necessary factual information can
often be obtained only by practitioners in the field
and by using the methods of the social sciences (sta-
tistics, survey research, etc.). As a result, philoso-
phers engaged in applied ethics must rely on experts
in the pertinent fields to provide them with the rele-
vant data, or they must develop the skills to gather
their own data. Applied ethics independent of em-
pirical information is like Hamlet without the Prince
of Denmark.
Ethicists as Experts
Philosophers who study and teach applied ethics
(often now called “ethicists,” especially in the field
of biomedical ethics) have begun to play a profes-
sional role as consultants and investigators, provid-
ing expert advice, evidence, and testimony in many
different institutional settings. Since the 1970s, phi-
losophers have served as members of various com-
missions (primarily on issues of MEDICAL ETHICS),
testified before legislative committees and PUBLIC
POLICY panels, and have performed other duties in
which their ability to identify and evaluate the ethi-
cal impact of various policies and practices has been
utilized.
Research Centers
In recent years, the study and practice of applied
ethics has been concentrated at research centers
83
applied ethics
through their publications, conferences, and work-
shops. Pioneering the field is The Hastings Center
(New York), founded in 1969 with a focus on BIO-
ETHICS. Most such centers are affiliated with univer-
sity departments of philosophy, such as the Center
for Philosophy and Public Affairs (University of
Maryland, 1976), the Center for the Study of Values
(University of Delaware, 1977), the Center for Val-
ues and Social Policy (University of Colorado,
1979), and the Social Philosophy and Policy Center
(Bowling Green State University, Ohio, 1981).
Journals and Encyclopedias
Although articles in applied ethics have from time
to time appeared in almost every professional jour-
nal in philosophy (notably, in Ethics, founded in
1890), the desire to provide a regular forum for
those interested primarily in this field has led to the
founding of several quarterlies devoted to problems
in applied ethics: Social Theory and Practice
(1970–), Philosophy and Public Affairs (1971–),
Social Philosophy and Policy (1983–), Journal of
Applied Philosophy (1984–), and Public Affairs
Quarterly (1987–). A comprehensive account of is-
sues, problems, and methods can be found in the
Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, three volumes,
1977. Biomedical issues have their own comprehen-
sive treatment in Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 2d,
1995.
See also (in addition to the many articles on specific
moral issues): ACADEMIC ETHICS; AGRICULTURAL
ETHICS; ANIMALS, TREATMENT OF; BIOETHICS; BUSI-
NESS ETHICS; CASUISTRY; CHILDREN AND ETHICAL
THEORY; CONSERVATION ETHICS; CORRECTIONAL
ETHICS; ENGINEERING ETHICS; ENVIRONMENTAL
ETHICS; GOVERNMENT, ETHICS IN; INTERNATIONAL
JUSTICE; JOURNALISM; LAND ETHICS; LEGAL ETHICS;
LIBRARY AND INFORMATION PROFESSIONS; MASS ME-
DIA; MEDICAL ETHICS; NUCLEAR ETHICS; NURSING
ETHICS; POLICE ETHICS; PRINCIPLISM; PROFESSIONAL
ETHICS; PUBLIC POLICY; REFLECTIVE EQUILIBRIUM;
SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL ETHICS; SITUATION ETHICS;
SLIPPERY SLOPE ARGUMENTS; SPORT; THEORY AND
PRACTICE; WELFARE RIGHTS AND SOCIAL POLICY.
Bibliography
Bedau, Hugo Adam. Making Mortal Choices: Three Ex-
ercises in Moral Casuistry. New York: Oxford Univer-
applied ethics
sity Press, 1997. Close scrutiny of three cases (two of
them hypothetical) involving life-and-death choices.
Brams, Stephen. Biblical Games: A Strategic Analysis of
Stories in the Old Testament. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1980. Application of game theory to various biblical
stories, including Solomon’s judgment in awarding the
infant.
Daniels, Norman. Justice and Justification: Reflective
Equilibrium in Theory and Practice. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996. A detailed discussion of
the method of wide reflective equilibrium and appli-
cation to several problems in health care. Bibliography.
DeMarco, Joseph P., and Richard M. Fox, eds. New Di-
rections in Ethics: The Challenge of Applied Ethics.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. Nineteen
essays by contemporary authors on the nature of ap-
plied ethics and related issues.
Rosenthal, David M., and Fadlou Shehadi, eds. Applied
Ethics and Ethical Theory. Salt Lake City: University
of Utah Press, 1988. Essays by contemporary writers
exploring the tasks of applied ethics, its usefulness, fea-
sibility, and relation to theory.
Singer, Peter, ed. Applied Ethics. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1986. Reprints fourteen essays on as many
topics, including two classics (Hume on suicide, J. S.
Mill on the death penalty). Bibliography.
Hugo Adam Bedau
Aquinas
See Thomas Aquinas, Saint.
Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975)
Born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad,
Russia); emigrated to France, 1933, and to the
United States, 1941.
Before 1960, Arendt was best known for two
books. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) she
analyzed “the burden of our time”: the thorough-
going eradication of political freedom by totalitarian
regimes, accomplished through ideology and terror.
The Human Condition (1958) elaborated her re-
sponse to that “burden,” a revival of the Greek idea
that political action is the freest, most characteris-
tically human, and most meaningful form of activity.
Though morally motivated, Arendt’s classical con-
ception of politics was a nonmoralized one. She was
concerned to vindicate the value of political action
as such, not just good political action; she quotes
with approval Pericles’s boast that Athens’s great
84
deeds, both good and evil, would win immortal
fame.
Though she never explicitly renounced her earlier
nonmoral conception of political action, Arendt’s
later works, beginning with the controversial Eich-
mann in Jerusalem (1963), amount in fact to a sus-
tained effort to remoralize the theory of political ac-
tion. They thus mark a break with her own earlier
work; they also form one of the twentieth century’s
most distinguished bodies of writing on MORAL PSY-
CHOLOGY. In Eichmann Arendt developed her most
famous concept, the “banality of evil.” She discov-
ered in Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) a “banal”
mass murderer moved by no monstrous intentions,
ideological convictions, or insanity. Eichmann’s
moral infirmity lay in an inability to think from the
point of view of others, and therefore to think at all.
From this infirmity arose, on the one hand, Eich-
mann’s striking lack of psychological and even per-
sonal identity over time, and, on the other hand, his
lack of moral judgment.
Arendt developed both sides of this argument in
the important essay “Thinking and Moral Consid-
erations” (1971). She identifies the capacity for
thought with the ability to divide one’s point of view
and conduct an internal dialogue. It is this capacity,
she claims, that makes possible both consciousness
and CONSCIENCE —personal identity and moral judg-
ment. But she admits puzzlement about how think-
ing works to insulate us from bad judgment. This
question motivates her final work in moral psychol-
ogy, the incomplete Life of the Mind (1978) and the
posthumously assembled Lectures on Kant’s Politi-
cal Philosophy (1982).
Arendt laid special emphasis on the faculty of
judgment—the capacity to assess actions without
appealing to rules. It seemed clear to her that sound
judgment, and not faithfulness to MORAL RULES or
to a procedure of moral assessment, is the key to
decency. (Throughout her writing she insists that
concrete stories, not theories, are the source of
meaning for us.) She hoped to elaborate on Imman-
uel KANT’s (1724–1804) thought that judgment
arises from an “enlarged mentality” whereby one se-
rially adopts representative standpoints (Critique of
Judgment, Sect. 40). But she died with only the title
and epigraphs of her book on judgment written.
Arendt has had little influence on Anglo-American
ethical theory. This is to be regretted. Arguing as she
does that personal identity requires the capacity to

adopt external standpoints, Arendt is close to phi-
losophers such as Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit
who have examined related theories. And her em-
phasis on the priority of moral judgment over sys-
tematic morality places her work in natural sympa-
thy with the many contemporary philosophers who
share her interests in CHARACTER, judgment, and
the importance of concrete narratives for moral
philosophy.
See also: CHARACTER; CONSCIENCE; EXTERNALISM
AND INTERNALISM; KANT; LIBERTY; MORAL PSY-
CHOLOGY; MORAL REASONING; NARRATIVE ETHICS;
PRACTICAL REASON[ING]; SELF-KNOWLEDGE; SOCIAL
AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; SYMPATHY.
Bibliography
Works by Arendt
Arendt published 140 articles and 9 books (in English)
during her lifetime; 4 more books appeared posthumously
as have several volumes of her correspondence. Listed
here are only those most important for her moral
philosophy.
Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political
Thought. Rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1968 [1961].
Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jova-
novich, 1972.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1965 [1963].
The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958.
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Edited and with
an interpretive essay by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1982.
The Life of the Mind. Edited by Mary McCarthy. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1968.
“Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture.” Social
Research 38 (1971): 417–46.
Works about Arendt
Of the dozens of works on Arendt, many recent, the fol-
lowing are particularly crucial for understanding her con-
tributions to ethics.
Beiner, Ronald. “Hannah Arendt on Judging.” In Lectures
on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 89–156. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1982.
Bernstein, Richard J. “Judging—The Actor and the Spec-
tator.” In his Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Prag-
matic Mode, 221–37. Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1986.
85
Aristotelian ethics
Hinchman, Lewis P. and Sandra K. Hinchman, eds.
Hanna Arendt: Critical Essays. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 1994.
Kateb, George. Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience,
Evil. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983. Con-
tains a bibliography of works about Arendt.
Villa, Dana Richard. The Cambridge Companion to Han-
nah Arendt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the
World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Con-
tains a complete bibliography of Arendt’s works.
David Luban
arete
See excellence; virtues.
Aristotelian ethics
Much of current moral theorizing is spent in an ef-
fort to tailor the moral theories of historically
prominent thinkers or schools of thought to the
complexities of the contemporary human condi-
tion. Fueling this is a conviction that very real
moral gains are to be achieved by bringing the his-
tory of ethics to bear on modern life. As a result,
we have neo-Aristotelianism, NEO-STOICISM, neo-
Kantianism, and neo-Hegelianism. We have not yet
seen a revival of EPICUREANISM, perhaps because we
are not yet that far removed from the popular culture
of the 1960s when being “laid back” was a crude
substitute for ataraxia. Nor does it seem that there
is that much movement on the UTILITARIANISM
front, a view thatby its very name discourages nos-
talgia and by its method any robust need for history.
What is it, then, that has led many to look back to
thinkers of the past to find the key to the future re-
garding ethics, and what must any view with his-
torical roots in Aristotle (or the Stoics, or Kant, or
Hegel) provide if it is to be adequate to the lives of
contemporary persons? Finally, is there anything
that might favor Aristotelian prospects over opti-
mistic competitors or pessimistic postmodernists?
One way to focus debate is in terms of PRACTICAL
REASON: What is it for contemporary persons to be
practically rational in regard to the complex prob-
lems of modernity? First, posing this question ex-
plains why there is an inquiry in the first place. Mod-
ern persons seem to be groping for a way to think
Aristotelian ethics
rationally about the complexities of their lives, and
a major part of the problem seems to be a conflict
of frameworks. Some of our moral history regarding
practical reason has a lineage to ARISTOTLE (384–
322 B.C.E.) and the pre-Hellenistic Greeks; other as-
pects go back through KANT (1724–1804) and
Christianity to the Stoics. Still others seem to find
their home in medieval Christianity. Hence all the
competitors are conservative in regard to postmod-
ernist options: they all think that the key to modern
reason lies in realizing how to adjust the insights of
the past to the complexities of the present. Second,
focusing the debate in this way explains why, to date,
the major competitors are Aristotelian and Kantian
(though the Stoics are beginning to mount an of-
fense). Why? Because both Aristotle and Kant had
developed views on practical reason.
The most pressing complexities to be addressed
by any updated version of either Aristotle or Kant
include at least two crucial matters: the relationship
between partial and impartial concerns—between
near and distantly related persons—and the need to
acknowledge adequately the tragic dimensions of
life. Contemporary persons are, by and large, cos-
mopolitan by necessity rather than choice. It is sim-
ply quite difficult to remain parochial in one’s moral
concerns given that the complexities of our daily
lives present us with the necessity of recognizing the
value of others who are much different from us and
who are not related to us through various personal
bonds, such as familial affection, FRIENDSHIP, and
community or cultural LOYALTY. On the other hand,
however cosmopolitan we are in our concerns, the
ties of love of FAMILY, of friends, of community must
be robust for most of us to have any reasons to live
at all. Without these ties, ALIENATION seems the
more likely result than either rationality or libera-
tion. Much the same can be said for the value of
aesthetic activity, meaningful activity that we find
interesting, fascinating, captivating, and the like, in-
dependent of its service to humanity or to our loved
ones. Life has to be interesting to some degree to be
worth living, and any theory of practical reason that
is indifferent to these nonsocial concerns is simply
overly moralized.
In regard to the issue of the relationship between
the personal and the impersonal, Kant would seem
to offer more of a solution to the problems of the
cosmopolitan self and Aristotle more regarding the
problems of the personal self. In this regard, the task
86
for neo-Aristotelians is constructing a view from Ar-
istotle that is adequate to the contemporary person’s
cosmopolitan values. The task for neo-Kantians is
constructing a view from Kant that is adequate to
the contemporary person’s personal values.
Viewed from this perspective, some neo-Aristo-
telian attempts seem doomed to failure, simply be-
cause they do not make sufficient place for those
beyond personal borders. At least, this seems to be
a widely held opinion of the fate of Alasdair MAC-
INTYRE’s project. Aristotelian communitarianism
seems too cloistered to house our cosmopolitan
needs and aspirations. Other forms of COMMUNITAR-
IANISM, such as Charles TAYLOR’s, seem to suffer
similar difficulties, though they are more traceable
to HEGEL (1770–1831) than to Aristotle. But even
if these views fail for their inability to address our
cosmopolitan concerns, they nonetheless pose a
challenge to more cosmopolitan-oriented theories,
such as are found in Kant and the Stoics and their
progeny. Our social values place too high a premium
on the values of family, friendship, and community
to be subsumed in some way under a concern for
universal justice or BENEVOLENCE.
Moreover, MacIntyre seems to have won an im-
portant part of the debate, namely, that practical rea-
son is narratival, which requires that in order for an
agent’s actions to be comprehensible as options they
must be placed within a context that is thickly de-
scribed in a way that makes essential reference to a
meaningful life from the agent’s own point of view.
The evidence that MacIntyre (and Bernard WIL-
LIAMS and others) have won this part of the debate
is that contemporary Kantians are now concerned to
show that Kant can and must be understood to allow
for this requirement. In this sense, contemporary
Kantians are less concerned to maintain as radical a
distinction between kinds of moral schemes as either
Kant himself or the early RAWLS were. By abandon-
ing the notion that the right is prior to the good and
by accepting the narratival nature of practical rea-
son, contemporary Kantians think they can provide
both a satisfactory cosmopolitanism and a concep-
tual scheme rich in personal values.
So construed, the Aristotelian victory is less than
ultimate because it requires only a reshaping of Kan-
tian boundaries so that what is right in Aristotle can
be annexed into Kantian territory; it does not require
Kantians to abandon the field. Indeed, the ultimate
victory belongs to Kant, or so the story goes.

The Kantian reconstruction of Aristotle (so argue
the revisionists) must and can be expressed narra-
tively in terms of the flourishing of a rational agent,
and the structure of Kantian narrative, which is
thick with the personal and broad with the cosmo-
politan, is roughly as follows. Rational human be-
ings come to the task of practical reason with a va-
riety of ends, some of which are subordinate to
others but nonetheless are valued as ends rather
than as mere means. But there is one end that is of
a different value and more central to the flourishing
of a rational agent than any other value. This is the
value of our rational nature or rational agency,
which is our ability to set ends for ourselves in a way
that is consistent with the equal value of any other
rational being to set ends for him- or herself. All
other ends, on this view, are subordinate to this end
in the sense that the value of our rational nature
regulates all our other ends: in cases of conflict we
never compromise on the value of our rational
agency. The capacity for a good will is what gives us
our DIGNITY, and this dignity is absolutely inviolable
in regard to other values. Thus, whatever personal
values we have need not be derived from the value
of human dignity—they can have their own inde-
pendent irreducible value—but the place they have
in our lives when we flourish as rational agents must
be regulated by the concern for respect for human
dignity as an absolute and inviolable value.
So morality is roughly divided into perfect and
imperfect duties. Perfect duties take priority over
imperfect duties and are more strict in the actions
they require than imperfect duties. Keeping prom-
ises and CONTRACTS, telling the truth, avoiding SUI-
CIDE, gaining and honoring CONSENT, not interfering
with autonomous choices, and considerations of jus-
tice are salient duties of this sort. Here the notion is
that some aspects of the value of rational agency are
so fundamental that they leave little room for indi-
vidual latitude about what is to be done and they are
lexically prior to other considerations of agency.
Considerations of humanity in the cosmopolitan
sense reign supreme. Imperfect duties, on the other
hand, commit us to certain obligatory ends: perfect-
ing our CHARACTER, developing our talents, and con-
tributing to the HAPPINESS of others. And it is under
these obligatory ends that we have obligations that
apply more to the personal, less cosmopolitan as-
pects of human dignity.
There is an extensive literature that tries to show
87
Aristotelian ethics
that, within this framework, we can assimilate what-
ever is salvageable from Aristotle to Kant. Hence,
we can have both the personal and the cosmopoli-
tan, thickness of character and a morally expansive
will, within a Kantian framework.
The prospects for a contemporary Aristotelian
view that resists assimilation by this neo-Kantian
program must demonstrate the ways in which it dif-
fers from the Kantian view and its structure of du-
ties; it must establish a plausible cosmopolitanism
without sacrificing the real value of the personal;
and it must establish itself as a better alternative
than postmodernist alternatives.
Perhaps the most visible attempt at an Aristote-
lian solution to the cosmopolitan problem is made
by Martha Nussbaum. The project begins with an
attempt to isolate a set of what she calls nonrelative
virtues that have their foundation in the fact that we
are human beings rather than gods or beasts. Both
eudaimonia (living well) and virtue are understood
in terms of basic capacities, which are functional ca-
pacities of an organism that are central to its living.
A basic capacity for a god is one thing; for a beast,
another; and for a human being, something else en-
tirely. Accordingly, accounts of eudaimonia and the
virtues internal to a way of life for a particular kind
of organism depend on whether the organism is a
god, a beast, or a human. The hope of this approach
is that there is some set of basic capacities that hu-
man beings have in virtue of being human rather
than being divine or beastly that will serve as the
basis for a set of nonrelative virtues.
Specification of the content of any virtue included
in a set of virtues proceeds from the thinnest account
of human capacities to thicker accounts. The thin-
nest account is one that applies most broadly to hu-
mans as humans rather than as beasts or as gods.
But even when the thinnest set is isolated, the con-
tent of these virtues is specified at different levels of
concreteness. Typically Aristotelian virtues like
COURAGE, moderation, justice, for example, are
likely to be in the thinnest set because unlike gods
humans must have the capacity to control fear in the
face of danger and to moderate their appetites, and
unlike either beasts or gods they must cooperate
with others in the expression of their sociality. The
content of virtues, however, is specified more locally
in cultural and historical context.
What the mean is regarding any virtue, say, cour-
age, moderation, or magnanimity, is specified not
Aristotelian ethics
just in terms of being human rather being beastly or
divine, but also in terms of humanly contingent fac-
tors like being a parent rather than childless, being
female rather than male, or being Chinese rather
than American. These thicker specifications of the
content of particular virtues are all various functions
of our being human understood in terms of more
generalized descriptions of our basic capacities but
concretely tailored in their expression to specific his-
torical and cultural contexts.
The basis for an Aristotelian cosmopolitanism is
the understanding that the thicker, more local spec-
ifications of the content of a set of virtues are all
functions of a common humanity. Thus we see same-
ness in diversity and difference. The idea then is to
spell out a conception of minimal human worth
based on the notion of basic human capacities. A
successful account should yield a result that distin-
guishes the Kantian agent from the Aristotelian
agent. This will mean that the Aristotelian concep-
tion of the worth of persons as a function of dis-
tinctively human capacities will not reduce to the
Kantian notion of the value of autonomy. The rec-
ognition of the worth of persons as having certain
basic capacities will regulate the place of more local
specifications of what we think is good character
and good living in a way that is analogous to the way
in which respect for autonomy regulates our more
personal commitments on the Kantian view. By thin-
ning the basis for the worth of persons, Nussbaum
hopes to avoid some of the problems charged by
postmodernists that any cosmopolitan view is in the
end a form of parochialism. Should such a project
succeed there could be little room for postmodernist
charges of cultural imperialism in the guise of uni-
versal morality as there is when Kantians insist on
ideals of autonomy against cultural ideals that place
less value than the Kantian scheme can allow.
Nussbaum is also concerned to address the issue
of TRAGEDY, and it is not yet clear how the tragic
aspect of life is depicted on the Aristotelian scheme
she is ultimately going to endorse, but it is nonethe-
less a central concern of her project. One very im-
portant aspect of the problem of tragedy for her will
be the nature of practical reason when cosmopolitan
values come into irresolvable conflict with the per-
sonal, as they surely can, even on her view. Whether
and to what extent this kind of project will succeed
is a story now in the telling.
Other appeals to Aristotle make use of the notion
88
of relative rationality and differ from Nussbaum in
being more agnostic or skeptical about nonrelative
rationality or virtue. Henry Richardson develops a
conception of practical reason that is Aristotelian in
spirit that accommodates the capacity within prac-
tical reason to deliberate about final and even ulti-
mate ends. Richardson argues that in order for de-
liberation about final ends to be possible, the
regulative relationships among practical ends must
be bidirectional. Moreover, he argues that there can
be conflicts among our ends that are incommensu-
rable. This requires a construction of an Aristoteli-
anism according to which eudaimonia is not a com-
mensurans for the ordering of ends in cases of
conflict. Rather, the ends of practical reason are mu-
tually supporting, none of which are immune to re-
vision in the deliberative attempt to further specify
our ends.
If Richardson is correct that relative rationality
begins with a set of ends and proceeds with refining
a conception of those ends through the employment
of practical reason in concrete particular situations
that require ACTION, then human dignity cannot be
the kind of end Kantians claim that it is. For it is a
crucial feature of the Kantian view that the value of
rational agency is an end that is not subject to revi-
sion through deliberation. It is not an end that is
bidirectionally related to other ends. Richardson’s
conception of mutually supportable ends that are bi-
directionally related leaves open the possibility that
we can revise our ends in such a way that we care a
great deal about those who do not stand within our
personal borders and the central focus of our lives
is more personal and local in orientation. The Aris-
totelian task, then, is to start where we are (with
relative rationality) and see if the project of a ra-
tional specification of our ends yields an equilibrium
of mutually supporting ends that reflects both a ro-
bust cosmopolitanism and a thickly personal life. So
unlike Nussbaum’s strategy, Richardson builds from
the bottom up, from the thick ends that we do have
to the possibility of a more expansive concern for
humanity. Whereas, Nussbaum’s strategy is top
down: she first articulates a set of nonrelative vir-
tues and then attempts to show how a person hav-
ing that set is culturally sensitive to more local con-
cerns. Both recognize tragic, rationally irresolvable
conflicts.
Another attempt to develop an Aristotelian con-
ception of relative rationality (Harris 1999) begins

with a specific conception of good character and
provides an account of practical reason within it,
with the concept of INTEGRITY playing a central role.
Presented in the second person to emphasize the
agent-centeredness of practical reason, the account
conceives of practical reason as an integrative psy-
chological function that allows you (the agent) to
integrate in a coherent way the various practical con-
cerns and commitments you have.
In any particular concrete situation, the task of
practical reason is to find a way to integrate the vari-
ous concerns and commitments you have so that you
can see a coherent way into the future either with
your commitments intact or with a revised set of
commitments. Otherwise, integrity cannot be main-
tained. Hence, this integration test is the ultimate
test for an acceptable account of practical reason.
Normative beliefs, then, are rational insofar as they
resolve for the person of integrity what PEIRCE
(1839–1914) and DEWEY (1859–1952) called
“problematic situations,” situations that involve
complex integration problems.
As with any conception of relative rationality, the
kinds of integration problems you face depend on
the kinds of concerns and commitments you start
out with, and your starting point says something
about the kind of person you are. It is in this sense
that practical reason is character-relative. The ac-
count diverges in its structure from the accounts of
both Nussbaum and Richardson, because unlike
Nussbaum’s, it does not start with a commitment to
a nonrelative account of practical reason and virtue,
and unlike Richardson’s, it does not simply begin
with concrete situations and reason up to a set of
mutually supporting ends. Rather, it asks, what kind
of character would a person have who had both cos-
mopolitan concerns and a robust personal life with
more local concerns? What thicker description
could we give of you if we were to describe you as
such a person?
The thicker description given in the account,
called the thick conception of integrity, is as follows:
you would be a respectful and sympathetic person
regarding those with whom you are not personally
or specially attached; you would be a loving person
in a variety of ways—(possibly and probably) a lov-
ing parent, a loving friend, and a loving neighbor;
you would be a person who takes aesthetic delight
(in a broad sense) in an extensive range of activities
valued for their own sake; and you would be a per-
89
Aristotelian ethics
son committed to EXCELLENCE at what you do. The
task, then, is to provide an account of practical rea-
son fitted to this thick conception of integrity that is
a competitor to recent Kantian accounts. For on the
Kantian view, a good person would be described as
person who fits the description of the thick concep-
tion of integrity.
Juxtaposed, then, are both recent Kantian ac-
counts and the proposed Aristotelian alternative:
both attempt to account for how such a person could
rationally integrate all the concerns that a person of
integrity in the thick sense would have in various
kinds of problematic situations. Similarly juxta-
posed are Kantian accounts and a proposed Aristo-
telian account of practical deliberation. It is argued
that a conception of practical reason in which all its
NORMS are symmetrical (bidirectional in Richard-
son’s sense) in their regulative functions requires
that human dignity cannot be treated as the kind of
value Kantians claim that it is for a person of this
sort and the conception be able to pass the integra-
tion test. Moreover, the proposed account, wherein
the norm of human dignity is treated as symmetri-
cally related in its regulative functions within prac-
tical reason to other more local normative concerns
(family, friends, work, and culture), can pass the in-
tegration test, while providing a more plausible ac-
count of the latitude of practical reason than the ac-
count of perfect and imperfect duties found in the
Kantian literature. The Aristotelian criteria of final-
ity and self-sufficiency are given direct roles in prac-
tical deliberation and are employed to bring coher-
ence to what Barbara Herman has called an agent’s
deliberative field—better, it is argued, than the best,
most recent interpretations of the Kantian Categor-
ical Imperative. A theory of personality disintegra-
tion is presented that serves as an empirical con-
straint on whether the integration test has been met.
Both Kantian and Aristotelian alternatives are tested
across a broad range of practical contexts as they are
faced by a person who fits the thick description. Fi-
nally, by addressing issues of incommensurability in
concrete deliberative contexts, the account illus-
trates both some of the ineliminably tragic aspects
of life that face human deliberation and some of the
limits of the unity of practical reason, a topic central
to an adequate response to POSTMODERNISM.
Concessions of some sort to postmodernist views
seem in order from any plausible historically ori-
ented theory, whether it is Aristotelian, Kantian,
Aristotelian ethics
Stoic, or whatever. Both Aristotle and Kant, for ex-
ample, held rather strong views regarding the unity
of the virtues and the unity of practical reason. What
we now know about the brain alone makes it un-
likely that these views can be sustained through
further inquiry. But admitting this is a far from
conceding some of the more extreme views of self-
fragmentation portrayed by some postmodernists.
Moreover, our increasing understanding of incom-
mensurable values through the work of thinkers like
Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) requires a rethinking of
the nature of tragedy, something perhaps neither Ar-
istotle nor Kant understood well enough to ade-
quately address postmodernist worries. The issue,
however, is whether it is best to adjust these his-
torical conceptions of ethics to what we now know
and to what we now face in life, or do we in facing
the future come to that task with a fragmented array
of irreconcilable cultural relics?
There are many other Aristotelian projects related
to issues in contemporary ethics of a less systematic
scope than the ones explicitly discussed here, some
of which are dealt with in the works listed in the
bibliography. Also, Thomas Hurka’s version of Ar-
istotelian PERFECTIONISM is not discussed here be-
cause there is an independent entry on that subject
by Hurka himself.
See also: ARISTOTLE; AUTONOMY OF MORAL AGENTS;
COMMUNITARIANISM; COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS; CUL-
TURAL STUDIES; DIGNITY; DUTY AND OBLIGATION;
EUDAIMONIA (ISM); IMPARTIALITY; INTEGRITY; KANT;
KANTIAN ETHICS; LIFE, MEANING OF; MORAL COM-
MUNITY, BOUNDARIES OF; MORAL RELATIVISM; MUL-
TICULTURALISM; NARRATIVE ETHICS; NEO-KANTIAN
ETHICS; NEO-STOICISM; PARTIALITY; POSTMODERN-
ISM; PRACTICAL REASON[ING]; RATIONAL CHOICE;
RATIONALITY VS. REASONABLENESS; SELF-KNOWL-
EDGE; SELF-RESPECT; STOICISM; TAYLOR; WILLIAMS.
Bibliography
Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1993.
Baron, Marcia. Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Becker, Lawrence C. A New Stoicism. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1998.
Berlin, Isaiah. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters
in the History of Ideas. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997 (1991).
90
Broadie, Sarah. Ethics with Aristotle. London: Oxford
University Press, 1993 (1991).
Engstrom, Stephen P., and Jennifer Whiting, eds. Aristotle,
Kant, and the Stoics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996.
Harris, George W. Dignity and Vulnerability: Strength and
Quality of Character. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997.
———. Agent-Centered Morality: An Aristotelian Alter-
native to Kantian Internalism. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999.
Herman, Barbara. The Practice of Moral Judgment. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Hurka, Thomas. Perfectionism. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1993.
Kenny, Anthony John Patrick. The Aristotelian Ethics: A
Study of the Relationship between the Eudemian and
Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1978.
Korsgaard, Christine M. Creating the Kingdom of Ends.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
———. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. London: Duckworth,
1981.
McDowell, John. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998.
Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. 1986.
———. “Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations
of Ethics.” In World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the
Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J.
Altham and R. Harrison, 86–131. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995.
———. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in
Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994.
Nussbaum, Martha, and Amartya Sen, eds. The Quality of
Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
O’Neill, Onora. Towards Justice and Virtue. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Richardson, Henry S. Practical Reasoning about Final
Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997
(1994).
Sherman, Nancy. The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s The-
ory of Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989.
———. Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant
on Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1989.
Wiggins, David. Needs, Values, Truth. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1987.

Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981.
———. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1985.
George W. Harris
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.)
Born in Stagira (Macedon), lived in Athens 367–
347, then in Lesbos, and in Macedon, before re-
turning to Athens. Student of PLATO (c. 430–347
B.C.E.); founder of the Lyceum school in Athens.
Aristotle’s Ethical Works
Aristotle’s ethical theory is mostly contained in
three treatises: the Magna Moralia (MM), the Eu-
demian Ethics (EE), and the Nicomachean Ethics
(EN). Some questions about the relation between
these works are still unsettled: (1) The MM is widely
agreed not to have been written by Aristotle. Some
believe, however, that it is authentic in substance—
that it contains a student’s notes on an early course
of lectures by Aristotle. Others believe (less plausi-
bly) that it is a post-Aristotelian compilation based
on the EE and EN. (2) The EE is widely agreed to
be authentic. It is generally, but not universally,
taken to be earlier than the EN. (3) Three books (EN
v–vii and EE iv–vi) are assigned by the manuscripts
to both the EE and the EN. They are fairly generally
believed to have been originally written for the EE;
but many critics believe they were partly rewritten
to fit the EN.
Though the differences between the ethical works
are not trivial, the area of agreement is very large.
This article ignores the differences, and is based
largely on the EN (all references refer to it unless
indicated otherwise).
In his ethical arguments Aristotle normally fol-
lows the method of dialectic (Topics i 2, EE i 3, 6,
EN 1145b2–7). He examines the puzzles (aporiai)
raised by common beliefs (endoxa), and tries to find
a general principle that will resolve the puzzles, and
justify most, or the most important, of the common
beliefs. His method is closely related to the Socratic
dialogue, without the overt form of a dialogue.
Aristotle conceives ‘ethics’ (MM 1181a24–
1182a1) as a part of political science; it is the part
concerned with finding the good for an individual
and a community (EN 1094b5–10). He treats the
91
Aristotle
EN and the Politics as parts of a single inquiry (EN
1181b12–23).
An account of the human good, in Aristotle’s
view, ought to show (a) what the VIRTUES of CHAR-
ACTER are, and why they are virtues; (b) why Plato
in the Republic is right to claim that we are always
better off if we have justice and the other virtues;
and (c) how we should acquire the virtues. On these
questions Aristotle’s views are closer to Plato’s than
to SOCRATES’ (c. 470–399 B.C.E.) (MM 1182a15–
30, EE 1216b3–25, EN 1104b11–13, 1145b23–
31). (He criticizes Plato, however, for introducing
the Form of the Good into ethical argument; he re-
jects the Theory of Forms in general, and thinks it is
in any case inappropriate to ethics [EN i 6].)
The Human Good
Aristotle argues that a human being has an ulti-
mate good, an end that we want for its own sake,
and for the sake of which we want other things
(1094a18–19). This ultimate end is HAPPINESS, EU-
DAIMONIA (1095a14–20), for the sake of which all
of us do all the other things (1102a2–3). If it is to
be an ultimate end, happiness must be complete (or
‘final’, teleion) and self-sufficient (1097a15–b21).
For if it is reasonable for us to choose everything for
the sake of happiness, and happiness for the sake of
nothing else, then we must have reason to believe
that no genuine intrinsic good lies outside happi-
ness; for if there were any such good, then it would
not be clear why happiness (rather than happiness
plus this further good) should be our ultimate end.
Aristotle takes happiness to be comprehensive,
insofar as he claims that a self-sufficient good must,
all by itself, make life lacking in nothing. He de-
scribes a test that implies the comprehensiveness of
happiness: if we think some good G is to be identi-
fied with happiness, but then find that we can add
some further good H to G, so that the total of G Ⳮ
H is a greater good than G alone, then G cannot be
identified with happiness.
These general criteria for happiness do not by
themselves imply that some definite kind of life
achieves happiness. But Aristotle thinks we can
reach a more definite account of happiness by atten-
tion to the human function (ergon), the character-
istic activity that is essential to a human being, in
the same way as a purely nutritive life is essential
to a plant, and a life guided by sense-perception
Aristotle
and DESIRE is essential to an animal (1097b32–
1098a18). Since a human being is essentially a ra-
tional agent, the essential activity of a human being
is a life guided by PRACTICAL REASON. Now the good
life for a human being must be good for a being with
the essential activity of a human being; hence it must
be a good life guided by practical reason, and hence
it must be a life in accordance with virtue (EXCEL-
LENCE; aretê). Aristotle therefore defines the human
good as an actualization of the soul in accordance
with complete virtue in a complete life (1098a16–
20). A life that is not guided by reason might be
good for some other sort of creature, but not for a
human being.
In speaking of a life in accordance with reason,
Aristotle does not exclude all animal or vegetative
activities from the life that achieves happiness. He
assumes only that rational activity is the distinctive
and essential feature of the human soul, and that this
organizes the human being’s other activities. He
does not thereby advocate any exclusive attachment
to thinking as opposed to ACTION. (See also below.)
He claims that a life that does not essentially include
the rational control of action cannot be good for a
human being.
Different Conceptions of Happiness
Though Aristotle recognizes that this is only an
outline of happiness (1098a20–2), he thinks it is
definite enough to guide our further deliberation in
the right direction.
1. It rules out the life devoted purely to PLEA-
SURE (1095b19–20). This life is incomplete
because it allows no essential role to ra-
tional activity; and mere pleasure without
rational activity is not the good for a ra-
tional agent (1174a1–4). Since a life of
pleasure can be improved on in this way,
pleasure cannot be the good (1172b28–
32). Hence Aristotle rejects HEDONISM
(later accepted by the CYRENAICS, and, in a
form perhaps modified in an attempt to
meet Aristotle’s objections, by EPICURUS
[341–270 B.C.E.]).
2. The Socratic view (later accepted by the
CYNICS, and in some form by the Stoics),
that virtue is sufficient for happiness, con-
flicts with common beliefs (1096a2). This
92
Socratic view fails to describe a suitably
complete and self-sufficient life; for exter-
nal misfortunes impede rational activity
(1100b29–30), and take away happiness
(1100a5–9).
3. Though virtue is insufficient for happiness,
it is nonetheless its dominant component.
No matter what we have to lose as a result
of being virtuous, we still have better rea-
son to choose virtue than we have to choose
any combination of other goods that are in-
compatible with it (1100b30–1101a8). Ar-
istotle agrees with Plato’s Republic on the
relation of justice to happiness.
4. From the general conception of happiness
Aristotle infers the general features of a vir-
tue of character (êthikê aretê; sometimes,
and not unreasonably, rendered “moral vir-
tue”) (i 13). Since (following Plato) he rec-
ognizes both rational and nonrational de-
sires, he argues that the excellent and
virtuous condition of the soul will be the
one in which the nonrational elements co-
operate with reason. Human beings fulfill
their function well and in accordance with
complete virtue, insofar as their nonra-
tional desires are guided by their rational
desires.
Virtue of Character
A virtue of character is defined as “a state involv-
ing decision, lying in a mean, a mean that is relative
to us, a mean defined by reason, and by the reason
by which the wise person would define it”
(1106b36–1107a2). The different elements in this
definition deserve discussion.
1. A virtue is a state (hexis), not simply a ca-
pacity or a feeling, though it involves both
capacities and feelings (ii 5). I may have a
capacity without using it properly on the
right occasions; for example, I may have
medical skill, even if I do not bother to use
it at all, or I use it to poison my patients.
But I am not a generous person simply be-
cause I know how to give money on the
right occasions; GENEROSITY requires an ac-
tual desire and disposition to give the
money (Metaphysics 1025a1–13).

