Essay Plans Flashcards
(22 cards)
1
Q
AVE
A
- Clashing virtues
- Use practical wisdom
- Tragic choice - no virtuous choice
- Accept such situations - no fault of agent
- No clear guidance
- Moral exemplar and habituation
- Don’t know who to choose, how to apply their advice, may practice vice over virtue
- Everyone has capacity to recognise virtuous people and become virtuous
2
Q
KAE
A
- Clashing duties
- Accept such situations, make hierarchy
- Can’t decide hierarchy, morality is not limited by facts about the world
- Ignores value of certain motives
- Motives are okay if the same thing would have been done with no motive, imperfect duties give us time to prioritise WWH we help
- Takes away from importance of that feeling, not something Kant would say - to focus on those we love over strangers
3
Q
RLE
A
- Ayer’s VP - can’t verify religious claims
- Hick: verifiable in heaven after we die (Eschatological)
- Duplicate of me in heaven is not me so can’t verify anything, couldn’t recognise God so can’t verify claims made on earth
4
Q
UTE
A
- Ignores fairness of individual liberty of rights / Tyranny of the majority
- Bentham: no good justification for rights so no reason to believe in them
- There are good justifications that do not require experience (Kant / Nozick / Rawls)
- Problems with calculation
- Change the definition to the right action being the one we can reasonably expect to maximise utility
- No longer Ut
5
Q
ICoG
A
- Paradox of the stone
- So long as God does not make the stone God remain omnipotent
- A being that can stop being omnipotent is not possible as God is necessarily omnipotent
- God’s omniscience vs free will of humans
- God is in time so knows everything logically possible to know, does not include props. about future
- God can’t be everlasting: God acquiring knowledge as time goes on is incompatible with God being immutable
6
Q
METAe
A
Moral realism vs Moral Anti realism - ontology
- Mackie’s relativity argument
- Not ‘enormous’ moral disagreement: just disagreement about non-moral facts
- still significant disagreement about morality
- Mackie’s queerness argument
- MN: natural props. can motivate independently of desires
- There are no such ‘queer’ natural props. - example does not work
7
Q
ONT
A
- Descartes’ ontological argument
- Kant’s obj. based on existence not being a predicate
- Discovering something changes our concept of it so existence is a predicate (Loch Ness)
- Malcolm’s ontological argument (survives Kant)
- Empiricist obj. to a priori arguments for existence
- Hume’s Fork is wrong: exceptions like numbers and God so existence is known a priori so Malcolm succeeds
8
Q
CAE
A
- Kalam argument
- The possibility of an infinite series (infinite library analogy)
- A posteriori (scientific: the red shift) and A priori (logically absurd / impossible) support for a finite series
- Leibniz’s argument from the PSR
- Commits the Fallacy of Composition (Russell)
- This is a legitimate inference: does not commit the fallacy, Leibniz’s reason for thinking that the whole series is contingent isn’t that the parts are contingent
9
Q
DAE
A
- Paley’s design argument: spatial order
- God is not the best explanation: evolution
-God could be using evolution to bring about design - Swinburne’s design argument: temporal order
- argument fails as it is from a unique case (Hume)
- Can draw conclusions about the universe through analogical reasoning: similar to human-produced temporal order, Scientists draw conclusions about the origin of a unique universe, so there’s nothing wrong with Swinburne doing the same.
10
Q
PBE
A
- Issues defining mental states: multiple realisability: HPB is false
- SPB: We can explain “multiple realisability” in terms of different dispositions to behave being brought about
- Leads to Circularity problem
11
Q
MBTITe
A
- Mind ≠ brain because of multiple realisability
- The multiple realisability of mental states
- They can accept multiple realisability (to some extent), but claim that MBTIT is just a theory about human mental state types, not mental state types in general.
- Mind ≠ brain because it is non-physical in some way
- The indivisibility argument (directed against identity theory)
- The mental is divisible in some sense
12
Q
DRe
A
Direct Realism
- against: Illusion argument
- No need for sense-data - ‘looks’ props
- against: Time-lag argument
- No need for sense-data - directly perceiving the past
13
Q
IRe
A
- support: illusion argument
- no need for sense data - ‘looks’ props
- support: time-lag
- no need for sense data - directly perceive the past
14
Q
JTBe - support JTB in first thread, supporting the addition of NFL in second thread
A
- JTB theory: knowledge = justified true belief
- Gettier obj. that they are not sufficient for knowledge
- (Addition to JTB) ‘No false lemmas’ (JTB + NFL)
- Conditions not sufficient because of the “barn” case where all conditions are met (inc. NFL) , but Henry still lacks knowledge
- Claim that the NFL condition has NOT been met since Henry (implicitly) relies on a false belief
15
Q
FUe
A
- functionalism
- The possibility of a functional duplicate with
(a) absent qualia - China Mind - The scenario is possible, but qualia are not essential features of a mental state, so functionalism can still explain mental states. - red knife
- qualia is an essential prop. so functionalism is false
- functionalism
- the Mary argument applied to functionalism
- Mary gains no propositional knowledge, she just gains new abilities
- she gains more than just abilities - imagine a scenario where she doesn’t learn anything but still gains something
16
Q
Inn / Emp e -Are there any universal truths/concepts?
A
Are there any universal truths/concepts?
- Innatism is supported by and requires universality
- There are no such universally accepted concepts/truths; this opposes innatism and supports empiricism (Locke)
- They are universally within people’s minds but not all people are (yet) aware of them (Leibniz) - marble
- It doesn’t make sense to say that something is in your mind but you are not aware of it (Locke)
17
Q
Inn / Emp e - Can empiricism (better) explain the things the innatist says are innate?
A
Can empiricism (better) explain the things the innatist says are innate?
- we know necessary truths (logic, maths, causation) and only innatism can explain this (Leibniz)
- Hume’s ‘fork’: it is true that these are not known a posteriori (they are not “matters of fact”) but they are not examples of innate knowledge.
18
Q
ScE
A
Global scepticism: Descartes’ ‘evil deceiver’ hypothesis
Rationalist response to scepticism: “intuition and deduction thesis”
- Cogito (global scepticism avoided: I know that I exist)
- …the cogito
It cannot be justified.
- Something must be having the mental states.
- Empiricist response to scepticism: Locke/Russell
- ‘Coherence’ and ‘involuntary nature’ is consistent with an evil deceiver
- Challenge the infallibilist view of knowledge which leads us to scepticism (it is too demanding)
19
Q
I&De
A
Rationalist response to scepticism: “intuition and deduction thesis”
- Cogito (global scepticism avoided: I know that I exist)
- …the cogito
It cannot be justified.
- Something must be having the mental states.
- The ontological argument
(Knowledge of God is required for knowledge of the external world) - Empiricist objection/s to Descartes’ arguments for God
Existence claims are a posteriori and contingent. (Hume’s ‘fork’)). - God is the exception
20
Q
Eliminative materialism
A
- folk-psychology has good explanatory and predictive power
- (1) it appears successful because we are commited to it. (2) we have good reason to think the theory is false
- our certainty about the existence of mental states takes priority over other considerations
- my feeling of is based on the commitment I have to a false conceptual framework - witches analogy
21
Q
DuE
A
- Indivisibility argument
- mental is divisible 2. physical is not always divisible
- Interactionist dualism
- empirical interaction problem - if it were true then the law of conservation of energy would be false
22
Q
BldE
A
- leads to solipsism
- other minds are the best hypothesis for what causes bodily behaviour
- cannot account for hallucinations
- can distinguish from hallucinations and veridical experiences - less vivid, voluntary, don’t cohere
