bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Faith
Authors: Wolterstorff Nicholas P.
Published: September 2018

Faith became a topic of discussion in the Western philosophical tradition on account of its prominence in the New Testament, where the having or taking up of faith is often urged by writers. The New Testament itself echoes both Hellenistic concepts of faith and older biblical traditions, specifically that of Abraham in the Book of Genesis.

The subsequent attention of philosophers has been focused primarily on three topics: the nature of faith, the connection between God’s goodness and human responsibility, and the relation of faith to reason. Discussions on the nature of faith, from Aquinas to Tillich, have tried to examine the subject in terms of whether it is a particular form of knowledge, virtue, trust and so on. Regarding divine goodness, the argument has primarily focused on the relationship between faith and free will, and whether lack of faith is the responsibility of the individual or of God. Concerning the relation between faith and reason, there are two quite separate issues: the relation of faith to theorizing, and the rationality of faith. Aquinas in particular argued that faith is a necessary prerequisite for reasoning and intellectual activity, while later, John Locke explored the relationship between faith, reason and rationality, and concluded that faith can be reached through reason. This latter viewpoint was later heavily criticized by Wittgenstein and his followers.
Farrer, Austin Marsden (1904–68)
Authors: Williams Thomas
Published: September 2018

Austin Farrer is widely regarded as the Church of England’s most brilliant philosophical theologian of the twentieth century. His elegant, sometimes difficult, writings aim more at synthesis and the elaboration of images than at analytical rigour; they characteristically take the form of a running debate between opposing positions. He focuses on the relations between divine and creaturely action in the spheres of nature, revelation and grace.
Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald (1887–1964)
Authors: McInerny Ralph
Published: September 2018

Garrigou-Lagrange was a French Dominican who for decades adorned the Angelicum in Rome, where in his courses he commented closely on the Summa theologiae. The spiritual life was a principal interest of Garrigou-Lagrange, and many of his books are devoted to the theology and practice of mystical union with God. Impatient with theological novelty, Garrigou-Lagrange came to be caricatured by the champions of innovators. His own work, solid, careful, illuminating, is a monument to a golden period of the Thomistic revival.
Goodness, perfect
Authors: Zagzebski Linda
Published: September 2018

The concept of perfect goodness had a central place in ancient Greek and medieval philosophy, and is still frequently discussed in contemporary natural theology. Medieval philosophers adopted the idea from the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, with the difference that they identified perfect goodness with a personal God. In ancient and medieval philosophy the concept is primarily a metaphysical one, since goodness was thought to be extensionally equivalent to being, but it is secondarily a moral concept referring to the distinctive sort of goodness appropriate to those beings that have wills. Thus it is fundamental to a long tradition on the metaphysical basis of value which lasted from Plato until at least the sixteenth century.

In Plato, perfect goodness is the Form of the Good, upon which everything that has being is ontologically and causally dependent. In Aristotle, the good is identified with the end or purpose of a natural being. The good is that towards which all things move for the fulfilment of their natures. By the time of Aquinas, medieval philosophers had identified the good in both the Platonic and Aristotelian senses with the Christian God and had argued that God is both the perfectly good creative source and the perfectly good end of all beings other than himself.

The concept of a perfectly good being in Christian philosophical theology faces two major kinds of difficulty. One is the problem that perfect goodness appears to be incompatible with the divine attributes of omnipotence and freedom of the divine will. And if a perfectly good being does not have a will that is free in a morally significant sense, that being seems to lack goodness in the moral sense of goodness. The second kind of problem is that the existence of a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good seems to be incompatible with the existence of evil. In spite of these problems, there is a strong attraction to the idea of a perfectly good God in contemporary philosophical theology. The category of perfect goodness is therefore one of the most persistent of the concepts in the Platonic legacy.
Incarnation and Christology
Authors: van Inwagen Peter
Published: September 2018

It is a central and essential dogma of Christianity that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified in Judea during the procuratorship (ad 26–36) of Pontius Pilate, and God, the eternal and omnipresent creator of the universe, were in some very strong sense ‘one’. The department of Christian theology that is devoted to the study of the nature and implications of this ‘oneness’ is called Christology. Orthodox Christology (unlike certain heretical Christologies) sees this oneness as a oneness of person, as consisting in the co-presence of two natures, the divine and the human, in one person, Jesus Christ. To speak plainly, orthodox Christology holds that there is someone, Jesus Christ, who is both divine and human. Because God pre-existed and is superior to every human being, orthodox theologians have found it natural to speak of the union of the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ as something that happened to the pre-existent divine nature: at a certain point in time, at the moment of the conception of Jesus, it ‘took on flesh’ or ‘became incarnate’; in the words of the Athanasian Creed, the union of the two natures was accomplished ‘not by conversion of the Godhead [divinitas] into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God’. This event, and the continuing union it established, are called ‘the Incarnation’. The Incarnation was not, according to Christian teaching, undone by Christ’s death (his corpse – a human corpse – continued to be united with the divine nature by the same bond by which the living man had been united) or by his ‘Ascension’ (his ‘withdrawal’ from the everyday world of space and time forty days after the Resurrection), and it will never be undone: the Incarnation is eternal.

