The best way to think about con-sciousness involves as a first step thinking in terms of conscious mental states and not in terms of consciousness as a unified faculty.. The problem with
Trang 1power should ideally be the basis for government Edicts
and punishment can at best secure behavioural
conform-ity but, if a ruler has approximated the ideal, he will care
about and provide for the people, who will be attracted to
him and be inspired to reform themselves k.-l.s
*Confucianism; Chinese philosophy
Confucius: The Analects, tr D C Lau (Harmondsworth, 1979).
conjunction.A proposition (P and Q) is a conjunction
where P and Q are each propositions The English
connect-ive ‘and’ conjoining propositions is sometimes
ambigu-ous For example, temporal succession may or may not be
implicit in ‘Sally arrived late and Jane scolded her’
In the *propositional calculus a conjunction (P· Q) is
true if and only if each conjunct is true Alternative
nota-tions for ‘·’ are ‘&’, ‘ ’, and juxtaposition
The inference of (P· Q) from premiss P and premiss Q is
known as the rule of conjunction r.b.m
*truth-function
W V Quine, Methods of Logic, 4th edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
connectionism.An approach in *artificial intelligence and
*cognitive science aimed at producing biologically
realis-tic models of the brain and of mental processing;
some-times called PDP (*parallel distributed processing)
In ‘old-fashioned’ (or cognitivist) accounts, the brain is
viewed as a symbol manipulator In PDP (or
connection-ist) accounts, the brain is viewed as a complex weave of
multilayered networks The units of a network (which
may be compared to the brain’s neurons) are simple
processors, and the connections between them, of which
there are massively many, have different strengths
Infor-mation-processing is parallel, i.e much is carried on
simul-taneously; and it is distributed, i.e any individual
connection participates in the storage of many different
items of information
There is controversy about the exact significance of this
new approach, and about its repercussions for debates in
K Plunkett, ‘Connectionism Today’, Synthese, 129/2 (2001).
William Ramsey, Stephen P Stich, and David E Rumelhart
(eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory (Hillsdale, NJ,
1991)
connective.A word or sequence of words which forms a
complex indicative sentence when joined with an
indica-tive sentence or sentences For example, the English
con-nective ‘and’ joins two sentences to make a more complex
sentence Connectives are classified according to the
num-ber of sentences with which they combine: ‘it is not the
case that’ is a one-place connective and ‘and’ is two-place
Connectives also divide into the truth-functional and
non-truth-functional A connective is truth-functional if the
truth-value(s) of the sentence(s) with which the
connect-ive combines completely determines the truth-value of
the sentence formed through the combination; otherwise
it is non-truth-functional The ‘&’ of the propositional
calculus is truth-functional: ‘p & q’ is true if and only if
*truth-function
R M Sainsbury, Logical Forms (Oxford, 1991), ch 2.
connotation:see denotation.
conscience.By ‘conscience’ is meant the sense of *right and wrong in an individual; described variously by philosophers as a reflection of the voice of God, as a human faculty, as the voice of reason, or as a special
*moral sense The most famous modern discussion is in the work of Joseph Butler, who insisted on conscience’s claim to ‘authority’ over other sources of motivation In moral epistemology Butler combined the rationalist and moral sense theories of the eighteenth century, describing conscience as ‘a sentiment of the understanding or a per-ception of the heart’ He underestimated the moral prob-lem of the erring conscience, treated explicitly in
Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (1a 2ae, Q 19, arts 5 and 6).
Aquinas pointed out that one acts badly in doing what is in fact bad, but also in going against conscience; so that unless he ‘put away his error’ someone of evil conscience
Charles A Baylis, ‘Conscience’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Ency-clopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967).
consciousnessexists, but it resists definition There are some criteria for saying of some organism or state that
it is conscious Consciousness involves experience or awareness Human mental life has a phenomenal side, a subjective side that the most sophisticated information-processing system might lack To paraphrase Thomas Nagel, there is something it is like to be in a conscious
*mental state, something it is like for the organism itself Conscious mental states are heterogeneous in phenom-enal kind Sensations, moods, emotions, dreams, propos-itional thought, self-awareness all occur consciously— perhaps some of these states only occur consciously For Descartes, all thinking is conscious; conscious thought is the essence of mind; humans have privileged and incorrigible access to their own conscious states; and the mind is a non-physical substance The modern nat-uralistic consensus is that only some mental processes are conscious and that all mental events and processes are physical That is, all mental states have neural
*realiza-tions in Homo sapiens The best way to think about
con-sciousness involves as a first step thinking in terms of conscious mental states and not in terms of consciousness
as a unified faculty Despite the widespread but by no means unanimous commitment to a naturalistic meta-physic of consciousness, there is heated debate over what exactly consciousness is; whether, and if so how, it can be studied; what if anything its causal role is; and whether, despite the fact that it is so far always realized in biological systems, it must be so realized The fact that conscious-ness has a subjective, uniquely first-personal side has led
∨
160 Confucius
Trang 2some to maintain allegiance to the Cartesian view that
consciousness is as consciousness seems On this view,
first-person phenomenology is the method for studying
consciousness The problem with this sort of view is that
while it may be true that there is direct and privileged
access to one’s own conscious states, it does not follow
that this access is incorrigible First, even first-person
phe-nomenology is ambivalent about the claim that we are
always in perfect touch with whatever conscious state(s)
we are in Furthermore, even if we do have privileged and
incorrigible access, the latter being stronger than the
for-mer, to the subjective aspects of consciousness, it does not
follow that we have either sort of access to all the aspects
of consciousness If, as most naturalists think,
conscious-ness has depth and hidden structure, then first-person
phe-nomenology will hardly be capable of yielding a complete
theory of consciousness *Naturalism implies that
con-scious mental states supervene on certain neural states
What neural state my experience of red supervenes on is
something to which there is no first-personal access
Some philosophers are pessimistic about joining the
subjective and objective sides of the story Others are
hopeful that we can yoke together the phenomenological,
psychological, and neural analyses of conscious mental
life to yield a more complete theory, a theory that gives
the way things seem its due and which at the same time
deepens our understanding of how conscious mental
events are realized and what causal roles they play The
question of causal role is pressing There is at present no
widely accepted theory of why consciousness evolved It
seems to many that a merely informationally sensitive
sys-tem, such as a community of ants and bees, may be, or
could be, as well adapted as equivalent experientially
sen-sitive systems There is no doubt that we are conscious,
but because the adaptive value of being conscious is not
well understood, epiphenomenalism, the view that
con-sciousness is a side-effect of more causally significant
processes, remains a live, and much discussed, possibility
in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive
sci-ence Another area of lively research and debate is on the
relation of conscious states and intentional states The
dominant view is that many conscious states are not
inten-tional Some conscious states, such as moods, do not
appear to be ‘of ’ or ‘about’ anything Relatedly, there is
the question of whether unconscious mental states exist If
there are unconscious mental states, then the door is open
for unconscious intentional states, for example, Freudian
beliefs and desires John Searle, despite advocating
*‘biological naturalism’, thinks that Descartes was right in
thinking that all bona fide mental states are conscious On
Searle’s view there are no *unconscious mental states at
all: all mental states are conscious states; beyond that
there are just non-conscious neural states, events, and
*consciousness, its irreducibility; mind, syntax, and
semantics; for-itself and in-itself; Honderich;
intention-ality; dualism; content of consciousness zombies
D Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York, 1996).
