defined it as the ‘total and perfect possession at once of an endless life’. It seemed unthinkable that for God there should be a ‘no longer’ and a ‘not yet’. Most Christian thinkers since the fourth century (unlike the authors of the Bible) held that God exists outside time, but in his timeless realm simultaneously acts at and knows about every moment of time. It is, however, doubtful if this is a coher- ent claim—if God sees some event in 500 bc as it happens and sees some other event in 2000 ad as it happens and all divine seeings are simultaneous with each other, then 500 bc must be the same year as 2000 ad—which is absurd. r.g.s. N. Pike, God and Timelessness (London, 1970). ethical formalism. A type of ethical theory which defines *moral judgements in terms of their logical form (for example, as ‘laws’ or ‘universal prescriptions’) rather than their content (for example, as judgements about what actions will best promote human well-being). The term often also carries critical connotations. Kant, for example, has been criticized for defining morality in terms of the formal feature of being a ‘universal law’, and then attempting to derive from this formal feature various con- crete moral duties. r.j.n. *prescriptivism. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, various edns., e.g. tr. H. J. Paton (London, 1948). G. J. Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London, 1967). ethical naturalism: see naturalism, ethical. ethical objectivism: see objectivism and subjectivism, ethical. ethical relativism: see relativism, ethical. ethical subjectivism: see objectivism and subjectivism, ethical. ethical voluntarism: see voluntarism, ethical. ethics: see moral philosophy. ethics, applied: see applied ethics. ethics, axiological: see axiological ethics. ethics, bio-: see bioethics. ethics, business: see business ethics. ethics, Chinese: see Chinese philosophy; Confucianism. ethics, deontological: see deontological ethics. ethics, divine command: see divine command ethics. ethics, emotive theory of: see emotive theory of ethics. ethics, environmental: see environmental ethics. ethics, evolutionary: see evolutionary ethics. ethics, feminist: see feminist ethics. ethics, Japanese: see Japanese philosophy. ethics, Kantian: see Kantian ethics. ethics, medical: see medical ethics. ethics, naturalistic: see naturalism, ethical. ethics and aesthetics. The two traditional branches of the theory of value. Aesthetics understood as value theory concerns itself with the value of perceptual and imagina- tive experiences to be had from engagement with objects, both natural and man-made, or with the value inherent in those objects in relation to human lives. More broadly, aesthetics as value theory may be said to be concerned with intrinsic value generally. Ethics as value theory con- cerns itself with the evaluation of human conduct, with how human beings ought fundamentally to behave, par- ticularly in relation to one another. Ethics and aesthetics are thus connected, in that part of the answer to the broader question ethics asks most likely involves an answer to the narrower question aesthetics asks, regard- ing what is worthwhile experiencing for its own sake, or what sorts of things enrich human lives. Furthermore, issues about the reality and objectivity of ethical and aes- thetic values are more or less parallel. Certain ethical theories, most notably virtue ethics of either an Aristotelian or Nietzschean sort, seem to make an aesthetic appeal at base, valorizing characters or actions or lives that display unity, balance, or grace, and making holistic grasp of situations in their concrete detail, rather than formulaic application of rules, the sine qua non of sound moral judgement. Even Kantian moral theory, with its emphasis on the good will as the ultimate source of value, might be seen as grounding morality in some- thing’s having a certain form or structure, an arguably aes- thetic notion. On the other hand, most accounts of aesthetic evalu- ation, and more particularly, the evaluation of art, allow that ethical considerations play a genuine role in such evaluation, one more or less central according the sort of artwork involved. Thus the ethical perspective embodied in, or conveyed by, a novel or film can be held to be ineliminably relevant to its evaluation as art, because appreciation of the work requires sharing or entering into that perspective to some extent, and yet such engagement might not be merited or justified. The moral dimension of artistic evaluation is most prominent with representa- tional works having sexual, violent, or racist content, but it can be argued that even pure instrumental music has an 270 eternity artistically relevant moral aspect, turning on the character of the mind one engages with in listening. j.lev. *art and morality. José Luis Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner (eds.), Art and Moral- ity (London, 2003). Noël Carroll, ‘Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview’, Ethics (2000). Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersec- tion (Cambridge, 1998). ethics and morality. ‘Morality’ and ‘ethics’ are terms often used as synonyms: an ethical issue just is a moral issue. Increasingly, however, the term ‘ethics’ is being used to apply to specialized areas of morality, such as medi- cine, business, the environment, and so on. Where pro- fessions are involved, a governing body will typically draw up a code of ethics for its members. ‘Ethics’ in this sense can be thought of as a subset of morality, being that aspect of morality concerned with the moral obligations pertain- ing to the practice of a profession. On the other hand, some philosophers, from Socrates to Bernard Williams, use ‘ethics’ in a broad sense to refer to reflective answers to the question ‘How should I live?’. If we accept this broad sense of ‘ethics’, then morality becomes a subset of ethics, being that aspect of ethics concerned with obligation. r.s.d. Brenda Almond and Donald Hill (eds.), Applied Philosophy: Morals and Metaphysics in Contemporary Debate (London, 1991). Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London, 1985). ethics of belief: see belief, ethics of. ethics of care: see care, ethics of. eudaimonia. Literally ‘having a good guardian spirit’, i.e. the state of having an objectively desirable life, universally agreed by ancient philosophical theory and popular thought to be the supreme human good. This objective character distinguishes it from the modern concept of *happiness, i.e. of a subjectively satisfactory life. Much ancient theory concerns the question of what constitutes the good life, e.g. whether virtue is sufficient for it, as Socrates and the Stoics held, or whether external goods such as good fortune are also necessary, as Aristotle main- tained. Immoralists such as Thrasymachus (in Plato’s Republic) sought to discredit morality by arguing that it prevents the achievement of eudaimonia, while its defend- ers (including Plato) argued that it is necessary and/or suf- ficient. The Kantian conception of morality binding on rational beings independently of their well-being was absent from Greek thought. c.c.w.t. *well-being. J. Annas, The Morality of Happiness (New York, 1993). T. H. Irwin, ‘Stoic and Aristotelian Conceptions of Happiness’, in M. Schofield and G. Striker (eds.), The Norms of Nature (Cam- bridge, 1986). euthanasia. Originally, the word ‘euthanasia’ was derived from two Greek roots meaning ‘good death’. The term subsequently came to have two distinct meanings: (1) the act or practice of painlessly putting to death those who suffer from terminal conditions (active euthanasia); (2) intentionally not preventing death in those who suffer from terminal conditions (passive euthanasia). The sec- ond meaning came into usage when technological advances in medicine made it possible to prolong the lives of persons without hope of recovery. Eventually, the requirement of a ‘terminal condition’ was dropped in many proposed definitions. Perhaps the most accurate general meaning today is that euthanasia occurs if and only if: (1) the death is intended by at least one other person who is either the cause of *death or a causally relevant condition of the death; (2) the person put to death is either acutely suffer- ing or irreversibly comatose (or soon will be), and this is the reason for intending the person’s death; and (3) the means chosen to produce the death must be as painless as possible, or there must be a sufficient moral justification for a more painful method. If a person requests the termination of his or her life, the action is called voluntary euthanasia (and often also assisted *suicide). If the person is not mentally competent to make an informed request, the action is called non- voluntary euthanasia. Both forms should be distinguished from involuntary euthanasia, which involves a person capable of making an informed request, but who has not done so. Involuntary euthanasia is universally con- demned and plays no role in current moral controversies. A final set of distinctions appeals to the active–passive dis- tinction: passive euthanasia involves letting someone die from a disease or injury, whereas active euthanasia involves taking active steps to end a person’s life. All of these distinctions suffer from borderline cases and various forms of unclarity. The centre of recent public and philosophical contro- versy has been over voluntary active euthanasia (VAE), especially physician-assisted suicide. Supporters of VAE argue that there are cases in which relief from suffering supersedes all other consequences and that respect for autonomy obligates society to respect the decisions of those who elect euthanasia. If competent patients have a legal and moral right to refuse treatment that brings about their deaths, there is a similar right to enlist the assistance of physicians or others to help patients cause their deaths by an active means. Proponents of VAE primarily look to circumstances in which (1) a condition has become over- whelmingly burdensome for a patient, (2) pain manage- ment for the patient is inadequate, and (3) only a physician seems capable of bringing relief. The laws of most nations and the codes of medical and research ethics from the Hippocratic corpus to today’s major professional codes strictly prohibit VAE (and all forms of merciful hastened death), even if a patient has a good reason for wanting to die. Although courts have often defended the rights of patients in cases of passive euthanasia 271 euthanasia, courts have rarely allowed any form of what they judged to be VAE. Those who defend laws and medical traditions opposed to VAE often appeal to either (1) professional-role obliga- tions that prohibit killing or (2) the social consequences that would result from changing these traditions. The first argument is straightforward: *killing patients is inconsist- ent with the roles of nursing, care-giving, and healing. The second argument is more complex and has been at the centre of many discussions. This argument is referred to as the wedge argument or the *slippery slope argu- ment, and proceeds roughly as follows: although particu- lar acts of active termination of life are sometimes morally justified, the social consequences of sanctioning such prac- tices of killing would run serious risks of abuse and misuse and, on balance, would cause more harm than benefit. The argument is not that these negative consequences will occur immediately, but that they will grow incremen- tally over time, with an ever-increasing risk of unjustified termination. t.l.b. T. L. Beauchamp and R. M. Veatch (eds.), Ethical Issues in Death and Dying (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997). Baruch A. Brody (ed.), Suicide and Euthanasia: Historical and Con- temporary Themes (Dordrecht, 1989). G. Dworkin, R. G. Frey, and S. Bok, Euthanasia and Physician- Assisted Suicide: For and Against (New York, 1998). James Rachels, The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality (Oxford, 1986). Euthyphro problem. Euthyphro, in the Platonic dialogue named after him, attempts to define ‘the pious’ as ‘the god-loved’. Socrates responds with the famous question: ‘Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?’ (Euthyphro 10a). The general point behind the discussion that follows seems to be this: No normative term (such as ‘the pious’ or ‘the *right’) can be defined satisfactorily as what some rational authority, such as God or the gods, loves or com- mands, unless we suppose that the command or approval is without rational justification. Alternatively, if we sup- pose the approval or command to be rationally justified, then it is to that justification, rather than to the action or attitude of the authority, that we must look for the meaning of the normative term. g.b.m. S. Marc Cohen, ‘Socrates on the Definition of Piety’, in G. Vlastos (ed.), The Philosophy of Socrates (Garden City, NY, 1971). evaluation: see value. Evans, Gareth (1946–80). Evans was part of a post-1970 flowering of work in Oxford on mind and language, influ- enced by the American Donald Davidson (see also Dum- mett, McDowell, Peacocke, Crispin Wright). His posthumous book The Varieties of Reference develops McDowell’s idea that aspects of mind such as thinking about individual objects are forms of embeddedness in an environment. This departs radically from *Cartesianism, according to which thinking is a process that takes place essentially independently of the nature or even existence of an environment. Evans has been particularly influential in stressing that thinking is grounded in bodily capacities and abilities, and this work continues the Oxford Kantian tradition, associated with Strawson, of laying down the conditions for the objectivity of thought. His very early death was, like Ramsey’s, a serious