The primary statements of the dogma of the Incarnation are the Definition issued by the Council of Chalcedon (ad 451) and the Athanasian Creed (fifth century; its origins are obscure). The creed issued by the Council of Nicaea (ad 325) and the longer, revised version of this creed that is today used liturgically (and commonly called ‘the Nicene Creed’) contain nothing of substance that is not found in the two later statements.
Inge, William Ralph (1860–1954)
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

Inge, a philosopher and theologian, was a Christian Platonist. Platonic philosophy emphasized knowledge of necessary truths that it held to be grounded in abstract objects; its deity was a designer limited by the properties of a matter it did not create. Christian theology emphasizes a God who, both Creator and Providence, became incarnate in Jesus Christ. For Platonism, nothing historical could have ultimate significance or importance; for Christianity, the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ have ultimate significance. As his thought developed, Inge increasingly was able to retain much of Platonism while slowly coming to accept the consequences of the Christian emphasis on history.
Lewis, Clive Staples (1898–1963)
Authors: Purtill Richard L.
Published: September 2018

C.S. Lewis was a British religious writer. Originally trained as a philosopher at Oxford, he combined literary scholarship and the writing of fiction with clear and persuasive argumentation for traditional Christianity. His religious works continue to be best sellers, and much of his writing is directly or indirectly of philosophical interest. For the non-philosophical public, he probably remains the best representative of the position that religion is more rational than any alternative. Lewis is regarded by his admirers as more than a philosopher: in the words of Walsh (1949), he is the twentieth century’s ‘apostle to the skeptics’.
Luther, Martin (1483–1546)
Authors: Higton M.A.
Published: September 2018

Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk who found the theology and penitential practices of his times inadequate for overcoming fears about his salvation. He turned first to a theology of humility, whereby confession of one’s own utter sinfulness is all that God asks, and then to a theology of justification by faith, in which human beings are seen as incapable of any turning towards God by their own efforts. Without preparation on the part of sinners, God turns to them and destroys their trust in themselves, producing within them trust in his promises made manifest in Jesus Christ. Regarding them in unity with Christ, God treats them as if they had Christ’s righteousness: he ‘justifies’ them. Faith is produced in the sinner by the Word of God concerning Jesus Christ in the Bible, and by the work of the Holy Spirit internally showing the sinner the true subject matter of the Bible. It is not shaped by philosophy, since faith’s perspective transcends and overcomes natural reason. Faith, through the working of God’s Holy Spirit within the believer, naturally produces good works, but justification is not dependent upon them – they are free expressions of faith in love. Nevertheless, secular government with its laws and coercion is still necessary in this world because there are so few true Christians. Luther’s theology brought him into conflict with the Church hierarchy and was instrumental in the instigation of the Reformation, in which the Protestant churches split from Rome.
Necessary being
Authors: Leftow Brian
Published: September 2018

Many think that God is perfect, or free from defect, and that being able not to exist is a defect. These infer that God is not able not to exist – that is, that God exists necessarily. Some add that what makes God perfect also makes him exist necessarily, and so trace his necessity to his immateriality (Aristotle), eternity (Plotinus) or simplicity (Aquinas). Others trace God’s necessity to his relation to creatures (Ibn Sina, Anselm). Spinoza and Leibniz held that what makes God necessary explains his very existence.

Many have thought that if God exists necessarily, there is a sound ontological argument for God’s existence, or that if there is a sound ontological argument for God’s existence, God exists necessarily. But both claims are false. Some have used philosophical views of the nature of necessity – for example, that all necessity is conventional, a matter of how we choose to use words – to challenge God’s necessary existence. But the theories which best support these challenges have fallen from favour, and in fact, even if one accepts the theories, the challenges fail.
Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971)
Authors: Marty Martin
Published: September 2018

Reinhold Niebuhr is widely regarded as the foremost public theologian in twentieth-century America. A ‘public’ theologian is one who is responsive to the biblical tradition and responsible to the Christian Church, but who also responds to the social and political concerns of the world and seeks to effect change in that world. In the case of Niebuhr, this meant being attuned to life in the USA as it passed through times of prosperity, depression, war, cold war and cultural complacency. It also meant that he had to be as alert to the secular philosophy and expression of the times as to the biblical and creedal traditions of the Church, and he managed to correlate and connect these in ever-changing ways.

