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Lars Bergström

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Papers by Lars Bergström

The Concept of Ownership

I shall be mainly concerned with two questions: (1) What is the meaning of statements to the effe... more I shall be mainly concerned with two questions: (1) What is the meaning of statements to the effect that someone owns something?, and (2) What is the basis of ownership, i.e. under what conditions does someone own something? In the context of this conference on the question "Who owns our genes?", one may wonder whether there are some "things" that cannot be owned by anyone. I guess the natural attitude among ordinary people would be that genes are not owned by anyone or, alternatively, that they belong to all of us together. In classical terms, a gene is either a res nullius or it is a res communes omnium. However, in order to justify-or discredit-such an attitude something has to be said about the questions (1) and (2). An answer to (2) might be sufficient, but in order to answer (2), a natural first step is to say something about (1). The meaning of ownership. So let's start with (1). It is commonly agreed that to own something, X, is to have certain rights and duties vis-à-vis other people or juridical persons with respect to X. In short, ownership is a bundle of rights and duties. For example, if you own a car, you have the right to drive it (provided you have a driver's license), the right to prevent others from using it, the right to sell it or to give it away, the duty to pay an owner's tax, and the duty to see to it that it satisfies certain safety regulations; moreover, the car is liable to execution for any debt or insolvency that you might have, and so on. However, we can hardly maintain that this is what we mean when we say that you own a car. For one thing, most of us have no clear conception of exactly what rights and duties are involved in the ownership of a car. Secondly, other instances of ownership may involve different rights and duties-e.g. if you own a piece of land, you may not have the right to prevent others from using it (in certain ways)-but it seems odd to say that the very meaning of terms such as "own", "ownership", and "property" varies from one instance to another. If this were the case, it would be hard to see how we could ever learn the meaning of these terms.

Reflections on consequentialism

Theoria, Feb 11, 2008

there is no separate entry for "consequentialism"; the reader is referred to "utilitarianism", an... more there is no separate entry for "consequentialism"; the reader is referred to "utilitarianism", and this is in turn explained as "the moral theory that an action is morally right if and only if it produces at least as much good (utility) for all people affected by the action as any alternative action the person could do instead". 2 This is a sufficient starting point for my purposes in this paper. It indicates, for example, that the kind of theory I have in mind is "act consequentialism", rather than "rule consequentialism". A well-known consequentialist theory would be the hedonistic utilitarianism described in the first two chapters of G.E. Moore's Ethics; another example would be Moore's own nonhedonistic "ideal" utilitarianism proposed in the same book. 3 Moore takes (hedonistic) utilitarianism to contain the "principle" that "a voluntary action is right, whenever and only when the agent could not, even if he had chosen, have done any other action instead, which would have caused more pleasure than the one he did do". 4 Notice, however, that, for Moore, utilitarianism does not only say "that the producing of a maximum of pleasure is a characteristic, which did and will belong, as a matter of fact, to all right voluntary actions (actual or possible)", it also says that "it is because they possess this characteristic that such actions are right". 5 I follow Moore here. I take consequentialism to be an explanatory theory of moral rightness; it is neither a statement of a mere correlation between rightness and a certain empirical and/or evaluative property, nor a decision procedure to be followed in actual situations of choice. The distinction between theories of rightness and practical decision procedures is probably quite old. It appears to go back at least to Henry Sidgwick. 6 It is quite clearly

Degrees of democraticity

Oñati socio-legal series, 2011

People have tended to load their different conceptions of democracy with their own political idea... more People have tended to load their different conceptions of democracy with their own political ideals; in this paper it is argued that normative and definitional questions should rather be separated, so that political philosophers and political scientists may adopt the same concept of democracy, even if they disagree normatively or politically. Moreover, it is argued that we should replace an absolute notion of democracy by a relativized notion, which allows for different degrees of democraticity. This facilitates the separation of normative and conceptual issues and it is convenient in contexts in which "democratic deficits" are discussed-as e.g. when democracy is to be implemented on a supranational level. Moreover, it has the consequence that democratic deficits are not necessarily bad.