Daniel C Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York, 1991) Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, Mass.,
1992)
Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, in Mortal Questions
(Cambridge, 1979)
John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
Q Smith and A Jokic (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford, 2003).
consciousness, false:see false consciousness.
consciousness, its irreducibility.Many efforts have been made to identify consciousness with some other feature such as behaviour, functional states, or neurobiological states described solely in third-person neurobiological terms All of these fail because consciousness has an irre-ducible subjective character which is not identical with any third-person objective features Consciousness is irre-ducibly subjective in the sense that conscious states are experienced by and accessible to the individual who has them in a way that they are not experienced by or access-ible to other individuals To understand this point it is essential to distinguish between the epistemic sense of the distinction between objectivity and *subjectivity and the ontological sense In the epistemic sense, objectivity is a matter of propositions being ascertainable by any compe-tent observer as opposed to subjective matters which are relative to individual tastes and preferences But in the ontological sense of the objective–subjective distinction, there are certain phenomena which are intrinsically sub-jective and other phenomena which are intrinsically objective Such matters as mass, force, and gravitational attraction are ontologically objective, but, in this sense, consciousness is ontologically subjective Subjectivity in this case is not a matter of the epistemology by way of which we find out about consciousness but a matter of its ontological status The objection, then, to any form of
*reductionism is that it is bound to fail because the onto-logically subjective cannot be reduced to the ontoonto-logically
*behaviourism; artificial intelligence; cognition; func-tionalism; cognitive science
F Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, Philosophical Quarterly
(1982)
T Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, in Mortal Questions
(Cam-bridge, 1979)
J R Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
consciousness, neural correlates of.Activities, states, or parts of central nervous systems which are directly related
to the occurrence of conscious perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and intentions, maybe under certain environ-mental or bodily conditions A central philosophical and also scientific question is whether the correlates are suffi-cient or just necessary for consciousness, and whether this
is a matter of nomic connection or something else How explanatory or predictive are they? Correlation, at least
consciousness, neural correlates of 161
Trang 3until more is said, is consistent with both dualistic theories
of causal connection between mind and brain and also
mind–brain identity theories In fact, the existence of
neural correlates is compatible with most of the different
philosophical theories of mind–body relationship When
correlates are taken as being only necessary conditions for
consciousness, they are compatible with the doctrine of
externalism, to the effect that conscious states depend on
extra-cranial facts Still, the ongoing discovery of
correla-tions has strengthened naturalistic views of the mind
T Metzinger (ed.), Neural Correlates of Consciousness (Cambridge,
2000)
consciousness, stream of:see stream of consciousness.
consent.The standard way of establishing *political
obliga-tion, and so binding citizens to obey the laws of the state,
in liberal thought and, putatively at least, in liberal
prac-tice Consent in the political realm is modelled on the
pri-vate promise and subject to the same qualifications: it is
morally binding only in so far as it is voluntary,
under-taken with full knowledge, after deliberation (The only
exception to this rule is the act of surrender in war, where
the implicit or explicit commitment not to renew the
combat, made under extreme duress, is morally binding
none the less.) The pre-liberal practice of exacting oaths of
allegiance to new rulers (especially usurpers and
con-querors, who had reason to worry about their legitimacy)
suggests that the idea of consent has practical as well as
theoretical value As obviously or mysteriously as the
promise, political consent generates a strong sense of
being bound Hence it provides a foundation for the
claims made on individuals by established regimes and for
the charge of criminal disobedience, rebellion, or treason
if these claims are ignored or refused
But explicit consent is relatively rare in political life
Oaths are commonly demanded only from notables,
office-holders, and aliens in the process of naturalization
Or, they are ritually recited (as American schoolchildren
recite the Pledge of Allegiance) under conditions that
don’t meet the requirements of rational agreement In
order to save the theory of obligation by consent, two
dif-ferent strategies have been adopted The first is embodied
in the idea of the social *contract as an act of hypothetical
consent by imaginary men and women negotiating with
one another (or engaged in solitary deliberation) in the
artificial conditions of the *State of nature or the *original
position Real men and women are invited to recognize
themselves in their imaginary fellows and to accept the
conclusions they reach The second strategy involves the
redescription of certain ordinary acts and omissions as
signs of tacit consent to the established form of political
rule These strategies might appear to cripple consent
and render it unable to play any sort of foundational role,
and yet they are compatible with radical claims: hence
Hobbes’s suggestion that rebels and traitors have
con-sented to their own punishment—either because as
rational individuals they must have consented, or because
as actual citizens they have tacitly consented, to the authority of the sovereign
The leading candidates for strategic redescription are,
in ascending order of plausibility, the failure to leave the country upon coming of age, the acceptance of whatever benefits the regime or, more generally, the ongoing sys-tem of political co-operation provides, and the decision to participate in certain political practices (voting, campaign-ing, protesting governmental policies) It is an interesting question whether redescription ‘works’ by virtue of being plausible, so that reasonable people ought to acknow-ledge its force, or only by virtue of being widely accepted
as plausible, acknowledged in fact by actual people The second view might well require the conclusion that con-sent doesn’t ‘work’ at all, not at least in the way liberal writers hoped it would, since most people, if asked, would not be able to recognize their own putative agreements They would probably declare themselves bound none the less, loyal and obedient citizens, but that kind of inward consent is as real in authoritarian as in liberal regimes Perhaps the strongest grounds for taking consent as the foundation of liberal democracy is the guaranteed right of dissent If avenues of political protest and oppositional politics are genuinely open and widely used in particular cases, then the survival of the organized system of political co-operation might be a sign that people really value it and
in that sense consent to its continuation m.walz
*democracy; liberalism
John Dunn, ‘Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke’, in
Political Obligation in its Historical Context (Cambridge, 1980).