Niebuhr is known as a developer of a school of thought often called ‘Christian realism’. Though shaped first by the more optimistic liberal thought of his teachers’ generation, which stressed the immanence of God and the potential for goodness in human beings, Niebuhr came to witness to the otherness of God and the drastic limits of human potential. He even helped resurrect the term ‘original sin’ to describe the human condition, well aware that the term was scorned by most philosophers of his time. Yet over the decades, his realism came to be seen as so appropriate to descriptions of human actions, especially in situations of power, that he attracted a following far beyond Church communities. Niebuhr thus influenced both domestic and international policies. He was seen both as a self-critical theologian who uttered judgments on the Christian Church and the American nation, and as a theologian of the Cold War who issued devastating critiques of Soviet Communism. In the time before the Second World War, when most of the more notable Protestant clerics leaned towards pacifism, Niebuhr let his realistic vision and his opposition to totalitarian powers lead him to argue for ‘preparedness’ for war and to scold those who refused to see with him a need for military response to the threat of dictators.
Nygren, Anders (1890–1978)
Authors: Allen Diogenes
Published: September 2018

Nygren hoped to recover the uniqueness of Christianity from the impurities introduced by the attempts of nineteenth-century liberal theology to free it from metaphysical speculation and confessional dogmatism. He aimed to do this by grounding all religion in an analytic philosophy of religion which would enable him to stress the objective character of Christian theology in contrast to the arbitrariness of confessional theology. He achieved international influence by his claim in Agapē and Eros (1930–6) that the uniqueness of Christianity is love in the sense of agapē, as opposed to Platonic eros.
Oman, John Wood (1860–1939)
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

A central theme of John Wood Oman’s writings is the possibility and actuality of knowledge that is not gained through science. He rejects as too simplistic the mechanistic view of the world. His belief in God rests not on the arguments of natural theology, but on the force and content of religious experience. The source of religion is to be found in our sense of the supernatural, from which stems also our moral dependence on God.
Pietism
Authors: Guelzo Allen C.
Published: September 2018

‘Pietism’ refers to a Protestant reform movement, arising in the late 1600s in Lutheran Germany, which turned away from contests over theological and dogmatic identity in Protestant confessionalism and urged renewed attention to questions of personal piety and devotion. As such, it has only the most tenuous historical connections to the Christocentric piety of the devotio moderna or the northern humanist piety of Erasmus or Zwingli. It found its first major voice in P.J. Spener and A.H. Francke, and established its principal centres of influence at the state university at Halle in 1691 and the Moravian community at Herrnhut in 1722. Pietism found followers and allies in the European Reformed churches, in the Church of England (especially through the example of John and Charles Wesley and through the Moravian exile community in England), and in Britain’s English-speaking colonies. In the colonies, pietism not only found Lutheran and Reformed colonial hosts, but also saw in New England Puritanism a movement of similar aspirations. Pietism’s impact on the spirituality of western Europe and America was clearly felt in the eighteenth-century Protestant Awakenings, and continues to have an influence in the shape of Anglo-American evangelicalism.
Purgatory
Authors: Zagzebski Linda
Published: September 2018

According to Roman Catholic teaching, purgatory is the place or state of purification after death in which those who die in a state of grace (and hence are assured of being saved) make expiation for unforgiven venial sins or endure temporal punishment for mortal and venial sins already forgiven. The concept evolved to resolve the theological confusion about the state of souls between personal death and the general resurrection and Last Judgment, to explain what happens to those persons who repent before death but do not live long enough to do penance for their sins, and to make intelligible the widespread practice of praying for the souls of the departed. The doctrine developed in conjunction with a ‘high’ Eucharistic theology, according to which all the faithful departed take part in the liturgy of the Church. The idea of purgatory is therefore intimately connected with Christian ideas of sin, judgment, retributive punishment, the communion of saints and the idea that salvation occurs in history. It was rejected by the Reformers and, in the second half of the twentieth century, interest from Catholic theologians has waned. Nevertheless, some modern Protestant thinkers have defended the concept as an intermediate phase in salvation.
Rahner, Karl (1904–84)
Authors: Bonsor Jack A.
Published: September 2018