loss for British philosophy. g.w.m cc. *reference. G. Evans, Collected Papers (Oxford, 1985). event. Roughly, a happening, occurrence, or episode: for example, the General Strike, the sinking of the Titanic, the arrival of the guests, the local jumble sale. Events need not be momentous: the fall of a sparrow is as much an event as the fall of the Roman Empire. According to most accounts, events need not be instant- aneous, nor even of brief duration. Ordinary language attempts to distinguish events from processes, but most modern theories of events show no interest in this distinc- tion. An event is sometimes defined as a change (for example, the loss or acquisition of a property by some- thing) or composite of changes. However, many theories of events include states that consist in things’ having (or retaining) properties (e.g. the lawn’s staying wet) as well as changes that consist in their acquiring or losing them (e.g. the lawn’s becoming dry). On this liberal view, a rest may be as good as a change as a candidate for an event. ‘An event’ is ambiguous: it may mean a particular event, occurring only once, with a particular duration and location (e.g. the 1992 Grand National), or a ‘type-event’ that can occur repeatedly (e.g. the Grand National that is a famous annual event). Events in the first sense are some- times described as ‘concrete particulars’ (also *‘tokens’ as opposed to ‘types’); events in the second sense as *‘univer- sals’ and as ‘abstract’. Most contemporary theorists (Chisholm was an exception) are primarily concerned with events as particulars. What distinguishes particular events from ‘things’? We speak of events as occurring, but we do not say this of mater- ial objects like tortoises, books, and pebbles. And we seem to think that the whole of a tortoise or a rock is there at any time in its existence, whereas (excepting instantaneous events) only part of an event is present at any one time. However, many are unimpressed by these facts. ‘A thing . . . is simply a long event [with certain characteristics]’, wrote C. D. Broad (Scientific Thought, 393), and many philosophers have reduced material objects to series of events. (*Identity; mereology.) On the other hand, Aris- totle, Strawson, and others have held that at least some material objects belong to an ontological *category dis- tinct from, and prior to, that of events. (*Substance; *things; *ontology.) The category of events is the focus of much recent dis- cussion of *action, the *mind–body problem, and *causal- ity, especially in work influenced by Davidson. Davidson 272 euthanasia has emphasized the significance of questions about the *individuation of events. When do we have one event rather than two? When do different descriptions pick out the same event? Could a mental occurrence (e.g. one of my decisions) be identical with some physical event in my brain? Was Oedipus’ marriage to Jocasta the same event as his marriage to his mother? If my hammering woke the cat next door and also caused the fall of the vase, was my ham- mering the same event as my waking of the cat, with the consequence (if causality is a genuine relation between events) that my waking of the cat caused the fall of the vase? (*Extensionality.) These are not mere conundrums: satisfactory answers are needed if we are to give coherent accounts of *mentality, *intention, *responsibility, and causation. (*Reasons and causes; *fact.) Davidson’s answers to these puzzles appear to be inde- pendent of his much-criticized criterion for the identity of events: that events are identical if and only if they have exactly the same causes and effects. (Indeed, this criterion does not appear to help us to answer substantive questions about event identity such as our question whether the hammering was the waking of the cat.) Davidson sub- sequently abandoned his ‘causal’ criterion in favour of the principle (also held by Quine) that events are identical just in case they occupy exactly the same places at the same times. Yet another criterion (proposed by Jaegwon Kim) is that events are identical when they consist in the same objects’ having the same properties at the same times. Another issue concerns the identity of events in differ- ent possible circumstances. Would it have been the same death if it had been a shooting rather than a stabbing? If it had happened at a different time or location? (*Essence.) Such questions must be addressed by theories that appeal to *counterfactual conditionals when assigning causes to, or attributing responsibility for, particular events. p.j.m. *process. J. Bennett, Events and their Names (Indianapolis, 1988). C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (Paterson, NJ, 1959). D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980). P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959). evidence. That body of belief, often of an observational sort, which supports some less well-established hypothe- sis. Doubtless the wise man should apportion his belief to the evidence he has, but problems lie in formalizing the notion of evidential support. Logically ‘All ravens are black’ is equivalent to ‘All non-black things are non- ravens’, and if logically equivalent statements are con- firmed by the same evidence, an irrelevant green violin is evidence for all ravens being black. Equally troubling is the fact that a black raven seen today logically supports mankind’s belief that all ravens are black, but also a Mart- ian’s contrary belief that all ravens are blite (= black if observed before the year 2000, and otherwise white). In practice these philosophically well-known dilemmas trou- ble us not; in life we assess how some evidence bears on a *theory against a background of shared but unformalizable assumptions about the nature of the world and degrees of evidential support. a.o’h. *confirmation; induction; grue. N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th edn. (1983). evil, human. The suffering which results from morally wrong human choices, especially when the moral wrong is of an extreme kind. Moral evil can be contrasted with natural evil, such as the suffering and death caused by earthquakes or other natural disasters. Whereas natural evil creates a problem for theology, moral evil creates one for secular moral philosophy. The first of these problems is whether evil is a predicate primarily applicable to human agents or to the effects of human choices. It is certainly true that there can be evil effects which follow from sincerely held beliefs, such as political ideologies or religious fundamentalism. This is the evil of fanaticism. But to the extent that the common thread in all fanaticism is the belief that individual suffer- ing is unimportant compared to the righteousness of the cause, the sincerity of the beliefs cannot exonerate the per- petrators from the charge of evil. A second source of evil is self-interest. The pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others is a common form of moral wrongdoing, but when the others are made to suffer in outstandingly bad ways, then we enter the sphere of moral evil. This is the evil of Macbeth. A third sort of moral evil lies in the enjoyment which many people seem to obtain from the infliction of suffering for its own sake. Closely related to this evil in human agency is the way in which some people try to compensate for their own feelings of inadequacy by dom- inating and humiliating their captives. Of course, evil desires of the sort mentioned could not be expressed unless the social and political conditions of a regime encouraged or at least permitted them. Hence, a fourth root for the growth of moral evil lies in the will of political rulers. Sometimes regimes actively encourage terror, and sometimes they remain silent for political reasons in the face of known perpetrators of evil. A fifth source of moral evil lies in a failure in moral imagination. It is well known that a psychopath is unable to imagine the sufferings he will cause, but the same can be true on a large scale at the political level. An example here is the use of napalm or nuclear weapons. Since the victims are remote, it is easy to fail to imagine their sufferings. Of course, this failure of the moral imagination happens more easily if the enemy has already been humiliated or can be depicted in some impersonal sort of way as subhuman, as happened at the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, or to the Jews in Nazi Germany, or to the Vietcong in the Vietnam War. R. L. Stevenson in ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ brings out in fic- tion the chilling truth that we have a dual nature, and that all of us may be capable of moral evil in certain circum- stances. Perhaps the upsurge of pressure from advocates of human rights can help a little to combat moral evil, although there is a risk that human rights will be trivialized by their use in minor legal grievances. r.s.d. evil, human 273 *evil, problem of. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London, 2001). Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling (London, 1992). F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 13, ed. Oscar Levy (Edinburgh, 1910). evil, the problem of. In Christianity and other Western religions, God is supposed to be omnipotent (i.e. able to do anything logically possible), omniscient (i.e. to know everything logically possible to know), and perfectly good; yet manifestly there is evil (e.g. pain and other suf- fering) in the world. Atheists have argued that since an omnipotent being could prevent evil if he chose, an omni- scient being would know how to do so and a perfectly good being would always choose to do so, there is no *God of the kind supposed. The problem of evil has always been the most powerful objection to traditional theism. The usual response of theists to this ‘problem’ is to deny that a perfectly good being will always choose to pre- vent evil, claiming that allowing some evils may make possible greater goods. If God is to allow evil to occur, it must not be logically possible to bring about the greater goods by any better route. Some theists have held that, being only human, we cannot be expected to know for which greater goods the evils of our world are needed. But it seems unreasonable to believe that there are any such goods without some demonstration as to what they are, i.e. without a *‘theodicy’. Central to most theodicies is the ‘freewill defence’. This claims that the greater good of humans having a free choice between good and evil involves no one, not even God, preventing them from bringing about evil. Theodicy needs one or more further defences to explain why God allows evil of kinds for which humans are not responsible, such as the pain of currently unpreventable disease. The ‘higher-order goods defence’ claims that such evils give humans opportunities to per- form, in response to them, heroic actions of showing courage, patience, and sympathy, opportunities which they would not otherwise have. This does still leave the problem of what justifies God in allowing some (e.g. bat- tered babies) to suffer for the benefit of others (e.g. par- ents, social workers, etc. having free choices). The theist may argue in reply that God who gives us life has the right to allow some to suffer for a limited time, that it is a privi- lege to be used by God for a useful purpose, and that there is always the possibility of compensation in an afterlife. The crux of the problem is whether such defences are ade- quate for dealing with the kinds and amount of evil we find around us. r.g.s. *evil, human. M. M. Adams and R. M. Adams (eds.), The Problem of Evil (Oxford, 1990). A. Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil (London, 1975), pt. 1a. R. Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford, 1979), chs. 9–11. evil demon, evil spirit: see malin génie. evolution. Evolution, the idea that the world and its con- tents—particularly organisms—have developed from primitive beginnings through natural processes, is a child of the *Enlightenment. Until that time, the Christian story of Creation combined with the essentialist thought of the Greeks, prevented people from thinking of origins in such a non-miraculous manner. What the Scientific Revolution started, with its successful subsumption of so much to nat- ural regularity and material cause, was finished by the rise of hopes and beliefs in progress, the ideology of upward change and improvement in the human lot, encouraged by an ever-increasing knowledge and control of nature’s processes. In France particularly, but also in Britain and Germany, people moved easily from a belief in social and cultural *progress to an analogous belief in upward devel- opment in the world of life, which latter development was then taken as confirmation of their social beliefs! Most notorious of the early evolutionists was the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, whose Philosophie zoologique (1809) offered the first full-length treatment of the subject. Interestingly, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the mechanism to which Lamarck gave his name, played only a minor role in his thinking, which was much more dominated by a desire to turn the static Chain of Being into an ever-moving escalator. More influential, perhaps, were the German *Naturphilosophs, who saw repeated patterns running through nature, and who linked this belief naturally with one of the unity of the organic world. Not that most of these thinkers or those sympathetic to them (such as Goethe) became full-blown evolutionists. In the spirit of the time, the idea was always more significant than the reality. It was therefore to be the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury before the picture of all-embracing development— now known as evolution and distinguished from