Meaning and morals

Gary Kemp Quine versus Davidson: Truth, Reference, and Meaning. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013. 191 pp. isbn 978-0-19-969562-1

Theoria, Aug 6, 2014

Death and Eternal Recurrence

Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 28, 2012

Many people-perhaps the vast majority of mankind-seem to believe that there is some kind of life ... more Many people-perhaps the vast majority of mankind-seem to believe that there is some kind of life after death. This is remarkable, if only because corpses appear to be so completely dead. Some people believe that each person has an immaterial soul that somehow lives on when the body is transformed into a corpse, but this is unlikely in view of the fact that a person's mental life appears to be intimately connected with what happens in his or her brain. Even so, there is perhaps some other way in which we might survive death. The belief in some kind of afterlife may of course be an instance of wishful thinking, but it is unclear to what extent a life after death is something to be wished for. To wish for good things-at least if one believes that they are at all possibleis perhaps not irrational, but it is not so obvious that life after death would be a good thing. It is very unclear what kind of life it could be. In this paper I shall explore the idea that life after death is exactly the same as life before death. This follows from the theory of eternal recurrence. Eternal recurrence-or "eternal return", as it is sometimes called-can be described in different ways; roughly, the basic idea is that the whole history of the universe has happened before and will happen again; cosmic history is cyclic, with no beginning and no end. In particular, whenever someone dies, he or she will be born again in the next cycle of cosmic history. So even if all of us die, our death is never definitive. There is always an afterlife, and this afterlife is just like the life we live before death. In one sense, we are certainly mortal-but, in another sense, we are also immortal. The idea that everything has happened before and will happen again may seem very implausible, but many philosophers have been attracted to it, and it used to be held by many people in earlier times. For traditional man, time was cyclical in the sense that life consisted in the repetition of archetypes; e.g. each year (often in the spring) men abandoned the past and started all over again, thereby achieving purification and recreation. 1 The distinguished historian of religions Mircea Eliade, in his book The Myth of the Eternal Return, writes as follows: This cyclical conception of the disappearance and reappearance of humanity is also preserved in the historical cultures. In the third century B. C., Berossus popularized the Chaldean doctrine of the "Great Year" in a form that spread through the entire Hellenic world (whence it later passed to the Romans and the Byzantines). According to this doctrine, the universe is eternal but it is periodically destroyed and reconstituted every Great Year (the corresponding number of millennia varies from school to school).

Democracy and future generations

Underdetermination of Physical Theory

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2004

W. V. Quine Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays, ed. DagfinnFøllesdal and Douglas B.Quine. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 482 pp. isbn 978-0-674-03084-8

Theoria, Apr 3, 2013

Davidsons's Objections to Quine's Empiricism

There are many similarities between Donald Davidson's philosophy and W. V. Quine's, but there are... more There are many similarities between Donald Davidson's philosophy and W. V. Quine's, but there are also differences. One difference has to do with Quine's empiricism. As everyone knows, Quine has argued that the notorious "two dogmas of empiricism" should be abandoned, but he himself is definitely still an empiricist. 1 Davidson, on the other hand, has drawn attention to a "third dogma of empiricism", which he attributes to Quine among others. Davidson has argued that this third dogma should also be given up, and he suggests that when it is gone there is nothing left to call empiricism. 2 In this paper I shall describe this apparent disagreement between Davidson and Quine in more detail, and I shall argue that Quine's empiricism is not really undermined by Davidson's arguments. 3

Putnam on the Fact-Value Dichotomy

Croatian Journal of Philosophy

In Reason, Truth and History and certain related writings, Hilary Putnam attacks the fact-value d... more In Reason, Truth and History and certain related writings, Hilary Putnam attacks the fact-value distinction. This paper criticizes his arguments and defends the distinction. Putnam claims that factual statements presuppose values, that "the empirical world depends upon our criteria of rational acceptability," and that "we must have criteria of rational acceptability to even have an empirical world." The present paper argues that these claims are mistaken.

