In 1948, at about the time of the founding of the United Nations, Michael Oakeshott wrote in an essay appropriately entitled ‘The Tower of Babel’ that ‘in a world dizzy with moral ideals we know less about how to behave in public and private than ever before’. In 2003 we have still the United Nations, itself the fruit of a dizzying moral ideal, and we also have a dizzying array of ideals.

Over the recent Iraq war, both the United Nations and moral dizziness were prominent; to those without certainty in advance of the action neither contributed to clarity about how we should behave. There were indeed those who sincerely and thoughtfully demonstrated against the war in various Western capitals who then, equally sincerely and thoughtfully changed their minds during or after the action; and perhaps, if this was so, in those of whom it were true, it demonstrated a degree of humility before the facts greater than was evident in some of those who were always adamant on one side or another.

And what did philosophers have to contribute? Opinions, to be sure, and philosophers are rarely short of opinions. But to what extent were these opinions the fruit of specifically philosophical reflection? To what extent should they have been? Should we expect philosophy to provide recipes for the solution of complicated and contested public questions? But if we don't expect this, and if we can give philosophical reasons for not expecting this, then philosophers have no more standing in these matters than any other segment of society.

In so far as philosophy did play a part in public discussion of the war, and it surely did and not just among professional philosophers, it tended to be a rehearsal of the just war doctrine of Aquinas and Suarez. We had the interesting spectacle of figures for whom scholastic views on usury or sexuality or divine retribution would be little more than medieval barbarism earnestly discussing the minutiae of the conditions for jus ad bellum and jus in bello as if they had been pronounced by Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, or had the sanctity of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

More to the point philosophically is the question as to whether a doctrine developed in the context of wars fought with medieval weapons and by comparatively small professional armies can have straightforward application in the context of modern weaponry, modern terrorism and the democratic assumption of a whole people being at war. Nor in the just war doctrine is there any conception of a war fought for humanitarian reasons. In discussing these questions philosophers surely would have a proper role to play, as philosophers, but it has been a discussion conspicuous by its reticence.

According to Jacques Monod, the Nobel prize-winning biologist, ‘the universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man’.

The work of the neurobiologist Benjamin Libet is often taken to show that free will is an illusion. When we ‘freely’ decide to do something, a good half-second before our conscious decision, there is unconscious cerebral initiation of the behaviour we mistakenly believe ourselves to be choosing later.

Joseph Conrad's novel, Lord Jim centres round the incident when, as a young man the seaman Jim jumps from his sinking ship into a lifeboat, leaving hundreds of passengers to their fate. All his life Jim ponders that decision. Did he choose to jump, or was he—in a metaphysical sense—pushed?

In his recent book Straw Dogs John Gray takes the episode of Jim and the lifeboat and the Libet data to show that we are not really free, and more radically that human agency and selfhood are illusions. Like many others, he is also more than content with the deflationary implications of Monod's conclusion: life itself is a fluke, and we ourselves no more than a lucky throw in the cosmic lottery. And humanity itself, in its despoliation of the planet, is a plague animal. Along with James Lovelock, Gray concludes that ‘Gaia is suffering from a plague of people’.

Maybe so, and Gray's position is certainly one for which reasons can be given. But do the facts compel us to hold it? How could one fraught and problematic incident in a novel show us that there was no such thing as human freedom? At the very most it shows that in moments of panic and crisis we know not what to do.

Nor are the Libet data inconclusive. For one thing the experimental set-up is such that the subject has already decided to act in the way prescribed, having agreed to the experimenter's request to execute a particular finger-movement in a tightly controlled situation; only the moment of action is uncertain. Nor, as John Searle has pointed out, is it clear that the finger movement follows directly on the unconscious readiness potential. There is a temporal gap between that and the conscious intention, and also another gap between that and the action. In any case Libet's subjects could at any time demonstrate a higher-level freedom by simply withdrawing from the experiment.

And if Monod interprets biology in one way, another Nobel prize winning biologist from France offers us a completely opposite interpretation. In his book Vital Dust Christian de Duve provides a detailed and elegant demonstration of the way elements of randomness both prior to the emergence of life and subsequently are going to be so constrained by the environment and by the possibilities internal to matter, organic and inorganic, as to make both life itself and intelligent life like ours highly likely.