2. In insisting on a state, rather than a pattern
of behavior, Aristotle shows that he is con-
cerned with virtues as something more than
means to virtuous action. Actions may be
virtuous even though they are not done for
the virtuous person’s reasons (1105a26–
b9, 1144a11–20). But agents are not vir-
tuous unless they do the virtuous action be-
cause they have decided to do it for its own
sake. Aristotle assumes that in praising and
valuing virtuous people we do not value
simply their reliable tendency to produce
virtuous actions, but also value the state of
character that they display in their actions.
On this point he agrees with KANT (1724–
1804) (in the contrast between doing what
duty requires and acting from duty; Grund-
legung, Akad. pp. 397–98).
3. In arguing that a virtue of character must
be a “mean” or an “intermediate” state, Ar-
istotle is not necessarily recommending
“moderation” in actions or in feelings. He
does not mean, for example, that if we
achieve the mean in relation to ANGER we
will never be more than moderately angry;
on the contrary, the virtuous person will be
extremely angry on the occasions when ex-
treme anger is called for. Still, Aristotle’s
doctrine is more than the trivial advice that
we should do what is appropriate to the oc-
casion. Possible treatments of nonrational
impulses would be these: (a) indulgence,
leaving them completely unchecked; (b)
suppression, as far as possible (1104b24–
26); (c) control or continence (cf. 1102b13–
20), as far as possible; (d) harmony and
agreement with the rational part. In treat-
ing a virtue as a mean, Aristotle signals his
adherence to the last solution, as opposed
to any of the first three. He thinks it should
be intermediate between the extremes of
excess (leaving anger, say, totally un-
checked) and the extreme of deficiency
(complete suppression of anger).
4. The task of MORAL EDUCATION, therefore,
is not merely to subject the nonrational part
of the soul to practical reason. Virtuous
people allow reasonable satisfaction to
their appetites; they do not suppress all
their fears; they do not disregard all their
93
Aristotle
feelings of PRIDE or shame or RESENTMENT
(1126a3–8), or their desire for other peo-
ple’s good opinion. Brave people are appro-
priately afraid of serious danger (1115b10–
20), and if the cause is not worth the danger
they withdraw; but when the cause justifies
their standing firm, their fear is not so strong
that they have to struggle against it.
5. In claiming that the virtuous person makes
a decision (prohairesis, discussed in iii
2–3) to do the virtuous action for its own
sake, Aristotle implies that a certain pattern
of desire and deliberation (which are the
origins of a prohairesis, 1113a2–12,
1139a21–b5) is characteristic of the virtu-
ous person. In claiming that the mean is de-
termined by the wise (phronimos) person,
he refers to the intellectual virtue that is re-
sponsible for good deliberation (1140a24–
31). These aspects of his definition of virtue
of character imply that it is inseparable
from virtue of intellect.
Wisdom and Virtue
But while Aristotle clearly sees a crucial role for
WISDOM and practical reason in virtue of character,
it is less clear what the precise role is. For if correct
decision and wisdom are expressed in action on
good deliberation, then the special role of practical
reason in virtue seems to be its role in deliberation.
But deliberation in Aristotle seems to have a rather
narrow scope, insofar as it is concerned with what
“promotes” an end (to pros to telos). If “x promotes
y” is interpreted as “x is an instrumental means to
y” (i.e., x causally contributes to y, without being
part of y—as shopping for food contributes to eating
our dinner), then Aristotle claims that deliberation
and wisdom are concerned only with instrumental
means to ends. They will tell us how to find the
means to happiness, but they will not tell us anything
about what happiness is. In that case Aristotle seems
to anticipate HUME’s (1711–1776) view that prac-
tical reason is subordinate to nonrational desires
(Hume, Treatise ii 3.3).
Aristotle need not, however, restrict the scope of
practical reason in this way, if “x promotes y” is not
confined to instrumental means. He also uses the
phrase for cases where x is a part or component of
y, or doing x partly constitutes doing y (as, for ex-
Aristotle
ample, serving partly constitutes playing tennis, or
eating the soup is part of eating the meal). If he al-
lows deliberation about components of ends, Aris-
totle is entitled to claim that wisdom is especially
concerned with deliberation about what promotes
happiness. For wisdom finds the actions that pro-
mote happiness insofar as they are parts of the happy
life. Such actions are (a) to be chosen for their own
sake, as being their own end, rather than (b) to be
chosen simply as instrumental means to some fur-
ther end. Aristotle identifies (a) as praxis (“action”
or “activity”) and (b) as poiêsis (“production”)
(1140b4–7). He draws a closely connected distinc-
tion between energeia (“activity”) and kinêsis (“pro-
cess”) (1174a14–b14).
The wide scope of deliberation makes it clearer
why decision is an essential element in virtue and
why Aristotle claims—surprisingly at first sight—
that we can decide on an action for its own sake,
even though decision is always about what promotes
an end. For the virtuous person’s decision is the re-
sult of deliberation about the composition of hap-
piness; and this deliberation results in specific claims
about which actions are non-instrumentally good
components of happiness. These are the actions that
the virtuous person decides on, both for their own
sakes and for the sake of happiness.
In claiming that wisdom involves deliberation,
Aristotle also emphasizes the importance of its
grasping the relevant features of a particular situa-
tion, since this is necessary if deliberation is to re-
sult in a correct decision about what to do here
and now. The right moral choice requires experience
of particular situations, since general rules cannot
be applied mechanically to particular situations
(1103b34–1104a11); and Aristotle describes the
relevant aspect of wisdom as a sort of perception or
intuitive understanding of the right aspects of par-
ticular situations (1143a32–b5).
Voluntary Action and Responsibility
In his general account of virtue of character Ar-
istotle includes an account of voluntary action and
conditions for moral RESPONSIBILITY. This is rele-
vant to his main concerns, because he wants to show
how his account of the nature of virtue supports the
common belief that we are justly praised and blamed
both for virtuous and vicious actions and for being
virtuous and vicious people. He agrees that the
94
proper objects of praise and blame are the things
that we ourselves, rather than necessity or fortune,
are responsible (aitios) for (EE 1223a9–15), and he
tries to show that we are responsible for our virtuous
and vicious actions and characters. Aristotle does
not explicitly confront the questions raised by Epi-
cureans and Stoics about the relation between causal
determinism and responsibility; and his claims
might seem to give support to more than one of the
views developed by his successors. But he clearly
sees the relevance of issues about responsibility to
questions about virtue and character.
He claims that we are open to praise and blame
for our voluntary (hekousia) actions, and that vol-
untary actions are those that are caused neither by
force nor ignorance, but have their “origin in us,”
insofar as we know the particular circumstances of
the action (1111a22–24). These actions are the ap-
propriate objects of praise and blame.
These criteria for voluntary action imply, accord-
ing to Aristotle, that nonrational animals also act
voluntarily (1111a24–26). These nonrational agents,
however, are not open to praise or blame. Hence the
criteria for voluntariness do not seem sufficient for
praise and blame.
Aristotle need not face this objection, however, if
the implications of his demand for the origin “in us”
(1110a17–18, 1111a22–24, 1113b20–21) are made
clearer. If the origin is in us, then it must involve us
as essentially rational agents (that is why a mere
bodily process, such as aging, over which we have
no rational control, does not have its origin “in us”).
Hence voluntary action is significant insofar as its
origin is in our control as rational agents, and since
it is in our control, we are justly praised and blamed
for it. (Though the voluntary action of a nonrational
animal has its origin in the animal, it is not in the
control of the animal’s [nonexistent] rational agency,
and so the animal is not praised and blamed for it.)
Even if we act without deliberation and premedita-
tion on a sudden impulse of EMOTION or appetite,
the origin is still in our character and decision; for
the presence or strength of our desire is the result
of the character and decisions we have formed.
It follows that we are held responsible for our
actions insofar as they reflect our character, deci-
sions, and hence (given the previous account of
practical reason) our deliberation about the good.
For similar reasons, Aristotle believes that our char-
acter and outlook are also open to justified and ef-

fective criticism (1114a4–9); for it is in our rational
control (when, presumably, we pass beyond the pure
habituation of early childhood) to affect the way our
character develops. Rational deliberation and deci-
sion are the source of responsibility for character no
less than for action.
Pleasure
Aristotle’s demand for the virtuous person to de-
cide on the virtuous action for its own sake is con-
nected with two further claims: First, the virtuous
person must take pleasure in virtuous action as such
(1099a7–21, 1104b3–11). Second, in doing so, the
virtuous person has the most pleasant life. In these
claims Aristotle relies on his views about the nature
of pleasure and its role in happiness.
To begin with, Aristotle identifies the life of plea-
sure with the life devoted (as the comment on Sar-
danapallus suggests, 1095b21–2) to the life of
rather gross sensual pleasures. This is not Aristotle’s
last word on pleasure in the Nicomachean Ethics.
Book vii (EE vi) and Book x contain quite elaborate
(and on some points apparently different) discus-
sions of the nature of pleasure and the different
value of different types of pleasure; and Aristotle
believes that true judgments about pleasure imply
that the virtuous person’s life is also the most pleas-
ant life.
He rejects the view that pleasure is some uniform
sensation to which different kinds of pleasant action
are connected only instrumentally (in the way that
the reading of different kinds of books might in-
duce the same feeling of boredom). Instead he ar-
gues that the specific pleasure taken in x rather than
y is internally related to doing x rather than y, and
essentially depends on pursuing x for x’s own sake.
(The pleasure of lying on the beach in the sun and
the pleasure of solving a crossword puzzle are not
two instances of the same sensation that just happen
to have different causes.) In Aristotle’s terms, plea-
sure is a “supervenient end” (1174b31–33) result-
ing from an activity that one pursues as an activity
(PRAXIS or energeia) rather than a mere process or
production (kinêsis or poiêsis); and he insists (fol-
lowing Plato in the Philebus) that the value of the
pleasure depends on the value of the activity on
which the pleasure supervenes (1176a3–29). Hence
he infers both that the virtuous person has the most
pleasant life and that the most pleasant life cannot
95
Aristotle
be the one devoted exclusively to the pursuit of
pleasure.
The Reciprocity of the Virtues
Aristotle’s views on the role of reason, feeling,
and pleasure in virtue define the area of agreement
and disagreement with Socrates. With Plato, he re-
jects Socrates’ belief in the unity of the virtues (i.e.,
that all the virtues are really one and the same vir-
tue), since he denies that knowledge of the good is
sufficient for virtue. Different virtues require the
training of different feelings, and Socrates was
wrong to leave out these noncognitive aspects of
virtue.
On the other hand, Aristotle accepts the reci-
procity of the virtues (again agreeing with Plato),
because he believes that each virtue requires wis-
dom, and that wisdom requires all the virtues
(1144b32–1145a2). We may mistakenly reject the
reciprocity of the virtues if we confuse “natural vir-
tue” with “full virtue.” People with merely natural
virtue have natural tendencies to do the brave or
generous actions; but without wisdom they will not
reliably find the best actions (1144b9), and so will
not have a full virtue.
Aristotle assumes that each virtue will be subject
to the direction of wisdom, because the point of each
virtue is to achieve what is best, and each will accept
the judgment of wisdom about that. In some cases,
for example, a decision about the generous action to
do for my friend requires some grasp of the require-
ments of justice (since generosity does not require
me to steal from a beggar to give a present to my
rich friend). To find the appropriate action in the
sphere of one virtue we need the cooperation of the
other virtues. That is why the mean in which a virtue
lies must be determined by the sort of reason by
which the wise person would determine it (1107a1–
2). Aristotle rejects any suggestion that two different
virtues could prescribe incompatible actions in the
same situation (MM 1199b36–1200a11); for each
fully developed virtue must focus on what is best
overall.
Incontinence
Aristotle also disagrees with Socrates over the
possibility of incontinence; since he assumes an ir-
reducible difference between rational and nonra-
Aristotle
tional desires, he rejects Socrates’ view that only ig-
norance of what is better and worse underlies
apparent incontinence; he asserts that the Socratic
view evidently conflicts with the appearances
(1145b27–28).
In Aristotle’s view, incontinents make the right
decision (1152a17), and act against it (1148a13–
17, 1151a5–7). Their failure to stick to their deci-
sion is the result of strong appetites; in Aristotle’s
example, we recognize that we ought to avoid eating
this sweet thing, but our recognition that it is sweet
actually triggers our appetite for sweet things, which
causes us to eat it after all.
Still, Aristotle agrees with Socrates, against com-
mon sense, in believing that an appeal to ignorance
is an important part of the explanation of inconti-
nence. Though he admits that incontinents have the
right decision and act against it because of appetite,
he believes it is impossible for them to act against a
correct decision that they fully accept at the very
moment of incontinent action (1147b15–17).
Aristotle therefore claims that incontinent peo-
ple’s appetite causes them to lose part of the reason-
ing that formed their correct decision. They retain
the right general principles, but they fail to see how
these apply to their present situation, and even
though they say they know they are wrong to do
what they are doing, they are just saying the words
without really meaning them (1147b9–12). To this
extent Aristotle thinks Socrates is right to appeal to
ignorance—though he disagrees with Socrates
about the kind of ignorance that is relevant.
The Scope of the Virtues
The virtues of character recognized by Aristotle
include some that seem largely self-regarding (e.g.,
TEMPERANCE, magnanimity), some that seem to in-
volve good manners (e.g., truthfulness [about one’s
own merits] and wit), and some that concern the
good of others to some degree (bravery, mildness,
generosity). Only one virtue—justice (in its general
form)—is clearly focused on the good of others in
its own right (1129b25–1130a5). This rather broad
conception of a virtue sometimes encourages the
view that these Aristotelian virtues are really not
moral virtues at all—on the assumption that genu-
inely moral virtues are essentially concerned with
the good of others.
Aristotle insists, however, that the virtuous per-
96
son decides on the virtuous action because it is “fine”
(kalon) and for its fineness (1115b13). He assumes
that the fine systematically promotes the good of
others, and he regards fine action as a necessary con-
dition for finding the mean that is characteristic of
a virtue (1122b6–7). It is reasonable, therefore, that
he thinks justice is nothing beyond the other virtues
of character, since they already involve the appro-
priate concern for others.
To justify concern for the good of others, Aristotle
appeals to human nature. A human being, he claims,
is a political animal insofar as human capacities and
aims are completely fulfilled only in a community;
the individual’s happiness must involve the good of
fellow members of a community (1097b8–11,
1169b16–19).
Aristotle defends this claim in his discussion of
FRIENDSHIP. His term philia, usually rendered by
“friendship,” actually covers many more cooperative
relations (as, for example, between business part-
ners, allies, members of families) than we find it nat-
ural to regard as friendships; and Aristotle’s classi-
fication recognizes the many varieties of philia. All
three of the main types of friendship (for pleasure,
for advantage, and for the good) are concerned with
the good of the other person; but only the best sort
of friendship—friendship for the good between vir-
tuous people—involves A’s concern for B’s good for
B’s own sake and for B’s essential character
(1156b7–12).
In the best sort of friendship the friend is “another
self,” so that if A and B are friends, A takes the sorts
of attitudes to B that A also takes to A (1170b5–7).
Aristotle uses this feature of friendship to explain
why friendship is part of a complete and self-suffi-
cient life (1170b14–19). Friendship involves living
together (that is, sharing the activities one counts as
especially important in one’s life), and especially the
sharing of reasoning and thinking (1170b10–14).
Friends cooperate in deliberation, decision, and ac-
tion; and the thoughts and actions of each provide
reasons for the future thoughts and actions of the
other. If A regards B as another self, then A will be
concerned about B’s aims and plans, and pleased by
B’s successes no less than by A’s own. The cooper-
ative aspects of friendship with B more fully realize
A’s own capacities as a rational agent, and so pro-
mote A’s happiness more fully.
For this reason Aristotle thinks that the full de-
velopment of a human being requires concern for

the good of others. He defends his claim initially for
friendship between individuals, but also for the type
of friendship that forms a political community (a po-
lis), the “complete community” (Politics 1252a1–7,
b27–30) that achieves the complete life that is iden-
tified with happiness.
Two Conceptions of Happiness?
Though one direction of argument leads Aristotle
to emphasize the other-regarding, social aspects of
happiness, his argument also seems to lead in a rad-
ically different direction. In EN x he has also some-
times been taken to identify happiness exclusively
with pure intellectual activity (or “study,” theôria)—
the contemplation of scientific and philosophical
truths, apart from any attempt to apply them to prac-
tice. Plato is sometimes attracted by this view of a
person’s good, and suggests that the philosopher
will be wholly absorbed in the contemplation of
Forms. EN x provides strong evidence to suggest
that Aristotle seems to share Plato’s contemplative
ideal, without the Platonic Forms.
Aristotle argues that the contemplative life meets
the general criteria for happiness (1177a18-b26),
and he especially focuses on two criteria. (1) The
connection between the human function and human
happiness supports contemplation. For contempla-
tion is the highest fulfillment of our nature as ra-
tional beings; it is the sort of rational activity that
we share with the gods, who are rational beings with
no need to apply reason to practice. (2) Contempla-
tion is the activity that best fulfills the demand for a
self-sufficient life. For it does not require many re-
sources outside it, whereas virtuous activity is vul-
nerable to external misfortunes that may prevent it
from resulting in happiness.
These advantages of contemplation lead Aristotle
to suggest that it is the happiest life available to us,
to the extent that we have the rational intellects we
share with gods, and that the life of virtuous activity
is a second-best form of happiness (1177b26–
1178a10).
Though the evidence suggesting that Aristotle
holds this purely contemplative conception of hap-
piness is strong, it is not conclusive. He does not
clearly claim that contemplation fully satisfies these
criteria for happiness, and therefore he does not in-
fer that by itself it is sufficient for happiness. (1) If
we were pure intellects with no other desires and no
97
Aristotle
bodies, contemplation would be the whole of our
good (as it is for an immortal soul, as Plato conceives
it in the Phaedo). Still, we are not in fact merely
intellects (1178b3–7); and Aristotle recognizes that
the good must be the good of the whole human be-
ing. In his considered view, contemplation is the
highest and best part of our good, but not the whole
of it. (2) Though contemplation is the single most
self-sufficient activity, insofar as it is the single ac-
tivity that comes closest to being self-sufficient, this
degree of self-sufficiency does not justify the iden-
tification of contemplation with happiness. For Ar-
istotle has argued that happiness must be complete,
and for this reason he argues that neither virtue
alone nor pleasure alone can be happiness. He should
not, then, agree that contemplation is happiness just
because it is invulnerable and self-contained. For con-
templation is not the complete good; we can think of
other goods (e.g., virtue and HONOR) that could be
added to it to make a better good than contemplation
alone.
Aristotle does not explain how we should decide
on particular occasions whether to pursue contem-
plation or to prefer one of the other components of
happiness; and decisions of this sort raise some dif-
ficulties for his general position. But the difficulties
do not seem insuperable; and Aristotle’s claims
about contemplation do not require any drastic
modification of his general conception of happiness
as a compound of rational activities that assigns a
central and dominant place to the moral virtues.
See also: ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS; CHARACTER; CYN-
ICS; CYRENAICS; DELIBERATION AND CHOICE; DESIRE;
EPICUREANISM; EUDAIMONIA, -ISM; EXCELLENCE; FI-
NAL GOOD; FRIENDSHIP; GOOD, THEORIES OF THE;
HAPPINESS; HEDONISM; MORAL EDUCATION; PHRO-
NESIS; PLATO; PRACTICAL REASON[ING]; PRACTICAL
WISDOM; PRAXIS; RESPONSIBILITY; SOCRATES; STOI-
CISM; VIRTUE ETHICS; VIRTUES; VOLUNTARY ACTS;
WEAKNESS OF WILL; WISDOM.
Bibliography
Works by Aristotle
Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Trans-
lation. Edited by J. Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984.
L’Ethique a nicomaque. Translated and edited by R. A.
Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif. 2d ed. 4 vols. Louvain: Nau-
welaerts, 1970.
Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd
ed. Indianapolis, IN.: Hackett, 1999.
Aristotle: Eudemian Ethics I, II, VIII. Translated and ed-
ited by M. J. Woods. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
Works about Aristotle
Ackrill, J. L. “Aristotle’s Distinction between Energeia
and Kinesis.” In New Essays on Plato and Aristotle,
edited by R. Bambrough, 121–41. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1965.
Barnes, J. “Aristotle and the Methods of Ethics.” Revue
Internationale de Philosophie 34 (1981): 490–511.
Barnes, J., M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji, eds. Articles on
Aristotle. 2 vols. London: Duckworth, 1977. See es-
pecially “Thought and Action in Aristotle,” by G. E. M.
Anscombe (chapter 6); and “Aristotle on the Volun-
tary,” by D. Furley (chapter 5).
Broadie, S. W. Ethics with Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1991.
Charles, D. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action. London:
Duckworth, 1984.
Cooper, John M. Reason and Human Good in Aristotle.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.
———. Reason and Emotion. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1998.
Dahl, N. O. Practical Knowledge, Aristotle, and Weakness
of Will. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984.
Engberg-Pederson, T. Aristotle’s Theory of Moral Insight.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Gosling, J. C. B., and C. C. W. Taylor. The Greeks on Plea-
sure. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. See chapters
11–17.
Hardie, W. F. R. Aristotle’s Ethical Theory. 2nd ed. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
Irwin, Terence. Aristotle’s First Principles. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1988. See especially chapters 15–21.
———. “Aristotle’s Methods of Ethics.” In Studies in Ar-
istotle, edited by D. O’Meara, 193–223. Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1981.
Kraut, Richard. Aristotle on the Human Good. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989.
Rorty, Amelie, ed. Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980. See especially
“Aristotle on Eudaimonia,” by J. L. Ackrill (pp. 15–
34); “Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean,” by J. O. Urm-
son (157–70); “Aristotle on Learning to be Good,” by
M. F. Burnyeat (69–92); “Deliberation and Practical
Reason,” by D. Wiggins (221–40); “Reason and Re-
sponsibility in Aristotle,” by Terence Irwin (117–56);
and “Aristotle on Friendship,” by John M. Cooper
(301–40).
Whiting, J. “Human Nature and Intellectualism in Aris-
98
totle.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 68
(1986): 70–95.
T. H. Irwin
atheism
Atheism (the belief that neither God nor any other
supernatural phenomena exist) was once thought to
be a form of madness. As late as the seventeenth
century even such a progressive thinker as John
LOCKE (1632–1704) thought atheism to be beyond
the pale of intellectual and moral respectability. But
by the end of the twentieth century, particularly
among the intelligentsia, atheism had become com-
monplace. There is no distinctive ethical theory that
goes with atheism, though atheists will typically
have the spectrum of values characteristic of the En-
lightenment. Atheists are frequently utilitarians; but
some are deontologists or perfectionists. In META-
ETHICS atheism fits well with either ethical NATU-
RALISM or noncognitivism. While religious thinkers
tend to be cognitivists and intuitionists, the link,
however, is not tight. Henry SIDGWICK (1838–
1900), G. E. MOORE (1873–1958), and C. D.
Broad (1887–1971) were distinguished intuition-
ists, one might say the most distinguished intuition-
ists. Yet they were either atheists or agnostics.
The key problem for atheists vis-à-vis morality is
not to work out a distinctive ethical theory providing
the unique fit for atheism but to meet the challenge
thrown out by religious believers and even by some
existentialist atheists—CAMUS (1913–1960) and
SARTRE (1905–1980)—that if God is dead nothing
matters, or at least nothing really ultimately matters.
Or, more moderately, atheists need to meet the claim
of some religious moralists that a secular ethic must
be inadequate when compared with at least a prop-
erly nuanced religious morality.
In our societies moral perplexity runs deep and
cynicism or at least ambivalence about moral belief
is extensive. A recognition of this situation is com-
mon ground between reflective and informed athe-
ists and believers. Atheists will argue that there is
no reason to lose our nerve and claim that we must
have religious commitments in order to make sense
of morality. Torturing human beings is wrong, CRU-
ELTY to human beings and animals is wrong, treating
one’s PROMISES lightly or being careless about the
truth is wrong, exploiting or degrading human be-

ings is vile. If we know anything to be wrong, we
know these things to be wrong and to be just as
wrong in a godless world as in a world with God.
God’s not existing has no effect on their moral status
or on our moral standing.
There is a philosophical problem about how we
know these things to be wrong, but that is as much
a problem for the believer as for the atheist. For if
any person, believer and nonbeliever alike, has an
understanding of the concept of morality, has an un-
derstanding of what it is to take the MORAL POINT
OF VIEW, than that person will eo ipso have an un-
derstanding that it is wrong to harm others, that
promises are to be kept and truth is to be told. This
does not mean that such a person will be committed
to the belief that a lie can never be told, that a prom-
ise can never be broken, or that a human being in
no circumstance whatsoever can rightly be harmed.
But if there is no understanding that such acts al-
ways require special justification and that the pre-
sumption of morality is always against them, then
there is no understanding of the concept of morality.
But this understanding is not logically bound up
with a belief in God or adherence to a religious point
of view.
Divine Command Theory
Defenders of Divine Command Theory, one of the
major types of religious ethical theories, maintain
that such an understanding does imply at least some
minimal knowledge of God because we know things
to be wrong only when we know they are against
God’s will. Something is good only because God
wills it, and wrong only because He prohibits it. That
is the central claim of the Divine Command Theory.
Setting aside skeptical questions about how we
can know what God does and does not will, the old
conundrum arises—something as old as PLATO (c.
430–347 B.C.E.): Is something good simply because
God wills it, or does God will it because it is good?
Leaving God aside for the moment, what is evident
is that something is not good simply because it is
willed or commanded. A military officer can com-
mand his troops to take no prisoners, or a father can
command his son to lie to his mother. Neither of
these things becomes good or in any way morally
acceptable simply in virtue of being commanded. In-
deed, something is not even morally speaking a good
thing to do simply because it is willed or com-
99
atheism
manded by an omnipotent and perfectly intelligent
being. Unless we wish to reduce morality to PRU-
DENCE, to take the will of such a being as our moral
law is to reduce morality to POWER worship. Might,
even omnipotence, doesn’t make right; a perfectly
intelligent being could be evil through and through.
However, to this criticism of the Divine Com-
mand Theory it is not implausible to respond that it
is God’s commanding that makes all the difference,
for God, after all, is the supreme, perfect good. In
turn, it can be asked how we know that. If we say
we know it through studying the scriptures and
through the example of Jesus where his goodness is
manifest, then we know it only by virtue of our own
quite autonomous moral appreciation of his good-
ness. In Bible stories we read about behavior which
we take to be morally exemplary. However, it is
through our own appreciation of what goodness is,
our own at least rudimentary conception of good-
ness, that we can appreciate morally exemplary be-
havior. Understanding something of what morality
is, we feel the moral force of the story of Jesus dying
on the cross to save humankind. Moral understand-
ing is not grounded in a belief in God; just the re-
verse is so. An understanding of the religious signif-
icance of Jesus and the scriptures presupposes a
logically independent moral understanding.
If alternatively we claim that we do not come to
understand that God is the supreme and perfect
good in that way, but instead understand it as a nec-
essary truth like ‘puppies are young dogs’ (some-
thing which is true by definition), then we still
should ask, how do we understand that putatively
necessary proposition? But again we should recog-
nize that it is only by having an understanding of
what goodness is that we come to have some glim-
mering of the more complex and extremely perplex-
ing notions of supreme or perfect goodness. Only if
we understand what a good meal is can we possibly
have any inkling of what a wonderfully good meal
is. Only if we understand what a sacrifice is can we
understand what a supreme sacrifice is.
The crucial thing to see is that there are things
which we can come to appreciate on reflection to be
wrong, God or no God. Whatever foundational ac-
count of morality we give, or indeed whether we can
give one or need to give one at all, we can be far
more confident we are right in claiming that tortur-
ing, lying, or breaking faith with people is wrong
than we can be in claiming any rational belief in God
atheism
or knowledge of his order or of what he requires of
us. There are primitive moral certainties that are
vastly more certain than any religious belief, and
these certainties are not at all undermined by ‘the
death of God.’
God, Morality, and the Causal Order
Someone might respond to the above critique of
Divine Command Theory by maintaining that since
God, assuming there is a God, is the cause of every-
thing, there could be (if the Judeo-Christian cos-
mological story is true) no goodness or anything else
if there were no God. Given the truth of that tale,
without God there would be nothing, and thus there
would be no valuable somethings. But this confuses
causes with reasons: confuses questions about
bringing something into existence causally and sus-
taining and justifying its existence. If God exists and
if he is what the scriptures say he is, everything caus-
ally depends on him. However, even if there were no
God who made the world, it still would be vile to
torture little children. Even if God had not created
people and thus there were no people to be kind, it
would still be timelessly true that kindness is a good
thing. The goodness of kindness does not become
good or cease to be good by God’s fiat or anyone
else’s, or even because of the fact that there happen
to be kind people. In terms of its fundamental ratio-
nale, morality is utterly independent of belief in
God. Atheists can respond to the religious claim that
if God is dead nothing matters by asserting that to
make sense of our lives as moral beings there is no
need to make what may be an intellectually stulti-
fying blind leap of religious faith. Such a moral un-
derstanding, as well as a capacity for moral response
and action, is available to us even if we are utterly
without religious faith. There is no reason the atheist
should be morally at sea.
Religious versus Secular Morality
There are religious moralists who would ac-
knowledge this and yet still maintain that there are
religious moralities which are (morally speaking)
more adequate than anything available to atheists.
We are religious beings in need of rituals and saving
myths. Without belief in God and immortality, our
lives remain fragmented and meaningless. A secular
morality can afford us no sense of providential care,
100
while a Jewish, Christian, or Islamic morality can.
God, on such conceptions, is taken to be a creator
who is the supreme source of CARE, protection, and
moral guidance. At least in certain vital respects we
will be, if our faith is strong, free of anxiety and fear.
With a firm belief in God, we have the reassurance
that, if we orient our will to God, we will be saved,
EVIL will not ultimately triumph, and our moral
struggles will not be in vain because the evil in the
world will not prevail and overwhelm us. In belief
in God we can find peace and reassurance that all
is not hopeless. Jews, Christians, and Moslems can,
if their faith is strong, have a confident, future-
oriented view of the world. Such a view would af-
firm that there is a purpose to life, that we are crea-
tures of God made for a purpose in which ultimately
there will be human liberation in a life of bliss. There
is, the claim goes, a hope and moral promise arising
from faith that no secular morality can match.
At this stage in the argument the viability of the
truth-claims of religion become important in a way
that is not the case in arguing about the Divine Com-
mand Theory. If, as atheists claim, we cannot know
or even reasonably believe what religious people
claim we know or can reasonably take on faith, we
should not crucify our intellects, and try to rely on
a religious morality. Moreover, the religious moralist
portrays things in a godless world as being much
grimmer than they actually are. There is no good
reason to think life without God is senseless or with-
out point. There are purposes in life even if there is
no purpose to life. And to be made for a purpose as
the religious story maintains is not so morally un-
problematic, for at the very least it seems to rob us
of our autonomy. An atheist need not be limited to
small, rather personal purposes in life. There are also
larger, rather impersonal things that can perhaps be
realized through political and social struggle, things
that we can make our own purposes by our own
deliberate acts. At a minimum, we can fight the
plague; maximally, we can struggle to transform the
world. Such efforts afford plenty of meaning in life
and prevent the threat of meaninglessness.
Morality, it should be added, still has a funda-
mental function in a godless world, just as much as
in any other kind of world: namely, its function to
adjudicate in a fair way the conflicts of INTERESTS
between persons. Atheists as well as religious people
might very well come reflectively to desire that
something like a kingdom of ends will obtain. An

atheist, just as well as the religious person, can re-
spect persons simply because they are persons. Athe-
ists, as others, will recognize SELF-RESPECT to be a
fundamental good. This will lead them to a respect
for others, for as moral agents we will recognize, if
we think at all carefully, that if self-respect is a good
for ourselves as individuals it will be a good for ev-
eryone else as well. UNIVERSALIZABILITY and FAIR-
NESS require us to go beyond ourselves and at least
acknowledge the appropriateness of a world in
which respect for persons plays center stage. Similar
things should be said for the relief of human suffer-
ing. If we can know anything to be bad we can know
that suffering is bad. (It may sometimes be instru-
mentally good but it is never intrinsically good.)
Where there is some reasonable expectation that we
can, at least without extensive sacrifice, do some-
thing about suffering, we have, God or no God, an
obligation to relieve it.
Again, a religious moralist can acknowledge the
truth of at least a number of the points raised above
and still respond that there are morally relevant
NEEDS that religious morality responds to that sec-
ular morality does not. But it is also true that there
are needs that a secular morality responds to that
religious morality does not. There is a question of
choices and of trade-offs. With a religious morality
there is a hope for immortality and a belief in a world
of providential care in which we can have at least
the putative guarantee that our moral efforts will not
be defeated. If religious beliefs, including belief in
immortality, are held to be reasonably plausible, that
might be enough to tip the scale in favor of a reli-
gious morality; but if, as atheists believe, belief in
the existence of God and immortality is highly im-
plausible, then a religious ethic becomes less attrac-
tive, for it appears that to adhere to it there must be
a crucifixion of the intellect which, pace Kierke-
gaard, is not such a plainly desirable thing. In such
a circumstance, moral INTEGRITY is a threat to or at
least a problem for a religious morality. Atheists will
argue that there is something to be said for the per-
son who can hold steadily on course in the moral
world without telling herself fairy tales or feeling the
need to believe things which are wildly implausible,
perhaps even incoherent. Moral integrity, fraternity,
and love of humankind are worth subscribing to
without a thought to whether such virtues will be
rewarded in heaven or will predominate in our
world.
101
atheism
There are trade-offs here, and the trade-offs athe-
ists will make are not, to put it circumspectly, obvi-
ously mistaken or indicative of a shallow worldview
with a shallow morality and conception of life. The
atheist’s view is that there is no need to make an
arbitrary Kierkegaardian leap of faith and believe to
make sense of one’s life, including one’s moral life,
in what one admittedly takes to be absurd. What
should be had by way of moral belief and commit-
ment is not independent of the probabilities here.
Atheists believe, and not unreasonably, that the
probabilities go very much against religious belief.
To have a robust moral conception of life one need
not go against those at least putative probabilities.
See also: ABSURD, THE; AGNOSTICISM; ALIENATION;
AUTONOMY OF ETHICS; AUTONOMY OF MORAL
AGENTS; CHRISTIAN ETHICS; DEONTOLOGY; EVIL;
FAIRNESS; GOOD, THEORIES OF THE; HUMANISM; IN-
TEGRITY; ISLAMIC ETHICS; JEWISH ETHICS; METAETH-
ICS; MORAL POINT OF VIEW; NATURALISM; NIHILISM;
PERFECTIONISM; PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION; RELI-
GION; THEISM; UNIVERSALIZABILITY; VOLUNTARISM.
Bibliography
Frankena, William, and J. Granrose, eds. Introductory
Readings in Ethics, 94–111. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1974. Clear exchange between secular
and religious-based moralities.
Hauerwas, Stanley, and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. Revi-
sions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy. No-
tre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
Challenges the more standard treatments of ethics and
religion.
Idziak, Janine, ed. Divine Command Morality: Historical
and Contemporary Readings. New York: Edwin Mel-
len, 1979. Good collection of historical writings on the
Divine Command Theory.
Mitchell, Basil. Morality: Religious and Secular. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980.
Nielsen, Kai. Ethics without God. Rev. ed. Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1989. A defense of secular ethics.
———. Naturalism and Religion. Amherst, NY: Prome-
theus Books, 2000.
———. Naturalism without Foundations. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1996.
Outka, Gene, and John Reeder, eds. Religion and Moral-
ity. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973. Wide-
ranging collection.
Pojman, Louis, ed. Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1987. See pp. 493–537 for
clear exchange between secular and religiously based
moralities.
atheism
Quinn, Philip. Divine Commands and Moral Require-
ments. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Careful discus-
sion of Divine Command Theory.
Kai E. Nielsen
attention
See moral attention; moral perception.
Augustine, Saint (354–430)
Aurelius Augustinus, bishop of Hippo and Christian
church father, was born in Thagaste, Northern Af-
rica (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria). He was trained
in rhetoric in Thagaste and Carthage and, except for
five years in Rome and Milan, from 383–388, he
lived his life in North Africa and died in Hippo
(modern Annaba, Algeria) in 430.
Augustine had nothing that one could properly
describe as formal training in philosophy, nor did he
ever enjoy the company of another philosopher as
good, or even nearly as good, as he was. He was
trained in rhetoric and he became a teacher of rheto-
ric. His studies led him to become a great admirer
of CICERO (106–43 B.C.E.). Augustine’s study of
Cicero’s works influenced more than his writing
style; through a careful and extensive reading of him,
Augustine got much of his education in philosophy,
as well as much of his early enthusiasm for the sub-
ject. Of the various philosophical schools known to
him, neo-Platonism influenced him the most. But he
took the skepticism of the New Academy seriously
enough to try to answer it in brief discussions scat-
tered throughout his writings. His most celebrated
response to the skeptic’s challenge, “What if you are
dreaming?”, includes the assertion, “If I am mis-
taken, I am” (si fallor, sum, in City of God 11.26),
which foreshadows DESCARTES’s (1596–1650) even
more famous saying, cogito, ergo sum (“I think,
therefore I am”).
Only the earliest of Augustine’s voluminous
writings are explicitly philosophical. But in virtu-
ally everything Augustine wrote, including the let-
ters, the sermons, and the biblical commentaries,
he displays characteristically philosophical preoc-
cupations along with his theological and pastoral
concerns. One often finds a philosophically inter-
esting paragraph tucked away in a sermon or letter
102
that is otherwise devoted to biblical exegesis or pas-
toral advice.
Heresy
Among the Christian church fathers, Augustine
is, perhaps, the leading definer of heresy, and hence,
of Christian orthodoxy. In particular, he wrote ex-
tensively to define and reject Pelagianism, Mani-
cheanism, and Donatism. In the case of each of these
heresies, both Augustine’s own view and the view
he rejects have implications for ethics.
Pelagianism denies that “in Adam’s sin we sinned
all,” and puts forward instead the notion that human
beings have it within their natural power to be with-
out sin. Pelagianism affirms the dictum, known to
modern philosophers through KANT (1724–1804),
OUGHT IMPLIES CAN. Through his formulation and
defense of the doctrines of original sin and human
depravity, Augustine denies human perfectibility
and maintains that inability to perform an action
unaided by the unearned grace of God does not free
an agent from the obligation to perform that action.
Early in his adult life Augustine was himself a
Manichee; thus, he supposed there to be a principle
of EVIL, or darkness, roughly coequal with the prin-
ciple of goodness, or light. In rejecting Manichean-
ism he took on the burden of showing how the ex-
istence of an all-good and all-powerful god is
compatible with the existence of evil (the classic
“problem of evil”). (For a statement of the problem
in Augustine, see Confessions 7.5.)
Among Augustine’s many responses to the prob-
lem of evil is the neo-Platonic suggestion that evil is
a privation, so that “whatever is, is good” (Confes-
sions 7.12). The idea seems to be that if, strictly
speaking, evil does not exist, there can be no prob-
lem about how the existence of evil is compatible
with there being an all-good and all-powerful god.
Another influential Augustinian response to the
problem of evil is the suggestion that evil, or sin, is
like a dark color in a beautiful painting—in itself,
ugly, but in context something that contributes to the
beauty and goodness of the whole (City of God
11.23). He also suggested, though left undeveloped,
the idea that FREE WILL is a good of sufficient value
that an all-good and all-powerful being would want
to create it, even at the risk of the evil that has re-
sulted from it (De libero arbitrio 1.18.186).
Donatism is the view that the Christian sacra-