Meaning and morals

Death and Eternal Recurrence

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, 2012

This chapter, which examines the concept of eternal recurrence and its relation to death, also di... more This chapter, which examines the concept of eternal recurrence and its relation to death, also discusses the concepts of the recurrence in linear time, closed time, and the objective and subjective perspectives in eternal recurrence. It provides arguments to show that eternal recurrence is both desirable and possible, and that it is the only intelligible version of eternal life even if it presupposes a rather nonstandard conception of time.

W. V. Quine Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays, ed. DagfinnFøllesdal and Douglas B.Quine. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 482 pp. isbn 978-0-674-03084-8

Theoria, 2013

This is the accepted version of a paper published in Theoria. This paper has been peer-reviewed b... more

Outline for an Argument for Moral Realism

Grazer Philosophische Studien, 1981

Until quite recently, the tenn "moral realism" has hardly been used at all in moral philosophy. H... more Until quite recently, the tenn "moral realism" has hardly been used at all in moral philosophy. However, "realism" is of course a wellknown label in other areas of philosophy. It is sometimes constrasted with "nominalism", sometimes with "idealism" and "phenomenalism", sometimes with "instrumentalism" and "conventionalism", and sometimes with "verificationism". In moral philosophy, what corresponds most closely to these contrasts are the traditional distinctions between naturalism, nonnaturalism, and noncognitivism (see e.g. Brandt 1959, Chapters 7-9). These three views are concerned with the nature of moral statements or with the meaning of moral language. Roughly speaking, naturalism is the view that moral statements are simply a kind of empirical statements. In other words, it is the view that moral sentences are used to express statements of empirical fact. Nonnaturalism is the view that moral statements are factual (and synthetic) but not empirical. Finally, noncognitivism is the view that so-called "moral statements" are no real statements at allat least, they are not factual statements; moral sentences are not used to express any statements of fact. The best-known fonns of noncognitivism are emotivism and prescriptivism. Thus, for example, emotivism can be described as the view that moral convictions are attitudes, not beliefs. More often, it is stated somewhat as follows: moral sentences are used to express the speaker's attitude and to invite others to share that attitude. It might seem natural to use the tenn "moral realism" to denote naturalism and nonnaturalism. For according to these views, moral statements are factual. But what does it mean to say that moral statements are "factual"? Perhaps it means that they are (synthetic and) either true or false. If so, there is a certain complication here, since some noncognitivists are also inclined to hold that moral statements

Notes on the value of science

Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science IX, Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, 1995

It is generally believed that science is a good thing. (I use the term "science", in this paper, ... more It is generally believed that science is a good thing. (I use the term "science", in this paper, to include not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences and the humanities.) Many people-and, in particular, most scientists-seem to take it for granted that scientific knowledge is valuable for its own sake. In addition, scientific research has very important social effects, and while some of these are generally held to be bad or neutral, I think the predominant view is that the total impact of science on society is positive rather than negative. After all, we do spend a lot of money on science, and scientists have a lot of prestige in our society. This might be explained by the assumption that most people think that science is valuable. (This ought to be the correct explanation, at least in a democracy.) But is the belief true? Is science, on the whole, good or bad? This is the problem I want to discuss in the present paper. 1 Most people would agree that so far science has had some positive as well as some negative effects. For example, it has given us electricity, which may be used to make our lives more comfortable, but it has also given us terrible weapons, which may one day put an end to our very existence. Einstein once described the situation as follows: Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for mankind, producing, on the one hand, inventions which liberated man from exhausting physical labor, making his life easier and richer; but on the other hand, introducing a grave restlessness into his life, making him a slave to his technological environment, and-most catastrophic of all-creating the means for his own mass destruction. 2 Most people would accept this statement. However, there may be some disagreement over other alleged effects of science. For example, some people may claim that only certain natural sciences, like physics and chemistry, can have negative effects, and that other sciences (including, in particular, the humanities) have only good effects, in addition to being valuable for 1 This paper partly derives from a talk given in January 1990 to a seminar on "Humanistic Aspects of Scientific and Technological Progress" at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. I am grateful to the participants for many helpful comments. I also wish to thank Hans Mathlein, Torbjörn Tännsjö, and Jan Österberg of Stockholm University for comments on the first written version.