the development of the individual organism—became an established doctrine and entered the halls of respectable science. Credit for this is due to the English naturalist Charles Darwin, who presented his theory of evolution through natural selection in his On the Origin of Species (1859). Starting with the Malthusian struggle for exist- ence, Darwin argued that successful organisms in life’s battles will tend to differ from the unsuccessful. There will thus be a ‘natural selection’ of the ‘fittest’—the successful giraffe will have a longer neck than the unsuccessful giraffe. It was Darwin’s claim that, over time, this will lead to significant permanent change. Darwin, however, had no adequate theory of heredity. This gap was filled in the twentieth century by the new science of genetics, which itself dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century and the ideas of Darwin’s then unknown contemporary, the monk Gregor Mendel. Evolution raises questions of considerable philosoph- ical interest and much controversy. Most obviously, there are matters to do with the science itself. Is it, as critics often claim, ‘just a theory and not a fact’? Comments of this ilk play on an equivocation on the word *theory. If one is ask- ing whether evolution as such is well established, then this 274 evil, human is a matter beyond reasonable doubt. Palaeontology, bio- geography, embryology, anatomy, and more all point to evolutionary origins. But if one is asking about a particular theory, then serious debate continues. Darwinian selection speaks to the fact that organisms seem well designed—they are ‘adapted’. Critics argue either that Darwinism is inadequate to account for this phenomenon, or (taking the counter tack) that the fit between organisms and their world is nowhere like as tight as the Darwinian supposes. In either case, other mechanisms must be sought. As pressing, there is the question whether our thinking on evolution can profitably be applied to the traditional problems of philosophy, especially epistemology and ethics. Traditional philosophers, most notably, in recent years, Wittgenstein, tend to rear back from such sugges- tions like vampires before garlic. But, thanks especially to the enthusiasm of Herbert Spencer, there has always been a steady stream of biological thinkers who extend their thinking to philosophy. Complementing them, there have generally been a few philosophers who suspect that the fact that we humans are the product of a long, slow nat- ural process of evolution rather than the miraculous prod- ucts of a Good God working on the Sixth Day may indeed be significant. *Evolutionary epistemology and *evolu- tionary ethics are hardly yet respectable, but today— thanks especially to some who think that perhaps evolution can be brought to work in conjunction with the insights and achievements of traditional philosophy rather that as a replacing rival—they thrive and offer new directions as never before. m.r. *evolution and philosophy. J. Dupré, Darwin’s Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (Oxford, 2003). R. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution (Chicago, 1991). M. Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution (Chicago, 1979). —— Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). evolution and philosophy. *Evolution is the belief that the organic world, including our own species, is the product of a long, slow, natural process of development from forms very different, extremely simple, and probably themselves the result of natural processes that turned the inorganic into the living. There have been many causal theories of evolution, but the dominant one today dates to the Origin of Species, published in 1859, by the English nat- uralist Charles Darwin. He pointed to the struggle for exist- ence that rules universally in the living world, and argued that this leads to a natural selection of the fitter over the less fit, with consequent ongoing change. Many philosophers, most famously Ludwig Wittgen- stein, have argued that evolution has no implications at all for philosophy. Others, starting with Darwin himself, dis- agree, thinking that the natural evolutionary origins of human beings has to make a difference to our thinking about knowledge (epistemology), as well as to our think- ing about morality (ethics). Some philosophers indeed— notably the American pragmatists—have thought that evolution must be one of the basic starting-points of any attempt to understand human nature and how it functions in the world. Applying evolution—selection theory in particular—to problems of knowledge (‘*evolutionary epistemology’) usually takes one of two forms. The first is to argue ana- logically from the biological situation to the cultural world. There is a struggle for existence among organisms leading to a natural selection; so, likewise, there is a strug- gle for existence among ideas leading to a selection of the best, which then survive and rule for a while. The philoso- pher Karl Popper argued that this is precisely what he was referring to when he spoke of the need of scientific theo- ries to be falsifiable—always ready to battle out their claims in the intellectual struggle for survival. The second approach is to take a literal position, pointing to the fact that the way in which humans think is itself moulded by selection. In other words, as was argued by W. V. Quine, our beliefs about causation and the virtues of such epi- stemic notions as prediction are beliefs that we have because they served well the ends of our would-be ances- tors. There is therefore no ultimate justification for think- ing causally. It is just that those proto-humans who learned to associate fire with burning survived and repro- duced, and those that did not, did not. Applying evolution—again selection theory in particu- lar—to problems of morality (‘*evolutionary ethics’) like- wise takes one of two forms. The first, due especially to Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer, goes from the processes of evolution to the way that things ought to be—notoriously from the struggle for existence to the promotion of laissez-faire socio-economics. More recent exponents have been the English biologist Julian Huxley, who argued for large-scale public works in the name of Darwinism, and today the American biologist Edward O. Wilson, who thinks that the evolutionary process justifies conservation. Famously, this whole line of think- ing was severely criticized by G. E. Moore in his Principia Ethica, where it was claimed that such an approach to morality (often called ‘Social Darwinism’) commits the naturalistic fallacy, a version of the illicit move noted by David Hume, where one goes without cause or reason from statements of fact to statements of obligation. The second approach to evolutionary ethics parallels the second approach to evolutionary epistemology, in this case arguing that human moral