Recent exchanges among Harman, Thomson, and their critics about moral explanations have done much to clarify this two-decades-old debate. I discuss some points in these exchanges along with five different kinds of moral explanations that have been proposed. I conclude that moral explanations cannot provide evidence within an unlimited contrast class that includes moral nihilism, but some moral explanations can still provide evidence within limited contrast classes where all competitors accept the necessary presuppositions. This points towards a limited version of moral skepticism.

Moral responsibility requires control of one’s behavior. But there are different kinds of control. One sort of control entails the existence of genuinely accessible alternative possibilities. I call this regulative control. I believe that an agent can control his or her behavior without having control over it. In such a circumstance, the agent enjoys what I call guidance control, but not regulative control. He guides his behavior in the way characteristic of agents who act freely, yet he does not have alternative possibilities with respect to his decision or action. I contend that moral responsibility requires guidance control, but not regulative control. In this paper, I wish to provide a measure of intuitive appeal to the claim that guidance control is all the control (or freedom) necessary for moral responsibility by sketching the picture that supports this claim.

There was a time when ecological problems were of no interest to philosophy. Now, these issues have raised philosophical problems in several areas. In moral philosophy, one question is what moral obligations, if any, we have to future generations, and another is how far we have moral obligations relating to the treatment and the preservation of plants, animals and atmospheres. In political philosophy, the issue is the range of such concepts as rights and justice, and whether or not they are limited to human relationships. As to the metaphysical question, we have to ask whether there is something about human beings which entitles us to consider them as being supernatural and whether we can think of Nature as an entity of which each human being constitutes a part.

The pivotal claim in environmental ethics is that humans in their cultures are out of sustainable relationships to the natural environments comprising the landscapes on which these cultures are superimposed. But bringing such culture into more intelligent relationships with the natural world requires not so much “naturalizing culture” as discriminating recognition of the radical differences between nature and culture, on the basis of which a dialectical ethic of complementarity may be possible. How far nature can and ought be managed and be transformed into humanized nature, resulting in “the end of nature,” is a provocative question. Environmental ethics ought also to seek nature as an end in itself.

When we deny the truth of someone else’s moral beliefs and give our grounds for so doing, we make or imply judgments about the inadequacy of their reasons for belief and about the causes of their belief. And we presuppose a difference between them and us in both respects. In so doing we provide matter for a shared philosophical inquiry about the relevant types of reason and cause. It is a mark of rational disagreement on matters of serious moral import that we who so disagree should be prepared to engage in this inquiry and to recognize its standards as binding on us unqualifiedly. This recognition commits us to a denial of moral relativism. Some of these best examples of rational disagreement are found in some, although only some, of the exchanges between medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian philosophers.

I review some themes of Naess’s “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements” article and Routley’s “Is there a Need for a New, An Environmental Ethic?” presentation at the 1973 World Congress. Naess’s affiliation to the Deep Ecology Movement deserves acclaim, theoretic entanglements notwithstanding. Routley advocated a new ethic because no Judaeo-Christian ethical tradition could cope with widespread environmental intuitions. However, the ethical tradition of stewardship can satisfy such concerns. It is compatible with environmental values, need not be managerial, and can assume a secular form. But the related res- ponsibilities vary with wealth and power, and structural change is necessary to empower people currently unable to uphold it.

Rights can be founded in a variety of ethical systems—e.g., on natural law, on the duties postulated by deontological ethics, and on the consequences of our actions. The concept of risk we will outline supports a theory of rights which provides at least individual human beings with the entitlement not to be harmed by the environmental impacts of biotechnology. The analysis can, we believe, also be extended to the rights of animals as well as ecosystems, both of which can be harmed by human actions. We argue that further examination of these harms and rights would be the best way to proceed from emotional moral objections to truly ethical analyses in the context of biotechnology and the environment.

Cultural pluralism has caused disturbing problems for philosophers in applied ethics. If moral sanctions, theories, and applications are culturally bound, then moral conflicts ensuing from cultural differences would seem to be irresolvable. Even human nature, good or evil, is not free from cultural determination. One way out of this pluralistic impasse is the expansion of the moral mind. It is the outlet taken by religion, the arts, and philosophy from the earliest time in human culture. In philosophy we find an authentic example of this in Socrates. Following the practice of Socrates, we can try to expand the moral mind philosophically, that is, by working on various forms of reasoning, both deductive and non-deductive, including induction, abduction, dialectics, analogy, and pragmatics.

A genuine bioethics would be fiercely devoted to human life (bios) and would express that devotion by articulating as well as advocating moral virtues that rigorously protect that value against the temptation to see life in purely instrumental terms. In my view, no genuine bioethics exists today. In what follows, I will question two fundamental assumptions often presumed in discussions of euthanasia and assisted suicide. These are (i) the agent does will her victim (i.e., her putative beneficiary) some significant human good, e.g., relief from pain, escape from becoming a burden to loved ones, a dignified death, or simply self-determination; (ii) in purposely helping someone to kill herself or in killing her for her own good, the agent wills her no serious harm. Put differently, I question the assumption of ‘mercy’ in so-called ‘mercy-killing’.

The word ‘dignity’ is a staple of contemporary American medical ethics, where it often follows the words ‘death with’. People unfamiliar with this usage might expect it to apply to one’s manner of dying—for example, a stately exit involving ceremonial farewells. Instead, conventional usage generally holds that “death with dignity” ends or prevents life without dignity, by which is meant life marked not by buffoonery, but by illness and disability. Popular examples of dignity-depleters include dementia, incontinence, and being “dependent on machines”—provided the machines are respirators rather than furnaces, refrigerators, and computers.