ments are not valid unless the priest who adminis-
ters them is in a state of grace. In rejecting Dona-
tism, Augustine sought to free communicants from
having to make moral judgments about their priests
in the hope of finding in them good works that might
be a sign of grace. “The conscience of a man is often
unknown to me,” he writes (In Answer to the Letters
of Petillian 1.7–8), “but I am certain of the mercy
of Christ.” More broadly, the rejection of Donatism
makes the importance of the Church as an institu-
tion largely independent of whether her clergy, as
individuals, are morally or religiously upright.
Intentionalism
Augustine was an extreme intentionalist in ethics.
In his Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the
Mount (1.12.34) he identifies the necessary and suf-
ficient conditions for committing a sin as (a) receiv-
ing an evil suggestion; (b) taking PLEASURE in the
evil act or thought suggested; and (c) consenting to
accept the thought or undertake the action. If this is
right, then whether one commits a sin is not in any
way dependent on whether one actually performs a
bodily ACTION as a result of the evil suggestion, plea-
sure, and CONSENT. And where an action does result,
it will be the INTENTION (understood as suggestion,
pleasure, and consent), rather than the conse-
quences of the action, that give it its immoral
character.
Weakness of the Will
Augustine’s Confessions is the first important au-
tobiography in Western culture. It includes extensive
passages of reflection on, and assessment of, his own
motivation. In Augustine there is no sign of a Pla-
tonic or Aristotelian worry (see, for example, Aris-
totle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book vii) about how
akrasia, or WEAKNESS OF WILL, is possible; that is,
how it can ever be that one is doing what one knows
one ought not to be doing. In recounting the child-
hood prank of stealing pears with a gang of his
friends, he confesses that he didn’t do it for the
pears; he had, he says, better pears at home. It was
simply doing something he knew to be wrong, he
says, that motivated the action. “The evil in me was
foul, but I loved it” (Confessions 2.4).
103
Augustine, Saint
Free Will
In the early dialogue, De libero arbitrio, there is
extensive discussion of how there can be such a
thing as free will. As Augustine maintains in the City
of God (5.9), unless there is free will, praise and
exhortation is vain, and there is no justice in reward
or PUNISHMENT. In both City of God and On Free
Choice of the Will, Augustine sought to disarm the
threat to human free will that God’s foreknowledge
seems to pose by suggesting that God can foreknow
that we will do something by the power of our own
will, that is, of our own free will. His idea is that
such foreknowledge, instead of being incompatible
with free will, actually guarantees it (De libero ar-
bitrio 3.3.33–5; City of God 5.9–10).
Lying
Among Augustine’s contemporaries the question
as to whether lying might ever be morally or reli-
giously permissible, perhaps even obligatory, was
hotly debated. Augustine addressed this issue in
many of his works, and devoted two treatises wholly
to the topic of lying. In both of them he condemns
lying, even when the lie might have been thought to
bring about some greater good. He bases his con-
demnation on the commandment, “You shall not
bear false witness,” and in both treatises he views
lying as a kind of self-defilement.
The first of the two treatises devoted solely to this
topic, De mendacio, begins with a philosophically
provocative discussion of the nature of lying. Au-
gustine is inclined to suppose that a person, A, lies
in saying that p, if, and only if, the following con-
ditions are fulfilled:
1. it is in fact false that p;
2. A believes it is false that p; and
3. A says that p with the intention of deceiving
someone.
But against the necessity of these conditions he
considers:
(a) the case of someone who believes false
what is in fact true, so that the first con-
dition is not fulfilled, though there is still
an intention to deceive;
(b) the case of someone who, hoping and ex-
Augustine, Saint
pecting to be disbelieved, says what is false
to get someone to believe the truth; and
(c) the case of someone who, expecting to be
disbelieved, tells the truth in order to de-
ceive another (like the fabled traveling
salesman in old Russia, whose competitor
charges, “You’re just telling me you’re go-
ing to Minsk so that I’ll think you’re going
to Pinsk; but you really are going to Minsk,
you liar!”).
Augustine seems uncertain about what to do with
these putative counter-examples. He contents him-
self with insisting that the three conditions are
jointly sufficient and leaves undecided whether they
are severally necessary (De mendacio 4.5).
This discussion of lying illustrates two important
features of Augustine’s thought. First, he empha-
sizes the “inner man” (homo interior), an emphasis
that leads to the intentionalism in ethics mentioned
above. Second, he holds fast to the truth of certain
tenets, especially biblical claims and religious doc-
trines with a strong basis in scripture, even when
key notions in those tenets are highly problematic
and seemingly recalcitrant to satisfactory philosoph-
ical analysis. This second feature of his thought pre-
figures the tendency of certain twentieth-century an-
alytic philosophers to suppose that the deliverances
of natural science, or of common sense, are true,
whether or not a philosopher can give them a sat-
isfactory analysis.
Moral Dream Problem
Like PLATO (c. 430–347 B.C.E.) before him (Re-
public 571C) and Descartes after him (Letter to
Elizabeth, 1 September 1642), Augustine is con-
cerned about whether one does something morally
wrong by doing something immoral in a dream
(Confessions 10.30). His anti-Pelagianism removes
for him the excuse that, since ought implies can and
he can’t prevent himself from acting immorally in
his dreams, he is not morally or religiously respon-
sible for what he does in them. According to Au-
gustine, ought does not imply can; or better, ought
does not imply that one can do anything without the
gratuitous assistance of God. And, of course, Au-
gustine is not really free to justify his immoral
dreams with the complaint that God has not granted
him enough gratuitous assistance.
104
A second possibility for exculpation might be to
say that, after all, what happens only in a dream does
not really happen. But Augustine’s strong intention-
alism makes this excuse unavailable to him. On Au-
gustine’s view, in dreaming an immoral dream (say,
a dream in which one commits adultery), one has
really done something—indeed really done the cru-
cial thing—since one has formulated the intention
to do something immoral. Augustine’s discussion of
Jesus’ warning, “Whoever looks at a woman to lust
after her, has already committed adultery with her
in his heart” (Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on
the Mount 1.12.33–34) makes clear that, in his view,
physical copulation is not required for the sin of
adultery to have taken place.
Finally, Augustine’s concession to radical skepti-
cism removes for him the excuse that, after all, I am
not my dream self. Thus in his Contra academicos,
when he offers “I know that I taste a sweet taste” as
a claim immune to skepticism and considers the
skeptic’s taunt, “What if you are only dreaming?”,
he responds: “Still that would give me pleasure even
in my sleep” (3.11.26). Consistent with that reply to
the skeptic’s challenge, Augustine cannot deny that
he is his dream self. Unlike Plato and Descartes, Au-
gustine continued to show concern for this problem
throughout much of his life.
Vice
Augustine distinguishes between things desirable
in themselves and things desirable for the sake of
something else by saying that things of the first sort
are to be enjoyed (frui), whereas those of the second
are to be used (uti). Using this uti-frui distinction he
then characterizes vice as wanting to use what is
meant to be enjoyed and to enjoy what is meant
merely to be used (De diversis quaestionibus
LXXXIII 30).
Virtue
Augustine follows Ambrose (d. 397) in adding
the four cardinal VIRTUES of Greek antiquity to the
distinctively Christian virtues of faith, HOPE, and
LOVE. Not only does he follow St. PAUL (5?–67?) in
assigning primacy to love (caritas, or agape, not cu-
piditas, or eros), but he even suggests an interpre-
tation of the original four virtues that makes them
expressions of love, too—in fact, expressions of the

love of God. Thus he says that TEMPERANCE is “love
keeping itself whole and incorrupt for God”; forti-
tude is “love bearing everything readily for the sake
of God”; justice is “love in serving God alone and
therefore ruling everything else well”; and PRUDENCE
is “love making the right distinction between what
helps one toward God and what hinders one” (De
moribus ecclesiae catholicae 15.25). In this way he
can insist that virtue is nothing other than the per-
fect love of God. And in this way he provides a
Christian analogue to the old Platonic idea (cf. Pro-
tagoras 329CD) that the many virtues are really only
one.
See also: CHARITY;CHRISTIAN ETHICS; CICERO;
COURAGE; DECEIT; EVIL; FREE WILL; FREEDOM AND
DETERMINISM; GOOD, THEORIES OF THE; INTENTION;
KANT; KANTIAN ETHICS; LOVE; OUGHT IMPLIES CAN;
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION; PRUDENCE; RESPONSIBIL-
ITY; SKEPTICISM IN ANCIENT ETHICS; TEMPERANCE;
THEOLOGICAL ETHICS; VIRTUE ETHICS; VIRTUES;
WEAKNESS OF WILL.
Bibliography
Works by Augustine
Complete Works. In vols. 32–47 of Patrologia Latina, ed-
ited by J. P. Migne. Paris, 1844–64. The Maurist edi-
tion; in Latin.
Works. In A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff. New York: Scribner’s,
1892. The largest collection of Augustine’s works in
English translation.
English translations of many of Augustine’s works are to
be found scattered throughout these two ongoing se-
ries: Ancient Christian Writers (Westminster, MD:
Newman Press); and Fathers of the Church (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Catholic University Press).
The first English-language translation of Augustine’s com-
plete works is currently being published in forty-six vol-
umes, edited by John E. Rotelle. Brooklyn, NY: New City
Press, in conjunction with the Augustinian Heritage
Institute.
Works about Augustine
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967.
Clark, Mary T. Augustine. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, 1994.
Elshtain, Kean Bethke. Augustine and the Limits of Poli-
tics. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press,
1995.
105
authenticity
Gilson, Etienne. The Christian Philosophy of St. Augus-
tine. New York: Random House, 1960 [1943].
Kirwan, Christopher. Augustine. Arguments of the Philos-
ophers. London: Routledge, 1989.
Matthews, Gareth B. Thought’s Ego in Augustine and
Descartes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
———, ed. The Augustinian Tradition. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1999.
Rist, John M. Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Wetzel, James. Augustine and the Limits of Virtue. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Wills, Garry. Saint Augustine. New York: Viking Press,
1999.
Gareth B. Matthews
authenticity
The term, introduced into existentialist philosophy
by Martin HEIDEGGER (1889–1976), was popular-
ized by Jean-Paul SARTRE (1905–1980). Although it
has come to denote the chief, if not the only, exis-
tentialist “virtue,” Heidegger insisted he was not us-
ing it in a moral sense. But implying, as it does, such
key existentialist values as autonomy, commitment,
individual RESPONSIBILITY, and finite freedom, it is
clearly an evaluative term for all thinkers in the so-
called existentialist tradition.
The Heideggerian term “eigentlich,” translated
“authentic” or “proper,” denotes that mode of com-
porting oneself that individualizes and distinguishes
one human way of being (Dasein) from all others.
Since it is one’s finitude, temporality, and ultimately
one’s DEATH that so distinguishes Dasein, authentic
existence consists in resolutely accepting and living
one’s being-unto-death as one’s proper possibility.
“Authenticity” in the Heideggerian sense, therefore,
refers to the ultimate focus of one’s concerns in the
finite context established by one’s being-unto-death.
Inauthenticity, conversely, consists in the flight
from this finitude, the loss of this focus, the dissi-
pation of one’s resoluteness in the “average every-
day” of mass culture and superficial concerns. From
a moral point of view, inauthenticity would show
itself in the grasping after pat formulae or ready
guarantees to relieve the anguish of pursuing one’s
unique path of finite existence. The Nietzschean
challenge of moral creativity is refused by the inau-
thentic individual, who prefers the security of think-
ing and acting as “they” would have one do. Tol-
authenticity
stoy’s (1828–1910) Ivan Ilych (in The Death of Ivan
Ilych, 1886) exemplifies this inauthentic state by
seeking to live his life “comme il faut.” The relation
between failure to choose and loss of self that
“proper” sets in relief is captured most graphically
in Either/Or (1843) by KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855)
who compares the one who fails to choose to the
captain of a ship who, in hesitating to shift direction,
is all the while moving forward: “because others
have chosen for him, because he has lost himself”
(2:164, translation modified).
Sartre’s moral usage is more straightforward than
Heidegger’s. He introduces the term in Being and
Nothingness (1943), where he promises an ethic of
authenticity as the sequel to his ontological master-
work. In the posthumously published notes for that
ethic, he characterizes “authentic existence” as the
tensive feature of the human project’s being both
radically gratuitous and reflexively willed (see Note-
books for an Ethics). If it is our finitude that Hei-
deggerian authenticity resolutely chooses to live, it
is our contingency that is the focus of Sartrean
choice. Whatever human reality (Sartre’s translation
of “Dasein”) may be, it is in the manner of not-being
it, that is, in the manner of being at an inner distance
from its predicates, its intentions, its very self. This
nonself-coincidence is the ground of our freedom.
Authenticity is to choose to live this freedom; in-
authenticity, or BAD FAITH, is to flee it by trying to
coincide with ourselves (with our self-image, for ex-
ample, or with that image which others have of us).
Simone DE BEAUVOIR (1908–1986), though she
does not use the term, appropriates the idea when
she insists: “it is a matter of reconquering freedom
on the contingent facticity of existence, that is, of
taking the given, which, at the start, is there without
any reason, as something willed by man” (The Ethics
of Ambiguity, 1947). Likewise, Albert CAMUS
(1913–1960) holds up for emulation the “decision”
of Sisyphus as he returns to the foot of the hill to
begin rolling the rock to the top yet again: “One
must imagine Sisyphus happy” (The Myth of Sisy-
phus and Other Essays, 1942). The similarity be-
tween these attitudes and that of NIETZSCHE’s
(1844–1900) Zarathustra is more than coinciden-
tal. The latter’s inversion of Christian salvation
reads: “To redeem those who lived in the past and
to recreate all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that
alone should I call redemption” (Thus Spoke Zara-
thustra, 1885). In such instances one is affirming the
106
brute contingency (facticity) of existence by making
it one’s own and constituting one’s individuality in
the process.
Others in this tradition, such as Jose Ortega y
Gasset (1883–1955), Karl Jaspers (1883–1969),
and Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), have a similar
sense of the anguish that accompanies our radical
freedom and the resultant inclination to flee this
freedom/responsibility for inauthentic (uncreative)
existence. Ortega underscores the creative choice of
the authentic individual; such a one is an artist. For
Jaspers, authenticity is a function of my unique, his-
torical self (Existenz) in the face of Transcendence.
For Marcel, it entails being “faithful” to the recol-
lected presence of absolute being in oneself and in
the other; but such FIDELITY is likewise “creative.”
From the many writers, both philosophical and
literary, who have advocated authenticity as a moral
value, several common features emerge. Authentic-
ity denotes practical consistency, a kind of truth-to-
oneself, however that “self” may be conceived. This
in turn implies an ontological understanding of hu-
man nature and/or the human condition, focused
on finitude, creative freedom, and responsibility.
Whether one “makes of [one’s] life a work of art”
(Nietzsche) or “dwells poetically” in the world (Hei-
degger), the model of the authentic individual is the
creative artist. Even Kierkegaard, for whom the poet
was paradigmatically inauthentic, advocates in the
choice of faith the typically artistic superiority of the
individual over the universal. The sometimes pro-
found differences between these thinkers—whether
this creativity, for example, is a “doing,” a “respond-
ing,” or a “letting be”—are functions of their re-
spective ontologies.
Authenticity thus belongs to that ethical tradition
which insists one “become what one is.” But what
distinguishes it from more conservative forms of this
position is its view of “what one is” as unique, open-
ended, transcending one’s circumstances and crea-
tive of values. It thus resembles some forms of
PRAGMATISM. But it likewise risks dismissal as con-
stituting an ethical style, not a content; of warranting
any sort of commonly acknowledged immoral activ-
ity (racism or rape, for example) so long as one acts
in full awareness of the freedom of the decision and
owns the consequences of the act. So the challenge
to any existentialist ethics is to flesh out the imper-
ative of authenticity so that one may exclude certain
acts that could scarcely be conceived as authentic.

Finally, the term seems to find its proper place either
in a SITUATION ETHICS or as the complement to any
number of ethical theories that demand a corrective
to their excessively impersonal rules and principles.
See also: AUTONOMY OF MORAL AGENTS; BAD FAITH;
BUBER; CAMUS; DE BEAUVOIR; EXISTENTIAL ETH-
ICS; FIDELITY; HEIDEGGER; INDIVIDUALISM; LIBER-
TARIANISM; KIERKEGAARD; NIETZSCHE; RAND;
RESPONSIBILITY; SARTRE; SELF-DECEPTION; SELF-
KNOWLEDGE; SITUATION ETHICS.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodore. The Jargon of Authenticity. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Neo-Marxist
critique of Heidegger.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.
New York: Vintage Books, 1955 [1942]. Authenticity
as revolt.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper
and Row, 1962 [1927]. Classic statement of authentic-
ity in the context of fundamental ontology.
Jaspers, Karl. Reason and Existenz. Translated by William
Earle. New York: Noonday Press, 1955 [1935]. Au-
thentic existence elucidated.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1987 [1843]. Choice and self-
constitution.
———. Two Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1978 [1846?]. Inauthentic forms of existence.
———. Sickness unto Death. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1980 [1849]. Choice of self in a re-
ligious context.
Marcel, Gabriel. The Mystery of Being. Chicago, IL: Reg-
nery, 1950–51. Definitive exposition of his thought in
the Gifford lectures.
Martin, Mike W. Self-Deception and Morality. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1986. Discussion of the
“authenticity tradition”; bibliography.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883–85.
The “overman” versus the last man.
Ortega y Gasset, Jose. Meditations on Quixote. New York:
Norton, 1961 [1914]. The authentic individual as
artist.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. New York:
Schocken, 1948. His classic analysis of authenticity/
inauthenticity.
———. Notebooks for an Ethics. Translated by David Pel-
lauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Ex-
tensive treatment of authenticity, including a discus-
sion of authentic love. (Written 1946–47; published
posthumously as Cahiers pour une morale.)
———. Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr. New York: George
Braziller, 1963 [1952]. Authenticity exemplified.
107
authority
Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992. Excellent study, by a
nonexistentialist, of the ethical value of authenticity.
Zimmerman, Michael E. Eclipse of the Self. 2d, rev. ed.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986. The development
of Heidegger’s concept of authenticity.
Thomas R. Flynn
authority
Accounts of the concept of authority often begin
with an etymological point. The word comes from
the same root as “author.” This suggests that a
holder of authority is a source of something, in par-
ticular, the decisions or judgments of the people over
whom authority is exercised. But in the modern
world, where hierarchy is not taken for granted, the
concept of authority is probably best understood by
focusing not on those who hold authority but on
those potentially subject to it. Regarded in this way,
the essence of authority is deference. Those subject
to authority defer to the communications of the
holders of authority. Two main questions arise about
this deference: How is it to be understood? And how
is it to be justified?
Discussion of both these points is facilitated by
making two distinctions. The first distinction is be-
tween de facto authority and justified or legitimate
authority. De facto authority obtains when people
are in fact prepared to defer to the communications
emanating from some source. Authority is legitimate
when this deference is justified, in the sense that
there is good reason, from the standpoint of those
displaying deference, to do so.
The second distinction is between subordinating
authority and expert authority. De facto subordinat-
ing authority involves uncoerced deference to direc-
tives. These enjoin an agent to perform a certain ac-
tion in a certain situation. Presumably, the agent is
capable of making up her own mind about what
course of action is appropriate in that situation, of
deciding for herself what all the relevant consider-
ations require. But if she accepts the authority of
some source of directives, she regards these direc-
tives as taking precedence over her own judgment
concerning what to do. Joseph Raz has employed the
concept of preemption to characterize the relation
between the communications of an authority and the
judgments of those subject to it. To accept the au-
thority of some source of directives is to allow its
authority
directives to displace the reasons that would other-
wise determine judgment. This has the effect of mak-
ing the directives decisive REASONS FOR ACTION.
To justify subordinating authority to an individual
is to provide her with a rationale for the preemption,
by the putative authority’s directives, of her judg-
ments concerning what to do (in situations of the
kind at issue). This raises the most philosophically
intriguing problem about authority. How can there
be good reason for an agent to set aside an all-things-
considered judgment regarding what there is good
reason to do? Obviously we need to make a distinc-
tion. The preempted judgment is based on all the
relevant substantive considerations, but there must
be further considerations of a different sort that jus-
tify its preemption. What might they be?
Historically, perhaps the most important way of
justifying subordinating authority has employed a
promise to obey—or CONSENT having promissory
force. It is doubtful, however, whether this approach
is generally applicable. If it is to justify subordinating
authority, a promissory obligation must have pre-
emptive force relative to the reasons that would oth-
erwise determine what to do. This is, perhaps, pos-
sible when the other reasons are nonmoral, for
example, reasons of self-interest. But a promissory
obligation cannot plausibly be regarded as preempt-
ing other moral considerations. It is just a further
substantive moral reason for action, which must
compete with the moral considerations that would
otherwise guide an agent, and may be defeated by
them. So this method cannot reliably justify author-
ity when agents have moral reasons for disobeying.
To understand how subordinating authority
could be vindicated when agents have moral reasons
for disobeying, we must consider how the displace-
ment of a judgment encompassing even moral con-
siderations might be justified. One possibility is that
the agent’s own reasoning is defective, or at any rate,
not as accomplished as the reasoning of the desig-
nated authority. He is likely to do better by comply-
ing with the directives of an authority, where doing
better is understood as better satisfying the very
same reasons the force of which he would try to cap-
ture in an all-things-considered judgment. Of
course, this presupposes that the holder of authority
undertakes to base her directives on these reasons.
This way of justifying subordinating authority re-
quires that the subordinates have available to them
a sound basis for regarding those issuing directives
108
as more competent reasoners. When subordinating
authority is justified in this way, it shades into expert
authority.
When a subordinating authority directs people to
behave cooperatively, the justification of the pre-
emption that it involves can also be understood an-
other way. We can regard the reasoning that is pre-
empted as reasoning concerning how an agent can,
as an individual, maximize the satisfaction of the
considerations that he regards as reasons for action.
As is well known, maximizing reasoning of this sort
can dictate free riding, and when generally followed
in a group, leads to the breakdown of cooperation.
If a source of directives that has de facto authority
in a group directs cooperative behavior instead, each
subordinate will find that his compliance is matched
by that of others, with the result that the consider-
ations he takes as reasons for action are better sat-
isfied than they would be in the situation of general
noncooperation. This is a second way of regarding
those who accept subordinating authority as doing
better in terms of the very considerations, including
moral considerations, that ground the preempted
judgments.
Expert authority involves the displacement of an
all-things-considered judgment not by a directive,
but by the assertion of a putative expert. Deference
to expert authorities is a sensible social response to
the proliferation of specialized knowledge. No one
can master it all, and thus general social perfor-
mance will be defective if people try to answer on
their own all the questions germane to modern life.
A better—though obviously not foolproof—policy
involves a division of labor in which some become
experts on matters of a particular sort, and everyone
else defers to the assertions of these people in the
areas of their expertise. Here, too, we can distin-
guish between de facto and legitimate authority. An
individual’s assertions may in fact be decisive in de-
termining the beliefs of the members of some group,
whether this is justified or not. What, then, justifies
expert authority?
Again, the justifying reason cannot be a substan-
tive consideration that has somehow been left out of
an all-things-considered judgment. The justification
must be that the expert is better at assessing the
force of all the applicable substantive considera-
tions. Typically, this is established inductively, by a
history of successful judgment. It becomes appro-
priate for the members of a group to defer to some-

one’s sincere assertions when they have repeatedly
compared her judgments with their own and found
hers better. One prominent case is that in which an
individual is more successful in predicting what will
happen next in situations of a certain type. In such
cases, the authority may employ a form of reasoning
that is completely inaccessible to those who defer to
her. To have a good reason for deferring, they need
only be able to observe whether her predictions are
more accurate than their own. In other cases, how-
ever, expert authority is based on a difference in the
degree of some shared competence. A given individ-
ual can reason more efficiently or creatively, about
matters of a particular sort, than other people. The
deference characteristic of authority becomes justi-
fied when, after a number of trials in which those
whose thinking is more cumbersome eventually as-
certain that the designated individual is correct, in-
ductive reasoning supports simply accepting her fu-
ture assertions. Expert authority in moral matters
would be of this sort. But given the ubiquity of moral
disagreement, it is doubtful that anyone could dem-
onstrate superior moral competence to most of the
members of a large community.
The phenomenon of authorization should also be
mentioned. We sometimes say that an individual acts
by the authority of another, in the sense of being
authorized by him to perform the actions in ques-
tion. For example, the agent of a principal acts by
the authority of the principal. This use of the concept
of authority is also connected with the idea of au-
thorship highlighted by etymological considerations.
However, deference need not be at issue. To act by
the authority of another is to act by his RIGHTS.
Sometimes rights can be transferred from one per-
son to another. But there is also room for the idea
that an individual can consent, in the normative
sense that involves incurring obligations, to the ex-
ercise of his rights by another, while still retaining
these rights himself. In such cases, we speak of the
second person as acting by the authority of the first.
See also: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE; COERCION; CONSENT;
CONTRACTS; COOPERATION, CONFLICT AND COORDI-
NATION; DUTY AND OBLIGATION; ELITE, CONCEPT OF;
EXCELLENCE; FREEDOM OF THE PRESS; GOVERNMENT,
ETHICS IN; INEQUALITY; JOURNALISM; LEGAL ETHICS;
LIBRARY AND INFORMATION PROFESSIONS; LOYALTY;
MASS MEDIA; MEDICAL ETHICS; OBEDIENCE TO LAW;
PATERNALISM; POWER; PROFESSIONAL ETHICS; PROM-
109
autonomy of ethics
ISES; REASONS FOR ACTION; RELIGION; SOCIAL AND
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; THEOLOGICAL ETHICS;
TRUST.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. “What Was Authority?” In Authority,
edited by Carl Friedrich for the American Society for
Political and Legal Philosophy, 81–112. Nomos 1.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Coleman, James. The Foundations of Social Theory. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Dan-Cohen, Meir. “In Defense of Defiance.” Philosophy
and Public Affairs 23 (1994): 24–51.
De George, Richard. The Nature and Limits of Authority.
Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985.
Friedman, Richard. “On the Concept of Authority in Po-
litical Philosophy.” In Authority, edited by Joseph Raz,
56–91. New York: New York University Press, 1990.
Green, Leslie. The Authority of the State. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1988.
McMahon, Christopher. Authority and Democracy: A
General Theory of Government and Management.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Peters, R. S. “Authority.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society Suppl. vol. 32 (1958): 207–24.
Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986.
———, ed. Authority. New York: New York University
Press, 1990.
Soper, Phillip. “Legal Theory and the Claim to Authority.”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (1989): 209–37.
Christopher McMahon
autonomy of ethics
More has been written explicitly on the autonomy of
some other areas of culture, especially art and RE-
LIGION, than on the autonomy of ethics as such; but
autonomy issues in regard to ethics have been writ-
ten about and discussed extensively.
Different things have been meant by the “auton-
omy” of an area of the culture or of a discipline.
Goran Hermeren distinguishes twelve different the-
ses meant by “autonomy” of art. Any one of at least
seven theses may be meant by “autonomy” of ethics:
(1) Ethics is not subject to being explained biologi-
cally, psychologically, or sociologically; (2) ethics is
not dependent on, or derived from, religion; (3) eth-
ical concepts are not reducible to, or definable in
terms of, nonethical concepts; (4) the justification of
autonomy of ethics
ethical judgments does not depend exclusively on
nonethical beliefs; (5) ethics is a language game
grounded in a form of life rather than in objective
values or normative structures in the external world;
(6) ethical judgments are not determinant judg-
ments (they are not determined by, or accountable
to, any objective truth or principle); and (7) philo-
sophical ethics is independent of other philosophical
disciplines, such as epistemology, metaphysics, and
philosophy of mind.
Thomas Nagel argues for thesis 1. His attack is
on a biological theory of ethics, but his argument
would apply equally to psychological and sociologi-
cal theories as well. Nagel maintains that if ethics is
“a theoretical inquiry that can be approached by ra-
tional methods, and that has internal standards of
justification and criticism,” then biology can no
more explain ethics than it can explain mathematics
or physics; and he argues that ethics is, in fact, such
an enterprise. If ethics is a rational discipline, and
the evidence seems to support Nagel on this, then
moral experiences, ethical judgments and argu-
ments, and human actions in general do not have
the appropriate categorial structure to be subject to
scientific description and explanation, whether in bi-
ology, psychology, or sociology.
With regard to thesis 2, many claim that ethics is
dependent on, and derivable from, religion; and
that, in a secular culture, ethics, deprived of its foun-
dation in religion, tends toward dissolution. Others
(e.g., Falk) contend that ethics, as a rational disci-
pline, is grounded in selfhood, rational agency, or
reflectively living a human life, or in cooperative en-
deavors and social organization; that, while religion
may reinforce ethics, ethics is more basic than, and
can stand apart from, religion; and that religions of-
ten lag behind the developing moral consciousness
of humankind. It seems obvious that rational dia-
logue across cultures is more fruitful on ethical mat-
ters than on religious issues. THOMAS AQUINAS
(1225?–1274) and other Christian philosophers of
the Middle Ages agreed with the Greeks and Ro-
mans that there is an independent rational basis for
ethics; and since the seventeenth century it has been
widely accepted by philosophers that ethics is epis-
temologically independent of religion.
Theses 3–6 have been at the center of the contro-
versies in moral philosophy in the modern age (see
E. M. Adams). Thesis 3 holds that ethics is seman-
tically autonomous; that ethical terms either locate
110
some uniquely ethical property or structure (à la
G. E. MOORE [1873–1958] and other moral real-
ists) or are devoid of cognitive meaning (à la logical
positivists, existentialists, or prescriptivists). Thesis
4 holds (à la HUME [1711–1776], KANT [1724–
1804], and others) that no ethical conclusion fol-
lows logically from purely factual premises; and, fur-
thermore, that no set of factual beliefs alone can
justify an ethical judgment. Some claim that an eth-
ical premise or commitment is always presupposed
in justifying an ethical judgment with factual state-
ments. Others have invoked an emotive response to
the comprehended facts to account for the move-
ment from factual premises to an ethical conclusion;
some have spoken of ethical rules of inference, some
of social conventions, and some of a special (but
optional) point of view that justify ethical conclu-
sions from factual premises; E. M. Adams has ar-
gued for the perception of objective normative re-
quirements. There is wide agreement with Hume,
Kant, and Moore (although the opposition has been
strong) that ethical terms are semantically different
from nonvalue terms and that the justification of
ethical judgments is different from that of factual
beliefs.
Ronald DWORKIN is a prominent advocate of the-
sis 5. He holds that the objectivity and truth of an
ethical judgment are an internal matter for the par-
ticular ethical language game and form of life of
which it is a part. A judgment is objective and has a
truth-value not by virtue of its relationship to an ex-
ternal, independent reality, but by virtue of the fact
that it is embedded in a theory or practice with suf-
ficient complexity for it to generate logical tensions
within the system. This position is countered by all
the arguments for MORAL REALISM, whether natu-
ralistic or nonnaturalistic.
Thesis 6 invokes a sense of “autonomy” intro-
duced in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant
held that aesthetic judgments of taste and teleolog-
ical judgments about nature are autonomous in that
they are not determined by any objective truth or
principle but rather by reflection on the appropri-
ateness of some object to one’s own sensibility or
intellectual powers. Friedrich SCHILLER (1759–
1805), Ralph Waldo EMERSON (1803–1882), and
others (see Richard Smyth) have claimed that ethical
judgments are autonomous in this sense. This, too,
is countered by all the arguments for moral objec-
tivism and realism.

Thesis 7, the independence of moral philosophy
from other philosophical disciplines, is more as-
sumed in practice than argued for by moral philos-
ophers. Dworkin, however, argues explicitly that no
skeptical argument about morality and no argument
for the objectivity of morality can be other than a
moral argument. John RAWLS claims that moral the-
ory, the analysis of substantive moral concepts and
their relationship to our moral sensibility and natu-
ral attitudes (which he acknowledges is not the
whole of moral philosophy), is independent of epis-
temological and metaphysical considerations. How-
ever, a case can be made (see Adams) for the claim
that most theories of ethics are in response to phil-
osophical skepticism about ethics that is generated
by epistemological and metaphysical positions
reached independently of moral philosophy, and that
these epistemological and metaphysical positions
may distort moral theory.
See also: INTUITIONISM; METAETHICS; METAPHYSICS
AND EPISTEMOLOGY; MORAL REALISM; MORAL REA-
SONING; MORAL SENSE THEORISTS; NATURAL LAW;
NATURALISM; PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION; PRESCRIP-
TIVISM; RELIGION.
Bibliography
Adams, E. M. Ethical Naturalism and the Modern World-
View. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1960.
———. Philosophy and the Modern Mind. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Reprint.
Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1985.
See chapters 4 and 5.
Alston, William P. “The Christian Language-Game.” In
The Autonomy of Religious Belief, 128–62. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
Collingridge, David. “The Autonomy of Evaluation.” Jour-
nal of Value Inquiry 14 (1980): 119–28.
Dworkin, Ronald. A Matter of Principle. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1985. See especially pp.
167–77.
Falk, W. D. “Morals without Faith.” In Ought, Reasons,
and Morality: The Collected Papers of W. D. Falk,
163–79. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Hermeren, Goran. “Autonomy of Art.” In Essays on Aes-
thetics, edited by John Fisher, 35–49. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1983.
Myers, David B. “Marxism and the Autonomy of Critical
Thought.” International Philosophical Quarterly 19
(1979): 213–26.
Nagel, Thomas. “Ethics as an Autonomous Theoretical
111
autonomy of moral agents
Subject.” In Morality as a Biological Phenomenon, ed-
ited by Gunther Stent, 198–205. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1980.
Rawls, John. “The Independence of Moral Theory.” Pro-
ceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association 48 (1974): 5–22.
Smyth, Richard. “Voyages to Syracuse: Adams, Schiller,
Emerson.” In Mind, Value, and Culture, edited by Da-
vid Weissbord. Altascadero: Ridgeview, 1989.
E. M. Adams
autonomy of moral agents
The idea of autonomy (from autos, self, and nomos,
rule or law) applied initially to states that were self-
governing, as opposed to colonies and conquered
peoples that were ruled by others. In modern times
the idea has been extended in various ways to char-
acterize individuals. The general description of auton-
omous agents as self-governing or self-determining,
in some sense, is common to all accounts, but phi-
losophers differ widely in their interpretations of this
general idea and in the value they place on it. Like
many philosophical terms of art, “autonomy” gets its
specific meaning in the context of various theories,
and these have developed in response to somewhat
different philosophical issues. (See Christman, 1988;
Dworkin; Feinberg, 1986; and T. Hill.)
Many writers, in discussing the foundations of
ethics, treat autonomy as a basic condition of moral
agency. Prominent among these is Immanuel KANT
(1724–1804), whose conception of autonomy may
be seen as an ancestor of many contemporary con-
ceptions which differ significantly from his. In The
Social Contract (1762) ROUSSEAU (1712–1778)
had set himself the task of finding a form of political
union that would preserve to each citizen “moral lib-
erty,” which he understood as being subject only to
laws that one gives to oneself. Adopting this idea for
ethics, Kant maintained that, contrary to all previous
moral theories, the crucial condition for being a
moral agent is having “autonomy of the will.” Nega-
tively, this means that principles cannot acquire
moral force simply by being demanded by something
external to the rational agent, such as God, secular
AUTHORITY, tradition, or natural instinct. Positively,
it means that one imposes moral constraints on one-
self through one’s own reason.
Kant argues that autonomy of the will is a positive
autonomy of moral agents
freedom inseparable from freedom conceived nega-
tively, and together these apparently imply: (a) being
able to act on principles without one’s act being
causally determined; (b) being able to act for reasons
other than to satisfy inclinations; (c) having and be-
ing able to act on principles that are rational, do not
merely prescribe means to given ends, and are in
some sense rationally self-imposed rather than bind-
ing by virtue of one’s desires or the commands of
others. Kant attributed this property to the will of
all rational agents, as a necessary and (with sensi-
bility) a sufficient condition of moral agency; but he
held that only acts actually motivated by respect for
such rational principles manifest one’s autonomy
and thereby have moral worth. Kant argued for the
autonomy of all rational moral agents not on empir-
ical grounds but as a necessary presupposition of
moral obligation and PRACTICAL REASON in general.
He argued, further, that any rational agent with au-
tonomy is necessarily committed to the Categorical
Imperative, the supreme moral principle, and from
this he attempted to justify some of the more specific
moral principles that contemporary writers often
classify as RIGHTS and duties of autonomous
persons.
Following Kant with modifications, John RAWLS,
in A Theory of Justice (1971), holds that the prin-
ciples of justice are whatever principles would be
adopted by rational and free agents in an idealized
choice situation. Rawls stipulates that persons in
this “original position” be mutually disinterested,
motivated to acquire certain “social primary goods,”
but excluded by a “veil of ignorance” from consult-
ing their individual goals, loyalties, and conceptions
of the good life. Thus the perspective from which
Rawls derives the principles of justice is partially
analogous to the point of view of Kant’s rational
agents with autonomy of will. Though Rawls seeks
to avoid the extreme metaphysical commitments as-
sociated with Kant’s ethics, in both theories rational
agents adopt or acknowledge moral constraints in
detachment from the particular ends they desire;
and acting autonomously is construed as acting from
principles that one would consent to as a free and
equal rational being. A significant difference, how-
ever, is that Kant holds that all rational agents, by
virtue of their autonomy of will, necessarily ac-
knowledge the moral law as rationally binding even
when they fail to conform. Rawls, by contrast, does
not claim that every rational agent is committed to
112
principles that would be adopted in his original
position.
Some moral theorists who treat autonomy as a
fundamental feature of moral agency conceive of au-
tonomy quite differently from Kant and Rawls. On
some accounts, for example, moral agents have the
autonomy, or freedom, to adopt moral principles, or
to make moral decisions, for themselves without be-
ing constrained by Kantian rationality, a Rawlsian
“original position,” objective moral truths, or any
substantive standards. Some versions of this view
are held by R. M. HARE, Aiken, SARTRE (1905–
1980), and others. Like Kant, these philosophers re-
ject the idea that morally binding principles are to
be “discovered” in nature, tradition, or theology; but
they also deny that such principles are commands of
reason or constructs of RATIONAL CHOICE. Moral
agents are “free” to adopt their own principles, lim-
ited only by requirements such as sincerity, consis-
tency, thinking for oneself, and willingness to apply
the same principles to others. Such procedural re-
quirements do not guarantee that all rational moral
agents will adopt the same moral principles, though
how often and how deeply they will disagree is an
empirical question. The autonomy, or moral free-
dom, in question here is obviously not (as for Kant)
freedom from the influence of inclination and per-
sonal desire. Assuming one is sincere, consistent,
etc., one is “self-governing” in moral conduct when
one lives by principles one actually accepts for one-
self as the particular individual one is, not by virtue
of conforming to universal principles that one would
adopt if choosing with Kantian autonomy or from
Rawls’s original position. The theories in question
attribute to all moral agents the freedom to adopt
one’s own moral principles (within the limits men-
tioned); and this is generally seen as an implication
of the theories’ conception of morality, not as a
metaphysical claim or an empirical observation.
However, whether a particular individual exercises
that freedom, and so lives autonomously, may de-
pend on the empirical facts about whether the per-
son makes and lives by his or her moral commit-
ments with the requisite sincerity, independence,
consistency, etc.
Many contemporary writers construe autonomy
not as a basic condition of all moral agents but as a
feature of persons who are especially self-controlled,
independent, or authentic. The typical context for
this conception is discussion of VIRTUES and ideals

rather than the source of moral obligation. Some ar-
gue, for example, that an ideal for education is to
develop autonomous individuals rather than blind
conformists. Others condemn sexist and manipula-
tive practices on the ground that they undermine a
person’s ability to make autonomous decisions. Au-
tonomy as self-control, in contrast to “wanton” and
addictive behavior, is sometimes presented as an at-
tainable sort of “free will” compatible with causal
determinism.
These writers generally agree that not everyone
satisfies the ideal of autonomy and that one can be
autonomous to various degrees. How to define the
ideal, however, remains a matter of controversy. Sev-
eral have attempted to characterize it as control over
one’s first-order desires and preferences by higher
order desires or evaluations resulting from deliber-
ation (Frankfurt; Watson). This strategy prompts
questions about how to distinguish autonomously
formed higher-order desires from manipulated ones
and whether an infinite regress can be avoided. An-
other controversial issue is whether autonomous
persons can choose to be ruled by others. Kuflick,
for example, argues that autonomy is inalienable,
but Dworkin argues that autonomy requires merely
procedural and not substantive independence from
others. In order to make autonomy compatible with
“loyalty, objectivity, commitment, and love,” Dwor-
kin offers a “content-free” definition of autonomy as
“a second-order capacity of persons to reflect criti-
cally upon their first-order preferences, desires,
wishes, and so forth and the capacity to accept or
attempt to change these in the light of higher-order
preferences and values.”
A rather different conception of individual auton-
omy is suggested by the analogy with autonomous
states that have the right to govern their own internal
affairs. Similarly, many believe, individuals have a
moral right to make their own decisions with regard
to a wide range of matters concerning their lives.
That is, individuals, at least those sufficiently ra-
tional and responsible to qualify for the right, are
seen as “sovereign authorities” over questions such
as how to dress, what to read, when to refuse sexual
advances, whether to worship, sell their PROPERTY,
pursue this or that lawful career, and so forth. The
right to make such decisions for oneself may be con-
strued as a right against individuals or against the
state, but the point in either case is that others would
be wrong to use COERCION, manipulation, decep-
113
autonomy of moral agents
tion, etc., to interfere with an agent’s efforts to make
and carry out these decisions. Authors differ about
the range and definition of the right of autonomy,
but none would deny that what one may decide for
oneself is limited by others’ autonomy and perhaps
further moral considerations (e.g., PROMISES, non-
injury, and justice). Appeals to the individual’s right
of autonomy are common in criticisms of UTILITAR-
IANISM and, more specifically, of PATERNALISM in
MEDICAL ETHICS. Some feminist writers have argued
that sexist and gender stereotypes violate women’s
right to autonomy or undermine their capacity to
exercise it.
Important questions arise about how these vari-
ous conceptions of autonomy are related. For ex-
ample, is Kantian or Rawlsian autonomy the ground
for the autonomous individual’s right to make self-
regarding decisions without interference? If so, what
is the argument that makes the connection? Is it a
necessary condition of having the right of autonomy
that one fully satisfy the ideal of rational self-control,
AUTHENTICITY, and independence, or does the right
extend to all who are autonomous to some minimal
threshold degree? If ideal autonomy is necessary,
only a relatively few elite will have the right; but if
a lower threshold suffices, then this minimum needs
to be specified and justified. Finally, if moral agents
are free to adopt their own moral principles subject
only to the procedural restrictions of Hare, Aiken,
and others, is there any common ground for holding
that we have a right of autonomy or that it is an ideal
to be an autonomous person?
A variety of objections have been raised against
theories which stress the importance of autonomy.
For example, communitarians in political theory
criticize the Kantian and Rawlsian conceptions of
autonomy as excessively metaphysical and individ-
ualistic. These conceptions, they contend, identify
one’s “true self” as an abstract rational being iso-
lated from the community values that make one who
one is. Theories of the sort advocated by Hare, Ai-
ken, and Sartre have drawn many objections, most
prominently perhaps the complaint that the sup-
posed freedom to choose our own moral principles
(with minimal restrictions) is incompatible with the
objectivity of morals. Ideals of autonomy as self-
control, independence, etc., are suspected of cul-
tural (and male) bias. More choice, some argue, is
not always better than less, and LOYALTY, commit-
ment, and compassion may be more important than
autonomy of moral agents
living autonomously. The supposed right of auton-
omy invites the objections that, if broadly extended,
it protects decisions that are foolish and contrary to
the general welfare and, if narrowly restricted to ide-
ally autonomous persons, it gives little guidance for
the real problems that arise, for example, in medical
ethics.
Further objections come from feminists who be-
lieve that traditional ethical theories have overem-
phasized autonomy to the neglect of compassion and
PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS. Carol Gilligan’s influen-
tial study of moral development in young women
suggested that women and men typically see moral
problems from different perspectives, the character-
istic values of men being autonomy, independence,
and emotional detachment, while women are more
concerned with caring, personal relationships. This
work has inspired hopes for new feminist theories
that articulate women’s moral perspectives as alter-
natives to autonomy-based theories sometimes seen
as reflecting the values of male-dominated societies.
Unfortunately, most contemporary discussions of
autonomy to date have been brief or incidental to
other projects. A challenge for future work would
be to attempt to develop a unified account of auton-
omy that is sensitive both to the critics’ objections
and to the best of the diverse ideas that have passed
as autonomy.
See also: AGENCY AND DISABILITY; AGENT-CENTERED
MORALITY; AUTHENTICITY; AUTHORITY; CARE; CAT-
EGORICAL AND HYPOTHETICAL IMPERATIVES; COER-
CION; COMMUNITARIANISM; CONSENT; DECEIT; DE-
LIBERATION AND CHOICE; DUTY AND OBLIGATION;
FEMINIST ETHICS; FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM;
HARE; IDEALIZED AGENTS; KANT; LIBERTY; LOVE;
LOYALTY; OPPRESSION; PATERNALISM; PRACTICAL
REASON[ING]; RATIONAL CHOICE; RAWLS; ROUS-
SEAU; SELF-CONTROL; SELF-RESPECT; SEX AND SEX-
UAL ETHICS; SOCIAL CONTRACT.
Bibliography
Aiken, Henry. Reason and Conduct. New York: Knopf,
1962. See “The Concept of Moral Objectivity.”
Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1969. See “Two Concepts of Liberty,”
pp. 118–72.
Christman, John. “Constructing the Inner Citadel: Recent
Work on the Concept of Autonomy.” Ethics 99, no. 1
(1988): 109–24.
114
———, ed. The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Au-
tonomy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Downie, R. S., and E. Telfer. “Autonomy.” Philosophy 46
(1971): 296–301.
Dworkin, Gerald. The Theory and Practice of Autonomy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. For
quoted passage, see p. 20.
Feinberg, Joel. Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. See
“The Idea of a Free Man,” pp. 3–29. Reprinted from
Educational Judgments, ed. by James F. Doyle (Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
———. The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. 3 vols.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984–88. See vol. 3,
Harm to Self, chapter 18.
Frankfurt, Harry G. “Freedom of the Will and the Con-
cept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971):
829–39.
———. “Identification and Wholeheartedness.” In Re-
sponsibility, Character and the Emotions, edited by F.
Schoeman, 27–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982.
Hare, R. M. Freedom and Reason. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1963.
Haworth, Lawrence. Autonomy: An Essay in Philosophi-
cal Psychology and Ethics. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986.
Hill, Sharon Bishop. “Self-Determination and Autonomy.”
In Today’s Moral Problems 3d ed., edited by Richard
Wasserstrom, 118–33. New York: Macmillan, 1985.
Hill, Thomas E., Jr. Autonomy and Self-Respect. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Mor-
als. Translated by H. J. Paton. New York: Harper and
Row, 1964 [1785].
Kittay, Eva, and Diana Meyers, eds. Women and Moral
Theory. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987.
Kuflick, Arthur. “The Inalienability of Autonomy.” Philos-
ophy and Public Affairs 13 (1984): 271–98.
Meyers, Diana. Self, Society, and Personal Choice. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1971.
———. “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory.” Jour-
nal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 515–35.
Richards, David A. J. “Rights and Autonomy.” Ethics 92
(1981): 3–20.
Scanlon, T. M. “A Theory of Freedom of Expression.” Phi-
losophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 204–26.
Watson, Gary. “Free Agency.” Journal of Philosophy 72
(1975): 205–20.

