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This book answers some of the oldest questions in moral philosophy. Claiming that a fundamental issue in normative ethics is what ultimate reasons for action we might have, it argues that the best statements of such reasons will not employ moral concepts. The book investigates and explains the nature of reasons themselves; its account of how we come to know them combines an intuitionist epistemology with elements of Pyrrhonist scepticism. It defends a hedonistic theory of well-being and an account of practical reason according to which we can give some, though not overriding, priority to our own good over that of others. The book develops original lines of argument within a framework of some traditional but currently less popular views.

George Berkeley notoriously claimed that his immaterialist metaphysics was not only consistent with common sense, but that it was also integral to its defense. This book argues that understanding the basic connection between Berkeley's philosophy and common sense requires a better understanding of the four principle components of Berkeley's positive metaphysics: the nature of being, the divine language thesis, the active/passive distinction, and the nature of spirits. This book begins by focusing on Berkeley's view of the nature of being. It elucidates Berkeley's view on Locke and the Cartesians, and examines Berkeley's views about related concepts such as unity and simplicity. From there, it moves on to Berkeley's philosophy of language, arguing that scrutiny of the famous Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge reveals that Berkeley identified the ideational theory of meaning and understanding as the root cause of some of the worst of humanity's intellectual errors, not abstract ideas. Abstract ideas are, rather, the most debilitating symptom of this underlying ailment. In place of the ideational theory, Berkeley defends a rudimentary use theory of meaning. This understanding of Berkeley's approach to semantics is then applied to the divine language thesis and is shown to have important consequences for Berkeley's pragmatic approach to the ontology of natural objects and for his approach to our knowledge of, and relation to, other minds, including God's. Turning next to Berkeley's much maligned account of spirits, the book defends the coherence of Berkeley's view of spirits by way of providing an interpretation of the active/passive distinction as marking a normative distinction and by focusing on the role that divine language plays in letting Berkeley identify the soul with the will. With these four principles of Berkeley's philosophy in hand, the book returns to the topic of common sense and offers a defense of Berkeley's philosophy as built upon, and expressive of, the deepest metaphysical commitments of mainstream Christianity.

This book focuses on Plotinus' notion of Intellect. Intellect comes second in Plotinus' hierarchical model of reality, after the One, which is an unknowable first cause of everything. Intellect is also the sphere of being, the Platonic Ideas, which exist as its thoughts. Plotinus' doctrine of Intellect raises a host of questions that the book seeks to answer: Intellect's thought is described as an attempt to grasp the One and at the same time as self-thought. How are these two claims related? How are they compatible? What lies in Plotinus' insistence that Intellect's thought is a thought of itself? The minimal requirements thought must satisfy according to Plotinus is that it must involve a distinction between thinker and object of thought, and the object itself must be varied. How are these two claims which amount to holding that Intellect is plural in two different ways related? What is the relation between Intellect as a thinker and Intellect as an object of thought? Plotinus' position here seems to amount to a form of idealism, a claim that is explored in the book. As opposed to ordinary human discursive thinking, Intellect's thought is all-at-once, timeless, truthful, and a direct intuition into ‘the things themselves’; it is presumably not even propositional. This strong notion of non-discursive thought is discussed and explained as well as Plotinus' claim that this must be the primary form of thought. The main conclusion of the book is that though clearly dependent on the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, Plotinus' theory of Intellect contains very significant innovations.

This book is a philosophical study of the nature and value of happiness. Part I is devoted to critical discussion of the most important theories about the nature of happiness, understood as some sort of psychological state. Views discussed include sensory hedonism, local preferentism, Kahneman's theory, and Whole Life Satisfactionism. Part II of the book contains the exposition and defense of a novel theory about the nature and value of happiness. It is a form of attitudinal hedonism. The idea that a person's welfare, or well‐being, depends essentially on happiness is explained and (with reservations) defended, provided that happiness is understood according to the theory presented here. Part III of the book extends the discussion into some areas that bear on interactions between empirical research concerning happiness and philosophical inquiry into the same phenomenon. Current methods of measuring happiness are criticized and a new method is proposed. Philosophical implications of empirical research concerning happiness are evaluated.