Medical ethics should show how an adequate description of morality is helpful in dealing with the problems that arise in the context of medical care. However none of the standard moral theories provide such a description. Further, all of these theories assume that there must be a unique correct answer to every moral question, though this answer may be that it is indifferent which of the proposed solutions one picks. The failure to recognize that there are unresolvable moral disagreements leads many philosophers to think that their moral theories will enable them to determine which policies ought to be adopted. However, the correct role for moral theories is more limited: to rule out morally unacceptable policies. Moral theories almost never can settle disputes about which of two well supported health care policies ought to be adopted.

This paper examines Hegel’s chief paradigm for interpreting his dialectical method, which is that of circularity. The position that Hegel’s Logic (whether Greater or Lesser) begins without presuppositions loses validity upon clarification of this model of reasoning. Philosophy must begin necessarily with presuppositions, according to Hegel, and can only be justified adequately by explaining those presuppositions while also reflecting upon its own immanent method of explanation. Philosophy must therefore be self-reflexive, immanent, and systematic (or holistic). Such a view of philosophy defends the goal of theoretical closure and excludes the assumption of a value-neutral standard of rationality.

In Virtues of the Mind I object to process reliabilism on the grounds that it does not explain the good of knowledge in addition to the good of true belief. In this paper I wish to develop this objection in more detail, and will then argue that this problem pushes us first in the direction of two offspring of process reliabilism—faculty reliabilism and proper functionalism, and, finally, to a true virtue epistemology.

Descartes, and many of the other great epistemologists of the modern period, looked to epistemology to put science and intellectual inquiry generally on a secure foundation. Epistemology’s role was to provide assurances of the reliability of properly conducted inquiry. Indeed, its role was nothing less than to be czar of the sciences and of intellectual inquiry in general. This conception of epistemology is now almost universally regarded as overly grandiose. Nonetheless, Descartes and the other great epistemologists of the modern era were not completely mistaken. Epistemology does have a foundational role to play, but not that of a guarantor of knowledge. Its role, rather, is the less flamboyant but nonetheless theoretically crucial one of providing a philosophically respectable foundation for a general theory of rationality.

We can describe languages in which no words refer to objects. Such languages may contain sentences equivalent to any sentences of English, and hence may allow for as much objectivity as English does. It is wrong to try to deal with such languages by claiming that there are more objects than those accepted by common sense ontology. The correct move is rather to acknowledge a sense in which the concept of an object might have been different. A consequence of this position is that we cannot have a general semantics applicable to every describable language in which words are referentially connected to objects. The point here is not that reference may be inscrutable, but that different concepts of ‘referring to an object’ may be required for different languages.

As the Pyrrhonians made clear, reasons that adequately justify beliefs can have only three possible structures: foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism. Infinitism—the view that adequate reasons for our beliefs are infinite and non-repeating—has never been developed carefully, much less advocated. In this paper, I will argue that only infinitism can satisfy two intuitively plausible constraints on good reasoning: the avoidance of circular reasoning and the avoidance of arbitrariness. Further, I will argue that infinitism requires serious, but salutary, revisions in our evaluation of the power of reasoning. Thus, reasoning can not provide a basis for assenting to a proposition—where to assent to a proposition, p, means to believe that we know that p. A non-dogmatic form of provisional justification will be sketched. Finally, the best objections to infinitism, including those posed by the Pyrrhonians, will be shown (at least provisionally!) to be inadequate.

The most powerful skeptical challenge to knowledge and justification is Pyrrhonian. It challenges nonskeptics to identify non-question begging warrant for their beliefs whereby they will not simply assume a point needing support in light of skeptical questions. The skeptical challenge is comprehensive, bearing on warranting conditions in general. Any answer given to such a comprehensive challenge apparently relies on a warranting condition being questioned. From this two questions emerge. First, is the skeptical challenge itself question begging in a way that undermines its epistemic significance? Second, is question begging necessarily an epistemic defect? This paper answers no to the first question, and identifies the problem facing skeptics who presuppose an affirmative answer to the second question. The problem stems from the availability of certain conceptions of epistemic rationality that do not prohibit question begging unqualifiedly.

This paper has three parts. First, a discussion of our use of intuitions as evidence (reasons) in logic, mathematics, philosophy (hereafter, “the a priori disciplines”). Second, an explanation of why intuitions are evidence. The explanation is provided by modal reliabilism—the doctrine that there is a certain kind of qualified modal tie between intuitions and the truth. Third, an explanation of why there should be such a tie between intuitions and the truth. This tie is a consequence of what, by definition, it is to possess the concepts involved in our intuitions. These three parts form the basis of a unified account of a priori evidence and, in turn, a priori knowledge.

In my book In Defense of Pure Reason, I offer an extended defense of the idea of a priori justification and, more specifically, of a rationalist conception of such justification: one according to which rational insight or intuition provides genuine justification for claims that need not be merely definitional or tautological in character. In the relatively brief space available to me on the present occasion, I want to present and defend, necessarily in rather broad strokes, four of the most central claims that are discussed at much greater length in that book. I will say the most about the first of these theses, somewhat less about the second and third, and only a very little about the fourth.