Young, Robert. Personal Autonomy: Beyond Negative and
Positive Liberty. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986.
Thomas E. Hill Jr.
Averroës
See Ibn Rushd.
Avicenna [Ibn Sı̄nā] (980–1037)
Abū ÛAlı̄ al-Husayn ibn ÛAbd Allāh ibn Sı̄nā, or
Avicenna. Of all the medieval Islamic philosophers,
we are best acquainted with the life of Avicenna
thanks to the efforts of his devoted pupil and long-
time companion, al-Jūzjānı̄, who preserved some-
thing resembling an autobiography along with his
own biographical appendix. We learn from it that
Avicenna was an assiduous and devoted learner
from the days of his youth to his death.
Having proved himself in the study of the Quran
and related works of literature by the age of ten, he
turned to Indian mathematics and Islamic jurispru-
dence, then to the study of philosophy. Afterward,
he set about reading Porphyry’s (c. 234–305) Isa-
goge, logic in general, Euclid (fl. c. 300 B.C.E.), Ptol-
emy’s (second cent. C.E.) Almagest, and eventually
undertook the natural sciences and metaphysics. For
the latter two pursuits, he claims to have read both
the original texts—presumably ARISTOTLE (384–
322 B.C.E.)—and the commentaries. Such theoreti-
cal inquiries soon gave way to more practical ones
as he focused his attention on medicine. Having
thoroughly mastered the forms of the syllogisms and
their various premises by sixteen, he moved on to
metaphysics. These studies occupied Avicenna until
the age of eighteen, at which time he found an oc-
casion to present himself as a physician to the ailing
ruler of Bukhara and gained access to this ruler’s
well-stocked library.
In the first chapter of the introductory volume to
the logical part of his famous Healing, the logical
part being at the same time the beginning part,
Avicenna explains the general order of the whole
work. After the part on logic is another part devoted
to natural science. It is followed by a third part that
sets forth mathematics, and the whole compendium
concludes with Avicenna’s explanation of the divi-
sions and aspects of the science pertaining to meta-
physics. From this account of its scope, one might
115
Avicenna [Ibn Sı̄nā]
think that Avicenna’s Healing was devoted solely to
theoretical philosophy or science, that it had nothing
to say about practical philosophy or science. Indeed,
it is not until the very end of his discussion of meta-
physics that he speaks of the practical sciences or
arts of ethics and politics. As he puts it, this “sum-
mary of the science of ethics and of politics” is
placed there “until I compose a separate, compre-
hensive book about them.”
Avicenna’s fuller teaching reveals, however, that
ethical and political science belong after divine sci-
ence intrinsically and not provisionally. Indeed, they
are the human manifestation of divine science—its
practical proof. They testify to divine providence for
humankind and thus to the truth of revelation more
clearly than any of the other sciences investigated in
the Healing. Yet because the correctness of what
they teach can also be verified by Aristotelian or pa-
gan reasoning processes, Avicenna must elucidate
the relationship he discerns between pagan philos-
ophy and the revelation accorded the Prophet
Muh. ammad.
Avicenna’s description of PLATO’s (c. 430–347
B.C.E.) Laws as a treatise on prophecy provides a
clue to how interrelated he deems philosophy and
revelation. Indeed, with one exception, he consis-
tently presents the revelation of ISLAM in terms that
admit rational defense. The exception concerns the
question of ultimate HAPPINESS. Even here, however,
he preserves philosophy’s role, never insisting on the
character of that happiness.
Similarly, the attention he gives to the political
aspects of prophecy and divine law leads to reflec-
tion on the most fundamental political questions: the
nature of law, the purpose of political community,
the need for sound moral life among the citizens, the
importance of providing for divorce as well as for
marriage, the conditions for just war, the consider-
ations that lay behind penal laws, and the end of
human life. Although he does not address the origin
of private PROPERTY any more than he explains how
future successors to the prophet-lawgiver might be
raised so that they will have the moral habits and
character traits suitable to such a position, he pro-
vides the basic principles for readers to pursue these
issues on their own. In this respect, Avicenna’s po-
litical teaching is propaedeutic rather than provi-
sional: it provides an introduction to the fundamen-
tals of political science and alerts readers to the need
to think carefully about the strong affinity between
Avicenna [Ibn Sı̄nā]
the vision of political life set forth by the pagan
Greek philosophers and that exceptional individual
who surpasses philosophic virtue by acquiring pro-
phetic qualities.
See also: ARISTOTLE; CIVIC GOOD AND VIRTUE;
DEATH; ISLAM; ISLAMIC ETHICS; ISLAMIC MEDICAL
ETHICS; LEGAL PHILOSOPHY; MEDICAL ETHICS, HIS-
TORICAL; PLATO; WAR AND PEACE.
Bibliography
Works by Avicenna
The Life of Ibn Sina. Edited and translated by William E.
Gohlman. Albany: SUNY Press, 1974.
Healing: Metaphysics X. Translated by Michael E. Mar-
mura. In Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook,
edited by Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, 98–111.
New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963.
Works about Avicenna
Butterworth, Charles E. “Medieval Islamic Philosophy and
the Virtue of Ethics.” Arabica 34 (1987): 221–50.
Marmura, Michael E. “Avicenna on Primary Concepts in
the Metaphysics of his al-Shifā.” In Logos Islamikos:
Studia Islamica in Honorem Georgii Michaelis Wick-
ens, edited by Roger M. Savory and Dionisius A. Agius,
219–40. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1984.
Charles E. Butterworth
Ayer, A[lfred] J[ules]
(1910–1989)
A. J. Ayer wrote little in philosophical ethics, but it
was not without importance. His position differs
only marginally from the more elaborately worked
out EMOTIVISM of Charles L. STEVENSON (1908–
1979).
In his notorious first book, Language, Truth and
Logic (1936), Ayer’s main concern was to provide
an account of ethical statements which was com-
patible with the logical positivist doctrine of which
it was the main British exposition. According to the
positivist’s verification principle as there formulated
there were only two types of meaningful factual
statement: analytic statements and empirically test-
able hypotheses. All necessary truths, such as those
of logic and of mathematics, were analytic, that is,
116
formulations of linguistic rules or their conse-
quences; as such, they provided no information, just
a reminder how to use language consistently. All
other meaningful statements were predictions about
what would be observed under certain empirically
identifiable circumstances and it was only such
statements which, if true, provided genuine factual
information, or, if they were false, misinformation.
The point of this doctrine was to distinguish sense
from nonsense. All traditional metaphysical state-
ments, such as statements about the Absolute, were
thereby supposed to be exhibited as meaningless,
and so were theological statements as advanced by
most modern believers. (Belief in visible gods, such
as those the Greeks believed were living on Mount
Olympus, was simply false.) The meaninglessness of
all such statements, on their criterion, was no prob-
lem for the logical positivist since it was expressly
designed to show this. But ethical statements were
rather more problematic for, while a society which
had no use for metaphysics, theology, or religion was
much to their liking, they were not quite happy to
urge a society emptied of all moral thought and con-
cern (though some critics took this to be the upshot
of their doctrine).
Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), the founder of the
Vienna Circle, had interpreted ethical statements as
informative about the effects on human HAPPINESS
of various forms of behaviour. To call an action
“right” was to say that it promoted human happiness
while to call it “wrong” was to say that it did the
opposite.
Ayer, however, could not accept this, for he be-
lieved that G. E. MOORE (1873–1958) had shown,
with his doctrine of the NATURALISTIC FALLACY, that
it could never be an analytic truth that actions with
certain empirically identifiable consequences (such
as an increase or decrease of human happiness) were
right, or were wrong, since in applying these ethical
predicates to such actions one was evidently engag-
ing in something other than mere tautology. Ayer’s
alternative view was that ethical statements were
factually meaningless but served to express our fa-
vourable or unfavourable feelings toward some-
thing. They were no more true or false than such
exclamations as “Hooray for English beer” or
“Down with English cooking”; in fact some typical
ethical “statements” were virtually equivalent to
such exclamations as “Hooray for capital punish-
ment” or “Down with adulterers.” This emotivist

analysis of ethical statements was sharply distin-
guished from the subjectivist analysis according to
which they asserted something about the speaker’s
feelings, since that would make them mere state-
ments of psychological fact and render ethical dis-
agreement impossible (since what I say about my
feelings cannot contradict the truth of what you say
about yours).
From the point of view of his later cooler reflec-
tions Ayer thought it a mistake to have treated the
alleged meaninglessness of theological and of ethical
statements as on a par. For while he wished to dis-
miss theology and religion as nonsense to be avoided
he did not really wish so to dismiss moral thinking
or morality. The essential doctrine was formulated
more satisfactorily in his article “On the Analysis of
Moral Judgements” (1949). Here it is attitudes
rather than feelings which are expressed by moral
judgements, and it is suggested that “moral attitudes
consist in certain patterns of behaviour, and that the
expression of a moral judgement is an element in the
pattern.” Likewise the role of moral argument is up-
graded, though our “reasons” for our moral views
are simply the considerations which prompt them in
ourselves and to which we refer in the effort to per-
suade others to share them. Thus when I say that an
action is wrong I am committing myself and urging
others to avoid such actions, but there is no factual
truth about the matter. “True” and “false” may, in-
deed, be used to show agreement or disagreement
with a moral position, but their use is logically
misleading.
This is completely different, argues Ayer, from the
MORAL RELATIVISM which asserts that what is right
or wrong varies from society to society or that any-
thing goes which the agent himself thinks right.
There is nothing logically or philosophically suspect
in someone holding that TORTURE is absolutely
wrong, independently of whether any society con-
117
Ayer, A. J.
dones it or not. For to say that torture is wrong in
all circumstances is to express and attempt to arouse
in others an unfavourable attitude to it wherever and
whenever practised. The emotivist is not saying that
there is nothing right or wrong but thinking makes
it so. For to say that is to express the rather peculiar
attitude of favouring all actions which the agent re-
gards as morally satisfactory—for example, the per-
secution of the Jews by the Nazis, something unlikely
to be endorsed by the emotivist philosopher. An as-
similation of emotivism to ethical relativism is a still
worse mistake than its confusion with SUBJECTIVISM
as characterised above.
Emotivism was a metaethical analysis of ethical
language, not the expression of a moral position.
And Ayer held that the expression of moral opinions
had no role in philosophy proper, as philosophical
argument had no bearing on their acceptability. Ayer
did, however, give some expression to his own eth-
ical outlook which might be described as qualified
desire-fulfilment UTILITARIANISM. Though favoura-
bly disposed to Jeremy BENTHAM’s (1748–1832)
greatest happiness principle he drew back from its
complete endorsement for such reasons as that it
might justify the persecution of minorities to fulfil
the desires of the majority.
See also: ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS; EMO-
TIVISM; LOGIC AND ETHICS; MOORE; MORAL RELA-
TIVISM; NATURALISTIC FALLACY; RELIGION; STEVEN-
SON; SUBJECTIVISM; THEOLOGICAL ETHICS.
Bibliography
Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic. Rev. ed. London:
Victor Gollancz, 1946 [1936]. Chapter 6.
———. Philosophical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1954.
Essays 10 and 11.
Timothy L. S. Sprigge
 B
bad faith
One of the lasting contributions of Jean-Paul SARTRE
(1905–1980) to the philosophical vocabulary is the
expression “bad faith” (la mauvaise foi). In common
parlance it has become synonymous with SELF-
DECEPTION, insincerity, or both. There is some truth
to each claim yet none exhausts its proper usage in
the Sartrean sense. As one might expect from its au-
thor, the term carries meanings that are at once on-
tological, epistemological, psychological, and moral.
Introduced in his masterwork, Being and Noth-
ingness (1943; subtitled “An Essay in Phenomeno-
logical Ontology”), the term presupposes that one
and the same human individual is radically divided
between domains of spontaneity and inertia (being-
for-itself and being-in-itself). The resultant “inner
distance” that characterizes human reality is the on-
tological condition for the phenomenon of bad faith.
Because it is conscious, human reality is never fully
identical with itself; it is always “other” than itself
in its temporal dimensions and in the relation of in-
ternal negation that Sartre calls “nihilation” which
distances the human individual from other individ-
uals and from its very own self. This is the ontolog-
ical source of Sartrean freedom: Human reality is
free because it is not a self (which would constitute
thing-like inertia) but a presence-to-self. This duality
is the reason an individual can exist in a state of self-
deception. Without appeal to an unconscious, which
he explicitly denies (the Freudian censor, he believes,
118
is itself in bad faith since it both knows and does not
know what to allow into consciousness), Sartre re-
lies instead on two dimensions of a totally translu-
cent consciousness: thetic or reflective conscious-
ness, and nonthetic or prereflective consciousness.
The latter is the direct consciousness that we have
before we advert to the fact that we are conscious.
In fact, throughout many of his subsequent writings
and at greatest length in his existentialist psychoan-
alyses of Jean Genet (1910–1986) and Gustave
Flaubert (1821–1880), we find Sartre ascribing to
a nonthetically conscious subject intentions and re-
sponsibilities that Freudians would have attributed
to the unconscious. If lying to another requires no
special ontology, lying to oneself clearly does, espe-
cially when this self-deception occurs within the
unity of a single, translucent consciousness. What
keeps bad faith from being a “cynical lie” is that it
occurs at the level of prereflective consciousness. On
the other hand, for that reason, it may resemble what
is often described as crass or supine ignorance—one
suspects there may be better evidence to the contrary
but doesn’t bother to investigate.
Epistemologically, the “faith” of “bad faith” pre-
sumes a readiness to rest content with “nonpersua-
sive evidence.” Sartre has a very Husserlian notion
of evidence as “the intuitive possession of the ob-
ject,” minus Husserl’s epistemic nuances. The origi-
nal project of bad faith is a decision in bad faith on
the nature of faith, namely, to be persuaded by in-
adequate evidence. This is not a reflective, voluntary

decision but a spontaneous determination of our
way of existing, a determination of which we are
prereflectively aware. “One puts oneself in bad faith
as one goes to sleep and one is in bad faith as one
dreams” (Being and Nothingness). An entire world-
view of bad faith can ensue from this attitude. In
fact, Sartre’s lengthy description of society in Sec-
ond Empire France could be read as an example of
such a Weltanschauung.
Epistemology and ontology overlap when bad
faith is seen as a fundamental denial of our ontolog-
ical condition, namely, the denial that the human be-
ing is both facticity (in-itself as the given of our sit-
uation) and transcendence of this facticity (for-itself
as project). “Bad faith seeks to affirm their identity
while preserving their differences.” The most com-
mon form of bad faith seeks to identify with our past
or with the image others have formed of us. In other
words, it collapses our transcendence into our fac-
ticity. Such is the condition of the “perfect waiter”
who wishes to be a waiter in full self-identity, a futile
gesture because consciousness disturbs any would-be
identity by the otherness it necessarily introduces.
But our ambivalent condition also enables us to live
in denial of our facticity and to project ourselves
entirely into our possibilities. This is the bad faith of
James Thurber’s (1894–1961) character Walter
Mitty, who exists in a phantasy world with no ac-
knowledged link to his factical existence. Every act
of bad faith is first of all a lie about our human con-
dition of nonself-coincidence and the freedom and
RESPONSIBILITY that this entails. It is an attempt to
overcome rather than to live positively with this
“metastable” condition of presence-to-self that Sar-
tre describes famously as “being what one is not and
not-being what one is.” This is why Sartre can claim
that sincerity, the supposed antithesis of bad faith
understood as “insincerity,” is itself in bad faith to
the extent that the agent claims to be sincere (or
identical with any other state or quality) “the way a
stone is a stone.” One can be sincere only in the
manner of not-being it, that is, as being at least pre-
reflectively aware that this situation is both precar-
ious and sustained by an ongoing project.
Psychologically, bad faith entails the flight from
the freedom and responsibility of our ambivalent
condition. For Sartre, consciousness, because of its
destabilizing character, conceals in its being a per-
manent risk of bad faith. In fact, all faith is “trou-
bled” in Sartre’s view from the moment that it is
119
bad faith
reflected on because of the “otherness” that infects
every act of reflection: “To believe is to know [re-
flectively] that one believes, and to know that one
believes is no longer to believe” (Being and Noth-
ingness). Such is the circle of spontaneity and inertia
that pervades human reality at every turn.
Morally, bad faith is often seen along with inau-
thenticity, with which it is sometimes identified, as
the primary existential vice. And yet Sartre, in his
lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (delivered
1945), remarks that anyone who seeks to excuse
himself by appeal to some deterministic doctrine is
a self-deceiver. He then asks himself: “But why
should he not chose to deceive himself?”, and re-
plies: “It is not for me to judge him morally, but I
define his bad faith as an error.” This seems to con-
firm Sartre’s remark that while HEIDEGGER’s
(1889–1976) term AUTHENTICITY (Eigentlichkeit),
despite the author’s objections, carries a clearly
moral denotation, “bad faith” does not. The latter is
simply an error of judgment. But this stands in such
contrast with Sartre’s evaluative use of the expres-
sion throughout his work, not to mention its em-
ployment in ordinary language, that one has the
right to be skeptical about Sartre’s interpretation of
this term in his own work. Since prereflective con-
sciousness is aware of our nonself-coincidence and
hence of the self-deception of bad faith, “we are
without excuse.” In a well-known footnote at the
conclusion of the chapter in Being and Nothingness
on bad faith, Sartre explains:
If it is indifferent whether one is in good or
bad faith, because bad faith re-apprehends
good faith and slides to the very origin of the
project of good faith, that does not mean that
we can not radically escape bad faith. But
this supposes a self-recovery of being which
was previously corrupted. This self-recovery
we shall call authenticity, the description of
which has no place here.
See also: AUTHENTICITY; DE BEAUVOIR; DECEIT; EX-
ISTENTIAL ETHICS; FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM; HU-
MANISM; HUSSERL; INTENTION; METAPHYSICS AND
EPISTEMOLOGY; PHENOMENOLOGY; PROMISES; PSY-
CHOANALYSIS; PSYCHOLOGY; RESPONSIBILITY; SAR-
TRE; SELF-CONTROL; SELF-DECEPTION; SELF-KNOWL-
EDGE; SITUATION ETHICS; WEAKNESS OF WILL.
bad faith
Bibliography
Catalano, Joseph. Good Faith and Other Essays: Perspec-
tives on a Sartrean Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1996.
Fingarette, Herbert. Self-Deception. London: Routledge,
1969.
Gordon, Lewis R. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. At-
lantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995.
Klemke, E. D., ed. The Meaning of Life. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1981.
Manser, Anthony. “A New Look at Bad Faith.” In Sartre:
An Investigation of Some Major Themes, edited by
Simon Glynn. Brookfield, VT: Gower, 1987.
Martin, Mike W. Self-Deception and Morality. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1986.
———, ed. Self-Deception and Self-Understanding. Law-
rence: University Press of Kansas, 1985.
Mele, Alfred R. Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-
Deception, and Self-Control. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1985.
Santoni, Ron. Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in
Sartre’s Early Philosophy. Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1995.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by
George J. Becker. New York: Schocken, 1995 [1945].
———. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E.
Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Tr. of
L’Être et le néant [1943].
———. Notebooks for an Ethics. Translated by David Pel-
lauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Tr.
of Cahiers pour une morale (published posthumously;
written 1946–47).
Thomas R. Flynn
Baier, Kurt E. M. (1917– )
Born and raised in Austria, Kurt Baier studied law
at the University of Vienna from 1935 to 1938. He
first pursued a career as a foreign correspondent. He
was based in England during the Nazi revolution
and was interned there in 1940. He was able to es-
cape to Australia, where he began his formal train-
ing in philosophy, taking the B.A. and M.A. degrees
(1944, 1947) at the University of Melbourne; there
he was appointed lecturer in philosophy. In 1949,
however, Baier decided to return to England in order
to receive more formal philosophical training at Ox-
ford University, where he studied with John Austin
(1911–1960), H. L. A. HART (1907–1992), Gilbert
Ryle (1900–1976), and Stephen Toulmin. He re-
ceived his D. Phil. from Oxford in 1952 and re-
turned to Australia in 1955, where shortly thereafter
120
he was appointed senior lecturer at Melbourne. In
1957, he moved to Canberra University College
(now Australian National University) to become
foundation professor. Then in 1962, he moved to the
United States, where he became chair of the De-
partment of Philosophy at the University of Pitts-
burgh, which in recent decades has been one of the
foremost departments in the analytical tradition.
In 1958, Baier published his major work, The
Moral Point of View. This work established him as
one of the three or four leading voices in the school
of thought known as the good-reasons approach to
ethics. Considered a master of ordinary language us-
age, Baier is credited with explicating the concept of
a reason with great insight and rigor. For an account
of the difference between reason as an excuse, a jus-
tification, or an explanation, there is perhaps none
better than Baier’s.
Writing in the Hobbesian tradition, but without
invoking the role of Thomas HOBBES’s (1588–1679)
famous Sovereign, Baier’s main objectives in the
book are (a) to show the supremacy of moral reasons
over all other reasons and (b) to show that reasons
to act morally can be derived from self-interested
reasons alone. Much of the excitement of the project
is owing to the fact that its success would entail that
ethical EGOISM (roughly: an act is right if and only
if it maximizes a person’s own HAPPINESS) is irra-
tional. The project attempts a kind of moral magic.
The validity of self-interested reasons is not denied
at all. What is denied, rather, is that the soundness
of ethical egoism follows from such reasons. A non-
egoistic morality is claimed to follow instead. Inter-
estingly, Baier does not take his position to be that
there is one true morality, but rather that there are
true moralities. This position makes him au courant
with theses advanced in the field of scholarship now
known as literary criticism.
The influence of The Moral Point of View spans
more than three decades, with writers in ethics as
different in their philosophical inclinations as David
Gauthier, Alan GEWIRTH, Derek Parfit, and John
RAWLS acknowledging its influence. Few would
claim that Baier succeeded in his project. To varying
degrees, this project has been attempted by others—
some who have buttressed their arguments with the
theoretical machinery and rigor of RATIONAL CHOICE
theory; yet it is not clear that others have been any
more successful. It seems that either the project will
succeed as Baier formulated it or it will not succeed

at all. And this is perhaps a great testimony to the
clarity of Baier’s thought and the depth of his
insight.
Baier remains convinced that his project can suc-
ceed. As he continues to defend it with characteristic
clarity, he continues to contribute to our understand-
ing of the notion of a good reason, having recently
observed that a theory can satisfy the formal con-
ditions of rationality and yet be unreasonable. This
he thinks is true of ethical egoism.
Kurt Baier retired as Distinguished Service Pro-
fessor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of
Pittsburgh. He is the author of over seventy articles,
including influential ones in the philosophy of mind
and political theory and on the topic of AUTHORITY
especially.
See also: ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS;
AUTHORITY; CRITICAL THEORY; EGOISM; EXCUSES; GE-
WIRTH; HISTORY OF WESTERN ETHICS 12: TWENTIETH-
CENTURY ANGLO-AMERICAN; HOBBES; IMPARTIAL-
ITY; MORAL POINT OF VIEW; MORAL REASONING;
MORAL RULES; RATIONAL CHOICE; RATIONALITY VS.
REASONABLENESS; RAWLS; REASONS FOR ACTION;
VIRTUE ETHICS.
Bibliography
Works by Baier
The Rational and the Moral Order: The Social Roots of
Reason and Morality. Chicago: Open Court, 1995.
The Moral Point of View: A Rational Basis of Ethics. Ith-
aca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958. Abridged un-
der the same title, New York: Random House, 1966.
“Rationality, Reason, and the Good.” In Morality, Reason
and Truth: New Essays on the Foundations of Ethics,
edited by David Copp and David Zimmerman, 194–
211. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985.
“The Social Source of Reason.” Proceedings and Ad-
dresses of the American Philosophical Association 51
(1978): 707–22.
Works about Baier
Darwall, Stephen. Impartial Reason. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1983.
Hospers, John. Human Conduct: Problems of Ethics. 2d
ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. In
this undergraduate textbook, some of Baier’s central
themes receive a thorough discussion.
Narveson, Jan. Morality and Utility. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1967.
121
Balguy, John
Richards, David A. J. A Theory of Reasons for Action.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Thomas, Laurence, ed. Kurt Baier Festschrift. In Synthese
72 (1987). Essays by Stephen L. Darwall, David Gau-
thier, James P. Sterba, David A. J. Richards.
Laurence Thomas
Balguy, John (1686–1748)
English moral philosopher and theologian. Balguy
defended a rationalist view of ethics, influenced by
Samuel CLARKE (1675–1729), against the moral
sense theories of SHAFTESBURY (1671–1713) and
HUTCHESON (1694–1746). Balguy’s most important
ethical work is his highly polemical Foundations of
Moral Goodness, published in two parts. In Part I
(1728), he criticizes Hutcheson’s moral sense theory
and responds to criticisms Hutcheson brought
against earlier rationalist theories in his An Inquiry
concerning Moral Good and Evil (1726) and Illus-
trations on the Moral Sense (1728). Hutcheson, in
turn, responds to Balguy in later editions of the Il-
lustrations. In Part II (1729), Balguy responds to
forty queries put by a follower of Hutcheson. Be-
cause of the polemical nature of his writings, Bal-
guy’s exposition of his rationalism is not systematic;
it emerges in a piecemeal way in his criticisms of and
responses to the sentimentalists.
Balguy is important because he signals a shift in
the direction of the British moralist debate. The de-
bate is now between the sentimentalists and the ra-
tionalists. There is agreement between Balguy and
Hutcheson, against HOBBES (1588–1679), on key
issues: Benevolent affections are an original part of
human nature; the motivation and approval of virtue
is disinterested; morality is not artificial, the result
of a compact, nor is it to be identified with the posi-
tive laws of a sovereign. They also agree, against le-
galistic theological theories, that the standard of
right and wrong conduct is not to be grounded in
God’s will. Theories that ground morality in God’s
will, positive law, or a compact were taken by critics
as implying that morality is something created
wholly by positive means. If morality is created, it is
arbitrary and so not real. Morality must be grounded
in nature, if it is to be real and worth pursuing.
Both Hutcheson and Balguy agree that virtue con-
sists in following nature; but Hutcheson, Balguy
says, thinks we should follow our instinct rather
Balguy, John
than reason. On Hutcheson’s view, as Balguy reads
him, we should follow instinct in two ways: Right
actions are those motivated by benevolent affections
(virtue is identified with BENEVOLENCE), and what
makes them right is a moral sense, implanted in us
by God, that approves of them. Balguy thinks that
while Hutcheson is correct in attempting to ground
morality in nature, he mistakenly identifies our na-
ture with instinct and so the attempt does not suc-
ceed. Balguy’s central criticism is that morality is as
positive on Hutcheson’s view as on the others. The
fact that God gives us benevolent affections and a
moral sense that approves of them is just a way for
God to create morality by positive means. In the case
of benevolence, Balguy argues that either benevo-
lence is virtuous in itself or it is not real. If moral
goodness consists in benevolent instincts implanted
in us by God, why did God choose benevolence and
not some other affection, for example, malice?
Hutcheson’s reply that God’s perfect goodness con-
sists in his benevolence, and so he prefers benevo-
lence, just pushes the problem back one step. Why
is God’s benevolence virtuous? Balguy argues that
either a reason can be given, which is then the real
ground of virtue, or God’s goodness is groundless.
If groundless, virtue is arbitrary because God could
have constituted our affectionate natures differently,
for example, with malicious affections. Virtue is not
necessarily good. The same argument applies to the
moral sense. God could have constituted our moral
sense differently, making us approve of ingratitude,
malice, and so on, and then those acts would be
right. Either actions are intrinsically and so neces-
sarily right, or rightness is arbitrary. Balguy con-
cludes that virtue and rightness no more depend on
affections or a moral sense than they do on positive
law. There must be something in actions absolutely
good or right antecedent to both affections and law.
Balguy, following Clarke, claims that moral good-
ness is a necessary relation between an action and
its situation discoverable by means of reason (e.g., a
relation of agreement or fitness holds between GRAT-
ITUDE and kindness; disagreement or unfitness be-
tween ingratitude and kindness). Balguy also makes
a distinction between external, natural obligation,
and internal, moral obligation. He insists that gen-
uinely virtuous actions not only conform to what is
morally right but also are motivated by the rational
perception of their rightness. He thus claims, against
Hutcheson, that justifying reasons may be exciting
122
reasons and that actions motivated by benevolent
affections are not morally worthy. Many of Balguy’s
criticisms and points were taken up and developed
more systematically by later rationalists (PRICE
[1723–1791] and REID [1710–1796]). Unlike later
rationalists such as Price, Balguy never directly criti-
cizes Hutcheson’s Lockean epistemological frame-
work, nor does he provide a rival moral epistemol-
ogy.
See also: BENEVOLENCE; CLARKE; FITTINGNESS;
HOBBES; HUME; HUTCHESON; MORAL SENSE THEO-
RISTS; PRICE; RATIONAL CHOICE; RATIONALITY VS.
REASONABLENESS; REASONS FOR ACTION; REID;
SHAFTESBURY.
Bibliography
Works by Balguy
A Collection of Tracts Moral and Theological. London,
1734. J. Pemberton collected and published most of
Balguy’s works, arranging them in the order in which
they were first published. This collection (with dates
for the first editions) contains the following: Letter to
a Deist Concerning the Beauty and Excellency of Moral
Virtue, and the Support and Improvement which it Re-
ceives from Christian Religion (1726), a criticism of
Shaftesbury; The Foundation of Moral Goodness, Parts
I (1728) and II (1729); Divine Rectitude: or, A Brief
Inquiry Concerning the Moral Perfections of the Deity,
Particularly in Respect of Creation (1730); A Second
Letter to a Deist, Concerning a Late Book, Entitled
“Christianity as old as the Creation,” more particularly
that Chapter which relates to Dr. Clarke (1731); The
Law of Truth, or The Obligations of Reason Essential
to all Religion (1733).
Works about Balguy
Monro, D. H. A Guide to the British Moralists. London:
Wm. Collins Sons, 1972.
Price, Richard. A Review of the Principal Questions in
Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948
[1787]. Reprint, with critical introduction by D. D.
Raphael, of the 3d edition (1787).
Selby-Bigge, L. A. British Moralists. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1897. See the introduction, volume 1.
Silvester, Tipping. Moral and Christian Benevolence: A
Sermon Containing Reflections upon Mr. Balguy’s Es-
say on Moral Goodness. London, 1734.
Charlotte Brown

bargaining
Bargaining is a social practice involving at least two
parties, each of whom seeks agreement on some ad-
vantageous form of cooperation. As a central feature
of markets, bargaining has been studied by econo-
mists, some of whom have developed theoretical
models of it. As a preamble to contract, bargaining
is typified in the familiar rituals of marketplace dick-
ering and real estate transactions: inspection of
goods, offer, rejection, concession, counteroffer, and
so on until walkout or acceptance. Though buyers
characteristically prefer agreement at a lower price
and sellers at a higher one, barring deadlock, the
parties will settle at a price acceptable to both.
Bargaining, presupposing a diversity of legitimate
INTERESTS among the actors, may be distinguished
from two closely related notions. On one side of the
concept, the give-and-take of negotiation shades into
reasoned discussion. There is no need for concession
where the parties take themselves to have common
interests: it is rather a question of how to secure or
maximize some collective good. On the other side,
bargaining can subtly intensify into conflict. Where
the parties take themselves to have mutually incom-
patible, nonnegotiable interests, the ensuing threats
and acts of force are characteristically intended to
bring about submission rather than cooperation.
As a social practice, bargaining derives appeal
from its voluntary character, from its implicit ac-
knowledgment of the diversity of human interests,
and from its contribution to economic efficiency in
the social distribution of goods. It is voluntary in
that either party can break off negotiations, settle-
ment requires mutual CONSENT, and agreement will
be vitiated by COERCION and fraud. The goods
sought through free exchange are as varied as hu-
man DESIRE itself. And, as economists like to stress,
each party can be expected to emerge from agree-
ment better off. For where an offer is advantageous
enough to make (the only kind a rational person will
make) and attractive enough to accept (the only kind
a rational person will accept), both parties will im-
prove on the endowments of their initial bargaining
positions by settling.
Assuming that the legitimate claims of nonparti-
cipants are respected, it would appear that the com-
munity that facilitates bargaining, respecting vol-
untary exchanges of ENTITLEMENTS and relying on
the market for distributing goods, can, to the ex-
123
bargaining
tent that it does, enjoy a higher level of preference-
satisfaction and welfare than communities that do
not. But this presumption in favor of bargaining and
market systems of distribution is challenged by sev-
eral types of consideration. Depending on the issue,
the community may act to void the legal effects of
bargained-for agreements, to place special obliga-
tions on would-be bargainers, to prosecute or hold
civilly liable one or both of the participants, or to
substitute or add other social mechanisms for con-
ferring entitlement (e.g., rationing).
Children and the demented, for example, who
lack stable preferences reasonably congruent with
their welfare, who do not exhibit an adequate grasp
of the world and the consequences of their behavior,
are appropriately excluded from many forms of bar-
gaining. One can expect bargains to make partici-
pating parties better off only if they have the capacity
to act in their own interests. Consent is vitiated
where that capacity is lost or undeveloped.
Consent may also be questioned when a party is
ignorant of or mistaken about material facts. While
requirements of disclosure are often low in what
lawyers call “arms’-length” relationships, they are
often higher where lay people must entrust impor-
tant matters to hired specialists. In medicine and
law, for example, professionals typically have a fi-
duciary obligation, beyond the mere prohibition of
fraud, to disclose risks associated with their services.
Like small children in a strange world, the patient
and the defendant may need instruction—reasoned
discussion on the client’s interests as a collective
good—if they are to choose wisely. Similarly, legally
mandated warning labels on cigarette advertising,
package inserts enclosed with prescription drugs,
waiting periods on door-to-door sales contracts,
and prohibitions on tampering with automobile
odometers all have the softly paternalistic effect of
improving the lay consumer’s capacity for RATIONAL
CHOICE.
Hard PATERNALISM would impose controversial
and often odious restrictions on bargained-for ex-
changes even where participants are competent, ad-
equately informed, and have had ample opportunity
to deliberate. Nonphysicians, for example, may not
perform surgery even when patients choose the ser-
vices voluntarily and in full understanding of the
risks and benefits of available alternatives. Compa-
rable bargains involving the sale of bodily organs,
drugs, or sexual services, selling oneself into SLAV-
bargaining
ERY, and assistance in SUICIDE have been opposed
on the heatedly contested grounds that the transac-
tions are objectively bad for one or both parties.
Closely related are restrictions imposed in the in-
terests of securing certain collective goods. Though
some workers might benefit by negotiating with em-
ployers as individuals, union contracts intended to
benefit all employees characteristically impose pro-
hibitions on separate arrangements that undercut
the terms of collectively bargained agreements. Sim-
ilarly, inalienable RIGHTS —e.g., the right to declare
bankruptcy, to file for divorce, and the right to trial
by jury—are precisely those that may not be given
up as part of an enforceable contractual agreement.
Though these restrictions on bargaining are some-
times defended on paternalistic grounds (see the
preceding paragraph), justification can rest on the
overall desirability of certain social practices. DE-
MOCRACY, for example, cannot survive when citi-
zens bargain away the right to vote for candidates
of their choice.
Much like voters in a democracy, judges, prose-
cuting attorneys, university admissions committees,
purchasing agents, tax assessors, building inspec-
tors, and so on, all occupy roles in preeminently cor-
ruptible INSTITUTIONS. Those who occupy such po-
sitions characteristically have obligations to exercise
their discretionary POWER in the proper interests of
the institution. BRIBERY and extortion are prohibited
even where all the actors welcome such exchanges.
A good deal of attention has been given to a com-
plex of problems involving what have been called
“coercive offers.” Consider the following heavily de-
bated cases:
Case 1. Swimmer is drowning near Bystander
who is uniquely and easily able to effect a
rescue. Bystander offers to save Swimmer
in exchange for $10,000.
Many would find such agreements void in virtue of
Swimmer’s hard-pressed circumstance: having to
choose between death and a substantial financial
burden. But consider:
Case 2. Patient is close to death as a
consequence of a medical condition that
only Doctor can cure. Doctor offers to
treat Patient in exchange for $10,000.
124
Like Swimmer, Patient must also choose between
death and an equivalent indebtedness. And yet few
would routinely permit patients, on that basis, to
void their bills for vital medical services.
There are several standard ways to ease the ten-
sion here. Some—libertarians, for example—would
honor both agreements. Bystander and Doctor are
not threatening to impose harm, the offers do not
make Swimmer and Patient any worse off than they
were in their preproposal situations, nor are the two
of them somehow entitled to the services they need.
Others would press us to acknowledge the special
entitlements of the vulnerable. It shocks the CON-
SCIENCE not to recognize a duty to intervene in the
easy-rescue cases; it is scandalous not to have a right
to desperately needed medical services. If bystanders
had clear legal obligations to shoulder minimal in-
conveniences in order to effect rescues, and if doc-
tors worked within a national health service, neither
would be permitted to extort tribute from the pre-
cariously placed.
Still others would focus, neither on the fact of
agreement nor on the vulnerability of the bargainer,
but on the terms of the bargains themselves. While
$10,000 is plainly an excessive price for modest as-
sistance out of the water, it may not be unreasonable
to have to pay $10,000 for $10,000 worth of critical
medical care. This third approach requires that we
distinguish the subjective value of a good (what one
might agree to pay for it under the press of circum-
stance) from its objective value, a variation on the
medieval theme of the just price. Bystander and
Doctor should receive a fair amount for their efforts,
a price approximating objective value. But no one is
entitled to unjust enrichment acquired through EX-
PLOITATION of the vulnerable.
Under capitalism, the social practice of bargain-
ing is close to the heart of economic life. In at least
some respects, our assessment of the quality of fun-
damental institutions can turn on how we under-
stand the proper place of bargaining transactions
and the constraints and limitations that should be
imposed on them.
See also: BAD FAITH; BLACKMAIL; BUSINESS ETHICS;
CHEATING; COERCION; COMPROMISE; CONSENT; CON-
TRACTS; COOPERATION, CONFLICT, AND COORDINA-
TION; CORRUPTION; DECEIT; DETERRENCE, THREATS,
AND RETALIATION; DISCOUNTING THE FUTURE; ECO-
NOMIC ANALYSIS; ECONOMIC SYSTEMS; ENTITLE-

