The purpose of this paper is to discuss and to relate to each other two topics: (a) the admissibility of ignorance and mistake of fact as defences against negligence in crime; and (b) the inadmissibility of ignorance and mistake of law as defences against criminal charges. I am in (a) not concerned at all with torts negligence, only with criminal offences (whether common law or statutory) which can be committed negligently, where negligence suffices for liability, as in the law of homicide. This produces an untidy classification of elements, one or other of which is needed to provide the required mens rea (the exception of strict liability offences is here ignored): intention ( = purpose or aim), knowledge (or belief), recklessness and negligence. It is untidy, because the last does not belong on the same list as the other three, each of which can appropriately be called a state of mind in what we might say to be a positive sense, for each of them includes some degree of awareness of and/or attitude to relevant facts. If negligence is to be called (partly) a state of mind, it is so in a very stretched and negative way: to be told that a person was not attending to, thinking of or noticing something that he should have been is to be given some information, of a negative sort, about his state of mind, but it tells us very little, for it eliminates only one of an unlimited range of states of mind (in the positive sense). His not attending, noticing, etc., is equally compatible with his daydreaming (not attending to or noticing anything) and with his concentrating hard on something else. If negligence requires inadvertence, as is commonly maintained, then there was a state of mind which the agent should have been in but was not; if, as I would argue, it does not require inadvertence, then there was a state of mind which the agent should have been in, and maybe he was not in it, maybe he was in it. (In the present state of English law most offences of criminal negligence do require inadvertence, the notable exceptions being traffic offences such as careless driving. On the other hand, the proposal in the Law Commission Working Paper, No. 31 (1970) would not require it; the definition runs, ‘a person is negligent if he fails to exercise such care, skill or foresight as a reasonable man in his situation would exercise’. However, that is only a proposal; at present advertent negligence is rare in criminal law, although common in torts.) On this view, the questions are (1) whether his performance fell below scratch, (2) what are to be the excusing conditions for such a performance, and (3) if the answer to (1) is yes, whether his performance was covered by the excusing conditions.

The remarks that critics make about works of art are various in character. Some of them are strictly interpretative—for instance, The Lord of the Rings may be claimed to be an allegorical representation of the Gospel Story; the slow movement of a symphony may be said to express a period of calm after a revolution; a painting may be said to depict the horrors of war. Some may be biographical—that the play was written in 1654, that the poem was written while the poet was in love, that the sculpture was commissioned by the Canada Council. Some may be autobiographical—that the 7th has always been one's favourite Beethoven symphony, that one identifies with Joe in Room at the Top, that Medea was the first tragedy one saw performed in the original Greek. Some are ‘descriptive’ in the philosopher's sense, ‘matters of fact’—that the narrator is a senior civil servant, that the painting is all in pastel colours, that the conductor has not played all the repetitions. Some invoke formal structural principles—that the doors are in classical proportions, that the work's catastrophe is deferred to the finale, that the poem is in iambic pentameters. Some are concerned with the exposition of technique—that the spaciousness is suggested by the use of open fifths, that speed is portrayed by making the moving object sharper than anything else in the picture, that the effect of a sculpture is achieved by the use of metallurgically distinct materials. I wish to concentrate on a type of remark found frequently in art criticism, which defies reduction to any of the kinds mentioned above. The following are typical instances:

That picture will not, at the first glance, deceive as a piece of actual sunlight; but this is because there is more in it than the sunlight, because under the glazing veil of vaulted fire which lights the vessel on her last path, there is a blue deep, desolate hollow of darkness, out of which you can hear the voice of the night wind, and the dull boom of the disturbed sea; because the cold deadly shadows of twilight are gathering through every sunbeam, and moment by moment as you look, you will fancy some new film and faintness of the night has risen over the vastness of the departing form (Ruskin, on Turner's The Fighting Temeraire).