Rahner sought to offer an account of the Christian faith that would be credible to the modern mind. His early philosophical works lay the foundation for this theological project. Using both the method and categories of the early Heidegger, Rahner placed the thought of the medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas in conversation with modern philosophy. He asked of Aquinas’ epistemology Kant’s question about the conditions of human subjectivity which make knowledge possible. Rahner argued that Aquinas’ description of knowledge and human freedom requires, as its necessary condition, that the subject possess an openness to a universal horizon of being, an openness to God. There is, in the structure of subjectivity, a constitutive, experiential, a priori relationship with the divine mystery. While this openness occurs within an individual’s self-awareness, it is always mediated by and interpreted through the objects, people, language and ideas that make up one’s historical context (the categorical). In his theology, Rahner argued that the true nature of humanity’s relationship with God had been revealed by Jesus to be one of absolute nearness. Rahner rendered Christian doctrines credible by correlating them with the transcendental experience of a God who is near.
Ritual
Authors: Wettstein Howard
Published: September 2018

Ritual, present throughout human affairs and central to many religious and cultural traditions, presents perplexities. One important question concerns the worth of such repetition and fixety – for example, in prayer, in human interaction, sometimes even in eating and drinking. To consider prayer, why not encourage the direct expression of religious thought and affect – from the heart, as it were, rather than in prescribed ways? It is sometimes suggested, and tempting to suppose, that to regularize such expression is to constrict it, ultimately to demean it. It is difficult to locate value in such apparently unnecessary regulation of human affairs.

In the context of philosophy the question becomes striking. None of the prevailing approaches to ethics makes it easy to see how ritual might possess ethical value or figure crucially in the ethical life. Yet this is precisely how ritualized ways are often seen within communities of practitioners.
Tennant, Frederick Robert (1866–1957)
Authors: Maitzen Stephen
Published: September 2018

A prolific writer on religion and philosophical theology, Tennant produced book-length studies of topics as diverse as the philosophy of science and the origin of sin. He is best known by philosophers for his two-volume Philosophical Theology (1928, 1930), which offered the most sophisticated version then available of the argument from design for the existence of God. Tennant’s philosophical legacy consists primarily in the influence his methodology has exerted on later philosophical theologians.
Thielicke, Helmut (1908–86)
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

Helmut Thielicke presented a systematic Christian theology with particular reference to concrete issues and situations within the world. He held that statements about God are inevitably conditioned by the fact that God reveals himself to and through humanity; they thus always have an anthropological aspect. Similarly, while theology arises from transcendent revelation, it necessarily belongs to a particular historical context. Thielicke maintained that the notion of a ‘perennial theology’ is therefore mistaken. This raises the question as to whether it is a perennial truth that there is no perennial theology, and, if so, how Thielicke could, on his grounds, know this.
Tindal, Matthew (1657–1733)
Authors: Seban Jean-Loup
Published: September 2018

Matthew Tindal was one of the last and most learned exponents of English deism. His most famous work is Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), a comprehensive apology for natural religion. In it, he argued that God’s law is imprinted on the nature of all things, including the human soul, and is accessible to reason. Revealed religion merely restates this universal law – the will of God – in a different form. Religion enables us to act in accordance with this natural order, and its end is happiness. However, Tindal was scathingly critical of the clergy, and cast doubt on the reliability of the Bible. Although Tindal’s work was severely criticized by William Law, it exerted a considerable influence on the English and Continental Enlightenment.
Open theism
Authors: Sanders John
Published: September 2018

Open theism is the name for a model of God which emphasizes divine love and responsiveness to creatures. It arises from a family of theologies known as free-will theism which accentuate the divine gift of freedom to humans and hold that God does not micromanage the affairs of the world. The name open theism was coined in the 1990s by a group of philosophers and theologians in order to distinguish it within the free-will theistic family. God is ‘open’ to creatures in that God is affected by what creatures do and God genuinely interacts and enters into dynamic give-and-take relationships with creatures. These reciprocal relationships mean that God has a history which includes changing mental and emotional states. As a consequence, open theists affirm that God is temporal and everlasting rather than atemporal and timeless.

Open theists believe that God is omnipotent but chooses not to exercise tight control over creation. Instead, God grants to creatures great latitude to act within boundaries. Because God chooses to elicit our free collaboration in divine plans God takes risks that we will act in ways contrary to the divine intentions.

According to open theists the future is ‘open’ as well because it contains multiple possible futures that may or may not come about rather than solely one unalterable future. The future is not a blueprint or script but rather a set of possibilities, and God solicits the cooperation of creatures in order to bring some of these possibilities into existence. Since the future is not determined and humans have genuine free will, God does not know with certainty future contingent actions. Rather, God possesses ‘dynamic omniscience’ in which God has exhaustive knowledge of the past and present and understands what we call ‘the future’ as the possibilities which could occur along with any events God has determined to occur. Divine omniscience is dynamic in that God constantly acquires knowledge of which possible future actions creatures select to actualize. Open theists reject standard accounts of divine foreknowledge because they believe that they are incompatible with human freedom, they are of no value to God in terms of planning and acting in world affairs and they fail to correspond with the biblical portrayal of God.
Applied ethics
Authors: Almond Brenda
Published: September 2018

Applied ethics is marked out from ethics in general by its special focus on issues of practical concern. It therefore includes medical ethics, environmental ethics, and evaluation of the social implications of scientific and technological change, as well as matters of policy in such areas as health care, business or journalism. It is also concerned with professional codes and responsibilities in such areas.