MENTS; EXPLOITATION; FAIRNESS; FIDUCIARY RELA-
TIONSHIPS; HONOR; INTEGRITY; INTERESTS; JUSTICE,
CIRCUMSTANCES OF; JUSTICE, DISTRIBUTIVE; LEGAL
ETHICS; LIBERALISM; LIBERTARIANISM; MEDICAL
ETHICS; MORAL COMMUNITY, BOUNDARIES OF;
NEEDS; PATERNALISM; PROFESSIONAL ETHICS; RA-
TIONAL CHOICE; RIGHT HOLDERS; RIGHTS; RISK; VOL-
UNTARY ACTS.
Bibliography
Frankfurt, Harry G. “Coercion and Moral Responsibility.”
In Essays on Freedom of Action, edited by Ted Hon-
derich, 65–86. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1973. Coercive offers.
Gauthier, David. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986. Bargaining theory as a basis for
ethics.
Golash, Deirdre. “Exploitation and Coercion.” Journal of
Value Inquiry 15 (1981): 319–28. Develops a concep-
tion of objective value.
Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanaly-
sis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1985. Argues for obligations to the
vulnerable.
Kipnis, Kenneth. “Criminal Justice and the Negotiated
Plea.” Ethics 86 (1976): 93–106. Assessment of plea
bargaining.
Lyons, David. “The Last Word on Coercive Offers . . . ?”
Philosophy Research Archives, 393–414. Bowling
Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1983.
A review of the area.
Nozick, Robert. “Coercion.” In Philosophy, Politics and
Society: 4th Series, edited by Peter Laslett, W. G. Run-
ciman, and Quentin Skinner, 101–34. New York:
Barnes and Noble, 1972 [1969]. Influential early anal-
ysis of coercion.
Postow, B.C. “Coercion and the Moral Bindingness of
Contracts.” Social Theory and Practice 4 (1976): 75–
91. Economic necessity, capitalism, exploitation.
Scanlon, Thomas M. “Liberty, Contract, and Contribu-
tion.” In Markets and Morals, edited by Gerald Dwor-
kin, Gordon Bermant, and Peter G. Brown, 43–67.
New York: Halsted, 1977. Discusses limiting the mar-
ket to prevent political domination through control of
essential goods.
VanDeVeer, Donald. Paternalism. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1987.
Wertheimer, Alan. Coercion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1987. Comprehensive discussion of
blackmail, duress, necessity, coercive proposals, ex-
ploitation, etc.
Young, Oran R., ed. Bargaining. Urbana: University of
125
Barry, Brian (M.)
Illinois Press, 1975. Instructively presented anthology
of classical papers in the theory of bargaining.
Kenneth Kipnis
Barry, Brian (M.)
Peripatetic and prolific, Brian Barry is an Anglo-
American political theorist who has been influential
for his work on theories of justice and DEMOCRACY.
Barry has taught at Essex, Oxford, University of Brit-
ish Columbia, University of Chicago, California In-
stitute of Technology, the London School of Eco-
nomics, and, beginning in 1998, at Columbia
University in New York.
Barry’s first major work, Political Argument
(1965), called for a research program in the analyt-
ical study of politics. This research would result
from the “marriage” of “analytical philosophy” with
its analysis of concepts and values, and “analytical
politics” with its empirical models. The aspiration
was for “a certain degree of analytical rigor” in
studying the forms of INSTITUTIONS that might
achieve the values identified. In the four decades
since that work was started, Barry’s writings have
set an example for that kind of analytical political
theory.
If there is a theme running through all of Barry’s
diverse writings, it is the prospects and limitations
of “rationality” both for normative evaluation and
for empirical explanation. In Political Argument, he
defended the possibility of making consistent nor-
mative judgments, despite what he argued to be the
inevitable pluralism and ultimate incommensurabil-
ity of political principles. He provided a vocabulary
that has been widely used for classifying kinds of
political principles—distinctions between principles
that are “want-regarding” or “ideal regarding,” those
that are “public regarding” or “private regarding,”
and those that are “aggregative” or “distributive.”
Barry argued that these distinctions identify kinds of
principles that are ultimately incommensurable.
Nevertheless, we can establish a basis for rational
consistency in our evaluations by employing an “in-
difference curve” analysis akin to that employed in
economics. Just as economists will chart the com-
binations of grapes and potatoes that people are in-
different between, Barry illustrated trade-offs be-
tween efficiency and equity which a rational person,
under certain assumptions, would be indifferent be-
Barry, Brian (M.)
tween. This analysis nicely illustrated the complex
structures that MORAL PLURALISM and complexity
could take, while conforming to some fairly sim-
ple and straightforward notions borrowed from
economics.
In Sociologists, Economists and Democracy
(1970), Barry took note of the flowering of the an-
alytical study of politics. Political theory “had for
many years been regarded as something that had oc-
curred in the past, but could hardly be expected to
happen nowadays—rather like the Church of Eng-
land’s view of miracles.” But now the “academic
study of politics” has “shown signs of becoming a
theoretical subject.” Barry set out one fruitful area
for this development—the connections between in-
dividual choice and collective decision. The ration-
ality of voting and political behaviour, of individual
contributions to collective goods, and of collective
decisions resulting from individual voting decisions
were all explored, both in Sociologists, Economists
and Democracy and in Rational Man and Irrational
Society? (1982). In the latter volume, Barry (and his
co-editor, Russell Hardin) decried the notion that
“rationality has displaced both truth and morality as
the ultimate criterion for judging both belief and
conduct.” They argued that we needed to lower ex-
pectations for the research program that held that
“truth is what it is rational (in ideal conditions) to
believe, and that principles of justice are what it is
rational (in ideal conditions) to adopt.” They con-
cluded “the concept of rationality cannot be ex-
tended indefinitely to solve all problems of conduct
and evaluation.”
Yet by the time of the three-volume Treatise on
Social Justice (vol. 1, 1989; vol. II, 1995; volume III
in preparation) Barry offered his theory of “justice
as impartiality” as an assertion of the “possibility of
putting forward a universally valid case in favour of
liberal egalitarian principles.” His theory was an ex-
tension of “the ‘Enlightenment project’ of address-
ing the reason of every human being of sound mind.”
He rejected the notion that such aspirations were an
error. Otherwise how could violations of HUMAN
RIGHTS be condemned in countries that had no tra-
ditions of respecting them?
Despite these enlightenment aspirations, a key
factor in Barry’s theory of justice is the “need for
scepticism,” by which he means scepticism about
theories of the good. Barry holds “that no concep-
tion of the good can justifiably be held with a degree
126
of certainty that warrants its imposition on those
who reject it.” Barry is attempting to employ a more
modest version of John RAWLS’s famous “original
position,” one which does not employ the famous
device of a RATIONAL CHOICE behind a “veil of ig-
norance.” Among other reasons for doing away with
the Rawlsian original position, Barry questions
whether “the concept of rationality is strong enough
to generate a unique solution.” Instead, Barry de-
velops a more modest version, which he calls the
“circumstances of impartiality” and which builds on
work originally suggested by T. M. Scanlon (and de-
veloped independently by Scanlon in What We Owe
to Each Other, 1999). The circumstances of justice
differ from the original position in two essential
ways. First, “the parties are aware of their identities
and hence of their own interests” and second, they
are no longer merely self-interested, but motivated
by the “desire for reasonable agreement.”
However, as Barry admits, the Rawlsian version
of a choice situation for principles of justice, by ab-
stracting from all elements that might lead to differ-
ent outcomes, at least was designed to lead to a def-
inite conclusion. The looser version which Barry
proposes may lead to different results depending on
what preferences people have, what information
they have, and what motivations they have. How-
ever, Barry conceives of a partly a priori and partly
“empirical” strategy for dealing with this problem.
A priori reasoning can narrow the range of accept-
able solutions. After that, there is room for an em-
pirical investigation. “Suppose we observe that a
rule of a certain kind is found only in societies that
approximate the circumstances of justice. The more
often it is found in those societies, the more confi-
dent we can be that it would emerge from a Scan-
lonian original position.” While Barry illustrates this
strategy with issues of economic INEQUALITY, he is
really launching a research agenda that is partly a
priori and partly empirical in its possible application
to a host of issues. In doing so, he is exemplifying
the aspiration to combine philosophical analysis and
the empirical study of politics with which he started
his career.
See also: ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS; COL-
LECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY; COMMENSURABILITY; COM-
MON GOOD; COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS; DEMOCRACY;
ECONOMIC ANALYSIS; EQUALITY; FUTURE GENERA-
TIONS; GOOD, THEORIES OF THE; IMPARTIALITY; IN-

DIVIDUALISM; INTERESTS; JUSTICE, CIRCUMSTANCES
OF; LIBERALISM; LIBERTY, ECONOMIC; MORAL PLU-
RALISM; NEEDS; POLITICAL SYSTEMS; PUBLIC AND PRI-
VATE MORALITY; PUBLIC POLICY ANALYSIS; RA-
TIONAL CHOICE; RATIONALITY VS. REASONABLENESS;
RAWLS; SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; SOCIAL
CONTRACT; TRUST.
Bibliography
Works by Barry
Political Argument. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1965.
Sociologists, Economists and Democracy. London: Collier-
Macmillan, 1970.
The Liberal Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973.
A Treatise on Social Justice. Vol. 1, Theories of Justice.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Vol. 2,
Justice as Impartiality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Essays in Political Theory. Vol. I. Democracy, Power and
Justice. Vol. II. Liberty and Justice. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989; 1991.
Barry, Brian, and Russell Hardin, eds. Rational Man and
Irrational Society? An Introduction and Sourcebook.
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982.
Work about Barry
Kelly, P. J., ed. Impartiality, Neutrality and Justice: Re-
reading Brian Barry’s ‘Justice as Impartiality.’ Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
James S. Fishkin
Beauvoir, Simone de
See de Beauvoir, Simone.
Beccaria, Cesare [Bonesana],
Marchesi di (1738–1794)
Marchese Cesare Beccaria Bonesana was born in
Milan and studied law at the University of Pavia.
With the leisure his family’s wealth provided, he de-
voted himself to literary and intellectual pursuits.
Challenged by the suggestion of a friend to write a
brief critical study of criminal justice, he produced
in 1764 his chief work, Dei delitti e delle pene (On
Crimes and Punishments). Within months the slim
volume was the subject of impassioned discussion
127
Beccaria, Cesare
in Italy; after its translation into French, it was read
all over Europe. The first of many English-language
editions appeared in London in 1767. No other trea-
tise on the subject so well captured the spirit of the
continental Enlightenment.
Beccaria argued for reform of the criminal law
from two basic principles. One is that the AUTHOR-
ITY of government is derived from “expressed or
tacit compacts” among the governed. Thus Bec-
caria’s conception of political obligation is in the
contractarian tradition of HOBBES (1588–1679),
LOCKE (1632–1704), and ROUSSEAU (1712–1778).
Second, under the influence of Claude Helvetius
(1715–1771), he adopted “the greatest happiness of
the greatest number” as the sole criterion for eval-
uating laws and social practices.
BENTHAM (1748–1832) acknowledged that it
was from Beccaria that he learned this slogan, later
popularized by J. S. MILL (1806–1873) and other
utilitarians. However, Beccaria also appealed to “the
rights of man,” and it is characteristic of the rather
superficial quality of his philosophy that he evi-
dences no concern over whether the results of his
avowed UTILITARIANISM and his rights-based think-
ing diverge or clash.
Beccaria’s treatise was best known in its day for
its attack on the prevailing practices of the death
penalty and TORTURE. Against torture, his central
objection was that it can be guaranteed only to elicit
false testimony from the weak. It is absurd to make
“pain . . . the crucible of truth.” As to PUNISHMENT
generally, its sole purpose is “to instill fear in other
men.” Retribution should play no role in justifying
punishment or in apportioning punishments to
crimes. Important though deterrence is, it is a func-
tion not only of the severity of a punishment but
also of the celerity and certainty with which it is
administered.
Against the death penalty, Beccaria argued as fol-
lows: (1) Society has no right to punish anyone by
DEATH, because rational egoistic contractors cannot
and would not transfer to the state their natural right
to life. (2) The death penalty is “neither useful nor
necessary” for the protection of society. The only
possible exception is the offender whose imprison-
ment would not eliminate his capacity to foment
“dangerous revolution.” (3) The prospect of long-
term imprisonment (“penal slavery”) is a better de-
terrent than the threat of death; a life in prison may
be—and should be perceived to be—far more
Beccaria, Cesare
“cruel” than a death on the scaffold. Executions
present an “example of barbarity,” thereby under-
mining respect for lawful authority.
Save for a brief visit to Paris in 1766 at the height
of his fame, Beccaria spent his entire life in his native
Lombardy. He devoted his adult years to a career in
local public administration; none of his subsequent
writings added appreciably to his fame or influence.
He died in relative obscurity.
See also: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT; CONTRACTARIANISM;
CORRECTIONAL ETHICS; DETERRENCE, THREATS, AND
RETALIATION; LIFE, RIGHT TO; SOCIAL CONTRACT;
TORTURE; UTILITARIANISM.
Bibliography
Editions of Beccaria’s Dei delitti:
Dei delitti e delle pene. Leghorn, 1764. The original Ital-
ian edition was published anonymously. Best recent
text is the one edited by Franco Venturi (Turin: Ei-
naudi, 1965).
On Crimes and Punishment. Translated by Henry Pao-
lucci. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. The most
widely used modern English translation.
On Crimes and Punishments. Translated by David Young.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986. A new translation and re-
ordering of the text, based on the sixth and final (1766)
edition as approved by Beccaria himself. Bibliography.
On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings. Trans-
lated by Richard Davies with Virginia Cox and Richard
Bellamy, and edited by Richard Bellamy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995. Introduction, bib-
liography and biographical glossary. The best and most
recent edition.
Works about Beccaria
Hart, H. L. A. “Bentham and Beccaria.” In his Essays on
Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Theory, 40–52.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
Maestro, Marcello. Cesare Beccaria and the Origins of Pe-
nal Reform. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1973. The standard biography in English. Includes
bibliography.
Sellin, Thorsten. “Beccaria’s Substitute for the Death Pen-
alty.” In Criminology in Perspective: Essays in Honor
of Israel Drapkin, edited by Simha F. Landau, and Les-
lie Sebba, 3–9. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1977.
Hugo Adam Bedau
128
beneficence
The principle of beneficence in its simplest form is
that we ought to do good or, if expressed as an ob-
ligation, that there is an obligation to help others. A
more substantial version is that human beings ought
to be taught to be strongly benevolent and benefi-
cent; where ‘benevolence’ signifies “a wish or dis-
position to help others”; where ‘beneficence’ signi-
fies “actually producing good”; where by helping
others is meant more than helping one’s children,
FAMILY, friends, or country; and, where the degree
to which we ought to help as well as the question
whether the relevant normative statement is best ex-
pressed as a virtue, definite or indefinite duty, rule,
or cooperative project is left to the particular theory
to specify.
One of the most sustained arguments against the
principle is as follows: There is no good reason why
we, as, moral agents, ought to be beneficent outside
our own bailiwick, i.e., outside our children, spouse,
in lesser degree friends, and in time of danger our
country. A rational person must first address herself
to her own survival. Unless she duly cares for her-
self, her CARE for others is quickly ended by DEATH.
Moreover, when there are more resources than nec-
essary for subsistence, she should use them to attain
the best possible life. If there is an even greater sur-
plus, she should put it away as a form of protection,
as insurance against loss. Expressed differently: In
the case of bare subsistence or grinding poverty
there is little to distribute; in situations of abun-
dance, beneficence—or at least that special form of
beneficence called kindliness (intended helpfulness
toward someone in need, not in return for anything,
nor for the advantage of the helper herself)—is not
conducive to her own welfare. It is not conducive
because rational living requires that we live well be-
fore giving to others which, in turn, demands ade-
quate savings or its like.
A few preliminary points need to be made before
considering how some influential moral theories
may be able to parry or meet this objection. First, it
is necessary to distinguish between ALTRUISM and
extreme altruism. Extreme altruism requires that we
sacrifice our own good for the good of others. Typ-
ically, it does not place limits on what morality or a
principle of beneficence can legitimately demand.
Altruism, or to be more accurate, an altruistic the-
ory, requires only that we contribute to the welfare

of other persons, where ‘other person’ denotes
more than one’s children, family, friends, or coun-
trymen. It follows that all forms of the more sub-
stantial version of the principle of beneficence are
part of altruistic theory; but not that all theories of
altruism must have an explicit formulation of the
principle of beneficence. It also follows that altru-
ism, per se, does not require sacrifice. Sometimes
sacrifice is involved; but often it is not. Thomas Na-
gel correctly observes that sometimes altruistic ac-
tion involves neither self-sacrifice nor nobility—as
when we tell someone he has a flat tire, or a wasp
on his hamburger. Second, it is necessary to avoid
the quagmire concerning the role of justice. Justice
is often viewed as being synonymous with social jus-
tice or with morality as a whole. It also may be in-
terpreted more narrowly as giving each person his
due according to a rather stringent interpretation of
merit and dis-merit. Given the latter, proponents of
beneficence neither believe justice has the sufficient
normative power a moral theory requires nor do they
believe that when a benefit is conferred as not being
due, it is gratuitous. Third, not all advocates of be-
neficence formulate their position in terms of the
principle of beneficence. It is true that modern
thinkers tend to do so. But others often begin from
a larger or different frame of reference, viz., the per-
spective of God’s law, the law of LOVE, compassion
viewed in its broadest sense, or, as in the empiricist
tradition, from role played by sentiment and
EMOTION.
Traditional Judaism
Perhaps the most influential formulation of the
principle of beneficence, one often referred to as the
GOLDEN RULE, occurs in Leviticus 19:17–18. We are
told: “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart.
. . . thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” In the
same chapter we find the additional injunction that
thou shalt love the stranger as thyself (verse 34).
These passages contain two elements: First, they
mandate altruism; second, they instruct us to attach
a prima facie, if not actual, weight to the well-being
of another individual that is exactly equal to our
own. In addition, there are other definite duties.
These include leaving the gleanings of the grain
fields and orchards and vineyards for the poor and
for the stranger (Leviticus 19:9–10); allowing the
products of the seventh year, when the fields lie fal-
129
beneficence
low and the vineyards are not to be pruned, to be
freely shared by all members of the community in
order that the poor of your people may eat (Exodus
23:11, Leviticus 25:27); and canceling all debts at
the end of the seventh year (Deuteronomy 15:2).
More general formulations of this duty include the
injunction to open one’s hand to one’s poor and
needy brother (Deuteronomy 15:11) and to relieve
the oppressed (Isaiah 1:17).
Traditional Judaism, conceived of as knowledge
of divine law, commands and commends benefi-
cence to the poor. It insists that there is a general
duty of BENEVOLENCE, beneficence, and specific du-
ties of kindliness. Beneficence is considered the sa-
cred duty of the individual who must return part of
what he has received from God. It is the sacred duty
of the community as well to protect its members
against the basic vicissitudes of life; and to the extent
that the community is rational, it recognizes that un-
less help and care are effectively institutionalized,
the hopes of the poor and the needy will be in vain.
In other words, beneficence is rational because it is
part of the ideal way we are required to live in the
world. It is rational because we are required neither
to sacrifice to the point of, or even close to the point
of, death, nor are we required to enrich our fellow
man. We are only required to maintain life, to live
more simply in order that others may live.
A Christian View
Christianity, or at least a Thomist (THOMAS AQUI-
NAS [1225?–1274]) interpretation of it, differs. It
stresses the redemptive role of Jesus, the definitive
AUTHORITY of the Church, and the importance of
practical beneficence in all its forms, by exalting love
as the root of all virtue. It also is largely responsible
for explicating certain distinctions. Jesus declared
the love of one’s neighbor to be the second great
commandment besides the love of God which is the
first (Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27).
Combining this with the light of reason, we come to
understand that the first principle of morality is the
love of God. Because CHARITY is the efficient cause
which unites man with God, it is a good which is of
prime importance. Beneficence, doing good to some-
one, is an act of charity. It, therefore, follows that
every act of beneficence brings us closer to God. Ev-
erything which is a duty is good; but the converse is
not true—good is not always a duty. An obligation
beneficence
is imposed by reason and binds the FREE WILL to
perform that act which is necessary for the attain-
ment of the last and absolute end. Supererogatory
acts, on the other hand, are desirable (as, for ex-
ample, acts of exceptional goodness or heroism), but
not mandatory. It is in this vein that the story of Jesus
speaking to the rich young man and telling him to
sell all that he has and distribute it to the poor (Mat-
thew 19:16–30; Mark 10:17–31; Luke 18:18–30)
is understood by the fathers of the Church as coun-
sel, not precept.
To be worthy of full respect, beneficence cannot
be autonomous. It must work from a system of NAT-
URAL LAW and rules, including rules other than the
injunction to be beneficent. Yet the authority of nat-
ural law does, indeed, mandate a general duty of
charity and sometimes a definite duty of beneficence.
We are not required to do good to every single per-
son since that is impossible; but each one of us is
bound to do good in some particular case; for charity
binds us, not actually to do good to someone, but to
be prepared to do good to anyone if we have time
and the resources to spare. Whether a particular act
is a duty is determined by comparing the relative
needs of self and others, and requires the judgment
of a prudent person. Some thinkers provide a more
canonical formulation and conclude that one is mor-
ally required to help when a neighbor is in imminent
peril of deadly EVIL to soul or body and is unable to
help himself, when the act of help is neither a venial
sin nor an exposure to the proximate occasion of sin,
and when by helping one would not be so similarly
imperiled.
Kant
Immanuel KANT (1724–1804) also maintains
that we have the duty to relieve the fortuitous dis-
tress of others when we can do so without great in-
convenience to ourselves. The difficult question is
whether he held more than this. He admits that the
grounds for the duty of beneficence lie, in part, in
the fact that human beings are in need of mutual
help, and that only by means of mutual help can the
systematic harmony of their purposes be attained.
Kant often talks as though duty requires a person to
share with others less fortunate than himself, right
up to the point when all good fortune is equally di-
vided. He maintains that it is a duty of every man to
be beneficent (i.e., to be helpful to people in need
130
according to one’s means, for the sake of their HAP-
PINESS and without hoping for anything in return).
He also explains why the altruistic maxim of benef-
icence toward those in need is a universal duty. The
reason is that all men are to be regarded as fellow
men, i.e., as needy rational beings, united in one
dwelling place for mutual aid. However, he does not
conclude from this that we have a strict (inflexible)
duty to help others. His reasons appear to be: first,
that it is not within our powers to further the ends
of all men equally, and that this “law” holds only for
maxims, not for definite actions; and second, that
we ought to regard the duty of beneficence only as
a laxer (meritorious) duty because raising it to a
stricter duty would deprive some men of their free-
dom, their autonomy as ends in themselves, and this
simply will not do. In other words, because we re-
spect and wish to preserve the SELF-ESTEEM of other
human beings, and because undiscriminating benef-
icence may humiliate or encourage them to be less
self-helpful than they would otherwise be, we cannot
legislate that men must always be helpful to other
men.
Mill and Sidgwick
JOHN STUART MILL (1806–1873) distinguishes
between the virtue and obligation of beneficence,
and in the latter sphere, between the obligations of
the individual and of the state. Professor Warnock
suggests that Mill’s thesis, that “actions are right in
proportion as they tend to promote happiness,
wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of hap-
piness,” where happiness “is not the agent’s own
greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of hap-
piness altogether” (Utilitarianism), reduces to “the
contention that beneficence is really the sole and suf-
ficient moral virtue.”
The question of obligation is, of course, more
complex. Mill maintains that there are “many posi-
tive acts for the benefit of others” which a person
may “rightly be compelled to perform.” Among
these he includes certain acts of individual benefi-
cence, such as saving a fellow creature’s life or in-
terposing to protect the defenseless against ill us-
age—things which whenever it is obviously a man’s
duty to do he may rightly be made responsible to
society for not doing. He also adds that a person may
cause evil to others not only by his actions but his

inaction and in either case he is justly accountable
to them for the injury.
Mill does not say only that it is our duty to render
aid because by not doing so, we harm another. Nor
does he formulate a principle of beneficence that re-
quires each person to perform the action, of those
available, that will make the best outcome. What he
does say is that it is our duty to render aid in certain
circumstances, when if by not doing so we will harm
others, and when we have evaluated that harm ac-
cording to the principle of utility. Nor is Mill con-
flating the notion of having a moral obligation with
having a legal one. There are many acts which, being
directly injurious only to the agent himself or inju-
rious to society only in the short run, ought not be
legally interdicted. Rather, the ability to help oneself
which may thereby accrue, more often than not, has
overriding utility. He concludes that “a State which
dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more doc-
ile instruments in its hands even for beneficial pur-
poses—will find that with small men no great thing
can really be accomplished” (On Liberty). Thus, we
are left with a principle of beneficence which in part
reads: society has an actual duty to aid others when
by not rendering aid that omission is a causal factor
in the harm fortuitously suffered by another, and
when that harm would not be outbalanced by the
general utility, the felicific beneficence, of having a
society of autonomous, self-respecting, and often
creative human beings.
In The Methods of Ethics, Henry SIDGWICK
(1838–1900) admits that, although this duty is
more or less unhesitatingly laid down by common
sense, it is difficult or impossible to extract from it,
so far as it is commonly accepted, any clear and pre-
cise principles for the determining the extent of the
duty. What may be of more value is his implemen-
tation of the distinction between principle and
method, and his fastidious exploration of the prob-
lem of how to reconcile rational self-interest and
duty. Sidgwick is convinced that commonsense mo-
rality embodies different ultimate principles and that
one of them is benevolence. Since benevolence (not
in Aristotle, but in modern times) is frequently held
to be a supreme and architectonic virtue, he believes
this sufficient to give it the first place after the virtue
of WISDOM. In his polemic against Kant, Sidgwick
insists on the importance of the affection of (the
emotional element contained in) love and kindness.
Not only does benevolence demand at least the cul-
131
beneficence
tivation of these feelings and the disposition to act
lovingly, but there is a duty to cultivate them so far
as it is possible to do. His discussion implies a dis-
tinction between having the strict duty to feel an
emotion (which he admits is problematic) and the
duty to inculcate these sentiments in such a way so
that they will excite, when appropriate, love in both
the helper and the individual helped, to the mutual
benefit of both. He reminds us that UTILITARIANISM
does not prescribe that we love everyone equally, but
that we should aim at happiness “generally as our
ultimate end, and so consider the happiness of any
one individual as equally important with the equal
happiness of any other, as an element of this total;
and should distribute our kindness so as to make this
total as great as possible, in whatever way this result
may be obtained.” Then, because of considerations
of PRACTICAL REASON, he retreats from this formu-
lation and seems unclear as to how it is to be best
formulated. One attempt reads that the utilitarian
doctrine “is that each man ought to consider the
happiness of any other as theoretically of equal im-
portance with his own, and only of less importance
practically, in so far as he is better able to realize the
latter.”
One may respond that this and similar formula-
tions represent an overaccommodation to practical
reason or mistake PRUDENCE for morality. Prudence
may say that we are entitled to give greater weight
to our own INTERESTS and purposes simply because
they are our own, but morality does not always. Al-
though Peter Singer’s formulation may be vulnerable
to what Liam Murphy calls “the over-demandedness
objection,” Singer maintains (in his essay “Rich and
Poor”) that there is a relatively unqualified obliga-
tion to assist others. “Helping is not, as convention-
ally thought, a charitable act which it is praiseworthy
to do, but not wrong to omit; it is something that
everyone ought to do.” One formulation of the ob-
ligation to assist others is this: “if it is in our power
to prevent something very bad [as, for example, fam-
ine] from happening, without thereby sacrificing
anything of comparable moral significance, we
ought to do it.” He is aware of the charge that this
may be too strong a formulation. Nonetheless he
contends that, given the extreme evil of people starv-
ing to death, the more conventionally accepted stan-
dards are too weak and, therefore, are not as plau-
sible as his own. He concludes the chapter with a
tithing suggestion, namely, that there may be some-
beneficence
thing to be said for contributing a round percentage
of one’s income, like 10 percent. This suggestion
serves to remind us that compassion, when limited
to working directly with the needy, is often self-
defeating and is definitely so in the case of famine
and similarly complex social problems. In this aspect
Singer’s utilitarianism invites comparison with one
of the most important practical insights of Judaism
and Christianity: as meritorious as acts of an indi-
vidual (directly) helping are, unless help and care
are effectively institutionalized, the hopes of the
poor and needy will be in vain.
John Rawls
RAWLS’s arguments are similar to Kant’s. The
duty of mutual aid is a reasonable requirement be-
cause it is not rational for a person to assume that
she will not need help during her lifetime and that
she will not be better off in a society where everyone
is prepared to render aid, when needed and when
they can easily do so. But he also draws a distinction
between actual beneficence and the sense of security,
confidence, and TRUST which depends on knowing
that one can count on others to come to one’s aid.
As such, a decisive rational advantage is gained. For
“the primary value of the principle is not measured
by the help we actually receive but rather by the
sense of confidence and trust in other men’s good
intentions and the knowledge that they are there if
we need them” (A Theory of Justice).
Rawls acknowledges that his definition and ar-
rangement of this duty is untidy and that he has
failed to deal with their more detailed specification
and with questions of priority. Part of the explana-
tion is that “there are no obvious rules for settling
these questions.” Other thinkers make a stronger
claim and say that there are not (and, in principle,
cannot be) any rules for making generic forms of the
principle more substantial or for explicating how to
adjudicate conflicts of principles or conflicts in par-
ticular cases. In their dispute with Clouser and
GERT, Beauchamp and Childress suggest that their
“open” formulation may be the best one can do, that
we may be able to say only that the principle of be-
neficence expresses an obligation to help others fur-
ther their most important and legitimate interests by
preventing and removing harm, and an obligation to
weigh and balance possible goods against possible
harms of an action. What this, in part, means is that
132
the principle of beneficence is a prima facie obliga-
tion. It is always binding unless it conflicts with ob-
ligations expressed in another moral principle, in
which case a balancing of the demands of the two
principles is necessary.
Most important, Rawls’s discussion of this duty
occurs in the context of his discussion of the nature
and duty of mutual SELF-RESPECT. Parties in the
original position (where free and equal persons must
choose to govern in terms of their cooperation)
know that in a society they need first and foremost
to be assured by the esteem of their associates and,
therefore, understand that everyone benefits from
living in a society where the duty of mutual respect
is honored. Similarly, in Political Liberalism, he
writes that the fundamental “importance of self-
respect is that it provides a secure sense of our own
value, a firm conviction that our determinate con-
ception of the good is worth carrying out. Without
self-respect nothing may seem worth doing, and if
some things have value for us, we lack the will to
pursue them.” Thus, self-respect as well as other
forms of protection seem to be confirmed, if not
most effectively encouraged and supported, by the
duty of mutual aid.
Finally, it should be noted that not all altruistic
theories can be reduced to, or should be interpreted
solely in terms of, moral principles. A principle of
beneficence, even if it is combined with other prin-
ciples, seems to make little sense, as far as many
altruistic thinkers are concerned. Bertrand RUSSELL
(1872–1970) argues that, since there is no conceiv-
able way of making people do things they do not
wish to do, being a moral person is less a matter of
knowing correct principles, and more a matter of
having right dispositions. Since the only way to mo-
tivate people is by ethical education, by strengthen-
ing certain desires and weakening others, what
should be inculcated is a feeling of benevolence, not
a principle of beneficence. Lawrence Blum suggests
that the duty of beneficence, if it exists, must be re-
garded as encompassing only a small area of the po-
tential aid we may bring to others. Instead of being
content to solve problems by seeking principles that
have universal applicability, a growing ethics of care
movement (inspired in part by the writings of Carol
Gilligan) stresses the need to develop altruistic dis-
positions and a sense of a broader self as well as the
need to approach problems situationally, using the
voice of RESPONSIBILITY and relationships.

The sentiment here being expressed is that a mo-
rality that effectively curbs the egoistic or antisocial
tendencies of human beings cannot be achieved by
means of moral principles alone or by placing the
primary emphasis on such principles. Stated posi-
tively: The first step is to open the windows of wis-
dom and morality as wide as is reasonably possible
by assisting human beings to feel more benevolent
and to extend the scope of their beneficence beyond
their own compatriots. If benevolent/beneficent
people, when they have the power and are reason-
ably informed, produce more good than people mo-
tivated by other attitudes, then it may follow that we
should employ the best means to achieve this end,
including ideals and ideology, ethics and law, atti-
tudes and emotions.
See also: ALTRUISM; BENEVOLENCE; CARE; CAUSA-
TION AND RESPONSIBILITY; CHARITY; CHRISTIAN
ETHICS; COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY; DUTY AND OB-
LIGATION; EMOTION; FINAL GOOD; GOLDEN RULE; IN-
STITUTIONS; INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE: DISTRIBUTION;
JEWISH ETHICS; JUSTICE, DISTRIBUTIVE; KANT; LOVE;
JOHN STUART MILL; MORAL COMMUNITY, BOUND-
ARIES OF; PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS; PRUDENCE;
RAWLS; SELF-ESTEEM; SIDGWICK; SUPEREROGATION;
SYMPATHY; THEORY AND PRACTICE; THOMAS AQUI-
NAS; UTILITARIANISM; VIRTUE ETHICS; VIRTUES.
Bibliography
Arthur, John. “Rights and the Duty to Bring Aid.” In World
Hunger and Moral Obligation, edited by William Aiken
and Hugh La Follette, 37–48. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1977.
Beauchamp, Tom L. “The ‘Four-Principles’ Approach.” In
Principles of Health Care, edited by Gillon Raanan, 3–
12. New York: John Wiley, 1994.
Beauchamp, Tom L. and James F. Childress. Principles of
Bioethics. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989. 195–255.
Blum, Lawrence A. Friendship, Altruism and Morality.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
Brandt, Richard B. “Morally Required Charitable Giv-
ing?” In his Facts, Values and Morality, Chapter 8
(222–36). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
Clouser, Danner K., and Bernard Gert. “Morality vs. Prin-
ciplism.” In Principles of Health Care, edited by Gillon
Raanon, 251–66. New York: John Wiley, 1994.
Eastland, David. “Mutual Benevolence and the Theory of
Happiness.” Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 4 (1990):
187–204.
133
beneficence
Frankena, William. “Beneficence/Benevolence.” In Benef-
icence, Philanthropy, and the Public Good, edited by
Ellen Frankel Paul, et al., 1–20. Basil Blackwell for
Bowling Green State University, 1987.
Gilligan, Carol. “Remapping the Moral Domain: New Im-
ages of Self in Relationship.” In Reconstructing Indi-
vidualism, edited by T. C. Heller, et al., 237–52. Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Hardin, Garrett. The Limits of Altruism: An Ecologist’s
View of Survival. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1977.
Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysical Principle of Virtue. In-
dianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964 [1797]. Sections 30
and 31.
Kekes, John. “Beneficence: A Minor Virtue.” In Benefi-
cence, Philanthropy, and the Public Good, edited by
Ellen Frankel, et al., 21–36. Basil Blackwell for Bowl-
ing Green State University, 1987.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. With critical essays, ed-
ited by Samuel Gorovitz. Indianapolis and New York:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1971 [1861]. Cited pp. 18, 21.
———. On Liberty. Edited by Currin V. Shields. India-
napolis and New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1956 [1859].
Cited pp. 14–15.
Milo, Ronald D., ed. Egoism and Altruism. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, 1973.
Monroe, Kristen Renwick. The Heart of Altruism. Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Explores the
causes of altruism, the difference between altruists and
other people, and provides the groundwork for a social
theory receptive to altruism.
Mulligan, Tim. “Two Conceptions of Benevolence.” Phi-
losophy and Public Affairs 26, no. 1 (1997): 62–79.
Murphy, Liam B. “The Demands of Beneficence.” Philos-
ophy and Public Affairs 22. No. 4 (1993): 267–92.
———. “A Relatively Plausible Principle of Beneficence:
Reply to Mulligan.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26,
no. 1 (1997): 80–86.
Nagel, Thomas. The Possibility of Altruism. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1970.
Nelson, William. “Mutual Benevolence and Happiness: A
Reply to Estland.” Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 1
(1994): 50–51.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, (1971) 1972. Sections 30 and 51.
Cited p. 339.
———. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1993. Cited p. 318.
Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 2d ed. London:
Macmillan, 1967 [1874]. 238–63. Cited pp. 262, 241,
252.
Singer, Peter. “Rich and Poor.” In Practical Ethics, 158–
81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981
[1979]. Cited pp. 169, 168.
———. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” In World Hun-
ger and Moral Obligation, edited by William Aiken and
beneficence
Hugh La Follette, 22–36. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren-
tice Hall, 1977.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa theologica. London: Gates and
Washbourne, 1976. See vol. 9: Questions 23 and 24
(on charity); 30–31 (on mercy and beneficence).
Warnock, G. J. The Object of Morality. London: Methuen,
1971. Cited pp. 29–30.
Marvin Kohl
benefit-cost analysis
See cost-benefit analysis.
benevolence
In the ethical theories of Christianity, the moral
sense school, SCHOPENHAUER (1788–1860), and
UTILITARIANISM, benevolence has central impor-
tance. By contrast, KANT (1724–1804) explicitly
warns against relying on it as a source of ethical mo-
tivation, because, like other feelings, it is fickle. The
classical eudaimonistic theories of PLATO (c. 430–
347 B.C.E.), ARISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.E.), and the
Epicureans and Stoics occupy an intermediate po-
sition between these two extremes. This dispute
about the importance of benevolence is a symptom
of a deeper one about the respective roles feelings
and reason have or should have in ethics. Kant de-
nies the importance of benevolence, partly because
he believes that ethics requires that reason should
dominate over feelings. Those who give benevolence
the pride of place in ethics do so on the ground that
the ultimate source of ethics is feelings and the role
of reason is merely to prevent feelings from going
astray. The claim that benevolence is the ethically
most important feeling rests on the supposition that
it is the indispensable motive for acting for the good
of others.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “benevo-
lence” as a “disposition to do good, kindness, gen-
erosity, charitable feeling (toward mankind).” To
this list may be added the cognate expressions of
ALTRUISM, humaneness, compassion, and LOVE (un-
derstood as agape or caritas). In what follows, both
the precise boundaries between benevolence and its
cognates and the distinction between it and BENEF-
ICENCE, the tendency to act for the good of others,
will be ignored. Benevolence then is a virtue, an eth-
ically desirable CHARACTER trait, because it fosters
134
conformity to one main requirement of ethics: to act
for the good of others. However, some VIRTUES, like
justice, TEMPERANCE, COURAGE, and WISDOM, are
important to good lives, others, such as cheerfulness
and tact, are not. Although the distinction between
important and unimportant virtues cannot be
sharply drawn, as a rule of thumb, virtues are more
important if they are needed by good lives whatever
forms they may take, and less important if good lives
can be lived without them. One main question, then,
is whether or not benevolence is among the most
important virtues.
Benevolence is composed of emotive, cognitive,
and motivational elements. Among them, the emo-
tive one is dominant, for the fundamental source of
benevolence is the feeling that leads agents to care
about the good of others. This feeling ranges from
rejoicing if others flourish, through many varied and
intermediate stages, to being distressed by the suf-
fering of others. It is just a fact about human beings
that, in the absence of overriding considerations,
they are inclined to care about the welfare of others.
They care whether lightning strikes a tree or a per-
son, or whether a boulder has someone pinned un-
der it. Benevolent feelings need to be controlled and
directed of course, and that is the task of the cog-
nitive component of benevolence. It directs the feel-
ing toward appropriate objects, it aims to resolve
conflicts between benevolence and justice, duty,
RIGHTS, and so forth; and it controls the actions be-
nevolence prompts. This last introduces the moti-
vational component of benevolence, for it is a dis-
position to act so as to increase the welfare or
decrease the suffering of others.
Interpreted in this way, benevolence is said to be
a basic element of human nature. As HUME (1711–
1776) put it, benevolence is a natural virtue. There
is no doubt a causal explanation of why it is basic,
but understanding benevolence does not require de-
ciding whether the explanation is evolutionary, theo-
logical, or psychological. Benevolence then has the
following characteristics: (1) it is primarily an emo-
tive disposition to care about the good of others;
(2) it is an ethically desirable character trait, hence
a virtue; (3) its dominant emotive element is cogni-
tively guided and it motivates action; and (4) it is a
basic component of human nature found in all nor-
mal human beings. The conjunction of these char-
acteristics defines limited benevolence, but there is
also general benevolence.