So are we rational vital dust or an irrational self-deluding plague?

D. H. Lawrence wrote of the novel that it ‘incapable of the absolute’; it is ‘quick’ and in it there is always ‘a tom-cat, a black tom-cat that pounces on the white dove of the Word.... A theosophist, or a Christian or a Holy Roller may be contained in a novelist. But a novelist may not put up a fence’. No more, it seems, should a philosopher.

In the 1990s ‘conflict resolution’ was a good phrase. With the ending of what had then seemed the conflict, the really big conflict, all the little conflicts could be resolved by the techniques of conflict resolution. (Never mind that in the last days of the Soviet empire far more people were being killed in little conflicts than by the big one.) All that was to be needed for the ‘new world order was a modicum of goodwill, some international peace-keepers and negotiators trained in ‘conflict resolution’. The fact that it would have been hard to point to a single conflict which had actually been solved by the methods of conflict resolution (and certainly the big one had not been) was taken to be carping and beside the point.

Conflicts are sometimes resolved, sometimes by force, sometimes by old believers dying out, sometimes by the parties getting richer and less interested in conflict, sometimes just by the parties getting tired or even forgetting whatever it was they had actually been fighting about, and sometimes by the onset of a grudging respect for enemies one never really hated and with whom one finds one can, after all, live. Sometimes they just stop for no ostensible reason at all.

But that there is a technique for conflict resolution looks like a rationalist mirage, a characteristic piece of the third-wayism of which it was a small but significant element. For what underlies such a belief is the premise that parties to a conflict typically share enough beliefs and principles to enable them to lay down their arms and agree among themselves by the application of appeals to reason and mutual self-interest. This surely is to misunderstand the nature of conflict, for most of the cases of conflict in the modern world which readily come to mind are cases where the protagonists have fundamental disagreements of principle or claim, and where violence has been resorted to precisely because there are feelings of great strength on both sides and no common ground of principle. Being lectured to by professional conciliators is hardly likely to do the trick, particularly where the conciliators are from a background which finds it hard to conceive of real differences of principle among reasonable people.

Well, maybe the protagonists in life and death conflict or in a battle between rival faiths are not, in that sense, reasonable. But it is patronising and, in the end, dangerous to have so attenuated a sense reasonableness that one is unable to envisage people willing to die—and kill—for their beliefs, without thereby being insane.

There is a strong case for university freedom. Universities are about illumination, about fostering illumination and about passing it on, in the deepest and broadest questions in the humanities and the sciences. To pursue this, their proper goal, they must be free from outside control in the people they appoint, in the subjects they study and in the pupils they admit.

It may be unrealistic to expect a modern state to fund universities and to respect their freedoms, though a state which does not have free universities within its borders will lack the illumination universities can provide. And this will be to the detriment of society as a whole and of those young people who might pass through their gates.

In Britain the hope of free state universities is certainly unrealistic at the moment. Recent government policy sees universities in terms of wealth creation and links with business; and it wants degree courses to be judged in terms of ‘aims’, ‘objectives' and learning outcomes’, criteria appropriate to training, perhaps, but not to education. And it also wants universities to admit many more students from what it calls lower socio-economic backgrounds, as an end in itself.

To this latter end, it is instituting an office called The Access Regulator. This person will allow universities to charge its better-off students higher fees and so partially compensate for a 36% drop in government funding per student over the last decade, providing that they admit more students from poor schools and whose parents earn little and who have had little formal education. To this end new applications forms are being devised, on which these factors will show up. And university admissions tutors are going to have to go on special courses to understand how to operate these new admissions policies.

There would be a strong argument for university fees—providing that they freed universities from extraneous interference. And there can be no objection to admissions tutors looking for academic potential in their candidates. They could do this by talking to them, and assessing their native wit; or they could get them to write about something of general interest; or they could ask their teachers for their opinions, or see how they have progressed over a given period. Best of all, they could look at the most reliable guide to future potential: a candidate's actual knowledge and achievements so far.