P H Partridge, Consent and Consensus (New York, 1971).
J P Plamenatz, Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation, 2nd edn.
(Oxford, 1968)
consequentialism determines the rightness or wrong-ness of an act, either solely by comparing the act’s consequences with the consequences of alternative acts,
or solely by comparing the consequences of rules or practices or motives that allow the act with the conse-quences of rules or practices or motives that prohibit the act
The term ‘consequentialism’ first appeared in Elizabeth
Anscombe’s article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (Philoso-phy, 1958) Anscombe espoused a kind of moral
*abso-lutism according to which some kinds of act (e.g intentionally killing the innocent) are wrong in any cir-cumstances, i.e no matter how bad the consequences would be of not doing the act She used the term ‘conse-quentialism’ to refer to any moral theory that rejected such absolutism On the meaning Anscombe gave to
‘con-sequentialism’, the simple view that only consequences
matter qualifies as a kind of consequentialism But so does the view (espoused by many *moral pluralists) that, while consequences are only one among a plurality of moral fac-tors, consequences are a factor of sufficient importance to make it the case that any kind of act can be morally right if
it has good enough consequences or avoids bad enough
162 consciousness, neural correlates of
Trang 4consequences Few philosophers now use
‘consequential-ism’ so broadly
There is controversy, however, over whether the term
‘consequentialism’ should or should not extend so far as to
allow the goodness of consequences to be *agent-relative
If each agent is required to produce the best available set of
consequences, but the goodness of consequences is
rela-tive to the agent who produces them, then different
agents will be required to produce different sets of
quences An extreme example of agent-relative
conse-quentialism is the kind of egoism that claims an act is right
if and only if it produces the best available consequences
for the agent This kind of egoism can reach different
con-clusions about the rightness of an act that makes Jill worse
off but produces the best available consequences for Jack
If Jack did this act, this kind of egoism judges the action to
be right If instead Jill did this act, this kind of egoism
judges it to be wrong
Another controversy over how broadly to take the
term ‘consequentialism’ concerns the relation between
acts and consequences Perhaps the most natural reading
of ‘consequences’ assumes that, apart from exceptional
cases, an act is not part of its consequences (This is not to
deny that some of an act’s consequences may be part of
the act: killing Jones necessarily has the consequence that
Jones goes from alive to dead Perhaps in the special case
of an act that produces the best consequences, all of the
act’s consequences are part of the act But we can think
that an act is not part of its consequences even if we admit
that some or all of the act’s consequences are part of the
act.) If an act is not part of its consequences, then any
intrinsic value in the act itself will not be included in the
value of the consequences So, if an act is not part of its
consequences, and if consequentialism evaluates an act by
its consequences, then consequentialist evaluation of acts
ignores any intrinsic value in the act itself
Examples of acts that have been thought to contain
intrinsic value are acts of promise keeping, of loyalty to
friends and family, of gratitude, of reparation to those
whom one has wronged, and acts of developing one’s
own talents and capacities Examples of acts that have
been thought to contain intrinsic disvalue are acts of
harming the innocent, of stealing, of promise breaking,
of disloyalty, of threatening to infringe others’ rights, of
lying, and acts of taking pleasure in the misfortune or
suffering of others However, whether these or any other
acts have intrinsic value or disvalue is controversial So
is whether to use the term ‘consequentialism’ so broadly
as to include theories that attribute intrinsic value or
disvalue to acts
Also controversial is the question of how much a
con-sequentialist theory can take facts about the past to be
morally pivotal It might seem that, if acts or rules or
prac-tices or motives are evaluated solely in terms of their
con-sequences, this evaluation ignores any relation an
outcome might have with the past However, many who
have called themselves consequentialists ascribe intrinsic
value to equal distributions among currently existing
people over their whole lives (as opposed to during each time slice) Since currently existing lives are partly in the past, this kind of egalitarianism takes that past to be morally relevant Another group who think of themselves
as consequentialists evaluate outcomes wholly or partly in terms of whether agents get what they deserve This approach also takes facts about the past to be morally piv-otal, since what people deserve presumably depends on their past
So some philosophers use the term ‘consequentialism’ broadly enough to allow for the inclusion of agent-relativity Some use ‘consequentialism’ broadly enough
to allow for inclusion of whatever intrinsic value or disvalue acts have And some use ‘consequentialism’ broadly enough to allow facts about the past to be morally relevant However, if the borders of ‘consequentialism’ are pushed out so far in all three directions, then ‘conse-quentialism’ acquires such a wide meaning that virtually every moral theory could be formulated as a kind of con-sequentialism The term ‘consequentialism’ should not be stretched so far as to trivialize it
Moreover, there is a good reason for consequentialists specifically not to allow agent-relativity into the founda-tional level of their theory This reason derives from the very close association of morality with *impartiality Much of the appeal of the most philosophically prominent forms of consequentialism derives from their aspiration to substantive impartiality at the foundational level of their theory
There is also a good reason for consequentialists not to allow intrinsic value for acts, intrinsic disvalue for acts, or desert into the foundational level of their theory What a theory assumes, it does not explain So if consequential-ism starts by assuming that such-and-such kinds of behav-iour deserve reward and so-and-so kinds of behavbehav-iour deserve punishment, then consequentialism is not explaining why there should be practices of reward and punishment Likewise, if consequentialism starts by assuming that such-and-such kinds of act have intrinsic value and so-and-so kinds have intrinsic disvalue, then consequentialism is positing rather than explaining the value of such acts Theories become less interesting the more they posit rather than try to explain Many conse-quentialists have thus eschewed assumptions about desert and the intrinsic value or intrinsic disvalue of acts The most philosophically prominent form of conse-quentialism has been the combination of the commitment