The difference between limited and general be-
nevolence is the addition of universality and IMPAR-
TIALITY to the four characteristics just noted. Lim-
ited benevolence is supposed to be universally
possessed by all normal human beings, but general
benevolence goes beyond this in being directed uni-
versally toward all human beings. Champions of
general benevolence do not hold the obviously false
view that all normal human beings have a disposi-
tion to foster the welfare of all other human beings.
Their view is that, as a matter of fact, all human
beings have limited benevolence, and, as a matter of
ethics, they ought also to transform limited into gen-
eral benevolence. According to them, ethical prog-
ress consists in expanding limited benevolence until
it embraces all human beings.
The universality of benevolence, however, does
not fully express the ethical vision of its defenders,
for universality is compatible with unequal benevo-
lence, provided everybody receives some of it. The
ethical vision also requires benevolence to be im-
partial. The underlying assumption is that from an
ethical point of view all human beings are equal and
hence they deserve to be cared for equally. General
benevolence, therefore, has the four characteristics
of limited benevolence and two additional ones:
(5) it is universal, in being directed toward all hu-
man beings; and (6) it is impartial, in being directed
toward all human beings equally.
Benevolence being natural and basic does not, of
course, exclude the presence of other natural and
basic elements of human nature. One central ques-
tion about benevolence is how it is related to these
other elements. The question is central because one
of these other elements is self-concern, benevolence
may conflict with it, and it has far-reaching ethical
implications how particular ethical theories cope
with their conflict. Utilitarians and Kantians agree
that benevolence and self-concern often conflict and
that the task of reason is to resolve their conflict.
But utilitarians think that the resolution depends on
strengthening the feeling of benevolence by expand-
ing it from its limited to general form and thereby
subordinating the feeling of self-concern to it,
whereas Kantians think that ethics requires reliance
on reason, not on feelings of whatever kind.
It is an important difference between ancient and
modern ethical theories that many of the former deny
that benevolence may conflict with self-concern. Per-
haps the most influential view of this kind is Aris-
135
benevolence
totle’s, who treats benevolence (the various forms of
philia) as one expression of self-concern. Rational
agents care about the good of others because a good
life necessarily involves various relationships with
other people, and these would be impossible without
caring for the good of those to whom the agents are
thus related. The Stoics reject this Aristotelian view
on the grounds that there are numerous benevolent
and ethically commendable actions that cannot plau-
sibly be assimilated to self-concern. They argue that
self-concern and benevolence are irreducibly differ-
ent sources of human motivation, that self-concern
develops first and benevolence only later, and that
both are guided, but neither is created, by reason.
The Stoics may be seen, therefore, as occupying in
this respect a position in between Aristotle, on the
one hand, and utilitarians and Kantians, on the
other.
Part of the significance of this dispute is its effect
on how the role of reason in ethics is conceived. On
the Aristotelian view, part of the role of reason is to
remove obstacles from the way of natural and basic
dispositions. On the Stoic and utilitarian views, part
of the role of reason is to develop natural and basic
dispositions in the direction of universality and im-
partiality. On the Kantian view, part of the role of
reason is to motivate agents to follow universal and
impartial principles, regardless of what feelings they
happen to have. These views are not logically incom-
patible, but they nevertheless point in different
directions.
It exacerbates these disputes that the ethical im-
portance of both limited and general benevolence is
open to serious questions. Doubts about general be-
nevolence may be formulated by noting that the nat-
ural sphere of limited benevolence is the agents’ im-
mediate context, including their FAMILY, friends,
and perhaps some other people to whom they are
personally connected. General benevolence requires
the expansion of this sphere to include everyone
equally. But as agents go from those they know and
understand toward the vast majority of human be-
ings whom they do not know and whose MOTIVES
and outlooks they could understand, if at all, only
with great effort, so their benevolence peters out.
The idea that people have the same obligation to
foster the welfare of total strangers as they do of
people to whom they are tied by love, fellowship, or
custom is widely unrealistic. It is also dangerous be-
cause it diverts their ethical concern from their own
benevolence
context in which their responsibilities are usually
clear and difficult enough to discharge. The more
general benevolence becomes, the less room it leaves
for private relationships and obligations stemming
from them in which universality and impartiality
play no role. Limited benevolence cannot simply be
extended to general benevolence because they are
incompatible with each other.
Defenders of general benevolence respond to
these doubts by asking: suppose that it is known of
remote strangers that they undeservedly suffer and
resources to help them are available, is there not
then an obligation to care about them? The critics’
response is to acknowledge the obligation, but deny
that its existence constitutes a defense of the ethical
claims of general benevolence, for the ground of this
obligation may be justice, duty, or rights. The dis-
pute, therefore, leads back to limited benevolence
and to the question of whether it has the ethical im-
portance its defenders claim. If it does, then it may
indeed be the motivation underlying the claims of
justice, duty, or rights.
Doubts about the importance of limited benevo-
lence may be put by granting its motivational force
and ethical value, while pointing out that exagger-
ating its importance is incompatible with ethical
considerations whose motivational force is as strong
and as valuable as those of limited benevolence. One
such consideration arises from ethical conflicts.
Limited benevolence may conflict with justice, duty,
or rights. It may prompt FORGIVENESS, while justice
may require PUNISHMENT. The frequency of such
conflicts shows that as a matter of fact limited be-
nevolence cannot be the ethically most important
motive because justice, duty, and rights often moti-
vate ethically commendable but contrary actions. If
defenders of limited benevolence deny this, then
they need an argument to support their claim. Such
an argument must appeal to some motives deeper
than either limited benevolence or whatever con-
flicts with it. But, then, the most important ethical
motive would be that deeper one and the importance
attributed to limited benevolence would have to be
correspondingly reduced.
A second consideration pointing to the same con-
clusion has to do with the various forms and
strengths of blame occasioned by the violation of
ethical requirements. Blame is certainly not benev-
olent: it is not directed at the good of the person
blamed. It may be said, however, that it is benevolent
136
in the long run, for it protects ethics. But ethics itself
may require blaming wrongdoers, expressing public
condemnation, or punishing wrongdoing regardless
of whether any good may come of it. Insofar as
agents are motivated by limited benevolence, they
will be disinclined to engage in nonbenevolent
blame. The ethical importance of limited benevo-
lence must be demoted to allow for this type of non-
benevolent motivation, or else a significant part of
ethics is excluded by exaggerating the importance of
limited benevolence.
Defenders of limited benevolence may respond to
these objections by arguing that the part of ethics
that is excluded by their emphasis ought to be ex-
cluded because ethics ought to be composed only of
benevolent elements. But this claim is itself an eth-
ical one, and it conflicts with ethical claims that at-
tribute fundamental importance, not to benevo-
lence, but to justice, duty, or rights. It appears
therefore that the defense of the ethical importance
of limited benevolence presupposes the framework
of a particular ethical theory: utilitarianism. If utili-
tarianism is correct, benevolence is fundamentally
important; if not, not.
See also: ALTRUISM; BENEFICENCE; BUTLER; CARE;
CHARACTER; CHARITY; CHRISTIAN ETHICS; DUTY AND
OBLIGATION; EGOISM; EMOTION; EUDAIMONIA, -ISM;
FAMILY; FRIENDSHIP; HUME; HUTCHESON; IMPARTI-
ALITY; LOVE; MORAL SENSE THEORISTS; MOTIVES;
PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS; RATIONALITY VS. REA-
SONABLENESS; SCHOPENHAUER; SYMPATHY; UNI-
VERSALIZABILITY; UTILITARIANISM; VIRTUES; VIRTUE
ETHICS.
Bibliography
Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1993. See chapters 11–12 for
ancient controversies about benevolence.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross,
revised by J. O. Urmson. In The Complete Works of
Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1984. See Books 8 and 9 for the
discussion of philia.
Brandt, Richard B. “The Psychology of Benevolence and
Its Implications for Philosophy.” Journal of Philosophy
73 (1976): 429–53. A survey of the psychological
literature.
Butler, Joseph. Fifteen Sermons. London: Bell, 1953
[1726]. Combined Christian and moral sense school
account.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by
L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon, 1960 [1737]. A
classic defense of the fundamental moral importance
of benevolence.
Kekes, John. “The Sentimentalism of Benevolence.” In
Against Liberalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1997. Criticism of ethical theories based on
benevolence.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1979 [1861]. A classic statement of the utilitarian
position.
Outka, Gene. Agape. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1972. A contemporary Christian account.
Roberts, T. A. The Concept of Benevolence: Aspects of
Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy. London: Mac-
millan, 1973. Account of the moral sense school as re-
flected in the writings of Hutcheson, Butler, and Hume.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. On the Basis of Morality. Trans-
lated by E. F. J. Payne. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1965. Tr. of Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik
[1841]. Argument for benevolence as the foundation
of ethics.
Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1981 [1874]. A classic utilitarian account.
Smart, J. J. C. Essays Metaphysical and Moral. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1987. A contemporary utilitarian account.
See essays 22 and 23.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianap-
olis: Liberty Classics, 1976 [1759]. A classic account
of the basis of virtues in benevolence.
Social Philosophy and Policy 4, no. 2 (1987). Special is-
sue containing important contemporary articles on be-
nevolence and beneficence.
Taylor, Richard. Good and Evil. New York: Macmillan,
1970. Contemporary view of ethics as based on
benevolence.
John Kekes
Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832)
Bentham articulated the first secular version of UTIL-
ITARIANISM and laid the philosophical foundations
of modern legal positivism. He was born in London
and lived most of his life there. After studying law
at Lincoln’s Inn, he turned to a career of radical criti-
cism and reform of English law, society, and politics.
By the early nineteenth century, the influence of his
work had spread throughout Europe, India, and
Latin America. Although caricatured as a doctrine
of cold-hearted calculation (Disraeli labeled it “bru-
tilitarianism”), his views proved a major source of
progressive social reform in Victorian England. Ben-
tham was a powerful advocate of prison reform, the
137
Bentham, Jeremy
abolition of CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, relief for the poor,
representative DEMOCRACY, birth control, sexual lib-
eration, and the humane treatment of animals.
A self-declared son of the Enlightenment (follow-
ing VOLTAIRE [1694–1778], d’Alembert [1717–
1783], BECCARIA [1738–1794], and Helvetius
[1715–1771]), Bentham believed that established
patterns of legal and political thought, which fos-
tered superstition, acquiescence, and CORRUPTION,
were major obstacles to improvement of the lot of
humankind. He sought to destroy the established
patterns and build in their place a structure of prac-
tical thought and discourse that was rational, deter-
minate, and accessible to all. To this end he sought
to purge language—especially the language of law,
morality, and politics—of all illusory fictions. Fol-
lowing the lead of LOCKE (1632–1704), he devel-
oped an elaborate theory of language that grounded
all discourse in terms that refer only to “real,” i.e.,
publicly observable, entities. His theory remarkably
anticipates much of contemporary philosophy of
language in the tradition of Bertrand RUSSELL
(1872–1970).
Bentham argued, for example, that talk of moral
right and wrong can be given substantial meaning
only if it is tied to the consequences of actions for
human HAPPINESS, which itself must be understood
in terms of empirically observable PLEASURE and the
absence of pain. Similarly, he argued that our talk of
laws, RIGHTS, and obligations is illusory nonsense
unless it is rooted in reference to canonically for-
mulated, verbal expressions of will of recognized
lawmakers and backed by credible sanctions. Unlike
the “fictions” of common law or NATURAL LAW the-
ories, “real laws” are rules the existence, content,
and AUTHORITY of which depend strictly on these
publicly accessible empirical facts and not on indi-
vidual judgments of the reasonableness, justice, or
even utility of the rules. On this essentially Hobbes-
ian basis, Bentham developed a very sophisticated
theory of law and adjudication.
Inspired by Helvetius, Bentham sought to artic-
ulate a utilitarian “science of legislation”—a set of
rational principles in terms of which laws and social
reform proposals could be assessed. Two basic prop-
ositions ground this science: (a) the master norma-
tive principle, the “principle of utility”; and (b) a
basic generalization about human nature, the “self-
preference principle.”
Bentham, Jeremy
The Principle of Utility
The view that utility provides the only rational
basic standard of moral evaluation can be found in
the systems of THEOLOGICAL ETHICS of Richard
CUMBERLAND (1631–1718) and Francis HUTCHE-
SON (1694–1746). It was also embraced in one form
or another in the secular works of such Enlighten-
ment figures as HUME (1711–1776), Beccaria, Hel-
vetius, and Priestly (1733–1804). While Hutcheson
introduced the phrase “greatest happiness of the
greatest number” (Inquiry Concerning Moral Good
and Evil, 1726), Bentham seems to have encoun-
tered it first in Beccaria’s Dei delitti e della pene
(1764). Bentham, however, articulated and clarified
the principle in its secular version and applied it
more extensively and systematically than any of his
predecessors or contemporaries.
Philosophical Defense. Bentham typically treated
the principle of utility simply as an axiom of his en-
terprise in need of no defense. But, as Harrison
noted, Bentham suggested a line of defense that re-
veals much about his understanding of it. He ob-
served, first, that moral judgments demand justifi-
cation. Justification is possible, he argued, only if the
language of morality is a public language, accessible
to all members of the community—that is, only if
the reasons offered in justification appeal to publicly
accessible considerations rather than to merely sub-
jective opinions. Pleasures and pains are publicly ob-
servable facts, accessible to everyone. So the lan-
guage of pleasures and pains alone provides the
necessary public basis for moral judgments. This
necessary public basis, he continues, also forces us
to recognize that, from the MORAL POINT OF VIEW,
everyone’s happiness is equally significant. My hap-
piness, of course, is of great importance to me, but
it is not likely to carry such weight with Smith, who
may accord that importance only to his happiness.
These assessments, appropriate enough from our pe-
culiar, subjective points of view, cannot hope to win
general public approval. Thus if moral judgments
are to meet the test of publicity, they cannot be made
from any subjective point of view but only from a
suitably public or impartial point of view. From this
impartial point of view, the happiness of any one
person is no more or less important than that of any
other (John Stuart Mill expressed this in the princi-
ple “each is to count for one and no one for more
than one”). Our moral concern for human happi-
138
ness, he concludes, must take the shape of the great-
est happiness principle, for this principle alone gives
equal weight to the happiness of each person.
Formulation. Bentham’s principle of utility is an
ordering of two complementary principles: (1) “the
greatest happiness principle” and (2) “the happiness
enumeration principle.” According to 1, the only
proper ultimate end of action is the greatest happi-
ness of each member of the community. This leading
principle sets the tone and direction of utilitarian
deliberation. Principle 2 comes into play when
agents are forced by conflicts among the INTERESTS
they must consider to choose the good of some at
the expense of others. In those cases, 2 requires the
agent to seek the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. Bentham makes clear that on his principle
of utility human beings are not merely “receptacles”
into which pleasure or pain are poured. The focus
of his utilitarian concern is not on happiness as some
abstract good but rather on the concrete happiness
of each individual person.
This emphasis is underscored by Bentham’s last
known gloss on the principle of utility. We must first
seek the greatest happiness of all members “without
exception in so far as possible,” he insists, but we
must seek “the greatest happiness of the greatest
number of them on every occasion on which the na-
ture of the case renders the provision of an equal
quantity of happiness for every one of them impos-
sible.” This strongly suggests that the basic utilitar-
ian aim is the greatest equal happiness in the com-
munity, and, where trade-offs of the happiness of
some for the happiness of others are unavoidable,
that alternative which most closely approximates
greatest equal happiness must be chosen.
It is not clear how seriously to take this late, egal-
itarian formulation of the principle of utility. It may
represent Bentham’s final attempt to solve an objec-
tion to the “greatest happiness of the greatest num-
ber” principle which troubled him greatly. Accord-
ing to this objection, the principle requires only that
the agent choose that alternative which would get
the largest number of votes were the choice put to
all those affected by the action, allowing the agent
to ignore the degree of loss suffered by the minority.
Bentham’s last formulation, by counseling the agent
to approximate equal distribution of happiness,
forces the agent to accord moral significance to the
sacrifices of the minority as well as the gains of the
majority. Some critics claim that Bentham’s princi-

ple of utility requires one to choose that action
which produces the greatest amount of happiness,
no matter how it is distributed, but this view fails to
recognize the sensitivity and complexity of the prin-
ciple. Concern for the distribution of happiness
played an important role in Bentham’s formulation
and defense of his principle.
Equality. Distribution of the means of happiness
also played an important though more ambiguous
role in Bentham’s political theory. He clearly artic-
ulated the now standard utilitarian argument for
economic arrangements that approximate equality
of income and wealth. Human psychology is such
that the ability of wealth to produce happiness de-
creases as the amount of wealth one already pos-
sesses increases (the marginal utility of wealth di-
minishes), he observed. For example, other things
being equal, more happiness can be produced by dis-
tributing a marginal $100 to a person who has only
$1,000 than to a person who has $100,000. Thus
the distribution of wealth that most closely approx-
imates EQUALITY is likely to produce the greatest
happiness for the greatest number, if other things are
equal. However, as he was quick to point out, con-
ditions are seldom equal. In order to protect general
“security” and “subsistence” and promote “abun-
dance” (economic productivity), INEQUALITY of
wealth is often necessary. Since equality is subordi-
nate to these other goals, in Bentham’s view, in-
equality of wealth can often be justified on utilitarian
grounds. In contrast, inequality of political power,
he argued, is seldom justified. Equality of POWER
does not threaten subsistence or abundance and is
absolutely necessary for security—especially secu-
rity against depredation of the many by the ruling
few. On this basis, Bentham mounted a powerful ar-
gument for representative democracy and nearly
universal franchise.
Scope. Although it has been the subject of recent
debate, most commentators now agree that Ben-
tham’s principle of utility instructs each agent to
maximize the happiness not only of all humankind
but of all sentient creation. The proper question to
ask of any potential objects of moral concern, says
Bentham, is not “Can they reason?” or “Can they
talk?” but “Can they suffer?” On another matter,
commentators still disagree about whether Ben-
tham intended his principle to be consulted in every
case or only when agents wish to determine what
laws and rules to follow (i.e., they dispute whether
139
Bentham, Jeremy
Bentham was a direct- or act-utilitarian or an
indirect- or rule-utilitarian). The evidence is mixed.
There is no doubt that Bentham concentrates
largely on utilitarian grounds for legislation. How-
ever, in his account of utilitarian judicial reason-
ing, where one would expect a clear statement of
indirect-utilitarianism, Bentham seems to have em-
braced a direct-utilitarian reading.
Hedonism and Egoism
Bentham’s theory of human nature draws directly
on the Empiricist tradition from HOBBES (1588–
1679) to Hume and Hartley (1705–1757). It also
inherited some of the confusion typical of this tra-
dition. Bentham clearly embraced psychological he-
donism, the view that every human action is caused
by the agent’s desire for some pleasure or aversion
to some pain. This frequently led him to express a
position very close to psychological egoism, the view
that human beings act only in pursuit of their own
private interest. In fact, occasionally he claims that
every human agent acts only to maximize his or her
net happiness. When he is careful, however, Ben-
tham admits that human beings, even the most sav-
age, can be moved by SYMPATHY with the good or
ill of others (even at the expense of their private in-
terests). But his HEDONISM leads him to insist even
here that they are moved by their own pleasure,
since sympathy is just the pleasure one takes in the
good others enjoy, as malice is the pleasure one takes
in the evil others suffer. While this may be so, it does
not follow that the pleasure human beings derive
from the well-being of others is the operative motive
of their actions.
It is unlikely that Bentham firmly held the strong
psychological egoist view that it is not possible for
human beings to act contrary to their present judg-
ment of their own best interest. Occasionally, he
states clearly that what he means by the claims that
“of action the sole efficient cause is interest” is just
that action is caused by the motive or desire which
is at the moment “most forcibly influencing,” regard-
less of whether it is self-regarding or other-regarding.
But he often trades on the ambiguity of his use of
“interest” in ways that create confusion about what
his view really is.
This confusion aside, however, Bentham did
clearly and consistently advocate a strategic version
of the egoist doctrine. He claimed that human beings
Bentham, Jeremy
are more likely in any particular case to be moved
by considerations of their own private interest than
by any other motive, especially when they exercise
power over others. Thus the only safe assumption
for the legislator or political constitution writer to
make is that people will act only to advance their
private (“sinister”) interests. The aim of law and so-
cial morality more generally, according to Bentham’s
“duty-and-interest-junction principle,” is to provide
individuals with adequate MOTIVES, through the
threat of sanctions, to comply with the dictates of
the utility principle, thereby securing artificially a
convergence of individual self-interest and utilitar-
ian duty.
The clearest application of this principle is Ben-
tham’s utilitarian deterrence theory of PUNISHMENT.
Punishment is justified not by appeal to desert or
retribution but by the fact that public knowledge of
the punishment of some violators is likely to deter
others from socially harmful behavior, because the
course of that behavior will then appear too costly
to the agent. Behavior in the interest of the com-
munity as a whole is thereby made consistent with
the self-interest of each individual member.
In his constitutional theory Bentham seems to
have given the artificial identification of interests a
slightly different form. A recent commentator has
argued that proper adjudication under law, in Ben-
tham’s theory, depends heavily on the enlightened
utilitarian judgment of judges. The aim of Ben-
tham’s complex constitutional arrangements is not
to supply each judge with sufficiently strong self-
interested reasons for doing what utility requires,
but rather to filter out or neutralize all sources of
possible conflicts of interest, thereby freeing up the
“moral aptitude” of the judge for the task of disin-
terested utilitarian deliberation.
Private Deontology
Unlike recent utilitarian theories, the focus of
Bentham’s utilitarianism was primarily social and in-
stitutional. Personal or private morality was never
more than marginal to his interests. (Harrison has
shown that Bentham’s claim that, given equal quan-
tities of pleasure, push-pin—the children’s game
“pin the tail on the donkey”—is as good as poetry,
was addressed to the question of what importance
the state should attach to various activities when de-
ciding which of them to support. It was not, as J. S.
140
MILL [1806–1873] assumed, a claim about the
place of these activities in a general view of human
good.) Designed as a framework to guide the legis-
lator who seeks rationally and humanely to restruc-
ture social behavior and INSTITUTIONS, the theory
has a decidedly technocratic character. However,
when Bentham belatedly turned his attention to per-
sonal morality in his Deontology, the technocratic
character remained. Bentham coined the word DE-
ONTOLOGY, but his use of it is directly opposite cur-
rent usage inspired by Kant. The ultimate aim of
“deontology,” as of legislation, is to motivate behav-
ior that maximizes community happiness. But while
the law’s basic technique is to alter the shape of in-
dividual interests with threats of punishment, the
technique of deontology is to mobilize reasons of
private (though perhaps hidden or long-range) in-
terest already available to the agent. While recent
utilitarian theories have abandoned Bentham’s he-
donism and ambivalent egoism, they still cling in
some fashion to this dubious Benthamite legacy.
See also: ANIMALS, TREATMENT OF; CAPITAL PUNISH-
MENT; CORRECTIONAL ETHICS; DEMOCRACY; EGOISM;
EQUALITY; GOOD, THEORIES OF THE; HEDONISM;
HUME; IMPARTIALITY; INDIVIDUALISM; JUSTICE, DIS-
TRIBUTIVE; LEGAL PHILOSOPHY; MILL, JAMES; MILL,
JOHN STUART; PAIN AND SUFFERING; PLEASURE; PUN-
ISHMENT; RATIONALITY VS. REASONABLENESS; SYM-
PATHY; UTILITARIANISM.
Bibliography
Selected Works by Bentham
Bentham’s Theory of Fictions. Edited by C. K. Ogden. Pat-
erson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1959. Bentham’s writ-
ings on language, logic, ontology, and epistemology.
Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edited by J. H.
Burns, J. R. Dinwiddy, and F. Rosen. London: Athlone
Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968–. In
progress; twenty-two volumes published to date. When
completed, this will be the definitive edition of Ben-
tham’s writings. Works of philosophical interest al-
ready published in this series are A Comment on the
Commentaries [1775] and A Fragment on Government
[1776], edited by Burns and H. L. A. Hart, London,
1977; An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation [1789], edited by Burns and Hart, London,
1970, 2nd edition with new introduction by Hart, New
York: Methuen, 1982; Constitutional Code [1830],
volume 1, edited by Rosen and Burns, Oxford, 1983;
Deontology [1834] together with A Table of the Springs
of Action and The Article on Utilitarianism, edited by

A. Goldworth, Oxford, 1983; First Principles Prepa-
ratory to Constitutional Code, edited by P. Schofield,
Oxford, 1989; ‘Legislator of the World’: Writings on
Codification, Law, and Education, edited by P. Scho-
field and Jonathan Harris, Oxford, 1998; Of Laws in
General [1782], edited by Hart, London, 1970.
Parliamentary Candidate’s Proposed Declaration of Prin-
ciples. London, 1831.
Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edited by J. Bowring. 11 vols.
New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. First published
in Edinburgh, 1838–43. An inferior edition, but indis-
pensable until the Collected Works is completed.
Works about Bentham
The Bentham Committee. The Bentham Newsletter. Lon-
don: The Committee, 1978–88. Published scholarly es-
says on all aspects of Bentham’s thought and times.
Included a running bibliography of recent Bentham
scholarship.
Dinwiddy, John. Bentham. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989. Very useful, short introduction to Ben-
tham’s moral and political theories.
Halevy, Elie. The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism.
Translated by M. Morris. London: Faber and Faber,
1972 [1928]. Extensive bibliography of classical stud-
ies of Bentham and his era.
Harrison, Ross. Bentham. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1984. The best available general assessment of
Bentham’s philosophical doctrines. Useful bibliography.
Hart, H. L. A. Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Po-
litical Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Critical
discussions of Bentham’s contributions to jurispru-
dence and political theory.
Kelly, Paul J. Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jer-
emy Bentham and the Civil Law. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990.
Long, Douglas G. Bentham on Liberty. Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 1977.
Lyons, David. In the Interest of the Governed. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1973.
Parekh, Bhikhu. Jeremy Bentham: Ten Critical Essays.
London: Frank Cass, 1974.
Postema, Gerald J. Bentham and the Common Law Tra-
dition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
———, ed. Jeremy Bentham: Moral, Political, and Legal
Philosophy. 2 vols. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
Rosen, Fred. Jeremy Bentham and Representative De-
mocracy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Steintrager, James. Bentham. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1977.
Utilitas. 1989–. Interdisciplinary studies of classical and
contemporary utilitarian thought.
Gerald J. Postema
141
bioethics
bioethics
Bioethics, a complex domain of inquiry, debate, and
decision making, has emerged over the past several
decades, with most commentators dating its origins
to the 1960s. In that decade, vital decisions about
the allocation of scarce, newly developed dialysis
machines received national attention in the public
press. The medical community was reassessing the
ethical integrity of American research with human
subjects. New treatment capacities prompted recon-
sideration of the traditional relationship between
doctors and patients and raised new concerns about
the difficulty of distinguishing between saving life
and prolonging death. Bioethics is the critical ex-
amination—both for theoretical and for practical
purposes—of the moral dimensions of decisions
made about such matters.
Bioethics now includes, but only as a part, a dis-
tinct and idiosyncratic academic discipline—com-
plete with a largely agreed-upon but evolving subject
matter; an identifiable and increasingly organized
group of practitioners; a set of conditions of profes-
sional admissibility that is still contested; and an un-
usually diverse academic and public following. Spe-
cialized bioethics research centers have proliferated
from the early 1970s, when the newly founded In-
stitute for Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences (The
Hastings Center) and the Kennedy Center for Bio-
ethics were the only such sites, to the late 1990s in
which dozens of such sites flourish around the
United States and abroad. The literature of bioeth-
ics, at first an occasional scattering of articles and
editorials, now includes an extensive array of jour-
nals and books of various levels of distinction, an
encyclopedia of bioethics in its second edition, and
even a recently published, comprehensive, and finely
crafted historical analysis.
Throughout its history medicine has reflected on
ethical aspects of clinical responses to illness and
injury, and debate about issues like ABORTION and
EUTHANASIA have been perennial. But modern bio-
ethics took shape when writers from various tradi-
tional disciplines and from the public press devoted
increasing attention to the proliferating moral chal-
lenges associated with technologically sophisticated
contemporary medical care and biological and medi-
cal research. That attention, on the part of physi-
cians, scientists, lawyers, journalists, philosophers,
theologians, sociologists, economists, and others, re-
bioethics
flected growing professional and public recognition
that in modern health care new factors require de-
cisions—by individuals, institutions, and society—
that are not simply medical or legal in nature, but
depend fundamentally on ethical reasoning and eth-
ical choice. These factors include the rapidly ex-
panding base of scientific knowledge; the conse-
quently increased effectiveness of medical and
scientific procedures; resulting challenges to our
understanding of basic notions of life, death, sick-
ness, and health; the greater visibility through the
MASS MEDIA of scientific knowledge and the possi-
bilities both of its practical applications and its
abuse; and changing and conflicted societal expec-
tations regarding health care.
Activity with bioethical content takes many
forms. Academic bioethicists teach in various set-
tings, contribute to the professional literature, and
address practical applications of their work in vari-
ous kinds of service activities. Members of institu-
tional review boards assess the adequacy of protec-
tion of human and animal research subjects, and
institutional ethics committees in hospitals, nursing
homes, and health plans consult on specific cases,
address matters of institutional policy, and provide
educational programs. Thousands of such people, in
addition to academic bioethicists, participate ac-
tively in bioethical deliberations as part of their pro-
fessional responsibilities. Their need for related con-
tinuing education has helped expand demand for
workshops, meetings, and conferences in bioeth-
ics—of which there were perhaps a few each year
two decades ago, and which occur now almost
weekly.
Initially, the term ‘bioethics’ to many was synon-
ymous with ‘medical ethics’, despite the existence of
nonmedical ethical issues in the biological sciences.
Later, ‘biomedical ethics’ addressed a broader range
of issues in ethics and the life sciences. Now, finer
distinctions are commonly made, such as among
clinical ethics (e.g., MEDICAL ETHICS and NURSING
ETHICS), research ethics (e.g., the proper use of hu-
man and animal subjects, the propriety of genetic
screening for low-penetrance genetic markers for
untreatable diseases, or the release of genetically al-
tered agents into the environment), and health pol-
icy ethics (e.g., protection of the PRIVACY of genetic
information, or health system reform to address the
lack of universal coverage in the United States—
142
alone among the developed nations in having a large
uninsured population).
Bioethics remains thoroughly interdisciplinary, al-
though those who pursue it at the highest levels of
quality tend to do so from the perspective of a solid
grounding in one of the traditional disciplines—typ-
ically law, literature, philosophy, religious studies,
and sociology of medicine—or in the professional
ethos of clinical practice. Indeed, bioethics is atypi-
cal as an academic domain in that many of its prac-
titioners try (often with little success) to distance
themselves from the term ‘bioethicist’, preferring to
retain professional identification with the discipline
which provides their intellectual grounding. Only re-
cently have scholars and teachers emerged who
identify themselves primarily as bioethicists, and the
notion of bioethics as an independent discipline re-
mains controversial.
Many issues addressed by bioethics are theoreti-
cal, speculative, and abstract; many others are di-
rectly connected with matters of immediate practical
concern. Bioethics is thus a major component of
what is called APPLIED ETHICS, which brings to bear
on practical ethical problems the sort of ethical anal-
ysis that had its origins in theoretical endeavors, es-
pecially in philosophical ethics and in the ethical
analyses of religious traditions. Initially, the most in-
fluential perspectives were from the analytic West-
ern philosophical tradition emphasizing personal
autonomy, respect for individuals, justice, and BE-
NEFICENCE, and from such Western religious tradi-
tions as CASUISTRY and Talmudic scholarship. Fur-
ther influences have come from constitutional law
and narrative theory and, more recently, feminist
and non-Western thought.
Because of their practical dimensions, and be-
cause of widespread public interest in health-related
matters, bioethical questions have been the concern
of presidential and congressional commissions; con-
gressional hearings; state legislatures, commissions,
and task forces; and other public forums at national
and, more recently, international levels. Bioethics is
now widely and regularly covered by the print and
electronic media and is even a recurrent theme in
mass-market entertainment. Relations between the
media and professionals in bioethics have them-
selves become the focus of analysis and dispute as
bioethicists reflect and debate about their role in
public education, judicial proceedings, and policy
formation.