Quine's relativism

Theoria, 2008

W. V. Quine claimed that relativism is paradoxical and unacceptable; nevertheless, his own views ... more

Reflections on consequentialism

Theoria, 2008

there is no separate entry for "consequentialism"; the reader is referred to "utilitarianism", an... more there is no separate entry for "consequentialism"; the reader is referred to "utilitarianism", and this is in turn explained as "the moral theory that an action is morally right if and only if it produces at least as much good (utility) for all people affected by the action as any alternative action the person could do instead". 2 This is a sufficient starting point for my purposes in this paper. It indicates, for example, that the kind of theory I have in mind is "act consequentialism", rather than "rule consequentialism". A well-known consequentialist theory would be the hedonistic utilitarianism described in the first two chapters of G.E. Moore's Ethics; another example would be Moore's own nonhedonistic "ideal" utilitarianism proposed in the same book. 3 Moore takes (hedonistic) utilitarianism to contain the "principle" that "a voluntary action is right, whenever and only when the agent could not, even if he had chosen, have done any other action instead, which would have caused more pleasure than the one he did do". 4 Notice, however, that, for Moore, utilitarianism does not only say "that the producing of a maximum of pleasure is a characteristic, which did and will belong, as a matter of fact, to all right voluntary actions (actual or possible)", it also says that "it is because they possess this characteristic that such actions are right". 5 I follow Moore here. I take consequentialism to be an explanatory theory of moral rightness; it is neither a statement of a mere correlation between rightness and a certain empirical and/or evaluative property, nor a decision procedure to be followed in actual situations of choice. The distinction between theories of rightness and practical decision procedures is probably quite old. It appears to go back at least to Henry Sidgwick. 6 It is quite clearly

Degrees of democraticity

People have tended to load their different conceptions of democracy with their own political idea... more People have tended to load their different conceptions of democracy with their own political ideals; in this paper it is argued that normative and definitional questions should rather be separated, so that political philosophers and political scientists may adopt the same concept of democracy, even if they disagree normatively or politically. Moreover, it is argued that we should replace an absolute notion of democracy by a relativized notion, which allows for different degrees of democraticity. This facilitates the separation of normative and conceptual issues and it is convenient in contexts in which "democratic deficits" are discussed – as e.g. when democracy is to be implemented on a supranational level. Moreover, it has the consequence that democratic deficits are not necessarily bad.

• T H R E E • A Defense of Quinean Naturalism

y aim in this paper is to defend a Quinean form of naturalism in epistemology.1 This defense will... more y aim in this paper is to defend a Quinean form of naturalism in epistemology.1 This defense will consist in a criticism of certain more or less well-known objections to such a naturalism. Most of those who object to W. V. Quine’s project would insist that it leaves out certain central topics of traditional epistemology that should not be left out. By contrast, I accept what I take to be Quine’s claim, viz. that naturalized epistemology preserves everything worthwhile within traditional epistemology, and that there are certain projects within traditional epistemology that should be given up because they are impossible or illegitimate. In particular, it is impossible to validate or justify our theory of the world by deriving it, by self-evident or certain steps, from self-evident or certain foundations.2 Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, and knowledge is justified true belief.3 However, justification and belief come in degrees, and we may wonder how much justification and beli...

