1,721,010 research outputs found
Review: What is This Thing Called Happiness? by Fred Feldman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xv + 286. H/b £36.00, P/b £16.99.
No full textReview: "Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language" by Stephen Finlay, Oxford University Press, 2014. viii + 278 pp. £42.00.
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The guise of reasons
Full text linkIn this article it is argued that we should amend the traditional understanding of the view known as the guise of the good. The guise of the good is traditionally understood as the view that we only want to act in ways that we believe to be good in some way. It will be argued that a more plausible view is that we only want to act in ways in which we believe we have normative reason to act. This change—from formulating the view in terms of goodness to formulating it in terms of reasons— is significant because the revised view avoids various old and new counterexamples to the traditional view, because the revised view is better motivated than the traditional view, and because the revised view is better placed to explain certain features of desire than the traditional view.<br/
Take in your hen: fittingness and hedonic adaptation
No full textHumans have a strong tendency to hedonically adapt to their circumstances, so that something that once brought joy eventually brings only indifference. Does this tendency guarantee a kind of failure on our part? Happiness, like other emotions, seems subject to evaluation in terms of its fittingness. But it’s not clear how hedonic adaptation could possibly maintain fittingness: it involves changing one’s level of happiness in a way that doesn’t track the absolute goodness of one’s circumstances. This paper mounts a defence of hedonic adaptation against this concern. It does so by articulating a key difference between the scale of happiness and the scale of goodness, and shows how that difference guarantees an inability to track absolute levels of goodness with our levels of happiness. Given this background constraint, hedonic adaptation may be the most appropriate way for our happiness to change over time
Review: Andrew Reisner and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Reasons for Belief, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 273pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781107006874.
No full textDisability and Wellbeing
No full textThis entry discusses the relationship between disability and well-being. Disabilities are commonly thought to be unfortunate, but whether this is true is unclear, and, if it is true, it is unclear why it is true. The entry first explains the disability paradox, which is the apparent discrepancy between the level of well-being that disabled people self-report, and the level of well-being that nondisabled people predict disabled people to have. It then turns to an argument that says that disabilities must be bad, because it is wrong to cause them in others. Later sections discuss whether disabilities might be intrinsically bad or even bad by definition. The final section addresses the claim that disabilities are bad only because society discriminates against people with disabilities
Reasons as good bases
Full text linkIn this paper, I defend a new theory of normative reasons called reasons as good bases (RGB), according to which a normative reason to φ is something that is a good basis for φing. The idea is that the grounds on which we do things—bases—can be better or worse as things of their kind, and a normative reason—a good reason—is something that is just a good instance of such a ground. After introducing RGB, I clarify what it is to be a good basis, and argue that RGB has various attractive features: it has intuitive implications, makes good sense of the weights of reasons, and attractively explains the relationship between normative reasons and motivating reasons. I then briefly defend the view from objections and compare it to rivals. Finally, I sketch two possible implications of RGB: some kind of constitutivism, according to which the norms that govern us are explained by the nature of agency, and second, the claim that agents who do things for reasons generally do them for good reasons
A very good reason to reject the buck-passing account
Full text linkThis paper presents a new objection to the buck-passing account of value. I distinguish the buck-passing account of predicative value from the buck-passing account of attributive value. According to the latter, facts about attributive value reduce to facts about reasons and their weights. But since facts about reasons’ weights are themselves facts about attributive value, this account presupposes what it is supposed to explain. As part of this argument, I also argue against Mark Schroeder's recent account of the weights of reasons, which purports to explain the weights of reasons in terms of further reasons without circularity. I then argue that if we abandon the buck-passing account of attributive value, it would be ad hoc and unjustifiable to continue to endorse the buck-passing account of predicative value. In short, there seems to be little hope for the buck-passing account in either form. The paper ends by sketching a novel alternative theory according to which reasons are analysed in terms of the attributive value of motives. I suggest that a normative reason to φ is something that would be a good motive for φ-ing. At least at first glance, this view has numerous merits and few problem
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