Precis of Suffering and Virtue

Talking Virtue: professionalism and virtue ethics

The twentieth century phenomenon of professionalism had a major impact on the economy of nation states and has been recognised as a key element of post-industrial societies. As an anointed class, professionals reserved the right to prescribe their own roles and responsibilities. Critics of professional interests, however, have described professionals’ own definition of their roles and responsib...

Precis of perception and basic beliefs

This book is concerned with a cluster of issues: the distinction between perception and inference; the role of nondoxastic experiential states in perceptual belief and perceptual justification; the nature of epistemologically basic beliefs; and a famous class of counterexamples to reliabilism involving agents with clairvoyance or other strange cognitive powers. What these issues have in common,...

Moderation, Rationality, and Virtue

Hype and Virtue

In this paper, we question whether hypervisors are really acting as a disruptive force in OS research, instead arguing that they have so far changed very little at a technical level. Essentially, we have retained the conventional Unix-like OS interface and added a new ABI based on PC hardware which is highly unsuitable for most purposes. Despite commercial excitement, focus on hypervisor design...

Virtue theory and abortion.

The sort of ethical theory derived from Aristotle, variously described as virtue ethics, virtue-based ethics, or neo-Aristotelianism, is becoming better known, and is now quite widely recognized as at least a possible rival to deontological and utilitarian theories. With recognition has come criticism, of varying quality. In this article I shall discuss nine separate criticisms that I have fr...