The Concept of Ownership

I shall be mainly concerned with two questions: (1) What is the meaning of statements to the effe... more I shall be mainly concerned with two questions: (1) What is the meaning of statements to the effect that someone owns something?, and (2) What is the basis of ownership, i.e. under what conditions does someone own something? In the context of this conference on the question "Who owns our genes?", one may wonder whether there are some "things" that cannot be owned by anyone. I guess the natural attitude among ordinary people would be that genes are not owned by anyone or, alternatively, that they belong to all of us together. In classical terms, a gene is either a res nullius or it is a res communes omnium. However, in order to justify-or discredit-such an attitude something has to be said about the questions (1) and (2). An answer to (2) might be sufficient, but in order to answer (2), a natural first step is to say something about (1). The meaning of ownership. So let's start with (1). It is commonly agreed that to own something, X, is to have certain rights and duties vis-à-vis other people or juridical persons with respect to X. In short, ownership is a bundle of rights and duties. For example, if you own a car, you have the right to drive it (provided you have a driver's license), the right to prevent others from using it, the right to sell it or to give it away, the duty to pay an owner's tax, and the duty to see to it that it satisfies certain safety regulations; moreover, the car is liable to execution for any debt or insolvency that you might have, and so on. However, we can hardly maintain that this is what we mean when we say that you own a car. For one thing, most of us have no clear conception of exactly what rights and duties are involved in the ownership of a car. Secondly, other instances of ownership may involve different rights and duties-e.g. if you own a piece of land, you may not have the right to prevent others from using it (in certain ways)-but it seems odd to say that the very meaning of terms such as "own", "ownership", and "property" varies from one instance to another. If this were the case, it would be hard to see how we could ever learn the meaning of these terms.

Reflections on consequentialism

Theoria, Feb 11, 2008

there is no separate entry for "consequentialism"; the reader is referred to "utilitarianism", an... more there is no separate entry for "consequentialism"; the reader is referred to "utilitarianism", and this is in turn explained as "the moral theory that an action is morally right if and only if it produces at least as much good (utility) for all people affected by the action as any alternative action the person could do instead". 2 This is a sufficient starting point for my purposes in this paper. It indicates, for example, that the kind of theory I have in mind is "act consequentialism", rather than "rule consequentialism". A well-known consequentialist theory would be the hedonistic utilitarianism described in the first two chapters of G.E. Moore's Ethics; another example would be Moore's own nonhedonistic "ideal" utilitarianism proposed in the same book. 3 Moore takes (hedonistic) utilitarianism to contain the "principle" that "a voluntary action is right, whenever and only when the agent could not, even if he had chosen, have done any other action instead, which would have caused more pleasure than the one he did do". 4 Notice, however, that, for Moore, utilitarianism does not only say "that the producing of a maximum of pleasure is a characteristic, which did and will belong, as a matter of fact, to all right voluntary actions (actual or possible)", it also says that "it is because they possess this characteristic that such actions are right". 5 I follow Moore here. I take consequentialism to be an explanatory theory of moral rightness; it is neither a statement of a mere correlation between rightness and a certain empirical and/or evaluative property, nor a decision procedure to be followed in actual situations of choice. The distinction between theories of rightness and practical decision procedures is probably quite old. It appears to go back at least to Henry Sidgwick. 6 It is quite clearly

Degrees of democraticity

Oñati socio-legal series, 2011

People have tended to load their different conceptions of democracy with their own political idea... more People have tended to load their different conceptions of democracy with their own political ideals; in this paper it is argued that normative and definitional questions should rather be separated, so that political philosophers and political scientists may adopt the same concept of democracy, even if they disagree normatively or politically. Moreover, it is argued that we should replace an absolute notion of democracy by a relativized notion, which allows for different degrees of democraticity. This facilitates the separation of normative and conceptual issues and it is convenient in contexts in which "democratic deficits" are discussed-as e.g. when democracy is to be implemented on a supranational level. Moreover, it has the consequence that democratic deficits are not necessarily bad.