thought and behaviour is a result of evolution, particularly of the fact that in the struggle co-operation (what biologists call ‘altruism’) is often a better strategy than outright warfare. Better to share a cake than to run the risk of getting no cake at all. At the normative level of ethics (What should I do?), there has been much recent interest in evolutionary strategies (often based on principles of game theory) that might gen- erate the norms that we hold dear. In his Theory of Justice, John Rawls argued for a contractarian theory of ethics (justice as fairness), suggesting that the original contract was not one put in place by conscious human intention but a result of the genes as chosen by natural selection. At evolution and philosophy 275 the meta-ethical level of discussion (Why should I do what I should do?), there is still considerable disagreement. Some think, as in epistemology, that because a feature like morality is adaptive, this does not preclude its giving a true picture of reality. There may well be objective or real moral norms. Others are less sure, and incline to scepti- cism, thinking that perhaps in some sense the whole of (normative) morality is an illusion put in place by our genes to make us good social co-operators. Recently, there has been much interest by philosophers of mind in the implications of evolutionary thought for a full understanding of the mind’s operating and function- ing. If indeed selection cares not about truth but about success—Patricia Churchland speaks of the 4-F impera- tives, Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Reproduction—can we possibly expect that the mind receives a true account of external reality? Some, notably Popper (following the ethologist Konrad Lorenz), think that this is no major problem. Others, notably the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, think it spells the end of any approach to under- standing using Darwinian evolution. Most, like philoso- pher Ruth Millikan, take a middle line. One can be mistaken, but evolutionary theory itself dictates the sorts of times when one might be mistaken—for instance, when there are no selective advantages in having the truth. If a fast train is bearing down on one, then the strong presumption is that selection is not about to deceive— there are no obvious reasons why one should be deceived into thinking it exists if it does not, and very good reasons why one should not be deceived if it does exist. m.r. R. Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). K. R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (LaSalle, Ill., 1976). M. Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philoso- phy, 2nd edn. (Buffalo, 1998). E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). evolutionary epistemology. This is an approach to the theory of knowledge claiming that the very fact that we humans are the end-product of a natural process of *evo- lution must be a significant factor in the ways in which we know and understand the world. Part of an overall con- temporary move towards a naturalized epistemology, it comes in two main forms. One argues that the growth of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, is akin to the evolutionary growth of organisms. Everything is in flux, forever moving towards some new level. Moreover, just as there is a struggle for existence in the organic world, so also is there a struggle in the world of concepts, with the consequent selection of the ‘fittest’. There is, of course, a major disanalogy, in that the raw stuff of *biology— ‘mutations’—are random, in the sense of not occurring according to need, whereas the raw stuff of science—‘dis- coveries’—generally come in response to need and are directed to such need. Hence, the growing popularity of the other form of evolutionary epistemology, which claims that all knowledge is shaped and informed by certain innate principles (like the laws of logic and math- ematics, as well as such epistemic norms as a preference for simplicity) which have selected into human thought because of their adaptive value. Controversial is the ques- tion whether these principles represent the necessary con- ditions of rational thought (that is, the synthetic a priori) or are merely contingent and non-unique, and could well have been quite different. Is the logic on Andromeda as dif- ferent from that of Aristotle as the slithering of the snake is different from the walking of the human? Equally contro- versial is the question whether such a philosophy points to the conclusion that knowledge is a generally faithful map- ping of a real (human-perception-independent) world, or whether one is pointed towards some sort of pragmatic or coherence theory of truth. m.r. *evolutionary ethics; evolution and philosophy. M. Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philoso- phy (Oxford, 1986). evolutionary ethics. This is a body of theory which seeks to locate moral institutions within the main ideas of evo- lutionary biology. The general thesis is that we value things and persons in accordance with their capacity to sustain and maintain survival in evolutionary terms. For example, it may be thought that friendship and altruism are valued because they preserve members of the human species against violence. Objections to this approach come, partly, from those who reject its strategy of deriv- ing values from facts about human nature, and partly from those who accuse it of over-simplifying factual issues about what strategies actually ensure survival. As an example of the latter kind of difficulty, it has been objected that even if a certain practice has been successful, its previ- ous environment may be unstable; so it would be bad practice, despite its evolutionary success. j.d.g.e. *evolutionary epistemology. M. Ruse, Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? (Dordrecht, 1979) con- tains a sympathetic but critical account of the subject. examination paradox. The teacher says that some time next week there will be an unexpected examination: on the morning of the relevant day, the students will not know it will happen on that day. The students reason that the teacher cannot set the examination on the last day of the week, for when that day comes they would expect it. He cannot set it on the penultimate day, for when that day comes, and knowing from the previous reasoning that it cannot be held on the last day, they would expect it on the penultimate day. And so on for each possible day. So there cannot be an unexpected examination! r.m.s. *prediction paradox. Mark Sainsbury, Paradoxes (New York, 1988), ch. 4. excluded middle, law of. The oldest principle so called is Aristotle’s ‘There is nothing between asserting and deny- ing’, i.e. ‘If neither “yes” nor “no” truly answers the ques- tion “Is it the case that P?”, nothing does’. This can slide 276 evolution and philosophy into ‘Either “P” or “not-P” is true’, and further into ‘Every proposition is true or false’ (more properly called the law of *bivalence). In modern logic the law usually called excluded middle is ‘“P or not-P” is valid’, i.e. true on all interpretations of ‘P’. c.a.k. W. V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970), 83–5. existence. ‘Existence’, a key term of *ontology, in one sense refers to the sum total of reality—everything that exists—and in another to the elusive characteristic of *being, which differentiates real *things from fictional ones. But whether there really is such a characteristic is debatable, because it is often held that ‘exist’ is not a first- level predicate. What this means is that ‘exist’ does not express a property of objects, as verbs like ‘shine’ and ‘fall’ do. According to Frege and Russell, ‘exist’ is a second-level predicate, expressing a property of properties. Thus ‘God exists’ does not have the same logical form as ‘Sirius shines’, predicating a property of a particular object. Rather, it is equivalent to ‘Godhood is instantiated’, assert- ing that the property of being divine has at least one instance, or that there is at least one thing possessing that property. According to Frege and Russell, in a tradition reaching back to Kant, Anselm’s *ontological argument for God’s existence is vitiated by its failure to grasp this point. W. V. Quine’s famous dictum ‘To be is to be the value of a variable’ takes the Frege–Russell account of existence as its inspiration, and implies that the entities to whose existence a theory is committed are precisely those which need to be invoked to interpret the quantified sentences of the theory. But this controversially assumes an ‘objectual’ rather than a ‘substitutional’ interpretation of the quantifiers. According to the latter, ‘There is at least one thing which is F’ is true just in case there is some true sentence of the form ‘a is F’, where ‘a’ is a singular term. Thus, if ‘Pegasus is identical with Pegasus’ is deemed true despite the non-existence of Pegasus, ‘There is at least one thing which is identical with Pegasus’ must likewise be deemed true, whence adherents of this account must repudiate Quine’s dictum. The thought that fictional entities like Pegasus have some reality despite lacking full-blooded existence is a tempting one, often associated with Meinong. But accord- ing to David Lewis’s more recent doctrine of modal real- ism, Pegasus and other possible but non-actual objects do have full-blooded existence, and differ from actual objects only in residing in other *possible worlds. This doctrine requires one to distinguish sharply between existence and actuality, treating the latter as an indexical notion akin to those of being here and now. On Lewis’s view, Pegasus is just as ‘actual’ in the worlds in which it exists as Julius Caesar is in ‘our’ world, and the objects existing in a world are all actual to its inhabitants in just the way that all moments of time are present or ‘now’ to those experiencing them. Such a view may, however, be accused of grossly inflating existence, understood as the sum total of reality. Perhaps the biggest metaphysical problem concerning existence is why anything should exist at all—why there should be something rather than nothing. Physicists can maybe tell us why matter exists, adverting to conditions obtaining shortly after the Big Bang; perhaps they can even explain the existence of time and space, if this is as intim- ately linked to the existence of matter and energy as modern cosmologists suggest. But the metaphysical ques- tion clearly goes beyond such merely empirical considera- tions. One response is to say that the question is absurd, because it erroneously presupposes that we can make sense of the idea of absolute nothingness as a genuine alter- native to the existence of at least something. On this view, we mistake the contingency of the things that do exist for a contingency in the fact that anything whatever exists. However, while it may indeed be impossible to imagine a world in which nothing exists, the notion of a wholly empty world does not seem obviously incoherent. e.j.l. *‘to be’, the verb. D. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford, 1986). W. V. Quine, ‘On What There Is’, in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953). Bede Rundle, Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (Oxford, 2004). C. J. F. Williams, What is Existence? (Oxford, 1981). existence, contingent and necessary: see contingent and necessary existence. existence precedes essence. An existentialist formula which signifies that we make ourselves the individuals we are. Heidegger uses the formula to indicate that for each *‘Dasein’, its ‘being’ or ‘essence’ is the way in which it shapes its life, its manner of ‘existence’ (in his special sense). Sartre interprets the formula in the light of his emphasis upon free choice: we are what we ‘choose’ our- selves to be. t.r.b. *existentialism. J P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, tr. P. Mairet (London, 1948). existentialism. ‘Existentialism’ is a loose term for the reaction, led by Kierkegaard, against the abstract rational- ism of Hegel’s philosophy. As against Hegel’s conception of ‘absolute consciousness’ within which all oppositions are supposedly reconciled, Kierkegaard insisted on the irreducibility of the subjective, personal dimension of human life. He characterized this in terms of the perspect- ive of the ‘existing individual’, and it is from this special use of the term ‘existence’ to describe a distinctively human mode of being that existentialism gets its name. Kierkegaard’s successors include the German philoso- phers Heidegger and Jaspers and the French philosophers Sartre and Marcel (who actually coined the term ‘existen- tialism’). I shall concentrate here only on aspects of the works of Heidegger and Sartre in addition to those of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard rejected the claim, which he took (perhaps unfairly) to be Hegel’s, that we can look forward to a time existentialism 277 postwar french philosophy jean-paul sartre became the archetype of the French intellectual: deep and difficult, against convention, politic- ally committed, with a recognized role as a critic of culture and society, in a café, with a cigarette. simone de beauvoir brought to existentialist morality, which exalted freedom, awareness of the importance of the social context of choice, and in particular of the power- relations between the sexes. michel foucault, in his histories of madness, sexuality, and punishment, examined how societies control dis- course and knowledge and thus power. louis althusser offered, in the 1960s, a new Marxist ap- proach to social and cultural theory, rejecting the principle of reductive explanation in terms of economic factors. when the different interests and concerns of people can be satisfied through their comprehension within an all- embracing