to impartiality with the commitment to pleasure as the single intrinsic value The classic *utilitarians—Jeremy Bentham, J S Mill, and Henry Sidgwick—held that the consequences that matter ultimately are increases or decreases in aggregate *happiness, which they took to consist in pleasure In the twentieth century, however, many philosophers and economists were persuaded that what people rationally want for themselves can extend beyond pleasure and indeed beyond any other introspect-ively discernible state In the name of preference auton-omy, many philosophers moved from thinking that the
consequentialism 163
Trang 5fundamental value is pleasure or happiness to thinking
that it is more broadly the fulfilment of people’s desires
Other consequentialists have been impressed by the
thought that people can desire things for themselves that
are in fact worthless Some of these consequentialists have
held that a good life for us is one in which we both get or
achieve certain things and desire these things Examples of
what these things might be are autonomy, knowledge,
friendship, achievement, beauty, and the perfection of our
natures (intellectual and physical) But there is
disagree-ment among consequentialists (as well as among other
philosophers) whether, in addition to pleasure, these
other things have intrinsic value
There is also disagreement among consequentialists
about what view of distribution to take The classical
util-itarians held that what matters is the amount of aggregate
good, where this is calculated by impartially adding
together everyone’s good (i.e with equal weighting)
Later consequentialists held that it matters not only how
much aggregate good is produced but also how equally
this good is distributed *Equality as an aim in distribution
has come under attack because of its acceptance of
‘level-ling down’ Instead of aiming for equality, many
conse-quentialists have advocated *prioritarianism, the view
that gains in the well-being of the worse off are morally
more important than the same size gains for the better off
Whether such priority for the worst off is compatible with
substantive impartiality, however, is uncertain
A more general dispute between consequentialists
con-cerns the common sort of situation where consequences
cannot be known with certainty in advance Some
conse-quentialists frame their theory in terms of actual value:
that is, the value of the outcome that would in fact result.
Other consequentialists frame their theory in terms of the
expected value Expected value is calculated by multiplying
the values of each possible outcome by the probability of
that outcome’s occurring and then adding together the
products of these multiplications
Especially since the 1950s, consequentialists have taken
a variety of views about the connection between (actual
or expected) good and moral rightness Three of the most
prominent consequentialist views have been maximizing
act-consequentialism, satisficing act-consequentialism, and
rule-consequentialism
Maximizing act-consequentialism holds that an act is
morally right if and only if that particular act maximizes
(expected) impartial value This is a view about morally
right action It is not the view that the agent’s standard
decision procedure should consist of trying to calculate
the expected values of the alternative possible actions and
then choosing the one with the highest expected value
Very few (if any) maximizing act-consequentialists think
agents should have such a decision procedure Agents
fre-quently lack the information needed to calculate the
expected good Even if they had the information, they
would frequently miscalculate Even if they didn’t
miscal-culate, there is the cost in time and attention of doing the
calculations Furthermore, there are ‘expectation effects’
If people could not confidently predict that others would behave in certain ways (e.g not attack others, not steal, not break their promises, not lie, etc.) without having to wait for the endorsement of consequentialist calculations, there would be a disastrous breakdown of trust in society For these and other reasons, most maximizing act-consequentialists hold that the decision procedure that agents should have for day-to-day moral thinking is made
up of rules such as ‘Don’t harm others’, ‘Don’t steal’, ‘Keep your promises’, ‘Tell the truth’, ‘Look out for the welfare of your friends and family’, and so on Maximizing act-consequentialism therefore agrees to a considerable extent with agent-relative moralities and *deontological ethics about how agents should decide what to do But opponents
of maximizing act-consequentialism hold that acts of inten-tionally injuring others, stealing, promise breaking, and other infringements of moral rights can be morally wrong even when the acts maximize impartial good
Impartial maximizing act-consequentialism is also per-sistently attacked for unreasonably making relentless demands on ordinary people to sacrifice their own good in order to help needy strangers A version of consequential-ism that tries to accommodate that objection is satisficing act-consequentialism, a theory developed by Michael Slote According to this theory, an act is morally permissible
if and only if its consequences are good enough Obvi-ously, satisficing act-consequentialism may have difficulty specifying what counts as ‘good enough’ Tim Mulgan’s
Demands of Consequentialism (2001) put forward other
dev-astating objections to satisficing act-consequentialism One is that satisficing act-consequentialism is even more permissive with respect to acts of intentionally injuring others, stealing, promise breaking, and so on than maxi-mizing act-consequentialism is The other objection is that, where the cost to the agent and others of producing the best consequences is no more than that of producing less good consequences, satisficing act-consequentialism seems mistaken to allow the agent to choose the less good consequences
Rule-consequentialism calls for the code of rules whose general acceptance has the greatest expected value, impar-tially considered The theory then judges the rightness or wrongness of acts by that code No kind of impartial act-consequentialism does as well as rule-act-consequentialism at agreeing with agent-relative moralities and deontological ethics about which acts are right and which wrong But rule-consequentialism disagrees with agent-relative moralities and deontological ethics (and of course with every other rival theory) over the fundamental explan-ation of why certain acts are right and others wrong Since the 1960s, rule-consequentialism has repeatedly been attacked as an unstable or incoherent compromise between deontology and act-consequentialism b.h
*absolutism, moral; agent-relative moralities; deonto-logical ethics; unlikely philosophical propositions
F Feldman, Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (New York,
1997)
164 consequentialism
Trang 6B Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of
Morality (Oxford, 2000).
