The most powerful version of the classic epistemic argument against consequentialism is stated in an article by James Lenman. Lenman’s “argument from cluelessness” claims that a significant percentage of the consequences of our actions are wholly unknowable and hence, when it comes to assessing the moral quality of our actions, we are literally without a clue. In this paper, I distinguish the a...

Moral error theory of the kind defended by J.L. Mackie and Richard Joyce is premised on two claims: (1) that moral judgements essentially presuppose that moral value has absolute authority, and (2) that this presupposition is false, because nothing has absolute authority. This paper accepts (2) but rejects (1). It is argued first that (1) is not the best explanation of the evidence from moral p...

In this paper I analyze the tension between realism and antirealism at the basis of Kantian constructivism. This tension generates a conflictive account of the source of the validity of social norms. On the one hand, the claim to moral objectivity characteristic of Kantian moral theories makes the validity of norms depend on realist assumptions concerning the existence of shared fundamental int...

This paper investigates the applicability of Possibilistic Stable Models (PSM) for Logic Programming to decision making through the use of several extensions to the PSM formalism that are chosen to enhance the realism in the resulting decision making model. The selected extensions to PSMs are unified through their incorporation into an argumentation framework designed to represent the combined ...

The paper presents an original version of the moral naturalism — a theory that combines realism and naturalistic empiricism. In first section, I give initial definitions basic concepts for our study (such as realism, epistemological metaphysical naturalism, supervenience) clarify their meaning. second present main motivation this those grounds on which we should try to defend both naturalism. t...

A source of much difficulty and confusion in the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a “naive realism about operators.” By this we refer to various ways of taking too seriously the notion of operator-as-observable, and in particular to the all too casual talk about “measuring operators” that occurs when the subject is quantum mechanics. Without a specification of what should be meant by “mea...

literary fiction can be criticized and analyzed through different approaches and literary schools. meanwhile, the most attention has been devoted to realism, as the most important and permanent intellectual concern of many writers. iranian modern literary fiction has shown its affection to realism from the beginning, and most of iranian writers have tried to illustrate the social-political situ...