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Thinking How to Live PDF

321 Pages·2003·0.8 MB·English
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Thinking How to Live Thinking How to Live Allan Gibbard harvard university press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2003 Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The lyrics on p. 48, Chapter 3, are from Trial by Jury, by W. S. Gilbert Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gibbard, Allan. Thinking how to live / Allan Gilbert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-01167-8 1. Expressivism (Ethics) 2. Normativity (Ethics) I. Title. BJ1500.E94G53 2003 170′.42—dc21 2003047801 To Beth with love Contents Preface ix I Preliminaries 1 Introduction: A Possibility Proof 3 2 Intuitionism as Template: Emending Moore 21 II The Thing to Do 3 Planning and Ruling Out: The Frege-Geach Problem 41 4 Judgment, Disagreement, Negation 60 5 Supervenience and Constitution 88 6 Character and Import 112 III Normative Concepts 7 Ordinary Oughts: Meaning and Motivation 137 8 Normative Kinds: Patterns of Engagement 159 9 What to Say about the Thing to Do: The Expressivistic Turn and What It Gains Us 179 viii Thinking How to Live IV Knowing What to Do 10 Explaining with Plans 199 11 Knowing What to Do 221 12 Ideal Response Concepts 236 13 Deep Vindication and Practical Confidence 251 14 Impasse and Dissent 268 References 289 Index 295 Preface A family, a house, a book, or a career emerges from decisions by the thousands. It is the upshot of answers to a multitude of questions: whether to wed her, what flooring to use, what to explore next. The aim of this book is to ask about these questions. I can ask myself how to spend the next few minutes, whether to attend a conference, or how to spend next year. I can ask myself too what to believe: Experts debate the extent to which differences in genes from person to person make for contrasting personalities, and I can investigate and ask myself what to believe on this score, given the evidence. And I can ask myself how to feel about a friend’s divorce or rivalry with a friend for a job. These don’t strike us as questions of fact alone; in asking what to do, I don’t seem to be seeking a fact of what to do. Facts, to be sure, do bear on what to do: many facts bear, say, on whether to marry one’s love. But is there a fact of whether to marry her? That might sound bizarre. Still, closely related questions do have more the ring of fact. Ought I to wed her? Does it make most sense to wed her? Is wedding her the thing to do? And if it is, is that a fact? Talk of fact here might sound tendentious, but a claim to facthood for oughts is one that philosophers do make; whole branches of philosophy deal in such purported facts. Some philosophi- cal theories of fact leave no doubt of facts like these—while others leave no doubt that there are no such facts. The hypothesis of this book is easy to state: Thinking what I ought to ix

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.