Thomas Nagel

Human beings​ seem to have a unique relationship to time. We carry within ourselves a sense of our past and future lives extending over decades. (Other creatures appear to live mainly in the present, though we know too little about the inner lives of elephants, for example, to have a firm opinion about this.) We can all second William Faulkner: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not...

Among philosophers​ of the 20th century, John Langshaw Austin is not a cultural celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. But for a period after the Second World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial influence in the wider Anglophone world and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way...

Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation – not in the minority and on the on the periphery, but central and predominant. Distinctive and talented though each of them was, it seems no accident that such a stellar group emerged from this atypical moment.

To evaluate states of affairs we use the concepts of good and bad, better and worse. To evaluate actions we use in addition the concepts of right and wrong. The classical problem is whether there is an independent aspect of morality governing the rightness and wrongness of acts and policies – either of individuals or of institutions – or whether the only truly fundamental values are good and bad, so that standards of right and wrong must be explained instrumentally, by identifying the types of actions and policies that lead to good and bad outcomes. The latter possibility was given the name ‘consequentialism’ by Elizabeth Anscombe, and its best-known version is utilitarianism. The opposite view, that the right is at least in some respects independent of the good, doesn’t have a name, but the principles that it identifies are usually called ‘deontological’ – an ugly word, but we seem to be stuck with it. Deontological principles say that whether an act is morally permitted, prohibited or required often depends not on the goodness or badness of its overall consequences but on intrinsic features of the act itself.