Millions of children suffer from diseases and illnesses who do not have adequate treatment. And many other children are harmed by medicines intended to help them. To protect and help these children society needs to conduct pediatric research. Yet, critics and courts have argued that it is unethical to expose children to research risks for the benefit of others. They argue that this practice violates our obligation to protect children and exploits them for the benefit of others. In this way, clinical research with children poses what appears to be an irresolvable dilemma: either we can protect pediatric subjects from exploitation or we can protect pediatric patients from dangerous medicines, but not both. The present work, which is the first to systematically evaluate this dilemma, offers an original justification for pediatric research based on an in-depth analysis of when it is in our interests to help others.

Volume 139 of the Proceedings of the British Academy contains thirteen lectures in the humanities and social sciences delivered at the British Academy in 2005. Subject matter ranges from archaeological perspectives on the essence of being human to discussions of the UK's Monetary Policy Committee, the role of judges, and Dame Marilyn Strathern on ‘Useful Knowledge’.

This book represents a study of the meaning of "the end" in the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar, that highlights both the originality and the fruitfulness of his vision of a reciprocal drama between God and the world. The argument of the book can be summed up simply: being -creaturely being and trinitarian being -unveils its final countenance as love in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. After setting forth three basic problems inherent in Christian eschatology, Healy introduces Balthasar's trinitarian perspective: eschatology is concerned with the life of the Trinity, as revealed by Jesus Christ, and as the origin and final destiny of the whole created cosmos. The book presupposes that a critical engagement with Balthasar's thought requires attending to the original way he uses philosophy within theology. Thomas Aquinas' analogy of being, fulfilled in the person of Christ, is both the abiding precondition of, and is ultimately disclosed in, the drama between God and the world whose form takes shape within Christ's return to the Father. The ultimate form of the end, and thus the measure of all that is meant by eschatology, is given in Christ's eucharistic and pneumatic gift of himself - gift that simultaneously lays bare the mystery of the Trinity and enables Christ to "return" to the Father in communion with the whole of creation. Insofar as Christ reveals the trinitarian life and the mystery of creation in their dramatic interplay, he establishes the form of eschatology as a participation in God's engagement with the world. Under the sign of the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist, Christian eschatology involves a sharing in Christ's double movement into the world and, together with the world, into God. By developing the metaphysical dimensions of Balthasar's doctrine of the last things, Healy shows that his writings on the eschaton contain unexpected resources for the ecclesial renewal envisaged by the Second Vatican Council and its missionary opening to the world.

One of the principal goals of antipoverty efforts should be to improve the absolute living standards of the least well-off. This book aims to enhance our understanding of how to do that, drawing on the experiences of twenty affluent countries since the 1970s. The book addresses a set of questions at the heart of political economy and public policy: How much does economic growth help the poor? When and why does growth fail to trickle down? How can social policy help? Can a country have a sizeable low-wage sector yet few poor households? Are universal programs better than targeted ones? What role can public services play in antipoverty efforts? What is the best tax mix? Is more social spending better for the poor? If we commit to improvement in the absolute living standards of the least well-off, must we sacrifice other desirable outcomes?

This book offers answers to the following questions. What does reality encompass? Is reality exclusively physical? Or does reality include non‐physical — mental, and perhaps ‘abstract’ — aspects? What is it to be physical or mental — or to be an abstract entity? What are the elements of being, reality’s building blocks? How is the manifest image we inherit from our culture and refine in the special sciences related to the scientific image as we have it in fundamental physics? Can physics be understood as providing a ‘theory of everything’, or do the various sciences make up a hierarchy corresponding to autonomous levels of reality? Is our conscious human perspective on the universe in the universe or at its limits? What, if anything, makes ordinary truths, truths of the special sciences, and truths of mathematics true? And what is it for an assertion or judgment to be ‘made true’? Answers to these questions are framed in terms of a comprehensive ontology of substances and properties inspired by Descartes, Locke, their successors, and their more recent exemplars. Substances are simple, lacking parts that are themselves substances. Properties are modes (tropes), particular ways particular substances are, not universals. Arrangements of propertied substances serve as truthmakers for all the truths that have truthmakers. The deep story about the nature of these truthmakers is addressed by fundamental physics.