D McNaughton and P Rawling, ‘On Defending Deontology’,
Ratio (1998).
D Parfit, Reasons and Persons, part 2 (Oxford, 1984).
P Pettit, ‘The Consequentialist Perspective’, in M Baron,
P Pettit, and M Slote (eds.), Three Methods of Ethics (Oxford,
1997)
S Scheffler, Consequentialism and its Critics (Oxford, 1988)
conservatism.An approach to political and social
ques-tions which was mapped out initially by Burke, though
drawing on earlier lines of thought dating back to Hobbes
and even to Aristotle, and subsequently developed by
many writers, including, notably, Oakeshott and, in his
later years, Hayek The conservative approach is
empiri-cal as opposed to rationalistic, cautiously sceptiempiri-cal rather
than dogmatic, and, in certain circumstances, seeks to
pre-serve the status quo rather than engage in wholesale
revo-lution or overthrow existing institutions It is a matter of
judgement how far so-called conservative political parties
are conservative in the wider, philosophical sense Nor
would a philosophical conservative seek to preserve an
apparently orderly political set-up simply for the sake of
preserving order if that set-up were based on principles
antithetical to conservatism (as was the case in Eastern
Europe during the Cold War)
Recognizably conservative thinkers have held a large
variety of views on such matters as religion, ethics, and the
concept of *human nature But, unlike liberals and
social-ists, they have all possessed a keen sense of the darker,
more egoistic sides of human beings For the
conserva-tive, the main defence against the Hobbesian war of all
against all is not the naked might of the sovereign Naked
power over others, whether vested in a hereditary tyrant,
a central party committee, or an elected legislature, would
actually be a form of the war of all against all Life in such
a society, as in Eastern Europe under communism, would
be characterized by mutual fear and suspicion
For the conservative, egoism, power, and mutual
suspi-cion need what Burke referred to as ‘the decent drapery of
life’, ‘pleasing illusions to make power gentle, and
obe-dience liberal’ Without institutions and forms to temper
and channel the energy and rapacity of the strong, and to
commend the allegiance of the ruled, we will have a
soci-ety which is dominated either by terror or by continual
litigiousness, and neither state is conducive to peace or
enjoyment
Where, though, are civilizing and allegiance-provoking
institutions and forms to come from? Here again the
con-servative differs significantly from liberals and socialists
F H Bradley echoes Hegel in saying that ‘the man into
whose essence his community with others does not enter,
who does not include relations to others in his very being,
is a fiction’; the individual is who he is because of the
rela-tionships and the *society into which he is born
Individu-ality being situated in this way implies the existence of
duties and roles not chosen by the individual, binding on
him and constitutive of his identity His relationship to his
society and its institutions is not first and foremost a con-tractual one, as liberals would maintain Whether, in prac-tice, the relationship is oppressive or genial will depend on the decency or indecency of the drapery of particular societies
Ideally, for a conservative each society’s forms and institutions will have evolved steadily over generations Such steady evolution will have two beneficial conse-quences First, it will enable today’s individuals to see themselves as linked to earlier centuries, reinforcing their own sense of identity and culture Secondly, in evolving over time, institutions will be shaped in accordance with the demands made on them; their defects and unintended consequences will become apparent and, under pressure for reform, reshaped
Far from being opposed to *reform, a principle of reform is central to conservatism For conservatives are sceptical of the ability of planners to know the conse-quences of policies or, indeed, of anyone to be able to sur-vey everything going on in a large society Rulers must legislate, but there must be means of counterbalancing and ameliorating the effects of their policies In the end, by trial and error, institutions and forms develop, often in ways undreamt of by their founders but often in ways which do serve the needs of those involved in them They thus embody a kind of tacit wisdom Because of his admit-ted ignorance about the ways in which things work and about the effects of change, the conservative, though open to reform, will be cautious about large-scale disturb-ance of things which are running reasonably well He will also seek to uncover the wisdom latent in ancient institu-tions and tradiinstitu-tions
Our ignorance of the effects of policies and of the nature
of society makes the conservative favour limited govern-ment, autonomous institutions (such as the family, the army, churches, and schools), and individual *freedom Conservatism, with its hesitations about human per-fectibility and its sense of the corrupting effect of power, would prefer government to focus on its basic tasks of upholding security and a framework of law in which indi-vidual decisions and transactions can be made Despite what is sometimes claimed, there is, in fact, no conflict between conservatism and the free *market, once mar-kets are understood as simply the most efficient way we know of enabling individuals to pursue their own ends, and once it is realized that markets depend for their proper running on an antecedent framework of law and morality Those who see the state of their society as riddled with defects and inequities are likely to be impatient with con-servatism for what appears to be its complacency Surely,
it will be urged, and not only by those moved by what con-servatives would call the *hermeneutics of suspicion, we must be able to reorganize things in a new and better way,
so as to eliminate whatever serious social and political problems we are confronted with
Conservatism, then, looks like little more than self-interest without the support of moral principle More-over, the conservative stress on human ignorance, the
conservatism 165
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the counterbalancing appeal to the wisdom of generations
is not just depressing of human endeavour and good
intention; it would, its critics say, not be given a hearing in
any other sphere, particularly not in the scientific, where
such principles would doubtless license creationism and
flat-earthism
Is conservatism based on nothing more than
self-interest bolstered up by a fine-sounding but ultimately
shifty obscurantism? It is true that conservatism, as
exemplified by Burke, say, will in certain circumstances
tend to uphold hierarchies and distinctions in a society To
that extent, it is a position which, from a functional point
of view, is acting in the interests of those hierarchies, and
will doubtless earn for the conservative the disapproval of
moralists such as Matthew Arnold What the moralist
needs to ask himself, though, is whether (in Maurice
Cowling’s words) ‘the freedom, discipline and social
solidarity of modern societies’ would be possible at all
without ‘the inequalities, sufferings and alienations
consequent upon ideological hegemony’ Burke’s point
would, of course, be that the inequalities etc consequent
upon the French and Russian Revolutions were certainly
no less than those of before, while the freedoms were a
great deal less And as far as socialism or its opposite are
concerned in basically democratic societies, the right
balance between inequality and freedom is always a
difficult one to find Experience at least has shown that it
cannot be assumed that centralized attempts either to
increase freedom or reduce inequality will actually have
the desired effects The conservative tendency will always
be to defend the tolerable and even the tolerably bad
against what he fears will be immeasurably worse
In any case, the Burkian conservative would not defend
any sort of hierarchy just because it is hierarchical In
par-ticular, he would not defend a hierarchical society in
which all important institutions are in the hands of the
state As part of his ignorance thesis, the conservative must
support autonomous institutions and the freedom of
indi-viduals to make their own way through life and to form
and develop their own little platoons He will also deny, in
distinction to natural science, that there are any special
experts in morality or politics, asserting that the
experi-ence of the whole of mankind over time is the main source
of moral knowledge, against which should be balanced the
pretensions of any particular set of people to moral
expert-ise, however intelligent they are in particular fields
Upholding the right of individuals to make their own
way through life and to benefit (or not) from the results of
their efforts, as the conservative does, is to say that
indi-viduals are the best judges of their own interests It is
not to say, as critics claim the conservative is saying, that
individuals should be motivated only by selfishness The
conservative, indeed, stresses the importance of the
trad-itional *virtues of individuals providing for their
depend-ants and also of charity, and would emphasize the
problems, social and individual, which arise when all such
matters are placed in the hands of the state
While the conservative does not find *inequality per se
objectionable, and will claim that there is no reason beyond resentment why anyone should, the value the conservative puts on both social cohesion and individual self-reliance must push him some way in the direction of economic redistribution, in order to ensure that no one starts so far behind the rest as to be unable to make his or her own way through life The conservative is neither an
anarchist nor a laissez-faire liberal.
