October 22, 2001 Personal IdentityⅢ . Review soul criterion and body criterion Soul criterion: x is the same person as y iff and y have the same soul. Problems: i)There is no way to establish body-soul correlations; and no way to establish personality correlations. So soul criterion doesn't make sense of our practices of recognizing and identifying people ii)We have no special access to souls, so even in our own case we can't be sure it's the same soul \inside\ us whenever we are conscious. ii) The problem of identity is \pushed back\: what is it for person-stage x to have the same soul as person-stage y? What makes for sameness of souls? Body criterion: x is the same person as y iff x and y have the same living human body

24.00: Problems of Philosophy Prof. Sally Haslanger November 7, 2001 Freewill IlI: Libertarianism I. Recap: Compatibilism v. Incompatibilism Hard determinism is the view that determinis is true and that because of this freedom is an illusion. The libertarian agrees with the hard determinist that freewill is incompatible with determinism, but disagrees about which claim should be rejected. The libertarian holds that we have free will, but this is only because determinism is false-free acts occur and are undetermined. The hard determinist and the libertarian are both incompatibilists. Soft determinism, also known as compatibilism, maintains that determinism is true, but also that determinism is

Different Sort of Personal Identity:\Ethical\ Identity . Personal Identity: \Ethical\v. \Metaphysical\questions The previous lectures and readings on personal identity were primarily concerned with the metaphysics of personal identity. Question of diachronic identity/unity: Confronted with an individual X at one time and Y at another, what would make it the case that X and Y are (or are parts of) the same person? We've seen that the answer to this question may well depend on what sort of thing you think persons are: are persons bodies? Streams of consciousness?

Moral Luck One of the important themes in the freewill debate is the idea that freedom is necessary for moral responsibility. In effect, if hard determinism is the correct view, then we should not hold ourselves or others morally responsible. Libertarians, in particular, seem to hold that in order to be responsible for an act, we must be its \sole author. Here is the principle at issue: Control Principle: You are only responsible for what you have control over. If you steal an axe from my garage and use it to break into a gas station, there's no point in holding me responsible, I didn't

November 29, 2001 Duty and Famine: Singer Last time we considered Mill's version of Utilitarianism, called Eudaimonistic Utilitarianism characterized by what he calls \the greatest-happiness principle\: You ought always to act so as to maximize happiness, i.e., the right act is the act that results in the greatest amount of happiness overall. The \greatest-happiness principle\, however, just states one version of Utilitarianism. Other versions of

December 10. 2001 (Meta-Ethical Subjectivism(or Non-cognitivism) For the past couple of weeks we have been focusing on the following questions i)Which acts are right and which are wrong? Which acts ought we to perform? ii)What makes an action right or wrong? What about the action determines its moral status? Our third question has received less attention

Prof. Sally Haslanger December 2, 2001 Kantian Ethics (and more on famine) So far we've looked at egoist and utilitarian approaches to ethics. The main objection we considered to egoism was that it failed to accommodate the common sense idea that morality involves a kind of impartiality, at the very least it seems that

Particularism and virtue ethics I. Universalism and Particularism We've considered before some basic questions that we would expect a moral theory to answer i)Which acts are right and which are wrong? Which acts ought we to perform(understanding the\ought\as a moral

November 21, 2001 Ethical Egoism Here are three questions (of course there are others)we might want an ethical theory to answer for us: i)Which acts are right and which are wrong? Which acts ought we to perform(understandir the\ought\ as moral \ought\)? ii)What makes a particular action right or wrong? What is it about the action that determines its moral status? ii)How do we know what is right and wrong? Remember that according to relativism, whether an action is right or wrong

Utilitarianism Last time we considered three questions one might ask an ethical theory to answer i)Which acts are right and which are wrong? Which acts ought we to perform(understanding the\ought as a moral ii)What makes a particular action right or wrong? What is it about the action that determines its moral status? 111) How do we know what is right and wrong? There are a variety of strategies for answering(iii). One might hold e. g. that moral truths are revealed by god and