This book argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, it shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of ‘pragmatic modulation’ must be taken into account in theorizing about semantic content, for it interacts with the grammar-driven process of semantic composition. Because of that interaction, the book argues, the content of a sentence always depends upon the context in which it is used. This claim defines Contextualism, a view which has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and of which the author of this book is one of the main proponents.

Human emotional suffering has been studied for centuries, but the significance of psychological injuries within legal contexts has only recently been recognized. As the public becomes increasingly aware of the ways in which mental health affects physical—and financial—well-being, psychological injuries comprise a rapidly growing set of personal injury insurance claims. Although the problems that people claim to suffer from are serious and often genuine, the largely subjective and unobservable nature of psychological conditions has led to much skepticism about the authenticity of psychological injury claims. Improved assessment methods and research on the economic and physical health consequences of psychological distress has resulted in exponential growth in the litigation related to such conditions. Integrating the history of psychological injuries both from legal and mental health perspectives, this book offers discussions of relevant statutory and case law. Focusing especially on post-traumatic stress disorder, it addresses the current status and empirical limitations of forensic assessments of psychological injuries and alerts to common vulnerabilities in expert evidence from mental health professionals. In addition, it also uses empirical research to provide the best forensic methods for assessing both clinical conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and for alternative explanations such as malingering.

Among the various conceptions of truth is one according to which ‘is true’ is a transparent, entirely see-through device introduced for only practical (expressive) reasons. This device, when introduced into the language, brings about truth-theoretic paradoxes (particularly, the notorious Liar and Curry paradoxes). The options for dealing with the paradoxes while preserving the full transparency of ‘true’ are limited. This book presents and defends a modest, so-called dialetheic theory of transparent truth.

This book addresses philosophical questions about death and well‐being. It defends two main theses. The first is hedonism, or the view that pleasure is what has intrinsic value for us. The second is a difference‐making principle about value, according to which (i) the value of an event for a person is determined by the difference it makes to the intrinsic value of that person's life, and (ii) the value of an event for someone at a time is determined by the difference it makes to how well‐off the person is at that time. These views have the following implications: things that happen after someone has died cannot harm that person; death itself, however, is bad for people after they die (contrary to what Epicurus thought), by making its victim worse off at those later times; death is worse the earlier it occurs, so it is worse to die as an infant than as a young adult; death is bad for fetuses and animals in essentially the same way as it is for adult humans; the only sensible way to make death less bad is to live so long that no more of a good life is possible.

Since the 1940s Americans and Britons have come to enjoy an era of rising material abundance. Yet this has been accompanied by a range of social and personal disorders, including family breakdown, addiction, mental instability, crime, obesity, inequality, economic insecurity, and declining trust. This book argues that well-being has lagged behind affluence in these societies, because they present an environment in which consistent choices are difficult to achieve over different time ranges and in which the capacity for personal and social commitment is undermined by the flow of novelty. The book's approach draws on economics and social science, makes use of the latest cognitive research, and provides a detailed and reasoned critique of modern consumer society, especially the assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being. The book falls into three parts. Part one analyzes the ways in which economic resources map on to human welfare, why choice is so intractable, and how commitment to people and institutions is sustained. It argues that choice is constrained by prior obligation and reciprocity. The second section then applies these conceptual arguments to comparative empirical studies of advertising, of eating and obesity, and of the production and acquisition of appliances and automobiles. Finally, in part three, the book investigates social and personal relations in the USA and Britain, including inter-personal regard, the rewards and reversals of status, the social and psychological costs of inequality, and the challenges posed to heterosexual love and to parenthood by the rise of affluence.