In practice, in democratic societies the difference over redistribution between ‘one nation’ conservatives and welfarist socialists will tend to be one of degree The con-servative, though, will be more resistant to centralized controls and blueprints than his opponents on the left This resistance arises not out of sheer obscurantism nor out of failure to recognize the need for limited social inter-ventions It is rather because the conservative is more sen-sitive than his opponents to the unintended consequences
of such plans, to their potential for bureaucratic bossiness and interference, to the self-serving characteristic of bureaucracies, and to the way centralized planning cramps individual initiative, undermining the intuitive sense individuals have of their right to keep the rewards of their efforts, talents, and luck Attacking this intuition by a policy of bureaucratic egalitarianism will seem to the con-servative likely to sap whatever enterprise or energy exists
in a society, and it cannot be said that history has shown him to be wrong
The issue between conservatism and political rational-ism, whether of a liberal or a socialist cast, is in the end an empirical one Have those societies which have had autonomous traditions and unplanned institutions done better socially and economically than those in which rad-ical and centralizing planning have been attempted? And,
in the developing world, have countries which have mod-elled themselves and their institutions on a conservative free-market model proved more successful than those governed by rationalistic attempts to impose new types
of order on their peoples? If the facts of history suggest that
a conservative approach to politics produces greater
*liberty and *well-being for individuals than rationalist approaches, conservatives can rebut the charge that they are merely advocating self-interest, and that their scepti-cism about politics is sheerly oscurantist
With their emphasis on learning from experience and their mistrust of a priori reasoning in social and political matters, conservatives might welcome a broadly empiri-cal approach to these questions They would, though, do well to temper any triumphalism the answers might tempt them to No country in the modern world has as limited a government as, in their different ways Burke, Hayek, or Oakeshott would see as compatible with true
*anti-communism; liberalism; socialism; Marxism; Marxist philosophy
E Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
F A Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (London, 1988).
166 conservatism
Trang 8G W F Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1833).
T Honderich, Conservatism (London, 1990).
M Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962).
R Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (London, 1980).
conservatism and Romanticism. Romanticism was a
reaction against *Enlightenment rationalism, stressing
the importance of non-rational or even irrational aspects
of human nature Conservatism, too, is critical of what it
takes as the shallowness of rationalism Not surprisingly,
therefore, some important conservative thinkers manifest
Romantic tendencies, and vice versa Examples would be
the defence of the wisdom contained in spontaneous
cus-tom and tradition in Edmund Burke, the cultural
organ-icism of J G Herder, the mystical attitude to authority
and monarchy of Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre,
and Thomas Carlyle’s exaltation of the hero as genius and
type However, following strains of thought in Rousseau,
the predominant tendency of the Romantic Movement
emphasized the natural, the free, and the unconventional
If you suspect the workings of *reason, one possible
response will be to replace the rational and the
conven-tional with the spontaneous and the *natural, and, even,
like the German Romantics, to attempt to break down all
existing categories of thought and language The
conserva-tive, though, schooled in Hobbes and in history, is too
aware of the destination of unconstrained freedom, and
relies rather on a strong social and cultural order,
but-tressed by tradition Thus, Burke, Bonald, and de Maistre,
though certainly anti-Enlightenment Romantics in their
attitude to tradition and to authority, would have none of
the free-booting insouciance of a Byron, nor of the
anti-nomianism of a Novalis or an E T A Hoffmann a.o’h
I Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London, 1992).
A O Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948).
consilience.According to Whewell, consilience occurs
when inductive explanations of two or more different
kinds of phenomena are discovered separately, but
unex-pectedly lead scientists to the same underlying cause For
example, universal gravitation explained both the
perturb-ations of the planets and the precession of the equinoxes
Such discoveries corroborate one another in proportion
to the number of explanations thus connected, as do
inde-pendent testimonies to the same fact in a legal trial
l.j.c
*induction
W Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London,
1847), ii 65–8
consistency proofs.A set of *axioms is said to be consistent
if no contradiction can be derived from the set by logical
reasoning This notion is best confined to axioms in a
pre-cisely defined formal language with given rules of
infer-ence; otherwise the logical *paradoxes might make any
set of axioms inconsistent By the *completeness theorem,
a set of first-order axioms is consistent if and only if
some interpretation makes it true Hilbert’s programme
proposed a goal for the foundations of mathematics, namely to prove the consistency of axioms for arithmetic, using only finitary methods *Gödel’s incompleteness the-orem showed that this is impossible if ‘finitary methods’ consist of syntactic operations on finite strings of symbols (as Hilbert probably intended); but Gödel also gave a con-sistency proof for first-order Peano arithmetic, using only
G T Kneebone, Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of Mathe-matics (London, 1963), chs 7 and 8.
