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
Enlightenment A European cultural movement that reached its height in the 18th century, but which still resonates today Enlightenment theories about economics and philosophy, still widely held today, have provided the basis for numerous critiques from numerous critics including members of the Frankfurt school and most of the leading French thinkers of modern and postmodern eras
Key Lectures 1)Social Thoughts of Ancient Greece 2)Cosmopolitanism of Mediterranean Empire: Hellenic Social Thoughts 3) Social Thoughts in Roman Law 4) Christian Social Philosophy in the Middle Ages