Some additional questions on the agenda of bio-
ethics concern treatment of chronically ill patients
and of very frail elderly patients; regulation of health
care; defining the scope of medical prerogative—
e.g., clarifying the extent to which a patient’s life-
style choices are a physician’s proper concern; TRUST
and respect in the relationship between provider and
patient; decision making on behalf of decisionally
incompetent patients; controlling the use of genetic
information and manipulation; and the justifiability
and regulation of technologically assisted human re-
production. Addressing such questions unavoidably
raises fundamentally philosophical issues—about
autonomy, dependency, equity, RESPONSIBILITY, in-
tergenerational justice, the social nature of the hu-
man condition, and more.
In pursuit of these matters, bioethics has brought
together scholars and practitioners who otherwise
would have had little exposure to one another’s dis-
ciplines. Their interactions, at times baffling or con-
tentious, have typically been mutually enriching.
Reactions to work in bioethics—not merely to in-
dividual works but to the enterprise as a whole—
have ranged from admiration to disdain, and diverse
expectations, disappointments, and criticisms have
surrounded it even as it has grown in scope, accep-
tance, and influence.
Among the most prominent criticisms of bioeth-
ics are that: it is not serious, well-grounded schol-
arship; it has no well-defined and clear methodology;
it lacks any solid conceptual foundation but is based
instead on the shifting sands of moral sentiment; it
is too abstractly removed from the realities of clini-
cal practice to merit being taken seriously; it is un-
teachable because morality depends on CHARACTER
rather than on intellect; it pursues unanswerable
questions; its utility has not been demonstrated; it
absorbs valuable time, distracting health care pro-
viders, policy makers, and researchers from dealing
directly with the problems they face; and it is itself
ethically problematic, because it either implicitly en-
dorses traditional values that ought to be challenged
or undermines traditional values that ought to be
advocated and reinforced. Many such criticisms
have contributed to the development of the field, as
bioethicists have refuted some and responded con-
structively to others.
Bioethics is now well established in the curricu-
lum of most colleges and universities and plays a role
in the training of health care students of many kinds,
143
bioethics
health law specialists, and hospital house officers. It
is also pursued by some scholars who profess little
interest in practical decision making, but who see
the biological and health care contexts as concep-
tually rich fields for theoretical philosophical, theo-
logical, or other scrutiny. Some philosophers have
even argued that the focus on issues in medicine has
so enriched the study of ethics as to have saved it
from a loss of all human relevance, by forcing a ster-
ile tradition of moral inquiry to confront real moral
issues as they are experienced in people’s lives.
The maturation of bioethics has been reflected in
the establishment and solidification of professional
organizations devoted to its pursuit. Most recently
(1998), in the United States, the American Society
for Bioethics and Humanities emerged from the con-
solidation of the American Association for Bioeth-
ics, the Society for Health and Human Values, and
the Society for Bioethics Consultation, thereby cre-
ating a unifying forum for discussion within the pro-
fession. The American Society for Law and Medicine
continues to emphasize legal aspects of bioethics.
At the global level, the International Association
of Bioethics both constitutes a network of commu-
nication across national boundaries and facilitates
an understanding of the global nature of many of the
substantive problems in health care ethics. For ex-
ample: increased international trade spreads infec-
tious diseases to new areas; the aggressive marketing
of American tobacco products in Asia, in ways pro-
hibited at home, will increase the burden of disease
in developing countries; and clinical trials of new
pharmaceutical products often take place in multiple
countries with differing standards of ethical scrutiny
for clinical research. And health-related information
flows at the speed of light around the world. Such
issues prompt bioethicists to consider the moral sig-
nificance of national boundaries, to investigate the
possibility of international standards, and to worry
about the perils of moral imperialism.
Specific bioethical issues such as the medical
plight of refugees or political prisoners have long
been acknowledged by various international profes-
sional associations. A sharply increased recognition
of bioethics at the global level, however, is reflected
in its explicit incorporation into the agendas of or-
ganizations such as the European Community and
the World Health Organization. The WHO-related
Council for International Organizations of Medical
Sciences, for example, initiated an ongoing dialogue
bioethics
on Health Policy, Ethics, and Human Values at an
international meeting in Athens in 1984, and has
since catalyzed or conducted much additional in-
quiry into bioethical issues that have substantial in-
ternational dimensions.
Further, as more is understood about the range of
factors influencing health status in populations—
not just sanitation and adequate nutrition, but fac-
tors such as literacy, economic stability, opportuni-
ties for women, other aspects of respect for human
rights, and a sense of capacity to influence one’s own
destiny—the concern with ethical issues related to
health care shades into concern with a much broader
range of ethical aspects of human affairs. Just as clar-
ity about the scope of medical matters is elusive, the
scope of bioethics is also hard to discern sharply, and
itself becomes a subject for bioethical inquiry.
Although the agenda of bioethics has expanded
greatly as it has encompassed questions about health
status and about the ethics of organizational deci-
sions, it also has intensified its focus on more sharply
defined domains, such as ethical issues as they per-
tain to specific populations—for instance, those
with disabilities, or who have AIDS and are preg-
nant, or who seek genetic testing for untreatable dis-
eases. Feminist perspectives, too, have enriched bio-
ethics, both by calling overdue attention to issues
that affect women differentially and by deepening
the profession’s understanding of interpersonal and
social issues as they affect all people.
Each of the ways in which bioethics has changed
has placed new demands on its practitioners. It
quickly became valuable—some would say essen-
tial—for bioethicists concerned with medical ethics
to have clinical exposure, because interacting with
real patients, providers, and family members in
medical settings facilitates understanding more
deeply the clinical realities as they are experienced
by those involved. Such understanding is necessary
for those who seek to be credible and helpful in ad-
dressing actual clinical cases. Similarly, it has be-
come essential for bioethicists, depending on the fo-
cus of their attention, to learn about such matters as
health economics, molecular genetics, radiation ex-
periments, health status in refugee camps, and hu-
man rights policies and politics, in order to pursue
their inquiries with rigor and persuasiveness.
Perhaps because bioethics reflects such diversity
of focus and of disciplinary grounding, addresses is-
sues about which ordinary people have strong feel-
144
ings, and joins debates in so many contexts, it has
also become an unusually self-critical and reflective
discipline. Its nature, purposes, and legitimacy have
become a recurrent theme for inquiry.
Bioethics has catalyzed discourse in many settings
about the foundations of social policy and the ap-
propriate modes of address—academic, political,
professional, and public—to contested issues about
which people feel deeply and differently. It has for
that reason come to be viewed as a provocative and
instructive model for civil deliberation in a context
of diversity of values and perspectives.
As they consider the full spectrum of issues re-
lated to the achievement and maintenance of health
and the associated problems of resource allocation,
the forums of PUBLIC POLICY have called increasingly
on professionals in bioethics to assist in their delib-
erations. Health care has changed fundamentally in
recent years: we recognize now the unavoidable
need to develop wisdom about the imposition of lim-
itations; we see the organizational structures of
health care transforming in ways we do not like yet
cannot seem to control; we know that new genetic
knowledge and capacities will have powerful con-
sequences we cannot fully anticipate. Each of these
phenomena, and others, generates renewed energy
for bioethical deliberations.
Thus, the transformation of information handling
capacities has had a profound impact on bioethics,
as on other intellectual domains. Electronic data-
bases raise substantive questions about the tension
between concerns for privacy and opportunities for
valuable research or improved patient care. Public
access to thousands of Web sites about health-
related matters, from the authoritative through
the iconoclastic to the fraudulent, confront health
care providers with the challenge of patients arriv-
ing with new kinds of expertise, superstition, or
demand.
The professional practice of bioethics has also
been changed by the Internet. A recently established
electronic bioethics discussion group has created an
international conversation among hundreds of pro-
fessionals in bioethics that facilitates research and
helps shape the agenda of inquiry. Participants
sometimes provide information that others might
value, such as a notice of impending legislation, or
raise specific questions about where to find a refer-
ence or what the status is of a current case, law, or

bill. Typically, someone answers such questions al-
most immediately.
Mostly, however, the content of the postings is
substantive exchange. A review of the topics ad-
dressed over the few weeks prior to this writing pro-
vides a useful overview of issues at the center of
contemporary bioethical discussion. Some of the
content has been about foundational or general
questions: what can be said to those who question
whether there is a rational basis for ethical decisions;
do health care providers have any special responsi-
bility to work in behalf of social justice in health
care, and if so how might that be integrated with
their clinical responsibilities; how can a balance be
found between societal and individual benefits in
making health care decisions; what counts as medi-
cal in an era of concern with preventive and public
health measures?
Other topics are more explicitly clinical: how phy-
sicians should reply to inquiring patients who ask
about the physician’s health; how to manage post-
death ventilation while awaiting the arrival of sur-
vivors of the deceased; when if ever it is appropriate
to treat a patient for the benefit of someone else;
how nurses ought to respond, in the process of treat-
ment already under way, when challenged by a le-
gitimate surrogate. And in addition to perennial
matters in clinical ethics, such as how much to tell
a fragile patient who appears not to want to know
the truth about his condition, there is increasing
concern with the changing organizational contexts
within which health care is provided: is health care
ethics facilitated or impeded by the need for corpo-
rate compliance with the external requirements of
bodies such as accrediting agencies; what ethical
problems are faced by health care administrators
specifically in their capacity as administrators?
Many topics explicitly concern matters of law:
what requirements of legal discovery apply to hos-
pital ethics committee consultations; what protec-
tions against financial responsibility do health care
surrogates have; how have different states developed
priority lists for the selection of surrogate decision
makers; what federal measures might be needed to
protect genetic privacy adequately, especially given
the prospect of a national database in which each
person has a health identifier number? Pedagogical
matters, too, are frequent: can an enlightened ethical
inquiry be based on a code of ethics such as that of
the American Medical Association; what readings
145
bioethics
might be effective in illuminating problems related
to the need to limit health care; are there ethical risks
in requiring health care students to practice certain
procedures on one another—such as pelvic exami-
nations done by female nursing students on one an-
other, with neither uncoerced consent nor assur-
ances of confidentiality regarding the findings?
New directions in bioethics include an expanding
body of empirical inquiry into the ways in which val-
ues are honored or violated in health care contexts
and into the consequences of public policy decisions
that have been shaped by bioethical arguments. Al-
though bioethics will sustain controversy as it con-
tinues to evolve, its rapid rise to intellectual promi-
nence and practical influence, and the certainty that
continued developments in the medical and biologi-
cal sciences will raise or accentuate ethical issues,
ensure that it will remain active and vital.
See also: ABORTION; AGENCY AND DISABILITY; ANI-
MALS, TREATMENT OF; APPLIED ETHICS; AUTONOMY
OF MORAL AGENTS; BIOLOGICAL THEORY; CHARAC-
TER; COMPUTERS; CONSENT; ENVIRONMENTAL
ETHICS; EUTHANASIA; FEMINIST ETHICS; FUTURE GEN-
ERATIONS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; HARM AND OF-
FENSE; ISLAMIC MEDICAL ETHICS; KILLING/LETTING
DIE; LIBRARY AND INFORMATION PROFESSIONS; LIFE
AND DEATH; LIFE, RIGHT TO; MEDICAL ETHICS, HIS-
TORICAL; NARRATIVE ETHICS; NUCLEAR ETHICS;
NURSING ETHICS; PAIN AND SUFFERING; PRINCIPLISM;
PRIVACY; PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY; PUBLIC POLICY; RE-
PRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES; TECHNOLOGY; THEORY
AND PRACTICE; TRUST.
Bibliography
The literature of bioethics has, in thirty years, grown from
almost nothing to tens of thousands of items. These few
illustrative resources can provide an efficient route into
that literature.
Council for International Organizations of Medical Sci-
ences. Geneva: World Health Organization. Various re-
ports and proceedings published over more than
twenty years addressing issues of values in medicine,
medical research, and health policy from international
perspectives.
Hastings Center Report. The leading journal in bioethics
for nearly three decades; see especially the section “In
the Literature” which provides briefly annotated no-
tices of important publications in the field from many
sources.
Jonsen, Albert R. The Birth of Bioethics. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1998. The only comprehensive
bioethics
overview of the development of bioethics over the past
thirty years. Excellent bibliographical references.
Moreno, Jonathan D. Deciding Together: Bioethics and
Moral Consensus. New York: Oxford University Press,
1995. Explores ethical decisions by groups of people,
such as hospital committees, whose individual values
or judgments may diverge.
New York State Task Force on Life and the Law. Ten re-
ports from an influential state commission published
since 1986, including Assisted Reproductive Technol-
ogies: Analysis and Recommendations for Public Pol-
icy (1988).
President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems
in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research.
11 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of-
fice, 1981–83. An influential collection of reports from
a federal commission.
Rachels, James. “When Philosophers Shoot from the Hip:
A Report from America.” Bioethics 5 (1991): 67–71.
A comment on the role of bioethicists in addressing the
public.
Reich, Warren T., ed. Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Rev. ed.
5 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1995. Revised edition of
a standard four-volume reference first published in
1978.
Sherwin, Susan. No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics and
Health Care. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1992. An early and influential presentation of feminist
perspectives on medical ethics.
Silvers, Anita, David Wasserman, and Mary Briody Ma-
howald. Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Per-
spectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy. Lan-
ham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Interchanges
among the authors on a cluster of issues only recently
receiving a sustained focus of attention.
Samuel Gorovitz
biological theory
The classical term for efforts to connect biological
theory with ethics is “evolutionary ethics.” However,
evolutionary ethics has progressed far enough that
dividing it into three parts clarifies the issues. Here,
then, the term “evolutionary ethics” is restricted to
attempts to use the theory of EVOLUTION, or parts of
it, as an important component of ethical theories.
“Evolved ethics” applies to attempts to uncover
evolved human dispositions relevant to ethics and,
typically, to justify such dispositions as truly ethical.
Evolved ethics is a subdivision of the modern field
of sociobiology. “Religion and ethics” refers here to
the influence of evolutionary ethics and evolved
ethics on RELIGION.
146
Evolutionary Ethics
The most popular approach to evolutionary ethics
is to claim that natural selection, the mechanism
largely responsible for evolution, results in ethically
valuable products. Since this is so, people should not
interfere with natural selection. We might even pro-
mote it. This form of evolutionary ethics results in
“Social Darwinism,” the belief that the “struggle for
existence” is good. Since it is good, government in-
terference in the struggle is wrong. There should be
no welfare state. We might even establish eugenics
programs to promote natural selection.
There are major difficulties with Social Darwin-
ism. The most obvious is its brutality, a particularly
objectionable attribute for an ethical theory. On
these grounds, T. H. Huxley (1825–1895) suggests
we ought to combat natural selection rather than
promote it. Another difficulty is that Social Darwin-
ists understand Charles DARWIN’s (1809–1882)
phrase “struggle for existence” literally, whereas
Darwin explicitly says he is using “struggle” meta-
phorically.
Moreover, natural selection does not appear to
culminate in ethically valuable products. Indeed, we
do not know where it culminates. It may operate on
Earth for another 3 billion years, and we do not
know what it has produced on other planets. If nat-
ural selection does not culminate in ethically valu-
able products, the Social Darwinists have commit-
ted the logical fallacy first noted by David HUME
(1711–1776) of deriving an “ought” from an “is.”
Herbert SPENCER (1820–1903) is the classical ex-
ponent of another version of evolutionary ethics.
This version rests on the idea that, whatever the evo-
lutionary mechanism may be, the history of life is
progressive, ascending like a ladder to its final goal.
Spencer thinks HAPPINESS and heterogeneity are its
goals. A twentieth-century follower of Spencer’s,
E. O. Wilson, sees the human mind as its goal.
This version of evolutionary ethics also has prob-
lems. The first is empirical. The history of life is not
demonstrably progressive. The applicable metaphor
is not a ladder but a bush with its top severed by a
horizontal plane representing the present. On this
plane lie the human mind, the bee’s sting, and the
mold’s slime, with nothing to indicate which is most
valuable. The second difficulty is logical. This ar-
gument commits the NATURALISTIC FALLACY first

named by G. E. MOORE (1873–1958), the error of
equating natural properties with ethical ones.
Recently, James Rachels has developed a new var-
iant of evolutionary ethics. His version rests on the
central thesis of evolution, that species evolve from
one another. Before Darwin, people thought bio-
logical species immutable and variations within
them unimportant. Darwin stood this idea on its
head. Species are mutable, and the variations within
them essential, for without variations, natural selec-
tion would have nothing to select. As a result, Dar-
win considered the divisions biologists draw among
species arbitrary. The Darwinian picture places in-
dividual organisms at the center of biology and rel-
egates species to the sidelines.
Rachels next argues that traditional Western
ethics rests on the pre-Darwinian view of the cen-
trality of species. Traditionally, Western ethics has
lifted our species to the pinnacle of ethical impor-
tance while treating all other organisms as our ser-
vants and slaves. But if species are arbitrary and in-
dividuals and their variations central, the old ethics
rests on false foundations. Rachels calls for a new
ethical foundation, with individuals and their vari-
ations central. He calls his new ethics “moral
individualism.”
Rachels develops the ethical side of his theory
from the ancient moral and legal principle that equal
cases should be treated equally. We argue that we
should not torture people because people feel pain,
TORTURE is painful, and pain a moral EVIL. Other
animals also feel pain. Under Rachels’s reasoning, if
they feel pain as we do, then we should not torture
them, for equal cases should be treated equally.
Rachels applies his theory to a wide range of
cases. He discusses the value of life, with its issues
of SUICIDE, EUTHANASIA, and vegetarianism, and he
reflects on the use of animals in psychological, medi-
cal, pharmacological, and cosmetic experiments. His
theory does important work in clarifying ethical is-
sues. Rooted in the center of biology, it has firm
foundations.
Critics have attacked Rachels’s theory on two
grounds. Philosophers who reject the use of empir-
ical facts in ethical theories see Rachels as breaking
Hume’s law or committing the naturalistic fallacy.
However, Rachels violates neither. He never argues
that Darwin’s theory is ethically good, only that it
describes the organic world accurately. And, he ar-
gues, Darwin’s description matters to ethics because
147
biological theory
it says we can no longer validly claim that all mem-
bers of our species are radically separated from all
other organic beings morally, just because of species
membership.
On the other hand, people steeped in biology and
committed to versions of evolved ethics criticize Ra-
chels for reaching beyond biology into reason for the
justification of ethical arguments. However, reason
provides justifications, and attempts to develop eth-
ical theories totally within biology have difficulties
with justification.
Evolved Ethics
Theories of evolved ethics claim the human ca-
pacity for ethics and/or particular ethical disposi-
tions evolved. Versions that try to justify following
these dispositions assert that we ought to do what
we evolved to do.
When Darwin’s contemporaries read his On the
Origin of Species (1859), some saw its implications
for human beings and argued that the moral and
spiritual aspects of humanity lie outside the reach of
natural selection. In Chapter III of The Descent of
Man (1871), Darwin attempts to counteract this re-
sponse by demonstrating that the human moral
sense (conscience) could have evolved.
He begins by claiming that other animals have
altruistic dispositions of SYMPATHY and LOVE to-
ward their kin and their social group. These dispo-
sitions are social, not distinctively moral. What is
distinctively moral is CONSCIENCE, our sense of duty.
Conscience evolves at the individual and social
level. Individually, conscience develops because our
memory, foresight, and intelligence lead to inner
conflicts between our immediate passions and our
enduring altruistic dispositions. When we compare
the two, we feel a duty to follow our enduring dis-
positions, thereby resolving the conflict. Socially,
conscience derives from the praise and blame of oth-
ers and from reason. Praise and blame heighten con-
science while reason enables us to realize the justice
of others’ judgments.
Darwin argues that, as people come to live in
larger groups, reason suggests they expand their
sympathies to the larger group. People attain the
highest morality when reason extends sympathy to
all humanity and beyond, to all sentient beings.
Darwin’s ideas on the evolution of ALTRUISM and
conscience are still influential. They acquired new
biological theory
depth in 1964 when William Hamilton revolution-
ized the study of altruism by explaining animal al-
truistic behavior mathematically as a branch of be-
havioral genetics. Hamilton’s work marks the
beginning of sociobiology—the genetical study of
animal social behavior—and of modern evolved
ethics.
His basic idea is simple. The evolutionary goal of
all organisms is to have as many copies of their own
genes survive in the next generation as possible. The
direct way to do this is to produce offspring and, if
they need care, to care for them. However, close kin
who are not offspring also carry copies of the organ-
ism’s genes, and if they need help, the organism will
increase copies of its genes in the next generation by
helping them. The help is “altruism,” and the mech-
anism “kin selection.” Altruism evolved in numerous
organisms, including us. While the evolution of al-
truism is not yet an ethical theory, it lays the grounds
for many efforts to derive ethics from evolution.
The most viable of these efforts is Peter Singer’s.
Like Darwin, Singer argues that kin and group se-
lection have resulted in altruism in us. But altruism
is not distinctly ethical. Ethics develops as a mode
of reasoning in a group context when conflicts occur
between individuals. According to Singer, successful
reasoners must reason impartially, considering
equally the interests of all parties to disputes. Be-
cause reason is impartial, it also helps us expand our
caring beyond immediate kin to all people and, even-
tually, to all sentient beings. However, because our
evolved altruism focuses on kin and clan, reason
alone is not likely to overcome our parochialism. We
need to develop rules and INSTITUTIONS to help us
extend our sympathies.
Knowledge of the narrowness of our evolved al-
truism is helpful. It facilitates critiques of the ethics
of kin and clan and undermines ethical justifications
based on NATURAL LAW. R. D. Alexander has devel-
oped these critiques most fully.
Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson (together and
separately) and Robert J. Richards claim that certain
ethical imperatives evolved and we ought to follow
them. Richards deliberately borrows from Darwin’s
descriptive ethics, emphasizing group selection. He
asks us to assume that natural selection produces
dispositions in us to act for the good of the group
and to believe such altruistic dispositions moral.
From these two empirical assumptions, he derives
148
the moral proposition, “People ought to act
altruistically.”
Richards claims he has not committed the natu-
ralistic fallacy because we use the same rule when
we say, “Thunder ought to follow lightning,” and
when we declare, “People ought to act altruistically.”
If each sentence uses “ought” causally, we do use the
same rule. However, both these “oughts” entail
causal determinism. Thunder must follow lightning
because lightning causes thunder. People must act
altruistically because genes cause altruistic behavior.
But, philosophers do not consider deterministic be-
havior moral. Moral behavior must be freely chosen.
Richards attempts to avoid this problem by con-
struing the second sentence as a moral one prescrib-
ing behavior. But if the second sentence is moral,
Richards slides illegitimately from causal use of
“ought” to a moral use, thereby committing the fal-
lacy of ambiguity as well as the naturalistic fallacy.
The problem of determinism plagues Ruse’s and
Wilson’s theories also. Like Richards, Ruse and Wil-
son argue that human morality rests ultimately on
human sentiments, and that our moral sentiments
evolved. They derive the moral “ought” from the fac-
tual “is” on prudential grounds by emphasizing the
power of our biology to constrain us. If we try to
contravene the “dictates” of our evolved moral sen-
timents, we will suffer psychological and social
stress. However, this places Ruse and Wilson on the
horns of a dilemma. If the dictates of our sentiments
determine our behavior so strongly we cannot dis-
obey, we are not free creatures and, so, not moral
ones. If we can disobey, we can make MORAL RULES
opposing our evolved sentiments.
Their dilemma forces Ruse and Wilson to justify
their theory by default. They claim our moral senti-
ments provide the only justification for our moral
beliefs and actions. Rachels, Singer, and even Dar-
win demonstrate the falsehood of this claim.
Moreover, Ruse’s and Wilson’s version of evolved
ethics provides no way to resolve moral conflicts if
our moral sentiments clash. Robert Trivers success-
fully argues that natural selection produces conflict-
ing moral sentiments.
Francisco Ayala has developed a theory of
evolved ethics in explicit contrast to Ruse and Wil-
son. Ayala claims general intelligence evolved in hu-
man beings because of its adaptive advantage, and
that morality is a by-product of general intelligence.

Further, he argues that only the proclivity to judge
actions right or wrong evolved, not moral NORMS.
The central strength of Ayala’s argument is that
the conditions necessary for general intelligence are
the same conditions required for morality, namely,
the capacity to anticipate consequences, to make
value judgments, and to choose between alternative
courses of action. Its weakness is empirical. Those
who study intelligence have demonstrated convinc-
ingly that we do not possess general intelligence. In-
stead, we have separate intelligences, for example,
mathematical, linguistic, and musical. Neurobiology
supports the idea of diverse intelligences by showing
that our brains contain modules specialized for vari-
ous functions.
Moreover, general intelligence without values is
helpless. Without values, we may be able to list all
the consequences of an action, but we cannot choose
which action is best. We function well because our
basic values are built in. And, if our basic values are
built in and we evolved, they evolved.
Religion and Ethics
Both evolutionary ethics and evolved ethics im-
pact religion, which is itself intimately connected
with ethics for most people. Below are three argu-
ments from evolutionary and evolved ethics under-
mining religion, followed by three supporting it.
First, natural selection, the main mechanism of
evolution, is morally nasty. For natural selection to
function, more organisms must be born than can
survive to reproduce. Selection selects some for sur-
vival and reproduction, and all the others die, some-
times horribly. This poses a very serious problem for
belief in a God who is benevolent, omniscient, om-
nipotent, and who planned and created the universe.
If natural selection is part of God’s plan, the plan
looks ugly. If selection is not part of God’s plan, God
is either not omniscient or not omnipotent, or both.
The workings of natural selection make the philo-
sophical problem of evil even more difficult to solve
than it has been traditionally.
Second, as Rachels argues, the bare fact that spe-
cies evolve from one another means our species is
not unique, and species’ divisions are arbitrary. We
must compare individuals when we ask ethical ques-
tions. Individually, it may happen that an adult chim-
panzee has a more valuable life than a human infant,
especially an infant who will never attain adult hu-
149
biological theory
man capacities, for example, one born without a
neocortex. As evolved creatures, we must be judged
along with other animals, and some of us will be
found wanting.
Third, in an issue of the journal Zygon devoted
to evolved ethics and CHRISTIAN ETHICS, the general
conclusion is that Christian ethics is untenable in the
light of evolution. Presented by Ruse, the main ar-
gument rests on the evolution of altruism through
kin selection. Kin selection promotes altruism to-
ward kin and clan. Christian ethics demands that we
love all equally. Thus, Christian ethics may be im-
possible to live by. If our ethics stem from our
evolved sentiments, Christian ethics may even ap-
pear to us to be “morally perverse.”
These are the main negative arguments. On the
positive side, it is possible that the human capacity
for religion, and even for communion with God,
evolved. The universality of religion suggests that
our religious dispositions are products of evolution.
Neurobiological work has uncovered particular ar-
eas in our brains suited to contemplation. Perhaps
these areas evolved in response to the presence of
God much as our vision evolved in response to light.
If so, God exists as objectively in our environment
as light does. If so, this has ethical implications.
The second argument looks at creation from a
cosmological perspective in addition to a biological
one. Cosmology explains the origin, structure, and
motion of atoms, molecules, planets, stars, and gal-
axies without invoking God’s action. It discloses an
autonomous cosmos, free of God’s intervening su-
pervision. Autonomy develops and increases within
the cosmos after natural selection begins to operate,
for organisms capable of making choices evolve.
With human evolution, creatures appear who make
extremely complex choices both as individuals and
in groups, increasing autonomy once more. Many of
these choices involve ethics.
A cosmological perspective also reveals an in-
crease of complexity, variety, and creative synergy in
the cosmos from the Big Bang forward, which nat-
ural selection within the cosmos again serves to en-
hance. Rather than being a separate, morally nasty
mechanism for biological evolution, natural selec-
tion is subsumed under the general development of
the universe toward positive qualities. And because
we are the most complex, creative, and autonomous
creatures on Earth, we can find our meaning and
value in these qualities.
biological theory
Finally, Darwin’s and Singer’s work points to-
ward a positive connection between the evolution of
altruism and the Christian ethical commandment to
love all equally. Altruism springs from love of kin
and clan. It makes human sociality possible. Without
it, life would be nasty, brutish, and short. But since
we are symbol-wielding, institution-building crea-
tures, altruism need not be limited to literal kin. We
say, symbolically, that all people are brothers and sis-
ters. We apply terms like “daughter” to those unre-
lated to us, calling them “daughters-in-law.” We es-
tablish institutions that demand we treat all equally
and condemn nepotism. In doing these things, we
can and do extend our capacity to love beyond kin
and clan to embrace all humanity, and even all-
sentient beings.
Yet, Singer is correct when he says extending our
altruism is difficult. With the best of intentions, we
stumble and fall. The distance between our evolved
altruism and our ideals may give us a new under-
standing of the Christian doctrine of original sin,
that side of our nature leading us to egocentricity
and nepotism. Moreover, the difficulty of loving be-
yond kin and clan also implies that we need a God
such as Christianity posits, one who forgives.
As increasing numbers of people have explored
the relationship between biological theory and
ethics, they have uncovered significant connections.
Rachels argues that the arbitrary nature of species
means we need to focus on individuals when we
think morally. Darwin and Ayala find our aptitude
for ethics has evolved. Kin selection says our capac-
ity for love and altruism has also evolved. Ruse and
Wilson claim some of our specific ethical disposi-
tions evolved.
Evolutionary and evolved ethics are relevant to
the problem of evil and the moral status of our spe-
cies. They help elucidate our capacity for religion
and our ability to follow the Christian ethical com-
mand to love all equally. Although there is no in-
eluctable causal or logical connection between bio-
logical theory and ethics, ethics can no longer be
done adequately without considering the contribu-
tions of biology to our understanding of our place in
the universe, our attraction to religion, our capacity
for doing moral philosophy, and the evolution of our
ethical sentiments, particularly our altruism.
See also: ALTRUISM; ANIMALS, TREATMENT OF; AU-
TONOMY OF ETHICS; COMPETITION; CONSCIENCE;
150
COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS; DARWIN; EVOLUTION; FAM-
ILY; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GROUPS, MORAL STATUS
OF; IMPARTIALITY; INDIVIDUALISM; LIFE, MEANING
OF; MORAL COMMUNITY, BOUNDARIES OF; MORAL
PSYCHOLOGY; NATURAL LAW; NATURALISM; NATURE
AND ETHICS; PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY; PHI-
LOSOPHY OF RELIGION; RECIPROCITY; RELIGION; SO-
CIAL CONTRACT; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SYMPATHY;
TECHNOLOGY AND NATURE; THEOLOGICAL ETHICS.
Bibliography
Alexander, Richard D. Darwinism and Human Affairs.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979.
Bradie, Michael. The Secret Chain, Evolution and Ethics.
New York: State University of New York Press, 1994.
History and criticism of evolutionary and evolved
ethics, including their relevance to animal rights.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. London: John
Murray, 1859. The beginning of it all.
———. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to
Sex. 2 vols. London, 1871. Darwin’s ethical theory.
Hamilton, William D. “The Genetical Evolution of Social
Behaviour I and II.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7
(1964): 1–51. The beginning of sociobiology.
Nitecki, Matthew H., and Doris V. Nitecki, eds. Evolu-
tionary Ethics. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1993. A well-balanced collection of new essays
by leaders in the fields of evolutionary and evolved
ethics.
Rachels, James. Created from Animals: The Moral Impli-
cations of Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991. Excellent short account of the theory of
evolution, Darwinism and religion, speciesism, and
moral individualism. The book to read.
Richards, Robert J. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolu-
tionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1987. Evolutionary ethics,
Darwin’s ethical theory, Richards’s ethical theory, criti-
cisms, bibliography.
Rolston, Holmes, ed. Biology, Ethics, and the Origins of
Life. Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1995. Wide-ranging
collection of new essays from the cosmos to a global
Earth ethic.
Ruse, Michael. Taking Darwin Seriously. Oxford: Black-
well, 1986. Spencer, social Darwinism, Wilson,
bibliography.
Ruse, Michael, and E. O. Wilson. “Moral Philosophy as
Applied Science.” Philosophy 61 (1986): 173–92. A
seminal early essay in evolved ethics.
Singer, Peter. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Socio-
biology. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981.
Thompson, Paul, ed. Issues in Evolutionary Ethics. Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Col-

lection of previously published seminal essays in
evolved ethics.
Trivers, Robert L. “Parent-Offspring Conflict.” American
Zoology 14 (1974): 249–64.
Wesson, Robert, and Patricia A. Williams, eds. Evolution
and Human Values. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Col-
lection of new essays in evolutionary ethics, evolved
ethics, religion, and social implications.
Williams, Patricia A. “Christianity and Evolutionary
Ethics: Sketch toward a Reconciliation.” Zygon: Jour-
nal of Religion and Science 31 (1996): 253–68. A re-
sponse to Zygon 29, no. 1.
———. Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and
Original Sin. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2001. Ex-
planations of theory of evolution and sociobiology. Ap-
plication of evolved ethics to Christianity and the prob-
lem of evil.
Wilson, E. O. On Human Nature. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1978. Evolved ethics; annotated bib-
liography in the “Notes.”
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 29, no. 1 (1994).
Issue devoted to Christianity and evolutionary and
evolved ethics.
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 34, no. 3 (1999).
Issue devoted to evolved ethics and religion.
Patricia A. Williams
blackmail
The issue of blackmail involves a significant element
of paradox, and brings up in novel ways central top-
ics such as the permissibility of threats and offers,
the relations between morality and the law, the role
of consequentialist and nonconsequentialist ethical
considerations, and the limits of freedom. Its relative
neglect by philosophers is therefore unfortunate.
The notion of blackmail is often applied loosely,
owing to confusion or an attempt to use its strong
pejorative implication rhetorically. Here it will be
considered in a narrow sense, which includes the
following features: (a) a declaration of INTENTION to
act (or refrain from acting) in a legally permissible
(and nonobligatory) way which the target of black-
mail would (it is thought) find unwelcome; ac-
companied by (b) an offer not to carry out the in-
tention on condition of receiving legally permissible
compensation.
The paradigmatic example is Q threatening to
tell Z’s wife about Z’s involvement with another
woman, unless Z pays him a large sum of money. Let
us call this “ordinary blackmail”. It is legal to ask for
money, and likewise it is not illegal to tell another
151
blackmail
person’s wife about her husband’s infidelity, or to
threaten to do so. The ethical analogue to the legal
issue is less clear, but it suffices for our purposes to
note that, taken individually, none of the compo-
nents of “ordinary blackmail” is normally thought to
be morally odious in a way which approaches the
common attitude toward blackmail. Hence the no-
tion of blackmail used here is set apart from “extor-
tion”, a coercive request accompanied by a threat to
carry out an illegal act (for example, the threat to
beat someone up); and also from the threat to spread
false information, which might fall under the notion
of “defamation”. Likewise, we are assuming that the
blackmailer’s advantage did not come about illicitly
(e.g., through wire-tapping). Requests to pay the
blackmailer in unacceptable “currency” (e.g., that
the person being blackmailed perform an immoral
or illegal act) also lie outside of blackmail in the
sense which concerns us. We must distinguish “or-
dinary blackmail” from these different cases if we
are to consider its inherent difficulties, since these
cases bring up different issues. Finally, it is impor-
tant to realise that the narrow notion of blackmail
that we are considering is not limited to the threat-
ening use of information (as in Q’s blackmailing Z).
If, for example, one asked all shops of a certain kind
to pay one a monthly retainer for not carrying out
the credible threat of opening a competing shop
nearby, problems might arise which fall within our
area of concern.
It has been claimed that the idea of “ordinary
blackmail” gives rise to two paradoxes, which will
now be addressed.
The Conceptual Paradox of Blackmail
The first difficulty with the common view of
blackmail is that all its components—the asking for
goods, the threat to do what one is permitted to do,
and the carrying out of the act itself—are in them-
selves permissible; so where does the powerful ob-
jection to blackmail come from? We have no similar
difficulty with understanding common attitudes to-
ward extortion, for if one is not allowed to beat peo-
ple up then it is understandable that one is not al-
lowed to threaten to do so, let alone demand
payment for desisting. It has been countered that in
“ordinary blackmail” the request for money is
backed up by a threat, and that this combination
brings forth something new, which is the focus of
blackmail
concern. Thus there is nothing paradoxical about the
fact that in themselves the elements which make up
the practice of blackmail are permissible.
The ethical significance of combined acts may in-
deed transcend the significance of their individual
elements, so that if the first paradox is taken as for-
mal it can be dismissed. However, the way in which
the “alchemy” of the novel emergence of badness or
wrongness operates in this case remains somewhat
mysterious, and noting the innocuous nature of the
elements of “ordinary blackmail” helps bring this
out. If one may threaten to do what one is allowed
to do, offering not to do so in return for limited mon-
etary compensation does not seem to bring forth
such radical and novel heinousness. And this sense
of dissatisfaction is increased when we reflect on
other factors. For example, the person being black-
mailed would in fact often prefer to be offered the
option of paying the blackmailer, and would accept
if offered. Allowing the would-be blackmailer to sell
news of the affair to the press but not allowing him
to sell his silence to Z would not be welcomed by Z.
Such concerns are substantive, and hence point us
in the direction of the second paradox.
The Substantive Paradox
The Substantive Paradox represents the main
philosophical difficulty with blackmail. It follows
from the apparent similarity between cases of “or-
dinary blackmail” and common practices in social
and economic life, which are not taken to be ex-
tremely reprehensible by morality, and are not pro-
hibited by law. Many examples of this sort in fact
conform to the explication of the two features of
blackmail elucidated above. In many labour disputes
workers legally threaten to cease work, while em-
phasising the damage they can inflict, in order to
gain higher salaries; and employers similarly
threaten to close down operations or hire other
workers if their demands are not accepted. In di-
vorce cases the partners can threaten to prolong the
proceedings if the settlement does not go their way.
Boycotts of goods or services may be threatened as
backing for various sorts of demands. People may
ask for money in order not to raise fences unpleasant
or even harmful to their neighbours. Victims may
threaten to sue companies under tort law, thereby
bringing them adverse publicity, unless compensa-
tion is forthcoming. Politicians indirectly threaten to
152
cut funds for groups who do not support them. And
the threat to use force or economic sanctions is a
common staple in international relations. Perhaps
many instances of pushing up prices of scarce goods
or services in effect constitute monetary demands
backed by threats. Why are all of these fundamen-
tally different from blackmail, from a moral point of
view?
One way of approaching the philosophical diffi-
culty of blackmail is to assume that our common
intuitions are correct. Under this interpretation the
puzzle merely becomes one of how to justify the
status quo. Even then we still have our philosophical
work cut out. But a true philosophical attitude will
seek to question more deeply whether common in-
tuitions are justified at all. One of the effects of
thinking deeply about the Substantive Paradox is to
call into question basic assumptions about RIGHTS
and moral limits. Note that the consequences of the
Substantive Paradox threaten to spread in both di-
rections. We may come to feel that we need to take
a more tolerant moral stance toward “ordinary
blackmail” and decriminalize it. But alternatively
common practices which resemble blackmail may be
seen as the moral equivalents of blackmail, and
therefore less tolerable morally and legally. In any
case the prospect is disconcerting.
A number of attempts to solve the Substantive
Paradox have appeared in the literature. First, it is
possible to offer a cynical explanation of common
attitudes. One such explanation is that the thought
of being blackmailed in the ordinary ways is fright-
ening to the rich and powerful in society, who may
be less concerned with, say, the threats of employers
or politicians. That “ordinary blackmail” be taken so
seriously is therefore just what one would expect.
But the cynical sort of explanation does not provide
justification, and we should attempt to go beyond it.
It is possible to concede that in MORAL TERMS the
similarity between “ordinary blackmail” and the
threatened social practices is great, but still perceive
the possibility for legal justification of common prac-
tice, thereby explaining away the paradox. For ex-
ample, difficulties with enforcement may justify a
divergent legal attitude, without deep underlying
moral differences. This approach is problematic,
however. First, although the issue of blackmail in-
herently involves both moral and legal matters, the
case for paradox can be limited to the moral side. It
would be hard to deny that we hold blackmailers to

be morally despicable, irrespective of any legal sanc-
tion. Such a severe negative attitude is not com-
monly expressed toward those who (say) engage in
sharp economic BARGAINING. Even our strictly eth-
ical intuitions seem to tolerate practices which, on
closer inspection, may seem indistinguishable from
“ordinary blackmail”. Second, arguing by way of a
firm distinction between the moral and the legal is-
sues would involve a high price. If our difficulties
with blackmail engendered a huge gap between the
two, this in itself would be a surprising and disturb-
ing result. Finally, the moral and the legal seem par-
ticularly entwined in the matter of blackmail: eth-
ical disapproval is an integral feature of its legal
circumscription.
A third way in which philosophers and jurists
have tried to deal with the Substantive Paradox is
by seeking to identify a feature of “ordinary black-
mail” which distinguishes it ethically from rough so-
cial practices which seem so similar. This route is
the most alluring, because it would diffuse the Sub-
stantive Paradox: once you look closely “ordinary
blackmail” and the threatened practices may turn
out to be substantially different. However, it has not
proved easy to formulate such a “litmus test”. The
candidates considered have included, among others,
coerced versus uncoerced choices, the invasion of
PRIVACY, the rights of third parties, the idea of EX-
PLOITATION, and the distinction between harming
and not benefitting. The specific discussions are
complex and intriguing, but have not been mani-
festly successful. The suggestions offered seem to
succeed only in limited types of cases, or to beg the
question by making crucial moral assumptions as to
what is morally disallowed which are shown to be
contentious by the issue of blackmail. For example,
the gutter press may invade a person’s privacy and
exploit her weaknesses in order to make money out
of her in a way that is similar to blackmail, and a
threat to raise a fence on one’s land to the detriment
of one’s neighbour, unless the latter pay, would seem
to be a case of coerced choice and outright harming;
and yet neither practice would be viewed in the same
way as “ordinary blackmail”.
Finally, perhaps it is not that “ordinary blackmail”
and the practices discussed are inherently ethically
very different, but rather that there are merely fur-
ther reasons to allow the other practices to continue.
“Ordinary blackmail” is singled out, not because its
bad features are unique, but because there is nothing
153
blackmail
good about it to overcome the badness. This ap-
proach requires the specific justification of the given
practices. Consequentialist, rights-oriented, con-
tractual, and virtue-based ethics approaches may all
be able to contribute here, but the first seems to ac-
quire a particular authority if this philosophical di-
rection is taken. For example, the nastiness of using
information might be increased through its appear-
ance in the gutter press, but there are other good
reasons to maintain a free press. The use of threats
and offers in “quasi-blackmail” form in economic
bargaining may likewise be justified because of its
economic efficiency or by virtue of the right both to
offer and withhold one’s labour or employment. But
no equivalent saving graces can be found in “ordi-
nary blackmail”. “Ordinary blackmail” is coercive,
exploitative, invasive, etc., like many other social
practices, but the point is that there is very little
good about it. Decriminalizing “ordinary blackmail”
would cause widespread social discomfort, gener-
ating fear for individual privacy as invasion becomes
commercially viable. Moreover, an atmosphere
would prevail in which each person constitutes a po-
tential enemy. Yet few benefits can be expected.
See also: BAD FAITH; BARGAINING; BRIBERY; BUSINESS
ETHICS; CENSORSHIP; COERCION; CONSENT; CONSE-
QUENTIALISM; CONTRACTS; CORRUPTION; CORREC-
TIONAL ETHICS; DECEIT; DETERRENCE, THREATS, AND
RETALIATION; ENVY; EXPLOITATION; FORGERY; FREE-
DOM OF THE PRESS; HOMOSEXUALITY; INTENTION; IN-
TERNATIONAL JUSTICE: CONFLICT; LEGAL PHILOSO-
PHY; POLICE ETHICS; PORNOGRAPHY; PRIVACY; PUBLIC
AND PRIVATE MORALITY; REVENGE; RIGHTS; SECRECY
AND CONFIDENTIALITY; TERRORISM; TRUST; WAR
AND PEACE.
Bibliography
Clark, Michael. “There Is No Paradox of Blackmail.” Anal-
ysis 54 (1994): 54–61. The case against the Formal
Paradox.
Feinberg, Joel. “The Paradox of Blackmail.” Ratio Juris 1
(1988): 83–95. A careful investigation of the difficul-
ties, with a legal orientation, particularly trying to dis-
tinguish the different types of blackmail.
Fletcher, George P. “Blackmail: The Paradigmatic Crime.”
University of Pennsylvania Law Review 141 (1993):
1617–38. A good critical explication of the Substan-
tive Paradox and attempts to solve it. This paper ap-
pears in a volume devoted to blackmail, and many of
the other articles are helpful as well.
blackmail
Gorr, Michael. “Liberalism and the Paradox of Blackmail.”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 21 (1992): 43–66. Dis-
tinguishing various forms of blackmail and exploring
the pragmatic difficulties of criminalizing similar
practices.
Lindgren, James. “Unraveling the Paradox of Blackmail.”
Columbia Law Review 84 (1984): 670–717. A fine
critical survey of legal scholarship, particularly of at-
tempts to distinguish blackmail from similar practices
that are legal.
Mack, Eric. “In Defence of Blackmail.” Philosophical
Studies 41 (1982): 273–84. The strongest case for le-
galising blackmail.
Murphy, Jeffrie G. “Blackmail: A Preliminary Inquiry.” The
Monist 63 (1980): 156–71. A good introduction to the
problem and a thoughtful investigation, particularly in
trying to find factors distinguishing blackmail from
similar practices.
Smilansky, Saul. “May We Stop Worrying about Black-
mail?” Analysis 55 (1995): 116–20. The case for the
Substantive Paradox, also considering blackmail which
is not information-based.
Saul Smilansky
Bradley, F[rancis] H[erbert]
(1846–1924)
Bradley’s father was a well-known preacher who, by
two successive wives, fathered twenty children. An
older half-brother became headmaster at Marlbor-
ough (a school Bradley attended for two years), and
a younger full brother, A. C. Bradley, achieved re-
nown as a literary scholar and critic. In 1865, Brad-
ley entered University College, Oxford, where he did
not distinguish himself in philosophically oriented
subjects; but he persevered, receiving a fellowship
(to be terminated only upon marriage) from Merton
College in 1870. Bradley never married, and he re-
mained a Fellow for fifty-four years. Extremely con-
servative in political matters (he hated even the
name of Gladstone) and highly eccentric in personal
practices (he allegedly prowled the grounds of his
college at night, shooting cats), Bradley became a
central figure of late-nineteenth-century British ide-
alism and, accordingly, a relentless and often insight-
ful critic of the prevailing “School of Experience”
(empiricism). Largely because of weak health, be-
ginning as early as 1871, he was a near recluse,
though he traveled frequently to the warmer climate
of southern France. A few months before his death,
Bradley was awarded the Order of Merit by King
George V.
154
Bradley’s sole work on moral philosophy is Eth-
ical Studies (1876), a second edition of which, with
additional notes, appeared in 1927; it was reprinted
in 1962 and again in 1988. The work ranges from a
discussion of “the vulgar notion of responsibility”
(which requires, among other things, an enduring
self—something, Bradley claims, the philosophical
theories of both determinism and indeterminism
cannot, to their detriment, allow for) to an account
of the relation between morality and RELIGION (in
which it is said that morality leads into religion and
that no truly religious person can be immoral). In
between, the work contains a negative critique of
both hedonistic UTILITARIANISM and the doctrine of
“duty for duty’s sake” (for both are one-sided or “ab-
stract,” hence, for Bradley, inadequate), and it pre-
sents a spirited defense of self-realizationist ethics,
which finds significant though not final expression
in “my station and its duties.”
Bradley introduces the heart of his ethics in essay
II, “Why Should I Be Moral?” This question, he
claims, is improper because it presupposes, gener-
ally, that whatever is good is good as a means—
hence either everything is good (relative to some-
thing or other) or nothing is good (in itself)—and
because it presupposes, specifically, that being moral
or virtuous is at best good merely as a means to a
nonmoral end—which is repugnant to “the moral
consciousness.” But the question is proper if under-
stood as posing these and similar questions: Is mo-
rality an end in itself? If so, how or in what way?
Are morality and the end for humankind contro-
vertible notions, or is morality only one part, aspect,
or side of the whole end for humanity? The very
formulation of these questions shows that Bradley’s
entrance into ethics is guided more by ARISTOTLE
(384–322 B.C.E.) than by HEGEL (1770–1831),
though once Bradley finds himself within ethics, his
position takes a decidedly Hegelian turn.
The end in itself, Bradley claims, is self-realization.
This end is not something that the moral agent,
through some activity, produces in the sense of a
product that exists outside the agent and outside her
activity (as with, say, a painting by an artist); thus it
is not something that the agent can in turn receive
from without and feel (as states of PLEASURE are).
The end in itself is to be realized in the moral agent
through her activity, such that it may be called an
end “internal to” the activity. In sum, the moral end
is the morally good or virtuous self, or, in the idiom