Typical of the issues discussed are abortion, euthanasia, personal relationships, the treatment of nonhuman animals, and matters of race and gender. Although sometimes treated in isolation, these issues are best discussed in the context of some more general questions which have been perennial preoccupations of philosophers, such as: How should we see the world and our place in it? What is the good life for the individual? What is the good society? In relation to these questions, applied ethics involves discussion of fundamental ethical theory, including utilitarianism, liberal rights theory and virtue ethics.

‘Applied ethics’ and ‘applied philosophy’ are sometimes used as synonyms, but applied philosophy is in fact broader, covering also such fields as law, education and art, and theoretical issues in artificial intelligence. These areas include philosophical problems – metaphysical and epistemological – that are not strictly ethical. Applied ethics may therefore be understood as focusing more closely on ethical questions. Nevertheless, many of the issues it treats do in fact involve other aspects of philosophy, medical ethics, for example, including such metaphysical themes as the nature of ’personhood’, or the definition of death.
Business ethics
Authors: Sorell Tom , Sandberg Joakim
Published: September 2018

Business ethics is the application of ethical theories to activity within and between commercial enterprises, and between commercial enterprises and their broader environment. It is a wide range of activity, and no brief list can be made of the issues it raises. The safety of working practices; the fairness of recruitment; the transparency of financial accounting; the promptness of payments to suppliers; the degree of permissible aggression between competitors: all come within the range of the subject. So do relations between businesses and consumers, local communities, national governments, and ecosystems. Many, but not all, of these issues can be understood to bear on distinct, recognized groups with their own stakes in a business: employees, shareholders, consumers, and so on. The literature of business ethics tends to concentrate on ‘stakeholders’ – anyone who occupies a role within the business or who belongs to a recognized group outside the business that is affected by its activity – but not in every sort of business. Corporations are often discussed to the exclusion of medium-sized and small enterprises.

Ethical theories in business ethics come from a number of sources. Academic moral philosophy has contributed utilitarianism, Kantianism and Aristotelianism, as well as egoism and social contract theory. There are also ideas that originate in organized religion, in the manifestos of political activists, in the thoughts of certain tycoons with an interest in social engineering, and in the writings of management ‘gurus’. Recently, business ethics has been affected by the ending of the Cold War, and the breakdown of what were once command economies. These developments have encouraged enthusiasts for the market economy to advocate moral and political ideas consistent with capitalism, and the handing over to private companies of activity in certain countries that has long been reserved for the state. More recently still, multinational corporations have been recognized among many nonstate actors that have responsibilities in a new global order. International financial institutions – such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and regional economic groupings, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – have also gained in prominence.
Deontological ethics
Authors: McNaughton David
Published: September 2018

Deontology asserts that there are several distinct duties. Certain kinds of act are intrinsically right and other kinds intrinsically wrong. The rightness or wrongness of any particular act is thus not (or not wholly) determined by the goodness or badness of its consequences. Some ways of treating people, such as killing the innocent, are ruled out, even to prevent others doing worse deeds. Many deontologies leave agents considerable scope for developing their own lives in their own way; provided they breach no duty they are free to live as they see fit.

Deontology may not have the theoretical tidiness which many philosophers crave, but has some claim to represent everyday moral thought.
Deontological ethics
Authors: McNaughton David , Rawling Piers
Published: September 2018

Deontology is often defined by contrasting it with one of its chief competitors, consequentialism. In its simplest form, consequentialism claims that we only have one moral duty: to do as much good as possible. Deontology (the word comes from the Greek deon meaning ‘one must’) denies this, and asserts that there are several distinct duties, not all of which depend for their status as duties on considerations of value alone.

Deontological duties are divided into two classes: constraints and duties of special relationship. The former govern the way we treat others regardless of our relationships to them. Some ways of treating people, such as torturing them, are ruled out, even to prevent others doing worse deeds. The latter govern our actions toward those to whom we stand in special relations such as friendship. You are required to do certain things for your friends, even if you could make the world better by abandoning them.