constant.In the *propositional calculus, a constant is a truth-functional operator, such as ‘not’, ‘and’, or ‘or’ The
truth-value of ‘p and q’, for instance, is a function of the truth-values of ‘p’ and ‘q’: it’s true if they are both true,
false if either is false ‘Variable’ was originally applied, by
contrast, to sentence-letters ‘p’, ‘q’, etc The specific role of
a constant can be given by a *truth-table, or by its intro-duction and elimination rules (the basic rules governing its involvement in logical inferences) Beyond the confines
of the propositional calculus, other symbols with fixed meanings can also be called constants, e.g the symbols for
‘all’, ‘some’, and ‘is the same as’ (in predicate logic), and for ‘necessarily’ and ‘possibly’ (in *modal logic) r.p.l.t
W Hodges, Logic (Harmondsworth, 1977), sect 17.
constant conjunction.Term used by Hume to describe the relation between two events one of which invariably accompanies the other If catching influenza is always fol-lowed by fever, these events are ‘constantly conjoined’; if there is no smoke without fire, there is a constant con-junction between the production of smoke and burning Hume regarded our experience of constant conjunctions
as the principal source of our idea of *causality Many
interpreters have held that he also proposed an analysis of
causality in terms of constant conjunction p.j.m
D Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed L A Selby-Bigge
and P H Nidditch (Oxford, 1978), i iii 6 and 15
Constant de Rebecque, Henri Benjamin (1767–1830) Although Swiss-born, Constant came to play a leading role in the politics and development of liberal ideology in France His *liberalism grew out of a critique of the ideas
of his compatriot Rousseau that was sparked off by their employment by the Jacobins during the French Revolu-tion Drawing on the arguments of the Scottish *Enlight-enment, which he had picked up during a brief period at the University of Edinburgh, he contended that the advent of commercial society had radically changed the character of *liberty and the political mechanisms needed
to secure it In the ancient republics that inspired Rousseau’s works, freedom had been understood primar-ily in collective terms and had involved participation in the life of the polity in order to secure it Within modern societies, in contrast, liberty was essentially individualistic
in nature The division of labour had destroyed any notion
of a common good or *general will The public welfare
Constant, Benjamin 167
Trang 9could only be promoted by protecting the ability of
indi-viduals to pursue their private ends and accumulate
prop-erty by freely contracting and exchanging with each other
in the *market This goal was best achieved not through
direct forms of participatory democracy, since
unre-stricted popular sovereignty could prove as tyrannous as
an unrestricted monarch, but via liberal constitutional
mechanisms such as representative democracy, the
separ-ation of powers, and a bill of rights r.p.b
*conservatism
B Constant, Political Writings, tr and ed Biancamaria Fontana
(Cambridge, 1988)
S Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism
(New Haven, Conn., 1984)
constatives.Class of ‘fact-stating’ utterances considered
in the work of J L Austin He initially distinguished
con-stative uses of speech, where a speaker states something,
from performative uses, where a speaker does something.
But he came to doubt his own distinction, realizing that
stating is a species of doing, and that stating, like other
speech-acts that may use performative formulas, should
be classified as *illocutionary j.horn
*linguistic acts
J L Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1961).
constitutionalismrelates to both the foundation and the
regulation of governments As a foundationalist doctrine,
it finds expression in the constitutional conventions that
have not only served to establish new political regimes, as
occurred in many European states after the Second World
War, but have also led to the formation of states, as in the
case of the United States As a regulative doctrine, it
con-sists of formal conventions, rules, and procedures, such as
voting by majority rule, and more substantive norms,
such as those embodied in written bills of rights or
assumed prerogatives and entitlements, which serve to
define legitimate political activity Whilst conservatives
have generally interpreted constitutionalism in terms of
the practices that have evolved over time and favour the
unwritten constitution of tradition and custom, liberals
associate it with the limitation of government and usually
favour a written constitution Constitutionalism harbours
a paradox, however, that is particularly problematic for
the liberal view For in both its foundationalist and
regula-tive guises it seeks to lie outside politics, providing its
grounding and framework, and yet can only achieve these
ends by political means As a result, constitutions come to
be objects of political debate and consequently are within
the very politics they claim to create and control r.p.b
*conservatism; liberalism
S Elkin and K E Soltan (eds.), A New Constitutionalism: Designing
Political Institutions for a Good Society (Chicago, 1993).
C H McIlwain, Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern (New York,
1940)
constructivism.The thesis of the programme is that an
assertion that there exists a mathematical object (such as a number) with a given property is an assertion that one knows how to find, or construct, such an object Philo-sophical opponents of constructivism include realists, who hold that since mathematical objects exist independ-ent of the mind of the mathematician, one can establish the existence of an object without showing how to find it Most constructivists hold that principles of reasoning con-cerning ordinary, finite domains do not apply to math-ematics For example, if one proves that not all natural numbers lack a certain property, one cannot conclude that there is a number that has the property, because the indi-cated proof need not provide a method for constructing such a number Similarly, the laws of *excluded middle and double negation are also rejected The technique of
*reductio ad absurdum can only be used to establish a
nega-tive formula Constructivism can result from reflection either on the nature of mathematics (Brouwer) or on the learnability of mathematical language (Dummett) s.s
*intuitionism; intuitionistic logic; mathematics, prob-lems of the philosophy of; mathematics, history of the philosophy of
C Chihara, Constructibility and Mathematical Existence (Oxford,
1990)
Erret Bishop, Foundations of Constructive Analysis (New York,
1967)
constructivism in ethics.The term ‘constructivism’ was first applied to ethical theories by *John Rawls The basic idea is that a system of moral obligations can be con-structed using an uncontroversial procedure, and starting from uncontroversial premisses about human nature Thus the constructivist approach is supposed to yield a moral theory that has no odd metaphysical commitments, and is demonstrably true (or at the very least, reasonable) Rawls’s own view developed over his lifetime, but remained broadly constructivist in its form: if a group of people situated in a certain way would choose a set of prin-ciples, then those principles are legitimate When Rawls introduced the term, he intended it in a fairly narrow sense: to apply to views that, like his, started from pre-misses about choices that rational beings would make in certain circumstances These days the term is used more broadly, to include views such as Korsgaard’s that start from premisses about our nature more generally e.j.m
consumerist ethics.The ethics of consumerism partly derives from the *rights-based approach to morality which was a marked feature of the second half of the twentieth century, and partly has been encouraged by those who advocate belief in the efficacy and essential righteousness of a free-market economy The main
con-cepts in consumer ethics are access to, choice of, and inform-ation about goods and services, competition beween suppliers, safety regulations, and redress in the event of
faulty goods or services Consumerism can be seen as
a specific outcome of nineteenth-century laissez-faire
168 Constant, Benjamin
Trang 10individualism, and it is therefore opposed to any form of
paternalism and to professional perceptions of social need
in the supply of goods and services r.s.d
P N Stearms, Consumerism in World History: The Global
Transform-ation of Desire (London, 2001).
