Ce travail vise à poser la continuité entre la psychologie et la morale ainsi qu’à reconnaît re la discontinuité entre celle-ci et la physique dans la pensée cartésienne. En effet, la détermination de la volonté consiste en un processus qui se déploie sur un fond de passivité. Car la liberté recèle des degrés qui vont de l’indétermination pure du libre arbitre jusqu’à l’inclination infaillible vers tel ou tel acte: l’inclination n’affaiblit ni la puissance de la volonté ni la liberté du sujet moral; tout au contraire elle les accroît. Le sage cartésien n’aspire donc pas à annihiler ses passions, il s’attache plutôt à les régler et à les investir afin d’atteindre la perfection, laquelle perfection s’avère indissociable de l’excès. Dépourvu de tout objet déterminé, le désir, pour sa part, constitue le ressort de cette régulation en ce sens qu’il renforce ou atténue chacune des autres passions.

The purpose of this paper is to present the classical problem of knowing if utilitarianism can admit a qualitatively distinction of pleasures or interests, introduced by John Stuart Mill, besides the quantitatively distinction supported by Jeremy Bentham. Moreover, it tries to clarify if the quantity theory of values is consistent with utilitarianism and, even so, if its acceptance does not prevent utilitarians from condemning elitism and speciesist prejudice, as many of them actually do. The claim, here, is that utilitarians can probably still hold that condemnation.

This paper is concerned with the political philosophy of Richard Price, analysing the way this author has developed the concept of liberty and the problem of human rights. The theme of liberty will be interpreted in a double perspective: a) in a private dimension, that sets liberty in the inner side of the individual; b) in a public dimension, that places it in the domain of a manifest action of the individual. We will try to show how this double outlook of liberty is conceived under the optics of a necessary complementarity, since liberty, which is primarily understood as a feature of the subject taken as an individual, acquires only a full meaning when she becomes efective in a comunitary field, as a social and political expression. The concept of human rights will appear located in this analysis, being defined simultaneously as condition and expression of the human dignity and happiness, at the same time natural attributes of an individual that should be cultivated and public effectiveness that contributes to the development of society.

In this article, Susanne Langer’s and Antonio Damasio’s theories are presented as candidates for the validation, both scientific and philosophical, of two different perspectives conceming the complexity of the animal mind. Despite their initial agreement about which kind of animais are incapable of producing mental activity (such as insects and other lower animals), they diverge when it cornes to the study of more developed animals, namely mammals. The present article sides with Damasio against Langer: Langer rejects the idea of ascribing to any animal complex human mental capacities (sense of individuality, extended memory and foresight, altruistic motivation, conceptualization and symbolic language); in turn, Damasio’s neurobiological theory (along with some etological data) gives us good reasons to attribute these same capacities to, at least, some species of mammals.

The main aim of this essay is to defend Don Marquis’s “future-like-ours“ argument against abortion from David Boonin’s recent critique to it. In the first two sections I show that Marquis’s FLO argument is much more plausible than the traditional argument against abortion, grounded on an appeal to the humanity of the fetus. The third section explains Boonin’s critique to the FLO argument. In the last section I show that: (1) Boonin’s critique rests on a misunderstanding conceming the content of Marquis’s moral principle; (2) We can restate Boonin’s position in order to avoid that misunderstanding, but such restatement leads to the (unacceptable) conclusion that infanticide, and not only abortion, is morally permissible.