In addition to constraints and duties of relationship, some deontologists claim that there is a requirement to do good whenever there is no other duty more pressing. Others are less demanding, requiring only that we do some good in addition to fulfilling our other obligations. The least demanding deontology would incorporate no moral requirement to do good, and claim that provided we breach no duty we are permitted to live as we see fit.

Some deontologists attempt to justify the various duties they propose by appeal to some more fundamental and unifying principle(s). Other deontologists deny that such unifying justification is available. Deontologists, then, may agree about surface features, such as the extent of our duties, while disagreeing about the possibility of an underlying rationale.
Evil
Authors: Kekes John
Published: September 2018

Evil is serious unjustified harm inflicted on sentient beings. Two types of evil can be distinguished: ’natural evil’, which is the product of nonhuman agency, and ’moral evil’, which is the product of human agency. Moral thinking tends to focus on moral evil, and three main interpretations of it have been made. One, initiated by Socrates, holds moral evil to be deviation from the good; another, favoured by Stoic-Spinozists, views it as illusory; the third, made originally by Leibniz, sees it as a contrast necessary for the existence of the good. A realistic account must face the fact that moral evil does exist, and much of it is due to common human vices, which coexist with virtues in human character. It is primarily the proportion of the mixture, not the knowledge and intentions of agents, that determines how much evil will be caused by specific individuals in specific contexts.
Happiness
Authors: Griffin J.P.
Published: September 2018

In ordinary use, the word ‘happiness’ has to do with one’s situation (one is fortunate) or with one’s state of mind (one is glad, cheerful) or, typically, with both. These two elements appear in different proportions on different occasions. If one is concerned with a long stretch of time (as in ‘a happy life’), one is likely to focus more on situation than on state of mind. If a short period of time, it is not uncommon to focus on states of mind.

By and large philosophers are more interested in long-term cases. One’s life is happy if one is content that life has brought one much of what one regards as important. There is a pull in these lifetime assessments towards a person’s objective situation and away from the person’s subjective responses. The important notion for ethics is ‘wellbeing’ – that is, a notion of what makes an individual life go well. ‘Happiness’ is important because many philosophers have thought that happiness is the only thing that contributes to wellbeing, or because they have used ‘happiness’ to mean the same as ‘wellbeing’.

What, then, makes a life go well? Some have thought that it was the presence of a positive feeling tone. Others have thought that it was having one’s desires fulfilled – either actual desires (as some would say) or informed desires (as others would say). It is unclear how stringent the requirement of ‘informed’ must be; if it is fairly stringent it can, in effect, require abandoning desire explanations and adopting instead an explanation in terms of a list of good-making features in human life.
Hedonism
Authors: Gosling Justin
Published: September 2018

Hedonism is the doctrine that pleasure is the good. It was important in ancient discussions, and many positions were taken, from the view that pleasure is to be avoided to the view that immediate bodily pleasure is to be sought. More elevated views of pleasure were also taken, and have been revived in modern times. There are three varieties of hedonism. Psychological hedonists hold that we can pursue only pleasure; evaluative hedonists that pleasure is what we ought to pursue; reflective hedonists that it is what on reflection gives value to any pursuit. Arguments for psychological hedonism suggest that an agent’s actions are a function of what they think will maximize their pleasure overall. Explaining altruism can lead such theories into truism. Similar arguments are used for reflective hedonism, and the same problem arises. The difficulty for evaluative hedonism lies in deciding how we can establish certain ends as desirable. The claim that pleasure is to be maximized seems immoral to many. Hedonism also faces problems with the measurement of pleasure.
Hope
Authors: Stratton-Lake Philip
Published: September 2018

In Christian theology ‘hope’ has a central role as one of the three theological virtues. As theology has gradually become separated from moral theory, the inclusion of ‘hope’ within a theory of ethics has become rare. Hope can be either intentional or dispositional. The former is a specific hope for something, whereas the latter is a state of character. Kant gave a central place to intentional hopes in his moral theory with his doctrine of the postulates. Hope also played an essential role in the moral and political writings of Ernst Bloch and Gabriel Marcel. Bloch regarded hope as concerned with a longing for utopia, whereas Marcel regarded hope as a disposition to rise above situations which tempt one to despair. In each of these writers the Christian connection between hope, on the one hand, and faith and love, on the other, remained, although Kant and Bloch did not oppose these categories to reason, but sought to ‘subsume’ them under it.
Kantian ethics
Authors: O’Neill Onora , Timmermann Jens
Published: September 2018

Kantian ethics originates in the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), which remain the most influential attempt to vindicate universal ethical principles that respect the dignity and equality of human beings without relying on theological claims or a metaphysical conception of the good. Kant’s systematic, critical philosophy centres on an account of reasoning about action, that is practical reasoning, which he uses to derive principles of duty and virtue, a liberal and republican conception of justice with cosmopolitan scope, and an account of the relationship between morality and hope.