Meaning and morals

Gary Kemp Quine versus Davidson: Truth, Reference, and Meaning. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013. 191 pp. isbn 978-0-19-969562-1

Theoria, Aug 6, 2014

Death and Eternal Recurrence

Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 28, 2012

Many people-perhaps the vast majority of mankind-seem to believe that there is some kind of life ... more Many people-perhaps the vast majority of mankind-seem to believe that there is some kind of life after death. This is remarkable, if only because corpses appear to be so completely dead. Some people believe that each person has an immaterial soul that somehow lives on when the body is transformed into a corpse, but this is unlikely in view of the fact that a person's mental life appears to be intimately connected with what happens in his or her brain. Even so, there is perhaps some other way in which we might survive death. The belief in some kind of afterlife may of course be an instance of wishful thinking, but it is unclear to what extent a life after death is something to be wished for. To wish for good things-at least if one believes that they are at all possibleis perhaps not irrational, but it is not so obvious that life after death would be a good thing. It is very unclear what kind of life it could be. In this paper I shall explore the idea that life after death is exactly the same as life before death. This follows from the theory of eternal recurrence. Eternal recurrence-or "eternal return", as it is sometimes called-can be described in different ways; roughly, the basic idea is that the whole history of the universe has happened before and will happen again; cosmic history is cyclic, with no beginning and no end. In particular, whenever someone dies, he or she will be born again in the next cycle of cosmic history. So even if all of us die, our death is never definitive. There is always an afterlife, and this afterlife is just like the life we live before death. In one sense, we are certainly mortal-but, in another sense, we are also immortal. The idea that everything has happened before and will happen again may seem very implausible, but many philosophers have been attracted to it, and it used to be held by many people in earlier times. For traditional man, time was cyclical in the sense that life consisted in the repetition of archetypes; e.g. each year (often in the spring) men abandoned the past and started all over again, thereby achieving purification and recreation. 1 The distinguished historian of religions Mircea Eliade, in his book The Myth of the Eternal Return, writes as follows: This cyclical conception of the disappearance and reappearance of humanity is also preserved in the historical cultures. In the third century B. C., Berossus popularized the Chaldean doctrine of the "Great Year" in a form that spread through the entire Hellenic world (whence it later passed to the Romans and the Byzantines). According to this doctrine, the universe is eternal but it is periodically destroyed and reconstituted every Great Year (the corresponding number of millennia varies from school to school).

Democracy and future generations

Underdetermination of Physical Theory

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2004

W. V. Quine Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays, ed. DagfinnFøllesdal and Douglas B.Quine. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 482 pp. isbn 978-0-674-03084-8

Theoria, Apr 3, 2013

Davidsons's Objections to Quine's Empiricism

There are many similarities between Donald Davidson's philosophy and W. V. Quine's, but there are... more There are many similarities between Donald Davidson's philosophy and W. V. Quine's, but there are also differences. One difference has to do with Quine's empiricism. As everyone knows, Quine has argued that the notorious "two dogmas of empiricism" should be abandoned, but he himself is definitely still an empiricist. 1 Davidson, on the other hand, has drawn attention to a "third dogma of empiricism", which he attributes to Quine among others. Davidson has argued that this third dogma should also be given up, and he suggests that when it is gone there is nothing left to call empiricism. 2 In this paper I shall describe this apparent disagreement between Davidson and Quine in more detail, and I shall argue that Quine's empiricism is not really undermined by Davidson's arguments. 3

Putnam on the Fact-Value Dichotomy

Croatian Journal of Philosophy

In Reason, Truth and History and certain related writings, Hilary Putnam attacks the fact-value d... more In Reason, Truth and History and certain related writings, Hilary Putnam attacks the fact-value distinction. This paper criticizes his arguments and defends the distinction. Putnam claims that factual statements presuppose values, that "the empirical world depends upon our criteria of rational acceptability," and that "we must have criteria of rational acceptability to even have an empirical world." The present paper argues that these claims are mistaken.