But what are not signs of potential in any sense are parental poverty and a candidate's poor schooling (the latter of which is the government's responsibility in any case, and because of which universities are being forced to distort their admissions policies, and ultimately their courses, to cater for these new types of students). People would be outraged if university places were given on the basis of parental wealth and the mere fact of having attended a good school. And rightly so. What is currently being proposed is simply the obverse of admitting a candidate because he or she was born with a silver spoon, and is just as objectionable. What we are currently seeing in Britain is what happens when universities are treated not as institutions of illumination, but simply in terms of training for wealth creation and of egalitarian social engineering. The result is the worst of both worlds, irksome fees, combined with massive and ever-more intrusive interference by the state. But, by a perverse incentive, the introduction of larger fees for students may also give an opportunity for those who wish to set up universities which are truly independent, particularly in subjects without huge capital overheads, in philosophy perhaps.

Waismann's Wittgenstein-influenced ‘How I see Philosophy’ presents a radical vision of philosophy. But its two most general themes—its stress on freedom and vision, and its emphasis on describing the grammar of our language—seem hard to reconcile. This paper elaborates four interrelated themes: 1) Waismann offers his conception of philosophy, not a delineation of the nature of philosophy. 2) His method is radically therapeutic. 3) He offers a diagnosis of the source of philosophical problems: unconscious analogies or conceptions. 4) He advocates a particular form of therapy: offering alternative analogies or conceptions to individuals. Against this background the apparent paradox can be dissolved.

I argue that itches, tickles, aches and pains—sensations of all sorts—are generally in the places where we say they are. So, for example, if I say that I have an itch in the big toe on my left foot, then, by and large, that is the very place where the itch is. James denied this in the 1890s; Russell and Broad denied it in the 1920s; Wittgenstein and Ryle denied it in the 1940s; Lewis and Armstrong denied it in the 1960s; and since then various kinds of materialists have denied it. But if itches etc. are states of the sensitive parts of bodies, then it is true.

Locke notoriously included number amongst the primary qualities of bodies and was roundly criticized for doing so by Berkeley. Frege echoed some of Berkeley's criticisms in attacking the idea that ‘Number is a property of external things’, while defending his own view that number is a property of concepts. In the present paper, Locke's view is defended against the objections of Berkeley and Frege, and Frege's alternative view of number is criticized. More precisely, it is argued that numbers are assignable to pluralities of individuals. However, it is also argued that Locke went too far in asserting that ‘Number applies itself to ... everything that either doth exist, or can be imagined’.

There is an argument often deployed by those who object to the rapid advances in technology, whether in agriculture and animal husbandry or in medicine, that some procedure is ‘unnatural’, and therefore should not be actually prohibited. An attempt is made to analyse and appraise the moral force, if any, of the dichotomy ‘natural’/‘unnatural’, especially in the area of assisted conception. The emotional resonances of the concept of Nature are partially explored, and found to be deep-seated and various, but not of themselves the source of moral imperatives.

Transcendental epistemology is an inquiry into conditions of human knowledge which reflect the structure of the human cognitive apparatus. The dependence thesis is the thesis that a proper investigation of such conditions must lean in important respects on the deliverances of science. I argue that Kant is right to object to the dependence thesis, but that the best objections to this thesis lead to the conclusion that the conditions of knowledge which Kant identifies are not, in any interesting sense, a relection of the structure of the human cognitive apparatus.

The author begins with an outline of Bernard William's moral philosophy, within which he locates William's notorious doctrine that reflection can destroy ethical knowledge. He then gives a partial defence of this doctrine, exploiting an analogy between ethical judgements and tensed judgements. The basic idea is that what the passage of time does for the latter, reflection can do for the former: namely, prevent the re-adoption of an abandoned point of view (an ethical point of view in the one case, a temporal point of view in the other). In the final section the author says a little about how reflection might do this.

Timothy Williamson has recently put forward a proof that every object exists necessarily. I show where the proof fails. My diagnosis also exposes the fallacy in A. N. Prior's argument in favour of his modal logic, Q.

The difference between right and wrong is not something that is taught; it is, necessarily, picked up by a child in the course of learning its native language, and parents have no choice about this. In learning the meaning of ‘steal’, for example, the child learns that such actions are wrong. It also develops, through a kind of conditioning, the appropriate feelings and attitudes. The very concept of a reason has a moral content; so that, in acquiring this concept, the child learns what counts as a good reason; and this includes altruistic and other moral reasons, no less than reasons of self-interest.