Numerous contemporary writers also advance views of ethics which they, and their critics, think of as Kantian. However, some contemporary work is remote from Kant’s philosophy on fundamental matters such as human freedom and practical reason. It converges with Kant’s ethics in claiming that we lack a substantive account of the good (so that teleological or consequentialist ethics are impossible), in taking a strong view of the fundamental equality of moral agents and the importance of universal principles of duty which spell out what it is to respect them, and in stressing an account of justice and rights with cosmopolitan scope.

Both Kant’s ethics and contemporary Kantian ethics have been widely criticized for preoccupation with rules and duties, and for lack of concern with virtues, happiness or personal relationships. However, these criticisms may apply more to certain strands within modern Kantian ethics than to Kant’s own ethics.
Life and death
Authors: Harris John
Published: September 2018

Problems concerning life and death are among the most dramatic and intractable in philosophy and they feature in all fundamental areas of philosophical inquiry, especially ethics. Most basic is the problem of what account to give of the value of life itself. This problem has had two main dimensions. One has been the controversy over what precise account to give of death; this has revolved around the issue of whether death is, as it is commonly perceived, an evil, and premature death a tragedy. The other has been the equally puzzling question of how to explain the positive value of life, and to resolve the problem that the more rich we make our account of the value of life, the more the value of life, and hence the nature of the wrong done by killing someone, seems to vary with the quality of the life of the person concerned.

A second set of problems concerns the definition of death and appropriate criteria for death. Death, as the most extreme consequence of violence, also leads one into psychological discussions of aggression and into issues of political violence, terrorism, war and capital punishment in political philosophy. Third, there has been concern with a number of practical moral issues, including abortion and euthanasia. Finally, issues have arisen concerning the relation of the value of the life of persons to other sorts of lives, those of animals, for example, or the life and survival of the ecosystem itself.

This discussion will concentrate on the central themes of the value of life and the harm and wrong represented by death.
Love
Authors: Nussbaum Martha C.
Published: September 2018

Love is usually understood to be a powerful emotion involving an intense attachment to an object and a high evaluation of it. On some understandings, however, love does not involve emotion at all, but only an active interest in the wellbeing of the object. On other accounts, love is essentially a relationship involving mutuality and reciprocity, rather than an emotion. Moreover, there are many varieties of love, including erotic/romantic love, friendly love, and love of humanity. Different cultures also recognize different types of love. Love has, as well, a complicated archaeology: because it has strong links with early experiences of attachment, it can exist in the personality at different levels of depth and articulateness, posing special problems for self-knowledge. It is mistake to try to give too unified an account of such a complex set of phenomena.

Love has been understood by many philosophers to be a source of great richness and energy in human life. But even those who praise its contribution have seen it as a potential threat to virtuous living. Philosophers in the Western tradition have therefore been preoccupied with proposing accounts of the reform or ‘ascent’ of love, in order to demonstrate that there are ways of retaining the energy and beauty of this passion while removing its bad consequences.
Desert and merit
Authors: Miller David
Published: September 2018

The ideas of desert and merit are fundamental to the way we normally think about our personal relationships and our social institutions. We believe that people who perform good deeds and display admirable qualities deserve praise, honours and rewards, whereas people whose behaviour is anti-social deserve blame and punishment. We also think that justice is in large part a matter of people receiving the treatment that they deserve. But many philosophers have found these ways of thinking hard to justify. Why should people’s past deeds determine how we should treat them in the future? Since we cannot see inside their heads, how can we ever know what people really deserve? How can we reconcile our belief that people must be responsible for their actions in order to deserve credit or blame with the determinist claim that all actions are in principle capable of being explained by causes over which we have no control?
Moral education
Authors: White John
Published: September 2018

This entry looks at three contemporary approaches to moral learning and education, all of which have roots in the history of philosophy. The first holds that just as children grow, or develop, in a physical sense, so they also develop in their moral dispositions or judgments. A central issue here is whether the concept of development is applicable outside its biological home.

The second sees moral learning not as a natural process, but as a deliberate induction into socially approved norms or values. On one version of this view, it is not enough to bring children to follow the rules enshrined in conventional moral codes as they need to learn to sift these in the light of higher-order rational principles. Problems arise here both about moral motivation and about whether morality is wholly to do with rules and principles. For other theorists moral education is more a matter of shaping children’s nature-given desires and emotions into settled dispositions or virtues on Aristotelian lines. While the ‘rational principle’ view focuses on the morally autonomous individual, this view has its roots in communal moral traditions.