objective understanding of the universe. For, according to Kierkegaard, no such synthesis can do justice to an individual’s concern for their own life; hence, he argues, even though Kantian epistemology correctly implies that we should recognize that our own subjective perceptions are just the manifestation of our objective situation in the world, we cannot similarly resolve ethical questions by subjecting our moral consciousness to an impersonal deliberative perspective. For ethical ques- tions essentially concern ourselves; in asking ourselves how we are to lead our lives, we deceive ourselves if we pretend that the adoption of an objective, impersonal understanding of our situation will by itself provide an answer. Kierkegaard takes it that this relationship between ethics and subjectivity is a two-way relationship. Not only are ethical questions essentially first-person, the ‘real sub- ject’ is also ‘the ethically existing subject’, as he puts it. He also holds, however, that we should not think of our exist- ence as ‘real subjects’ as a feature of our lives which we can just take for granted (comparable, say, to our embodi- ment). Instead (and here he remains to some degree Hegelian) he thinks that it is an aspect of our lives that needs to be developed if we are to achieve our full poten- tial as individuals; the fact of our ‘existence’ implies that we cannot avoid first-person practical questions, but we may well lack a coherent conception of ourselves by refer- ence to which we can begin to answer them. How, then, is such a conception to be acquired? How is one to ‘become an individual’? Not, certainly, by acquiring more know- ledge of the world. Instead we have to engage the will: it is by making choices and commitments (such as marriage) which enable us to develop long-term interests that we give our lives an ethical structure. When Kierkegaard writes that ‘it is impossible to exist without passion’, he means that it is only by entering into engagements whose fate can arouse the passions that we gain a sense of our own identity and in that way become an ‘existing individual’. Nothing so far explicitly implies that in becoming such an individual one becomes a virtuous one. But Kierkegaard takes it that the good life for a person is one that fulfils the requirement that that person live as an indi- vidual. The basic idea here is that one is able to make sense of one’s life as a whole only through personal conduct and relationships with others which manifest the virtues. This may not seem persuasive. In Kierkegaard’s case, however, this thesis is presented in the context of the further belief that no one can create a life for themselves which will sur- vive the vicissitudes of fortune without making ‘the leap of faith’, a personal commitment to the kind of life lived by Jesus Christ, i.e. without becoming ‘Christlike’. What stands behind this belief is the experience of *‘Angst’—vari- ously translated as ‘dread’ or ‘anxiety’. Kierkegaard’s claim is both that this experience reveals to us the unsatis- factory nature of a life that depends on the contingencies of success or human love, and that we are thereby moti- vated to commit ourselves to an ‘ethico-religious’ life which offers a salvation that is not dependent upon such contingencies because it rests upon a relationship with God. Heidegger follows Kierkegaard in using the term Exist- enz to describe the mode of being that is distinctive of human life (or *Dasein, as Heidegger would put it), and he explicitly contrasts this mode of being with that of the everyday objects which we categorize in terms of their use (the Zuhandenheit) and that of those objects which we think of as altogether independent of us (the Vorhanden- heit). Heidegger also holds that the distinctive feature of human existence arises from the irreducibility of the prac- tical concern we each face concerning our lives: for each of us ‘our own being is an issue’, and the way in which we face up to this issue determines the nature of our exist- ence. There is no fixed human essence which gives a structure to human life that is independent of the engage- ments and goals which, by giving us a sense of our own practical identity, fill out our existence. Where Heidegger differs from Kierkegaard is in assign- ing this ‘existential’ thesis an absolutely fundamental role in general metaphysics. He maintains that the answer to the question of being in general is to be found by a line of inquiry which commences with an inquiry into the ‘exist- ential’ constitution of Dasein, i.e. human life. Since, as we have seen, Dasein’s existence involves a practical concern for itself, it is not surprising that a metaphysics which builds out from this has many similarities with pragma- tism. So when Heidegger proceeds to develop his account of Dasein’s ‘existence’ as ‘being-in-the-world’, he makes it clear that our fundamental mode of being-in-the-world is action (rather than, say, contemplative perception), and that we basically understand the world in terms of the cat- egories which enter into the explanation of our actions. So, for example, although Heidegger endorses Kant’s claim that spatiality is an essential element of our experi- ence of the world, he argues that we should not think of this spatiality in terms of the space of physical theory (as Kant did); instead, we should think of it as the ‘existential space’ of everyday life, that spatiality which is conceived in essentially egocentric and practical terms. Heidegger’s ‘existential pragmatism’ goes beyond Kierkegaard’s existentialism, and in other respects, too, he modifies important aspects of Kierkegaard’s conception of existence. Where Kierkegaard linked the ‘passionate’ nature of human existence directly to the will, to the sub- ject’s chosen commitments, Heidegger argues that our emotions characteristically reflect cares and concerns that we have not chosen, since they arise from involvements which we just find ourselves ‘thrown’ into (e.g. our coun- try, our family, and, more fundamentally, those aspects of our world which simply record our everyday needs). Hei- degger then argues that these involvements provide an essential background for the practical undertakings of everyday life whereby we seek to meet our needs and answer the demands that arise from our unchosen existentialism 279 . those sympathetic to them (such as Goethe) became full-blown evolutionists. In the spirit of the time, the idea was always more significant than the reality. It was therefore to be the middle of the. probably themselves the result of natural processes that turned the inorganic into the living. There have been many causal theories of evolution, but the dominant one today dates to the Origin. sup- pose the approval or command to be rationally justified, then it is to that justification, rather than to the action or attitude of the authority, that we must look for the meaning of the normative