of KANT (1724–1804), the good will (which is good
through its willing alone). But now, as Bradley sees
it, Kant must be left behind: “Realize yourself” does
not mean merely to “be a whole” in the Kantian
sense, that is, in the sense of consistency (“it is no
human ideal to lead the ‘life of an oyster’”); it is to
“be an infinite whole,” which apparently means (fol-
lowing Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit) to become a
member of a social whole such that you desire to do
only what you, as a member of a social whole, ought
to do—in which case, you experience no limit or
restriction from without, this being a central mean-
ing of infinity. In the course of this convoluted bit of
reasoning, Bradley corrects Goethe’s admonition,
“Be a whole or join a whole,” by saying, “You can
not be a whole unless you join a whole.”
As hinted at already, Bradley denies that the self
to be realized is the self presupposed by hedonism
(i.e., the “feeling self”) or the self of the doctrine of
“duty for duty’s sake” (i.e., the purely formal self)
whose “morality” (it is said, following Hegel again)
lacks all matter or content. The self to be realized is,
first of all, the social self, and it is realized (indeed,
it is real) only by carrying out the duties of one’s
station in society. In response to the objection that
this position is “mere rhetoric,” “a bad metaphysical
dream,” because it assumes the “priority” of the state
or society over the individual, Bradley uses his typ-
ical ploy: He argues that this objection presupposes
something—here, the notion of “the individual”—
that cannot be justified—an abstraction, a fiction, a
nonentity. Reference might be made at this point to
Bradley’s distinctive style, which T. S. Eliot (1888–
1965) once called “perfect,” as illustrated perhaps
by these remarks: “The child is not fallen from
heaven”; “he is not born into a desert, but into a
living world.” While jettisoning the notion of the in-
dividual, Bradley also rejects the theory of natural
rights—largely on grounds resembling those of very
recent advocates of VIRTUE ETHICS and communitar-
ian ethics. (It is surprising that these recent move-
ments recognize no significant debt to Bradley.)
Bradley’s account of “my station” can be summed
up in two statements: “To be moral is to live in ac-
cordance with the moral tradition of one’s country”
(which Bradley quotes from Hegel), and, “There is
nothing better than my station and its duties, nor
anything higher or more truly beautiful” (said in re-
sponse to the person who would improve upon the
morality of his society and who, Bradley remarks, is
155
Bradley, F. H.
“already on the threshold of immorality”). But Brad-
ley recognizes the problems and limitations of the
ethics of “my station”; for one thing, the community
of a person may be “in a confused or rotten condi-
tion”; for another, and this statement must be added
to the two cited just above, “You can not confine a
man to his station and its duties.” These thoughts
lead Bradley to the essay on “ideal morality,” which
deals with the nonsocial self, that is, the self that
finds it obligatory to search for beauty and truth:
“Man is not man at all unless social, but man is not
much above the beasts unless more than social.”
Even within “my station” there can occur a level of
morality higher than that of merely carrying out my
duties as a possessor of various stations or roles; it
is (I think) the constant manifestation of a good
moral character in all aspects of life, including (and
these Bradley mentions) eating, sleeping, walking.
(Perhaps he has in mind the idea from Aristotle that
the truly noble man manifests his nobility in even his
gait.)
To the charge that his ethics contradicts absolute
morality (the “right in itself” thesis), thereby making
morality relative and therefore nonexistent, Bradley
counters that “unless morals varied, there could be
no morality”; the ethics of any state in human EVO-
LUTION is justified (hence, in a sense, absolute) for
that state, but to demand an ethics justified for all
ages is futile. Moral philosophy, Bradley stresses, is
not to reform the world but to provide an account
of what, at any given time, morality amounts to. Nor
is it to instruct us as to what is right and wrong in
particular cases: “The decision rests with percep-
tion.” No moral theory, including that of “my sta-
tion,” can eliminate all “collisions of duties,” and to
expect otherwise, Bradley insists, is to be deluded.
Moreover, every act can be considered right and
wrong, since, Bradley notes, from at least one “side”
it can be “subsumed under a good rule” and from at
least one other counted as violating a good rule. (To
point this out to ordinary people, Bradley says, is
likely to “debauch” and “corrupt” them.) Finally, full
realization of the self reaches beyond even “ideal”
morality (within which there is always a “something
to be done”) to religion (where, somewhere and
somehow, “all is done”). This suggests the mystical
notion that the individual self can achieve satisfac-
tion (and become truly “what it is”) only in the
“world self,” the Absolute—but on this note we
have gone far beyond ethics.
Bradley, F. H.
See also: COMMUNITARIANISM; HEGEL; IDEALIST
ETHICS; SELF AND SOCIAL SELF; VIRTUE ETHICS.
Bibliography
Selected Works by Bradley
Appearance and Reality. London, 1893; 2d ed., 1897. Ap-
pearance is contradictory, and reality is consistent, ex-
periential, and all-inclusive (the Absolute).
Collected Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935.
Essays on Truth and Reality. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1914.
Ethical Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 [1876].
A reissue of the 1962 edition, edited and introduced
by Richard Wollheim.
Principles of Logic. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1922 [1883]. Bradley attacks traditional subject-
predicate logic and the inductive logic of J. S. Mill.
Works about Bradley
Manser, Anthony, and Guy Stock, eds. The Philosophy of
F. H. Bradley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Con-
tains two essays explicitly on Bradley’s ethics: one by
David Bell and one by Crispin Wright.
Nicholson, Peter P. The Political Philosophy of the British
Idealists: Selected Studies. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1990. Defense of Bradley on social mo-
rality and self-realization.
Wollheim, Richard. F. H. Bradley. Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1959. A very helpful commentary, though only
part of one chapter deals with Bradley’s ethics.
John Atwell
Brandt, Richard B. (1910–1997)
In a series of influential works, Brandt has developed
a sophisticated form of rule-utilitarianism and has
applied it to such topics as ABORTION, SUICIDE, the
rules of war, and welfare rights. This article focuses
on his most systematic work, A Theory of the Good
and the Right (1979).
In his theory of the good, Brandt applies a twist
to the familiar account of a person’s good as the
satisfaction of her desires. He allows only rational
desires to count, where the criterion of rationality is
whether the desire would survive maximum expo-
sure to facts and logic in a process of cognitive psy-
chotherapy. This proposal has two virtues: It dis-
counts most desires based on defective processes of
acquisition, while allowing that the same desire may
156
be rational for one agent and irrational for another.
An unresolved problem is that faulty acquisition of
a desire, and its extinction by exposure to evidence,
will not necessarily go together (e.g., if early trauma
produces an aversion that withstands cognitive
psychotherapy).
Brandt’s theory of the right concerns the moral
code for society that people would choose if fully
rational, in the following sense. Individuals remove
all desires that are irrational according to the cog-
nitive psychotherapy test. Then, while fully aware of,
and attentive to, all relevant information (including
facts about themselves and the INSTITUTIONS of their
society), they choose a common code to live under.
As a utilitarian, Brandt would like to be able to
assert the strong conclusion that a happiness-maxi-
mizing code definitely would emerge from such a
process. But he realizes that persons varying in the
degree or scope of their BENEVOLENCE would not all
arrive at the same code. So he settles for weaker
conclusions: (1) Since impartial benevolence is not
irrational, some people would choose a happiness-
maximizing code. (2) Even pure egoists would ben-
efit from a code containing the familiar happiness-
promoting rules (of, for example, nonaggression);
hence, even they would select a code that overlaps
a happiness-maximizing code in many of its core
elements. (3) Somewhat benevolent people would
choose codes that overlap even more with happiness-
maximizing codes.
Why doesn’t Brandt derive the strong conclusion
by stipulating impartial benevolence as a feature of
those who choose a moral code? He feels that moral
theory should be capable of justifying a code to peo-
ple with various motivations. Showing a code is ra-
tional, in his sense, should incline even an egoist to
favor it. Such a person would not be moved by a
demonstration that the code would be chosen by im-
partially benevolent people.
As it is rational for at least some people to favor
a happiness-maximizing moral code, Brandt outlines
what such a code is like. It consists of a plurality of
rules that are simple enough to be learned, together
with procedures for dealing with conflicts among the
rules. The content of these rules resembles that of
traditional morality, except when certain precepts of
the latter derive from false beliefs or social condi-
tions that no longer hold. Brandt also argues that a
happiness-maximizing code would be economically
egalitarian (because of the declining marginal utility

of income), with departures from EQUALITY allowed
to provide incentives and take care of special NEEDS.
Perhaps the most novel idea here is Brandt’s use
of a pragmatic criterion to deal with rule complexity
and rule conflict. The appropriate level of complex-
ity, and the correct procedure of conflict resolution,
is determined by what would produce the most HAP-
PINESS, given the cognitive and motivational limita-
tions of those who will live under the rules. This
suggestion may solve, for utilitarians, some of the
problems arising from the fact that any act falls un-
der a multitude of accurate descriptions and a mul-
titude of possible rules.
See also: BENEVOLENCE; DESIRE; EXCUSES; GOOD,
THEORIES OF THE; HAPPINESS; IMPARTIALITY; META-
ETHICS; MORAL RULES; NORMS; PSYCHOANALYSIS;
PSYCHOLOGY; RATIONAL CHOICE; SOCIAL CONTRACT;
UTILITARIANISM; WELFARE RIGHTS AND SOCIAL
POLICY.
Bibliography
Selected Works by Brandt
“The Concept of a Moral Right and Its Function.” Journal
of Philosophy 80 (1983): 29–45.
“The Concepts of Obligation and Duty.” Mind 73 (1964):
374–93.
“The Definition of an ‘Ideal Observer’ Theory in Ethics.”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 15 (1954):
407–13.
Ethical Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1959.
Hopi Ethics: A Theoretical Analysis. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1954.
“Moral Philosophy and the Analysis of Language.” The
Lindley Lecture, Department of Philosophy, University
of Kansas, 1963, pp. 1–24. Published by the Depart-
ment of Philosophy, University of Kansas.
“Rational Desires.” Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association 43 (1970): 43–64.
“Some Merits of One Form of Rule-Utilitarianism.” Uni-
versity of Colorado Studies in Philosophy 3 (1967):
39–65.
A Theory of the Good and the Right. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1979.
“Toward a Credible Form of Utilitarianism.” In Morality
and the Language of Conduct, edited by Hector-Neri
Castañeda and George Nakhnikian, 107–43. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1963.
“Traits of Character: A Conceptual Analysis.” American
Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970): 23–37.
157
Brentano, Franz Clemens
“A Utilitarian Theory of Excuses.” Philosophical Review
78 (1969): 337–61.
“Utilitarianism and the Rules of War.” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 1 (1972): 145–65.
Brandt, Richard, and Jaegwon Kim. “Wants as Explana-
tions of Actions.” Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963):
425–35.
Gregory S. Kavka
Brentano, Franz Clemens
(1838–1917)
A German philosopher and psychologist, Brentano
taught at the universities of Würzburg and Vienna.
His most influential philosophical work was the Psy-
chologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), in
which he emphasized the importance of the concept
of intentionality. His principal ethical writings were
the Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889) and Grund-
legung und Aufbau der Ethik (1952), the latter pub-
lished posthumously.
Brentano’s theory of value is based on the analogy
he believed to hold between intellectual and emotive
phenomena. As did DESCARTES (1596–1650), Bren-
tano assumed that all mental phenomena are di-
rected on the objects of our ideas. We may take an
intellectual stand toward such objects, thereby hav-
ing a belief about them; and we may take an emo-
tional stand toward these objects. In each case, the
attitude is either positive or negative: We may affirm
or deny the object of the idea; and we may love or
hate that object. And the emotive attitudes, like the
intellectual attitudes, may be correct or incorrect.
Brentano’s theory is primarily a theory of intrinsic
value, a theory of what is good or bad “in itself” or
“as an end.” To say that a thing is intrinsically good,
according to him, is to say that it is correct to love
that thing as an end; and to say that a thing is in-
trinsically bad is to say that it is correct to hate that
thing as an end. Brentano believed that we can be
immediately aware of the correctness of certain of
our emotive attitudes, just as we can be immediately
aware of the correctness (i.e., the truth) of certain
of our intellectual attitudes. In each case, the cor-
rectness consists in a relation of appropriateness or
FITTINGNESS between the attitude and its object.
Brentano’s theory of intrinsic value is pluralistic.
He constructed a hierarchy of values in which PLEA-
SURE plays a subordinate role. The only bearers of
intrinsic value, according to Brentano, are conscious
Brentano, Franz Clemens
states. And every conscious state, as a conscious
state, contains some part that is intrinsically good.
Every correct judgment is intrinsically good; so, too,
is every correct emotion and every enrichment of our
intellectual life. Since every intrinsic EVIL is itself a
conscious state, there can be no intrinsic evil that
does not include some intrinsic good. Among the
things that are “predominately bad” are error, pain,
every unjustified act of HATE (especially the hatred
of that which is good), and every unjustified act of
LOVE (especially the love of that which is bad). Sen-
sory pleasure is, as such, intrinsically good.
Brentano stressed the importance of what G. E.
MOORE (1873–1958) was to call “the principle of
organic unities.” Such unities are illustrated by
“pleasure in the bad” and “displeasure in the good.”
The intrinsic value of the whole is not a function
merely of the intrinsic value of its parts. Brentano
appealed to organic unities in dealing with the prob-
lem of evil.
His ethics is based on his theory of value. He for-
mulated the “supreme ethical maxim” this way:
“Choose the best that is attainable.” According to
one plausible interpretation, the maxim tells us that
if the agent is justified in believing that the conse-
quences of his act are intrinsically better than those
of any alternative act, then the act is right.
See also: EMOTIVISM; FITTINGNESS; GOOD, THEORIES
OF THE; INTENTION; VALUE, THEORY OF.
Bibliography
Works by Brentano
The Foundations and Construction of Ethics. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 [1952].
The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right in Wrong. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969 [1889].
Works about Brentano
Chisholm, Roderick M. Brentano and Intrinsic Value.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Kraus, Oskar. Die Werttheorien: Geschichte und Kritik.
Brünn: Rudolf M. Rohrer, 1937.
McAlister, Linda. The Philosophy of Brentano. London:
Duckworth, 1976.
Roderick M. Chisholm
158
bribery
Bribery has long been a topic of interest to legal
scholars, but serious work on the topic by philoso-
phers is of very recent date.
Analysis of the Concept
The following are all clear instances of bribery:
1. A gambler gives a professional boxer a new
car in exchange for the boxer’s losing a
fight.
2. A defendant pays a judge or juror to decide
a case in her favor.
3. A businessman pays a purchasing agent to
purchase products from his company.
In all of these cases, an individual (the briber) pays
another individual (the bribee) something of value
in exchange for the bribee’s doing something that
violates a special duty or special obligation that at-
taches to an office occupied, or a role or practice
participated in, by the bribee. To be bribed is to ac-
cept a payment that compromises a special duty or
special obligation that one has. Paying someone to
violate a moral duty that holds for all human beings
regardless of their particular circumstances—for ex-
ample, the duty not to murder others—is not an in-
stance of bribery.
All of the philosophers who have proposed defi-
nitions of bribery endorse the outlines of the analysis
sketched above. However, there is considerable dis-
agreement about the nature of the special duties in-
volved in bribery. Some contend that these must be
duties owed to specific third parties for whom one
is an employee or agent. Others contend that the
bribee’s special duties need not be derived from be-
ing the employee or agent of a third party. This dis-
pute about the proper analysis of the concept has
important consequences for the normative assess-
ment of bribery. In nonslave, noncaste societies, peo-
ple assume the duties of office, employment, and
agency of their own FREE WILL. And it is plausible
to claim that one has an implicit promise or contract
to fulfill the duties of one’s office or position.
Any satisfactory account of bribery must be able
to distinguish between bribery and extortion. Very
roughly, extortion involves threatening another with
harm unless she pays one something of value. For
example, the threat by a foreign official to cease do-

ing business with a company unless it pays him large
sums of money is a case of extortion rather than brib-
ery. Many of the payments forbidden by the anti-
bribery provisions of the United States Foreign Cor-
rupt Practices Act constitute extortion payments
rather than bribery payments. Bribery must also be
distinguished from practices that are tantamount to
tipping. In some countries, government officials
and businesspeople expect nominal payments in ex-
change for performing routine tasks (e.g., passing
goods through customs). When such payments are
openly condoned as a means for officials to supple-
ment their incomes, and do not secure special favors
incompatible with the duties attaching to the offi-
cials’ positions, the payments should not be viewed
as bribes but rather as tips.
What’s Wrong with Bribery?
The moral status of accepting a bribery payment
to violate special duties or obligations that one owes
depends crucially on the moral status of the special
duties or obligations in question. In cases in which
one’s special duties derive from one’s voluntary par-
ticipation in offices or roles whose goals are morally
permissible, there are typically several kinds of rea-
sons for thinking it morally wrong to accept bribes
to violate those duties. (1) Violating the duties in
question is tantamount to a breach of promise or
breach of contract. For, by hypothesis, one has vol-
untarily adopted an office or role to which specific
duties attach; one has agreed or consented to fulfill
those duties. (2) Acceptance of the bribes and sub-
sequent failure to fulfill the duties in question often
have very bad consequences. For example, if a busi-
nessperson accepts a bribe to purchase a product or
service that is either inferior to or costlier than some-
thing that he could have purchased, then he is ham-
pering the efficiency of his company. Acceptance of
the bribe also harms the competitors of the firms he
is being paid to favor. The acceptance of bribes by
government officials may lead to such undesirable
consequences as the pollution of the environment,
the endangerment of the health and safety of work-
ers, or the noncollection of taxes. Bribery also has
indirect bad consequences in that it tends to dimin-
ish public TRUST in the political, legal, and/or eco-
nomic system(s).
The moral obligations appealed to here are only
prima facie or presumptive obligations and can be
159
bribery
overturned by weightier moral considerations.
Weighty financial obligations (e.g., the need to fund
life-saving surgery) might override the ordinary pre-
sumption against accepting bribes. Moreover, some
institutional obligations arise within organizations
whose very aims are immoral (e.g., the Gestapo).
The existence of these obligations prompts us to ask
whether there is any kind of prima facie moral duty
to fulfill institutional duties that promote immoral
ends. Does the Gestapo agent who freely promises
to obey the Führer thereby incur a prima facie (albeit
clearly overridden) moral duty to help murder Jews?
The foregoing does not address the moral status
of offering bribes. Bribers sometimes have special
duties and obligations of their own that would be
violated by the offer of a bribe. For example, it might
be contrary to the explicit policies of a person’s em-
ployer to promote sales by offering bribes to pro-
spective buyers. The wrongness of offering a bribe
may also be partly accounted for by something like
the following principle: It is prima facie wrong to
cause or induce another person to do something that
is morally wrong, all things considered. Conversely,
in at least some cases in which it would be morally
permissible, all things considered, for someone to
accept a bribe to do X (e.g., paying a guard in a
concentration camp to allow someone to escape),
there may be no moral presumption whatever
against offering her a bribe to do X.
There are other significant moral questions relat-
ing to bribery; among them are the following: the
moral status of extortion payments and threats, and
the extent (if any) to which the recipients of bribery
payments are morally obligated to do the things they
have been paid to do.
See also: AUTHORITY; BUSINESS ETHICS; COERCION;
CONTRACTS; CORRUPTION; CULTURAL STUDIES; DE-
CEIT; DETERRENCE, THREATS AND RETALIATION;
DUTY AND OBLIGATION; ECONOMIC SYSTEMS; FIDU-
CIARY RELATIONSHIPS; GOVERNMENT, ETHICS IN;
INSTITUTIONS; MULTICULTURALISM; PARTIALITY; PO-
LICE ETHICS; POLITICAL SYSTEMS; PROMISES; RECI-
PROCITY; RESPONSIBILITY.
Bibliography
Carson, Thomas L. “Bribery, Extortion, and ‘The Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act.’” Philosophy and Public Affairs
14 (1985): 66–90. Defends the view that accepting a
bribe involves the violation of an implicit promise or
bribery
agreement. Argues that many of the payments prohib-
ited by the FCPA are extortion payments and questions
the legitimacy of the FCPA’s prohibition on extortion
payments. Includes references to legal scholarship on
the FCPA.
———. “Bribery and Implicit Agreements: A Reply to
Philips.” Journal of Business Ethics 6 (1987): 123–25.
Danley, John. “Toward a Theory of Bribery.” Business and
Professional Ethics Journal 2 (1984): 19–39. Defines
bribery as follows: the offering or giving or promising
to give something of value with the corrupt intent to
induce a person to violate the duties of his or her role
or office. Argues that accepting bribes is not always
prima facie wrong.
DeAndrade, Ken. “Bribery.” Journal of Business Ethics 4
(1985): 239–49. Defends the view that bribery in-
volves the “alienation of agency.”
Donaldson, Thomas, and Patricia Werhane, eds. Ethical
Theory in Business. 3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren-
tice Hall, 1988. See “Ethics and the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act” by Mark Pastin and Michael Hooker, pp.
48–53 (argues that many of the payments prohibited
by the FCPA are extortion payments and questions the
legitimacy of the FCPA’s prohibition on extortion pay-
ments); and “Moral Dimensions of the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act: Comments on Hooker and Pastin” by
Kenneth D. Alpern, pp. 54–59 (argues that the FCPA,
in particular its prohibition of payments which consti-
tute extortion payments rather than bribes, is morally
defensible).
Fremantle, Adam, and Sherman Katz. “The Foreign Cor-
rupt Practices Act Ammendment of 1988.” Interna-
tional Lawyer 23 (1989): 755–67.
Noonan, John T. Bribes. New York: Macmillan, 1984. A
monumental historical study with many interesting an-
ecdotes by a distinguished legal scholar.
Philips, Michael. “Bribery.” Ethics 94 (1984): 621–36.
Defines bribery as follows: “P accepts a bribe from R
if and only if P agrees for payment to act in a manner
dictated by R rather than doing what is required of him
as a participant in his practice.” Argues that accepting
bribes is not always prima facie wrong.
———. “Bribery, Consent and Prima Facie Duty: A Re-
joinder to Carson.” Journal of Business Ethics 6
(1987): 361–64.
Thomas L. Carson
Buber, [Mordekhai] Martin
(1878–1965)
Born in Vienna, Buber was influenced as a child by
the Hasidic mystical piety of joy in the everyday and,
as a student, by Ludwig FEUERBACH’s (1804–1872)
notion of the relation of Ich und Du (I and thou).
Widely learned in languages, he translated Friedrich
160
NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) into Polish and, with
Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), the Hebrew Bible
into German. His thought underwent development
from a mystical phase stimulated by Meister Eck-
hardt (1260–1327) and by Indian thought, through
German idealism, on to Taoism and existentialism,
ending in the dialogical philosophy of I and Thou
(1923). During the early days of Nazism when Jews
were expelled from the public schools in Germany,
Buber helped develop a separate Jewish educational
system. In 1933 he emigrated to Israel where he
taught and worked for Arab-Jewish unity until his
death.
The central concept of Buber’s thought is con-
tained in the title of his major work: I and Thou (Ich-
Du), a concept he contrasts with the I-It (Ich-Es).
“Thou” suggests something personal, “It” something
impersonal. But the I-Thou relation is not confined
to the interpersonal sphere. For Buber there are also
I-Thou relations possible with things found in nature
and with “spiritual beings” or “forms of the spirit”
(geistige Wesenheiten), the sources and products of
inspiration in the realms of art, philosophy, and
RELIGION.
I-It constitutes the world of orientation which
comprises the everyday world as well as the special
worlds of knowledge, both theoretical and practical,
which are familiar to us. Whatever we meet is fitted
into the framework of what we already know and
evokes routinized responses, each of which involves
only an aspect of our own being. But genuine meet-
ing with a “Thou” involves a call of greater or lesser
depth to reorganize that world. It gathers our whole
self and pours inspiration into the forms the reor-
ganization takes. I-Thou involves respons-ibility, a
capacity to respond to the call to change, to renew,
to convert our attention.
The primordial distance (Urdistanz) characteris-
tic of human beings directs us beyond the functional
circle of the senses and the routinized worlds of un-
derstanding and response to the wholeness of each
thing within the whole of being. This structural fea-
ture of humanness is lived through most deeply
when a meeting with a Thou furnishes a glimpse
through to the eternal Thou. In Genesis, this expe-
rience culminates when each thing is perceived as a
word addressed by JHWH, whose speech makes
things to be.
Ethical RESPONSIBILITY is ultimately linked to
such experience. But in the course of time, the

“Thou shalt” expressed, for example, in the Ten
Commandments, which addresses us personally and
situationally, is transformed into the impersonal and
abstract “One should.” All such ethical abstractions
must be led back to the concrete meeting with the
Thou. When they are not, then “there is nothing that
can so hide from us the face of our fellow-man as
morality can,” just as “religion can hide from us as
nothing else can the face of God.”
See also: EXISTENTIAL ETHICS; FEUERBACH; HISTORY
OF WESTERN ETHICS, 10, 11: NINETEENTH- AND
TWENTIETH-CENTURY CONTINENTAL; INDIA; JEWISH
ETHICS; LEVINAS; MYSTICISM; NIETZSCHE; RELIGION;
RESPONSIBILITY; TAOIST ETHICS.
Bibliography
Works by Buber
Between Man and Man. Translated by R. G. Smith. Bos-
ton: Beacon, 1961 [1936]. A collection of essays, sev-
eral of which deal with ethical themes.
Eclipse of God. New York: Harper, 1952. Contains an im-
portant chapter on religion and ethics.
Good and Evil. New York: Scribner’s, 1953 [1952]. A
biblical exploration.
I and Thou. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York:
Scribner’s, 1970 [1923]. Buber’s central work.
Der Jude und seine Judentum. Koln: Melzer, 1963. A col-
lection of essays spanning Buber’s career.
The Knowledge of Man. Translated by M. Friedman. New
York: Harper and Row, 1965. Collection of later
essays.
Werke. 3 vols. München: Kosel, 1962–3. I. Schriften zur
Philosophie—II. Schriften zur Bibel—III. Schriften
zum Chassidismus. This and Der Jude contain the texts
selected from the four areas of his completed works
Buber thought worthy of republication.
Works about Buber
Friedman, Maurice. Martin Buber’s Life and Work. 3 vols.
New York: Dutton, 1981–83. Authoritative biography
by the major English translator of Buber’s works.
Friedman, Maurice, and Paul Schilpp, eds. The Philoso-
phy of Martin Buber. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967.
Essays on Buber’s thought from various perspectives,
with a reply by Buber.
Wood, Robert E. Martin Buber’s Ontology. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1969. Select commen-
tary on I and Thou drawing on all of Buber’s works.
Robert E. Wood
161
Buddha
Buddha (6th century B.C.E.)
(Also: Gautama Buddha; Siddhārtha; the Enlight-
ened.) The founder of Buddhism, born in the village
of Lumbini, southern Nepal. His personal name was
Siddhārtha, family name Gautama. As the son of a
ruler of the Sākya clan, he was also known as Sāk-
yamuni. Siddhārtha is said to have renounced his
well-to-do life at home at the age of twenty-nine after
becoming aware of suffering in the world, including
the sufferings of old age, sickness, and death. For six
years he wandered the Ganges River Valley studying
traditional religious teachings. For a time he joined
ascetics in their rigorous lifestyle. Later, however, he
repudiated the overelaborate ceremonialism of tra-
ditional religion and discounted both theistic beliefs
in various gods and philosophical commitment to
absolute reality, including concepts of Ātman and
Brahman. For the remaining forty-five years of his
life, he propagated his new Dharma, or truth, and
formed the San̄gha or Buddhist organization and
monastic order.
The Buddha’s main concern was how to remove
suffering and EVIL from life. His teachings aimed to
obtain nirvān. a, or salvation, in a sorrowful world.
During his life he is said to have avoided the discus-
sion of purely theoretical or metaphysical issues. He
sought to enlighten people on the most urgent and
important problems of suffering, its origin, its ces-
sation, and the way leading to its cessation. These
teachings are called the Four Noble Truths of
Buddhism.
The First Noble Truth states that suffering is uni-
versal. All life includes the sufferings of birth, old
age, and DEATH. The Buddha did not deny that we
do experience PLEASURE and HAPPINESS in life, but
he stressed that all things, including happiness, are
conditioned and transitory. In essence, happiness is
also relative and entails unhappiness.
For whatever exists there must be a cause of its
existence. The Second Noble Truth discusses the
causes of suffering. The Buddha pointed out that
suffering has its source in craving and ignorance, an
analysis that has both psychological and epistemo-
logical aspects. These aspects are interrelated: Crav-
ing and ignorance originate interdependently. Hu-
man beings may appear to be free, but in reality they
are bound by blind PASSION and unconscious
DESIRE.
In this analysis, life is suffering, but it is not hope-
Buddha
less. The last two Noble Truths provide the Buddha’s
gospel of HOPE. Since whatever exists would cease
to exist if its cause disappeared, the Third Noble
Truth holds that suffering can be eliminated by elim-
inating craving and ignorance. The extinction of suf-
fering is described as the state of nirvān. a. The
Fourth Noble Truth shows the way leading to the
cessation of suffering. This way is called the Eight-
fold Path and consists of maintaining right view,
right aspiration, right speech, right conduct, right
livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right
concentration. WISDOM, morality, and mental dis-
cipline together lead one to nirvān. a.
Morality plays an important role along the path
to nirvān. a. To become enlightened, one should
speak, act, and live ethically and kindly. Right speech
advises one to shun gossip, slander, harsh words,
and foolish talk. Right conduct teaches the avoid-
ance of killing, stealing, lying, adultery, and intoxi-
cation. Right livelihood means that one should en-
gage in WORK that does not injure other living
beings. The Buddhist is expected to lead a life of
service and loving kindness rather than one focused
on profit and indulgence. This moral life has much
to do with compassionate motivation since external
behavior springs from an inner mental state. So the
enlightened life depends on right effort, right mind-
fulness, and right concentration to purify one’s men-
tal state. Morality, according to the Buddha, is not
merely a matter of EMOTION but has noetic or intel-
lectual aspects; it involves the right view or under-
standing of oneself and the world.
Buddhist ethics counsels against a hedonistic way
of life but does not advocate an ascetic lifestyle. The
Buddha himself tried and abandoned asceticism. In
his first sermon to five mendicants after his enlight-
enment, he taught that devoting oneself to ascetic
practices with an exhausted body only made the
mind more confused. It would not even produce a
worldly knowledge. The Buddha compared asceti-
cism to trying to light a lamp with water; there
would be no chance of dispelling the darkness. The
Eightfold Path is truly a middle way, which re-
nounces the extremes of both HEDONISM and
asceticism.
Buddhism as the middle way became very impor-
tant in different parts of Asia after the Buddha’s
death. Early Buddhism developed in a scholastic di-
rection and then into Mahāyāna (Great Vehicle)
Buddhism. During this historical expansion, Sid-
162
dhārtha Gautama was mythologized and even dei-
fied. The question, “Who was the Buddha?” has
arisen. Was he a man or a divine being, and does he,
even today, represent absolute reality?
Different Buddhists have held different view-
points. Hı̄nayāna or Theravāda Buddhists showed a
tendency to portray the Buddha, even during his
early life, as going beyond the phenomenal into the
transcendental realm and as a transcendent figure.
With the rise of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Buddha
was regarded both philosophically and religiously as
supramundane and transcendent. The Buddha is
said to have a threefold body, termed Trikāya. The
three bodies are described as the body of truth or
Dharmakāya; the body of bliss or Sambhogakāya;
and the body of transformation, Nirmānakāya.
When the Buddha is viewed as a man, he is the Nir-
mānakāya, the historical Siddhārtha Gautama who
was born at Lumbini. When the Buddha is viewed
as divinely enlightened, he is the Sambhogakāya, a
teacher to the bodhisattvas to help them in their
work of saving sentient beings. And when viewed
from a metaphysical and universal point of view, he
is the transcendent Dharmakāya, ultimate reality.
The historical Buddha is understood as the incar-
nation of the transcendent Buddha who takes incar-
nations for the salvation of sentient beings. Ulti-
mately, certain Buddhists believe, everything in the
world, although distinct in nature and activity, is one
in essence and manifests Buddha’s nature.
See also: BUDDHIST ETHICS; DESIRE; EMOTION; EVIL;
HAPPINESS; HEDONISM; HOPE; PAIN AND SUFFERING;
PASSION; RELIGION; THEISM; WISDOM.
Bibliography
Ch’en, Kenneth K. S. Buddhism, the Light of Asia. Wood-
bury, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 1968.
Cheng, Hsueh-li. Empty Logic: Mādhyamika Buddhism
from Chinese Sources. New York: Philosophical Li-
brary, 1984; 2d ed., Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991.
Conze, Edward. Buddhism, Its Essence and Development.
New York: Harper and Row, 1951.
De Bary, William Theodore, ed. The Buddhist Tradition in
India, China and Japan. New York: Random House,
1969.
Jayatilleke, K. N. The Message of the Buddha. Edited by
Ninian Smart. New York: Free Press, 1975.
Kalupahana, David J. Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical
Analysis. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976.

Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught. New York:
Grove Press, 1959.
Robinson, Richard H. Buddhist Religion. Belmont, CA:
Dickenson, 1970.
Thomas, E. J. The Life of the Buddha as Legend and His-
tory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949.
Hsueh-li Cheng
Buddhist ethics
I. Ethics seems to have played a more important role
in Buddhism than in many other world religions. Un-
like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, Buddhism
does not believe in the existence of a god as the cre-
ator and governor of all things. Buddhist scriptures
seldom discuss divine providence or the problem of
creation. For Buddhists, salvation or nirvān. a rests
not so much with divine mediation as with human
effort. Human beings will be responsible for what
they do and will reap what they sow. Moral culti-
vation, rather than faith, worship, and sacrifice to a
supreme being, dictates human destiny. Moral dis-
cipline and practice are at the core of Buddhism,
whose message is succinctly stated as “Avoid evil,
do good and purify the mind: this is the teaching of
the Buddhas” (Dhammapada, verse 183).
So, to be a Buddhist is to be a moral person. A
good person, according to the Buddha, should ob-
serve five basic precepts: (1) do not kill, (2) do not
steal, (3) do not commit adultery, (4) do not speak
falsely, and (5) do not take intoxicating liquors.
These are the minimal requirements for a lay Bud-
dhist to follow. Their perfect observance is seen as
a storehouse of virtue.
The first four Buddhist precepts are similar to the
last four of the Ten Commandments in the Christian
Bible; they are also found in Hindu moral law. All
these religions teach that religious men should live
lives pure of heart and honest of INTENTION. They
urge us to avoid indulgence in sensory pleasures and
urge us to be kind to our fellows. However, Buddhist
morality seems to have treasured the value of life
much more than Christian and HINDU ETHICS. Most
religions have encouraged believers to sacrifice and
offer animals as a part of religious worship. But in
Buddhism, loving kindness is not limited to human
beings, but is extended to all sentient beings. Fore-
most among Buddhist virtues is to abstain from tak-
ing any animal or human life.
163
Buddhist ethics
To be a moral person, one should be attentive to
good deeds. But taking intoxicating liquors may
cause mental confusion and sluggishness, and some-
times physical violence. Therefore the fifth precept
warns against intoxication. This precept concerns
the soundness of both bodily and mental states.
From an unsound psychological state, good behavior
can scarcely result. Today, alcohol and drugs are of-
ten at the root of crime in society. Buddhism is
keenly aware of these problems and asks its adher-
ents to refrain from alcohol and drugs.
These five precepts are obligatory for most Bud-
dhists; they are duties all Buddhist laymen ought to
observe. Their practice is not without utilitarian
benefits in the Buddhist understanding. In the first
place, the virtuous person may be able to obtain
great wealth through his industry. Second, the rep-
utation of his deeds will spread abroad. Third, what-
ever society he enters, he enters confident and self-
possessed. Fourth, he will die without anxiety.
According to some Buddhist schools, he will be re-
born in the heavenly realm after DEATH. Thus there
is a fivefold benefit for the moral person who prac-
tices virtue.
In addition to the five precepts, there are many
more precepts to be followed by the serious Buddhist.
They are designed to bring the Buddhist nearer to the
ideal of religious life. The monk or bhikkhu has to
observe 227 precepts. Generally speaking, these pre-
cepts aim at simplifying life. Living a simple life, one
will not be distracted by worldly affairs and can de-
vote oneself whole-heartedly to spiritual discipline.
Laymen are encouraged to live more like monks by
observing some of these precepts, such as (1) absti-
nence from taking life; (2) abstinence from taking
what is not given; (3) abstinence from sexual un-
cleanness; (4) abstinence from speaking falsely;
(5) abstinence from drinking intoxicating liquors;
(6) abstinence from eating at forbidden times; (7) ab-
stinence from dancing, singing, playing music, and
seeing shows; (8) abstinence from using garlands,
perfumes, unguents, or taking a high seat. While the
Buddhist layman should keep the five precepts
throughout his life, he may follow these eight pre-
cepts on particular occasions. The eighth, four-
teenth, and fifteenth days of every half lunar month
are considered to be holy days. During these holy
times the Buddhist layman might fast or take no
meals after noon; refrain from dancing, singing,
and seeing shows; and avoid using garlands, per-