Despite Plato’s belief that only knowledge is teachable, and therefore that it is doubtful whether moral goodness can be taught at all, the third view of moral learning maintains that it must include the acquisition of relevant knowledge and understanding, and cover the formation of dispositions. All this bears on how moral education should feature in schools – on the role of school ethos, learning by example, and the contribution of the whole curriculum.
Moral expertise
Authors: Hooker Brad
Published: September 2018

Moral experts are best defined as those who have studied moral questions carefully, know the main theories developed in response to such questions, and (where possible) know and are able to offer arguments that would convince reasonable people.

In scientific and technical areas, one important feature of a successful answer is that it works, in the sense that it makes accurate predictions. We can say that successful answers to moral questions take the form of arguments which, if examined carefully, would persuade reasonable people and lead to convergence in their moral views.

The moral responsibility of individuals for themselves does not preclude the role of moral advisor. Many self-pronounced moral experts might be interfering, condescending and hypocritical, but such characteristics need not accompany moral expertise. Probably no one could claim a high degree of expertise in all areas of ethics.
Moral justification
Authors: Scanlon T.M.
Published: September 2018

Questions of justification arise in moral philosophy in at least three ways. The first concerns the way in which particular moral claims, such as claims about right and wrong, can be shown to be correct. Virtually every moral theory offers its own account of moral justification in this sense, and these accounts naturally differ from each other. A second question is about the justification of morality as a whole – about how to answer the question, ‘Why be moral?’ Philosophers have disagreed about this, and about whether an answer is even possible. Finally, some philosophers have claimed that justification of our actions to others is a central aim of moral thinking. They maintain that this aim provides answers to the other two questions of justification by explaining the reasons we have to be moral and the particular form that justification takes within moral argument.
Moral motivation
Authors: Wallace R. Jay
Published: September 2018

Questions about the possibility and nature of moral motivation occupy a central place in the history of ethics. Philosophers disagree, however, about the role that motivational investigations should play within the larger subject of ethical theory. These disagreements surface in the dispute about whether moral thought is necessarily motivating – ‘internalists’ affirming that it is,‘externalists’ denying this.

The disagreement between externalists and internalists reflects a basic difference in how the subject matter of ethics is conceived: externalism goes with the view that ethics is primarily about the truth of theories, construed as sets of propositions, while internalists see morality as a set of principles meant to guide the practical deliberations of individual agents. Internalists interpret questions of objectivity in ethics as questions of practical reason, about the authority of moral principles to regulate our activities. Here controversy has centred on whether the authority of practical principles for a given agent must be grounded in that agent’s antecedent desires, or whether, instead, practical reason can give rise to new motivations.

There are also important questions about the content of moral motivations. A moral theory should help us to make sense of the fact that people are often moved to do the right thing, by identifying a basic motive to moral behaviour that is both widespread and intelligible, as a serious source of reasons. Philosophers have accounted for moral motivation in terms of self-interest, sympathy, and a higher-order concern to act in accordance with moral principles. But each of these approaches faces difficult challenges. Can egoistic accounts capture the distinctive character of moral motivation? Can impartial sympathy be integrated within a realistic system of human ends? Can we make sense of responsiveness to moral principle, as a natural human incentive?
Naturalism in ethics
Authors: Sturgeon Nicholas L.
Published: September 2018

Ethical naturalism is the project of fitting an account of ethics into a naturalistic worldview. It includes nihilistic theories, which see no place for real values and no successful role for ethical thought in a purely natural world. The term ‘naturalism’ is often used more narrowly, however, to refer to cognitivist naturalism, which holds that ethical facts are simply natural facts and that ethical thought succeeds in discovering them.

G.E. Moore (1903), attacked cognitivist naturalism as mistaken in principle, for committing what he called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. He thought a simple test showed that ethical facts could not be natural facts (the ‘fallacy’ lay in believing they could be), and he took it to follow that ethical knowledge would have to rest on nonsensory intuition. Later writers have added other arguments for the same conclusions. Moore himself was in no sense a naturalist, since he thought that ethics could be given a ‘non-natural’ basis. Many who elaborated his criticisms of cognitivist naturalism, however, have done so on behalf of generic ethical naturalism, and so have defended either ethical nihilism or else some more modest constructive position, usually a version of noncognitivism. Noncognitivists concede to nihilists that nature contains no real values, but deny that it was ever the function of ethical thought to discover such things. They thus leave ethical thought room for success at some other task, such as providing the agent with direction for action.

Defenders of cognitivist naturalism deny that there is a ‘naturalistic fallacy’ or that ethical knowledge need rest on intuition; and they have accused Moore and his successors of relying on dubious assumptions in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Thus many difficult philosophical issues have been implicated in the debate.