content, non-conceptual.Theorists of non-conceptual
mental content hold that some mental states can
repre-sent the world and be true or false even though the bearer
of those mental states does not possess the *concepts
required to specify how they represent the world (to
spec-ify their content) This basic idea has been used to try to do
justice to the differences between how the world is
repre-sented in perceptual experience and how it is reprerepre-sented
in belief, as well as to elucidate the representational
con-tent of subpersonal computational states, such as those
appealed to in information-processing accounts of vision
On some accounts of what it is to possess a concept, the
representational states of non-linguistic creatures such
as human infants and human animals have
non-conceptual content Not all of these developments and
applications are consistent with each other, but each offers
a challenge to the widely held view that the way in which
a creature can represent the world is determined by its
*cognition; perception
Y H Gunther (ed.), Essays on Nonconceptual Content (Cambridge,
Mass., 2003)
content of consciousness.That which one is, or seems to
be, conscious of The content of *consciousness is to be
contrasted with one’s consciousness of it The
conscious-ness is always mental, the content may (e.g a toothache)
or may not (a sunset) be mental Contents come in two
distinct flavours: sensory and propositional In seeing (or
hallucinating) a spotted cow, the content of sensory
con-sciousness is either the spotted cow, if there is one, or (on
some theories of perception) a mental image (*percept,
*sense-datum, appearance) of a spotted cow In either
case, spottedness is a feature of the content, of what one is
conscious of The content of propositional awareness, on
the other hand, is a *proposition, what it is one
con-sciously knows or believes, judges or thinks Believing
that there are spotted cows, for example, is a mental state
that has as its content the (possibly false) proposition that
there are spotted cows or that one is seeing a spotted cow
Propositions, even propositions about spotted cows, are
C McGinn, Mental Content (Oxford, 1989).
C Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford, 1983).
contextual definition. Definition of an expression by
explaining systematically how to paraphrase all sentences
in which the expression is to be used It is far more widely
applicable than direct definition, which paraphrases the
expression in isolation It supports the view that sentences
rather than words are the basic vehicles of meaning
In 1813 Bentham propounded contextual definition, or
‘definition by paraphrasis’, as a way of accommodating convenient expressions without commitment to fictitious objects to which they seem to refer Thirty years later Boole applied the idea in mathematics, instituting a so-called method of operators Familiar operators are the minus sign, the square-root sign, the prefix ‘log’ for loga-rithm, the ‘sin’ and ‘cos’ of trigonometry Boole simulated
multiplication, as if ‘–x’, ‘√ x’, ‘log x’, and the rest were numerical products like ‘5x’, subject to the usual algebraic
manipulations He applied the idea to operators in the dif-ferential and integral calculus, where it became standard procedure
Russell’s account (1905) of singular *descriptions as
‘incomplete symbols’ is a celebrated contextual definition, prompted, he wrote, by the method of operators He
wanted to make sense of ‘the object x such that Fx’,
sym-bolically ‘(ix)Fx’, irrespective of there being such a unique object Where ‘G( ix)Fx’ represents an innermost context
of ‘(ix)Fx’, hence an innermost sentence about that pur-ported object, Russell defined ‘G( ix)Fx’ as
There is something y such that Gy and such that any-thing x is identical with y if and only if Fx. w.v.q
Bertrand Russell, ‘On Denoting’, Mind (1905); repr in R C Marsh (ed.), Bertrand Russell: Logic and Knowledge (London,
1965)
contextualism.The dependence of important features of language (or thought) on the surroundings in language or reality; also called token-reflexiveness, of which egocen-tricity is one species Any linguistic expression can be used many times—e.g there is only one English word ‘mother’ (the word-type), and one sentence ‘Today is her birthday’ (the sentence-type), but many utterances of them (word-tokens and sentence-(word-tokens) The *referents of singular terms, the truth-values of sentences, and the illocutionary force of an utterance often depend on the context of use Who ‘she’ refers to depends on the linguistic or perceptual context of utterance, who ‘my mother’ refers to depends
on who is speaking; the truth of ‘Today is her birthday’ depends on the date, and the point of saying this (e.g as an excuse for rejecting an invitation) will depend on other features of the context The meaning of an ambiguous word or sentence is also context-dependent (e.g ‘He went
to the bank’, ‘Flying planes can be dangerous’) According
to some theorists such as Charles Travis, some kind of contextualism, occasion-sensitivity, or *externalism
affects all language use A contextualist theory of
*mean-ing would try to make all this explicit, giv*mean-ing rules by which meaning, reference, truth-value, and linguistic act can be determined from sentence-type and context
*egocentric particulars
R M Gale, ‘Indexical Reference, Egocentric Particulars, and
Token-Reflexive Words’, in P Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967).
G Preyer (ed.), Contextualism in Philosophy (Oxford, 2005).
contextualism 169