Meaning and morals

Death and Eternal Recurrence

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, 2012

This chapter, which examines the concept of eternal recurrence and its relation to death, also di... more This chapter, which examines the concept of eternal recurrence and its relation to death, also discusses the concepts of the recurrence in linear time, closed time, and the objective and subjective perspectives in eternal recurrence. It provides arguments to show that eternal recurrence is both desirable and possible, and that it is the only intelligible version of eternal life even if it presupposes a rather nonstandard conception of time.

W. V. Quine Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays, ed. DagfinnFøllesdal and Douglas B.Quine. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 482 pp. isbn 978-0-674-03084-8

Theoria, 2013

This is the accepted version of a paper published in Theoria. This paper has been peer-reviewed b... more

Outline for an Argument for Moral Realism

Grazer Philosophische Studien, 1981

Until quite recently, the tenn "moral realism" has hardly been used at all in moral philosophy. H... more Until quite recently, the tenn "moral realism" has hardly been used at all in moral philosophy. However, "realism" is of course a wellknown label in other areas of philosophy. It is sometimes constrasted with "nominalism", sometimes with "idealism" and "phenomenalism", sometimes with "instrumentalism" and "conventionalism", and sometimes with "verificationism". In moral philosophy, what corresponds most closely to these contrasts are the traditional distinctions between naturalism, nonnaturalism, and noncognitivism (see e.g. Brandt 1959, Chapters 7-9). These three views are concerned with the nature of moral statements or with the meaning of moral language. Roughly speaking, naturalism is the view that moral statements are simply a kind of empirical statements. In other words, it is the view that moral sentences are used to express statements of empirical fact. Nonnaturalism is the view that moral statements are factual (and synthetic) but not empirical. Finally, noncognitivism is the view that so-called "moral statements" are no real statements at allat least, they are not factual statements; moral sentences are not used to express any statements of fact. The best-known fonns of noncognitivism are emotivism and prescriptivism. Thus, for example, emotivism can be described as the view that moral convictions are attitudes, not beliefs. More often, it is stated somewhat as follows: moral sentences are used to express the speaker's attitude and to invite others to share that attitude. It might seem natural to use the tenn "moral realism" to denote naturalism and nonnaturalism. For according to these views, moral statements are factual. But what does it mean to say that moral statements are "factual"? Perhaps it means that they are (synthetic and) either true or false. If so, there is a certain complication here, since some noncognitivists are also inclined to hold that moral statements

Notes on the value of science

Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science IX, Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, 1995

It is generally believed that science is a good thing. (I use the term "science", in this paper, ... more It is generally believed that science is a good thing. (I use the term "science", in this paper, to include not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences and the humanities.) Many people-and, in particular, most scientists-seem to take it for granted that scientific knowledge is valuable for its own sake. In addition, scientific research has very important social effects, and while some of these are generally held to be bad or neutral, I think the predominant view is that the total impact of science on society is positive rather than negative. After all, we do spend a lot of money on science, and scientists have a lot of prestige in our society. This might be explained by the assumption that most people think that science is valuable. (This ought to be the correct explanation, at least in a democracy.) But is the belief true? Is science, on the whole, good or bad? This is the problem I want to discuss in the present paper. 1 Most people would agree that so far science has had some positive as well as some negative effects. For example, it has given us electricity, which may be used to make our lives more comfortable, but it has also given us terrible weapons, which may one day put an end to our very existence. Einstein once described the situation as follows: Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for mankind, producing, on the one hand, inventions which liberated man from exhausting physical labor, making his life easier and richer; but on the other hand, introducing a grave restlessness into his life, making him a slave to his technological environment, and-most catastrophic of all-creating the means for his own mass destruction. 2 Most people would accept this statement. However, there may be some disagreement over other alleged effects of science. For example, some people may claim that only certain natural sciences, like physics and chemistry, can have negative effects, and that other sciences (including, in particular, the humanities) have only good effects, in addition to being valuable for 1 This paper partly derives from a talk given in January 1990 to a seminar on "Humanistic Aspects of Scientific and Technological Progress" at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. I am grateful to the participants for many helpful comments. I also wish to thank Hans Mathlein, Torbjörn Tännsjö, and Jan Österberg of Stockholm University for comments on the first written version.