Invisible Hand accounts of the operations of the competitive market are often thought to have two implications for morality as it confronts economic life. First, explanantions of agents economic activities eschew constitutive appeal to moral notions; and second, such moralism is pernicious insofar as it tends to undermine the operations of a socially valuable social process. This is the Mandevillean Conceit. The Conceit rests on an avarice-only reading of the profit-motive that is mistaken. The avarice-only reading is not the only way of characterising the profit-motive, and there are some positive grounds for thinking the benefits of profit pursuit are better attributed to the “lucrephile”, and not the avarice-only “lucrepath”.

Gilbert Harman and John Doris (among others) have maintained that experimental studies of human behaviour give good grounds for denying the very existence of moral character. This research, according to Harman and Doris, shows human behaviour to be dependent not on character but mainly on one's ‘situation.’ My paper develops a number of criticisms of this view, among them that social science experiments are ill-suited to study character, insofar as they do not estimate the role of character in continuously shaping the direction of one's life—including what situations one is apt to get into in the first place.

This article queries Winch's view that moral issues are particular, subjective, context-dependent and not open to generalizations. Drawing on examples from film and literature, Winch believes he can prove first, that the universalisability principle is idle and second, that morality is wrongly conceived as a guide to moral conduct. Yet, neither example proves his point. Quite the contrary, they show that we face moral dilemmas only when moral theory fails to provide an answer to moral problems. Therfore, it is not the case, as Winch suggests, that moral issues have a force independent of moral theory.

The article questions a general trend in contemporary moral theory that argues that abstract principles are inconsistent with the actual way we live our lives.

Timothy Williamson offers a proof of the counterintuitive claim that, if an object exists, then it exists necessarily. David Wiggins argues that this result reveals the philosophical disadvantage of a first level (or ‘ticking over’) view of the very ‘exists’ and the advantage of the second level account offered by Frege and Russell. The author seeks to show how, using an idea of G. Evans but without the use of the resources of ‘free logic’, all occurrences of ‘exist’, including its occurrence in true, negative existential, singular statements, can be accommodated to the Frege–Russell view and accorded the intuitively required modal status.

A small minority of biologists, psychologists and philosophers have recently tried to show, in various ways, that evolutionary psychology is of relevance to politics and to policy makers. Two widely accepted arguments still suffice (with only a little tweaking) to dismiss such attempts to forge a link between evolution and policy. The first denies the link between adaptation and fixity, the second denies that ‘adaptive thinking’ is of strong heuristic benefit. Finally, the silence of many evolutionary explanations with respect to developmental mechanisms should also make us suspicious of the relevance of evolutionary psychology to matters of policy.

It is central to virtue ethics both that morally sound action follows from virtuous character, and that virtuous character is itself the product of habitual right judgement and choice: that, in short, we choose our moral characters. However, any such view may appear to encounter difficulty in those cases of moral conflict where an agent cannot simultaneously act (say) both honestly and sympathetically, and in which the choices of agents seem to favour the construction of different moral characters. This paper argues, against possible counter-arguments, for a view of virtue ethics which embraces the diversity of moral character.

Hume is sometimes thought to provide a ‘naturalistic’ response to the sceptic. I consider two ways in which this response may be construed. According to the first, the fact that we are psychologically determined to hold a belief provides it with justification. According to the second, ‘natural’ beliefs provide limits within which reason can legitimately be employed, limits which the sceptic transgresses when he attempts to defend his position. Both versions of the naturalistic response to scepticism, I will argue, aren't plausible. And they aren't, at least not predominantly, Hume's.

A defence of the possibility of amoralism is important to discussions about the foundations of ethics and the justification of morality. I argue against Michael Smith's attempt to show, through a defence of internalism, that amoralism is incoherent. I argue first, that a de dicto reading of the externalist's explanation of changes in motivation which are pursuant upon changes in judgement is not objectionable or implausible as Smith contends; and second, that internalism cannot account for the effort of the will required to make such changes in motivation. I also argue that the internalism/externalism debate can be diffused by considering the epistemic difficulties associated with identifying motivating states and by rejecting the notion that motivation can be understood in terms of psychlogical states.