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1	Practical necessity : a study in ethics, law, and human action O'Brien, Matthew Bennett 10 June 2011 (has links) The dissertation is an examination of obligation, which I argue is a mode of rational necessity that is proper to human agency. I begin from G. E. M. Anscombe’s celebrated attack against modern moral philosophy, and then sketch a positive theory of obligation as it figures in morality and in law, drawing upon the work of Aquinas and Aristotle. The first chapter explicates this idea of “practical necessity” and the second chapter shows that Aristotelian ethics, because it is not a theological law conception of ethics, has no place for a peculiarly moral conception of obligation. The third chapter examines Aquinas’s conception of moral law and argues that Aquinas vindicates Anscombe’s negative critique of the “moral ought.” The fourth chapter shows that the application of exceptionless moral norms (i.e. moral absolutes), which is one kind of obligation, requires attention to aspects of social practices. Attention to social practices allows the resolution of controverted problems about specifying intentions and applying the principle of double effect in a way that makes exceptionless moral norms workable. The fifth and final chapter defends the conception of intentional action assumed in the fourth chapter, and demonstrates that the scholastic ‘sub specie boni’ thesis is an integral part of action explanation, as well as Anscombe’s notion of “practical knowledge”. The upshot of the dissertation is an integrated investigation into how the ideas of good and necessity figure in ethics, law, and human action. / text Obligation Virtue ethics Law Elizabeth Anscombe Thomas Aquinas Aristotle Double effect Intention Practical reason Aristotelian ethics Practical knowledge
2	Aristotelova etika ctností a její renesance ve 20. století / Virtue ethics in Aristotle's work and its renaissance in the 20th century PODZIMKOVÁ, Markéta January 2015 (has links) This diploma thesis deals with the Aristotelian virtue ethics and its renaissance in the twentieth century. Ethics is first defined generally as a separate science which belongs to the practical sciences. Subsequently, the emphasis on virtue ethics as one of the directions of normative ethics. A key part of the thesis deals with the ethics of virtue in Aristotle and interpretation corresponding more or less to the interpretation of the work of Nicomachean Ethics. The emphasis is on concepts of virtue, bliss and goodness. The development of u virtue ethics from the time of Aristotle until the twentieth century is also mentioned. The last part deals with the form of virtue ethics in the twentieth century, including the process how the ethics of virtue acquired its present form. It is also compared to the interpretation of virtue ethics in Aristotle and in the works of modern moral philosophers, particularly the work of Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue is emphasized.
3	The nexus of control : intentional activity and moral accountability Conradie, Niël January 2018 (has links) There is a conceptual knot at the intersection of moral responsibility and action theory. This knot can be expressed as the following question: What is the relationship between an agent's openness to moral responsibility and the intentional status of her behaviour? My answer to this question is developed in three steps. I first develop a control-backed account of intentional agency, one that borrows vital insights from the cognitive sciences – in the form of Dual Process Theory – in understanding the control condition central to the account, and demonstrate that this account fares at least as well as its rivals in the field. Secondly, I investigate the dominant positions in the discussion surrounding the role of control in moral responsibility. After consideration of some shortcomings of these positions – especially the inability to properly account for so-called ambivalence cases – I defend an alternative pluralist account of moral responsibility, in which there are two co-extant variants of such responsibility: attributability and accountability. The latter of these will be shown to have a necessary control condition, also best understood in terms of a requirement for oversight (rather than conscious or online control), and in terms of the workings of the dual system mechanism. I then demonstrate how these two accounts are necessarily related through the shared role of this kind of control, leading to my answer to the original question: if an agent is open to moral accountability based on some activity or outcome, this activity or outcome must necessarily have positive intentional status. I then apply this answer in a consideration of certain cases of the use of the Doctrine of Double Effect.
4	A Critique of the Learning Brain Olsson, Joakim January 2020 (has links) The guiding question for this essay is: who is the learner? The aim is to examine and criticize one answer to this question, sometimes referred to as the theory of the learning brain, which suggests that the explanation of human learning can be reduced to the transmitting and storing of information in the brain’s formal and representational architecture, i.e., that the brain is the learner. This essay will argue that this answer is misleading, because it cannot account for the way people strive to learn in an attempt to lead a good life as it misrepresents the intentional life of the mind, which results in its counting ourselves out of the picture when it attempts to provide a scientific theory of the learning process. To criticize the theory of the learning brain, this essay will investigate its philosophical foundation, a theory of mind called cognitivism, which is the basis for the cognitive sciences. Cognitivism is itself built on three main tenets: mentalism, the mind-brain identity theory and the computer analogy. Each of these tenets will be criticized in turn, before the essay turns to criticize the theory of the learning brain itself. The focus of this essay is, in other words, mainly negative. The hope is that this criticism will lay the groundwork for an alternative view of mind, one that is better equipped to give meaningful answers to the important questions we have about what it means to learn, i.e., what we learn, how we do it and why. This alternative will emphasize the holistic and intentional character of the human mind, and consider the learning process as an intentional activity performed, not by isolated brains, but by people with minds that are extended, embodied, enacted and embedded in a sociocultural and physical context. Learning Brain Learning Cognitivism Representational Theory of Mind Computational Theory of Mind Mentalism Mind-Brain Identity Computer Analogy Scientism Anthropological Holism Enactivism Intentionality Intentional Action Phenomenology Philosophy of Mind Cognitive Science Capabilities Practical Knowledge Bildung Wolf Singer Kurt W. Fischer Jerry Fodor Vincent Descombes Ludwig Wittgenstein Elizabeth Anscombe Evan Thompson Philosophy Filosofi

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