Quine's relativism

Theoria, 2008

W. V. Quine claimed that relativism is paradoxical and unacceptable; nevertheless, his own views ... more

Reflections on consequentialism

Theoria, 2008

there is no separate entry for "consequentialism"; the reader is referred to "utilitarianism", an... more there is no separate entry for "consequentialism"; the reader is referred to "utilitarianism", and this is in turn explained as "the moral theory that an action is morally right if and only if it produces at least as much good (utility) for all people affected by the action as any alternative action the person could do instead". 2 This is a sufficient starting point for my purposes in this paper. It indicates, for example, that the kind of theory I have in mind is "act consequentialism", rather than "rule consequentialism". A well-known consequentialist theory would be the hedonistic utilitarianism described in the first two chapters of G.E. Moore's Ethics; another example would be Moore's own nonhedonistic "ideal" utilitarianism proposed in the same book. 3 Moore takes (hedonistic) utilitarianism to contain the "principle" that "a voluntary action is right, whenever and only when the agent could not, even if he had chosen, have done any other action instead, which would have caused more pleasure than the one he did do". 4 Notice, however, that, for Moore, utilitarianism does not only say "that the producing of a maximum of pleasure is a characteristic, which did and will belong, as a matter of fact, to all right voluntary actions (actual or possible)", it also says that "it is because they possess this characteristic that such actions are right". 5 I follow Moore here. I take consequentialism to be an explanatory theory of moral rightness; it is neither a statement of a mere correlation between rightness and a certain empirical and/or evaluative property, nor a decision procedure to be followed in actual situations of choice. The distinction between theories of rightness and practical decision procedures is probably quite old. It appears to go back at least to Henry Sidgwick. 6 It is quite clearly

Degrees of democraticity

People have tended to load their different conceptions of democracy with their own political idea... more People have tended to load their different conceptions of democracy with their own political ideals; in this paper it is argued that normative and definitional questions should rather be separated, so that political philosophers and political scientists may adopt the same concept of democracy, even if they disagree normatively or politically. Moreover, it is argued that we should replace an absolute notion of democracy by a relativized notion, which allows for different degrees of democraticity. This facilitates the separation of normative and conceptual issues and it is convenient in contexts in which "democratic deficits" are discussed – as e.g. when democracy is to be implemented on a supranational level. Moreover, it has the consequence that democratic deficits are not necessarily bad.

• T H R E E • A Defense of Quinean Naturalism

y aim in this paper is to defend a Quinean form of naturalism in epistemology.1 This defense will... more y aim in this paper is to defend a Quinean form of naturalism in epistemology.1 This defense will consist in a criticism of certain more or less well-known objections to such a naturalism. Most of those who object to W. V. Quine’s project would insist that it leaves out certain central topics of traditional epistemology that should not be left out. By contrast, I accept what I take to be Quine’s claim, viz. that naturalized epistemology preserves everything worthwhile within traditional epistemology, and that there are certain projects within traditional epistemology that should be given up because they are impossible or illegitimate. In particular, it is impossible to validate or justify our theory of the world by deriving it, by self-evident or certain steps, from self-evident or certain foundations.2 Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, and knowledge is justified true belief.3 However, justification and belief come in degrees, and we may wonder how much justification and beli...