My students complain about the translation we're using...of John Stuart Mill.

Even as a person who reads analytic philosophy for a living, there are some whose writing is so turgid that I simply refuse to commit the time needed to get through it. Brandom comes to mind.

I'm glad to have read the Blanshard essay.
 

brian_g wrote:

There was a time when I didn't care for the notion of retributive justice.  It seems to me that criminal justice should be about protecting society and rehabilitating the criminal.  Here is what convinced me otherwise.  If we punish someone, not because they deserve it, but because it would benefit society, then it isn't really necessary that the person be guilty.  It's conceivable that punishing an innocent person might actually benefit and protect society. 

Exactly. And for me, this was one of the (many) reductios of Utilitarianism as a general account of moral obligation. The Principle of Utility knows nothing of desert. The guilt of the punished party is a non-essential detail; the only thing that matters is that utility is maximized. That may coincide with punishing the guilty, but it also may not. And when the identity of the guilty remains unknown, the Principle of Utility may well favor punishing an innocent person, especially if that person can be made to appear guilty. Many, many such scapegoating scenarios have been offered against Utilitarianism.
 

Tomislav Ostojich wrote:

Third, you make a cogent point. Outside of turning it into a psychological problem, I don't know how to handle the phenomenon of retribution and why people feel satisfaction from it. But I feel that if it isn't psychological, then I have to concede that it is objectively rational (i.e. not simply a part of a hypothetical imperative) and therefore subject to an objective rational standard that we're all bound to, but that's precisely what I'm having trouble believing in.

It's not limited to retribution, though, is it? The general concept of desert, as in treating people as they deserve to be treated, raises the same set of questions. A person can deserve praise and reward as well as condemnation and punishment. And generally speaking, what a person deserves, whether positive or negative, depends on what the person has done. I wouldn't claim that all moral obligations are about desert, but surely some are. So the question is, Is desert simply a psychological impulse? If I say that someone deserves our gratitude, am I simply saying that this is how I expect people to feel? That doesn't sound right to me. But if I'm saying that we should feel gratitude, I've re-introduced a prescriptive element and the claim isn't merely psychological anymore.

I think the "disturbance in the force" is actually a way of saying there's an objective moral order, and when we act in a way that does not conform to it, there is indeed a kind of real disequilibrium that exists until something is done to restore it to equilibrium. That "something" can be punishment, or restoration, or forgiveness, or some combination of the three.

This has been a perennial issue for Christianity, hasn't it? Did Jesus actually have to be crucified "for the forgiveness of sins"? Couldn't God just forgive sins without that horrendous occurrence? Why does the writer of Hebrews say "Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of bl

It seems to me that belief in the existence of a persisting self (for lack of a better term) is properly basic, in Plantinga's sense. That's not to say that reasons can't be offered in support of it, but those reasons tend to be different in kind from the kind we adduce for most other existence claims. They are, in Kant's sense, transcendental, i.e., necessary as a precondition of making other kinds of sense of things. Even Hume's "constant conjunction" account of causation presupposes some continuous vantage point from which "constant" can be noticed. Without that, we have only a temporal string of impressions, each a kind of windowless monad.

Some contemporary philosophers of mind are hyperventilating over the supposed "convergence"  between cognitive neuroscience and Buddhism's doctrine of "no-self". Personally, I see this convergence as a mark of the failure of both. For what it's worth, I think Barry Dainton (Liverpool) is doing some interesting work in this area. His short book, The Self, is worth a read.
 

I just discovered the forum, by way of mention on Ed Feser's blog, and at the same time learned of the passing of Scott. Since I'm absolutely new here, I don't know much about Scott or the forum itself, except that it's all about civil discussion of classical theism and related philosophical and theological concerns. I hope to learn more.

I'm 62, with a PhD in philosophy (analytic). I teach at a Catholic university, but I'm not Catholic. I'm best described as a "recovering atheist" and "entry-level Christian."