In Plato's Meno, there is a famous discussion of desire and evil. This paper is not a contribution to Platonic scholarship, but a direct taking up of the issue whether someone can desire evil. One stock interpretation of the putative impossibility of desiring what is evil or bad is the interpretation which emphasizes an internal or conceptual tie between desire and good. This interpretation compares pairs of terms such as ‘fear—danger’, ‘belief—truth’ and ‘desire—good’. To fear something is to regard it as, or believe that it is, dangerous (or harmful); to believe something is to regard it as, or believe it to be, true (in this case the connection is trivially obvious); to desire something is to regard it as, to believe it to be, good. Since it is obvious that people believe things which are false, it is maintained that it is equally obvious that people may desire what is (in fact) bad and fear what is (in fact) harmless or of no danger. Let us call this interpretation of the doctrine that it is impossible to desire evil the weak thesis. The weak thesis allows what seems a plain fact of human reality, that people believe falsehoods, fear things that cannot harm them and desire things which are not good. Equally obviously, it allows that people fail to believe truths, fail to desire goods, and fail to fear things that are dangerous. On this weak interpretation, the manner in which wickedness to others and self-destructiveness are due to ignorance is that people are ignorant about the nature of things and ways of acting, ignorant about what it would be like to possess something or ignorant about what it would be like to do something or other.

Arthur Prior is perhaps best known for his contributions to the philosophy of time. I shall argue here that his views about reference are not easily reconciled with his views about time, and suggest that his views about existence and his acceptance of some dubious Cartesian epistemological principles led him to increasingly bizarre and counter-intuitive claims about the sufficient conditions for successful reference to particulars. First he seems to have claimed that we cannot refer to individuals which no longer exist; then that we can refer only to individuals which stand in a direct perceptual relationship to us; and finally that one can really only talk about oneself. In this paper I shall trace the development in Prior's thought which led him to this extraordinary conclusion.

In part I of this paper I defend Locke's account of personal identity against three well-known objections; in part II, I put forward a criticism of my own.

It is notorious that great philosophers are apt to be misunderstood. Controversy rages about their work, and sometimes they are credited with completely contradictory views. Consider the sharply contrasted opinions of Plato's political thought by Sir Karl Popper, on the one hand, and G. C. Field and H. B. Acton on the other.

Some of my best friends are women, but I would not want my sister to marry one of them. Modern-minded persons criticize me for manifesting such out-dated prejudices, and would like to send me to Coventry for a compulsory course of reindoctrination. They may be right. It could conceivably be the case that in due course the Sex Discrimination Act will be tightened up, even to the extent of our recognizing that there are no ‘good reasons why the State should not recognize contracts which are in all respects like marriage, except for the sex of the parties concerned’. We can envisage a society so enlightened that the relations between men and women will be purely platonic and it will be a matter of no concern whether two people are members of the opposite sex or not: or, alternatively, our feelings could be so completely homogenized, that it will make no difference to an emotional relationship whether Leslie and Julian have only one Y-chromosome between them, or two, or none at all. In that event I shall be shown to be wrong, and my critics entitled to erect a monument to female equality on my grave. But I have doubts, and suspect that long after I am dead men will go on falling in love with women and women will continue to find their hearts wooed and won by men. And this fact, if it is a fact, makes a profound difference to our social institutions. I want to follow out the logic of social differentiation, relying as little as I can on putative facts about the differences between the sexes. Scientifically attested knowledge is scarce in this field. Many academics take refuge in a safe suspension of judgment, but this is a craven dereliction of duty. We have yet to develop an adequate theory of knowledge in social matters, and only by thrashing out the apparently telling arguments on this and similar issues can we clear our minds about the nature of social knowledge. Moreover, if those who might argue rationally draw back from doing so, they leave the field clear for others who suffer from fewer inhibitions and fewer scruples. And finally, serious social consequences can follow from public confusion about the logic of a situation, and what things are possible and what desirable. There is a danger that in our attempts to remedy the real wrongs done to women we shall only succeed, as with much modern legislation, in making a bad case worse.

In everyday arguments we often meet with such phrases as ‘That's rational, it is mere common sense’ used in conjunction to approve of or back up some particular statement. The juxtaposition of these everyday locutions embodies a profound truth, the truth, namely, that the basis of rational communication between human beings is plain common sense. I call this point profound because it has been missed in all the discussions about rationality and its basis that I know; certainly its elusiveness thus seems to indicate that participants in these discussions have not delved deeply enough. But I concede that this truth is simple and obvious, and conclude, therefore, that it has been overlooked only because its very obviousness has been taken, wrongly, to indicate superficiality and inadequacy. In suggesting that it is neither superficial nor inadequate I shall be relying on Wittgenstein's interpretation of Moore's ‘Defence of Common Sense’, to which I shall be adding a particular twist of my own.

In his discussion note ‘J. J. C. Smart, Materialism and Occam's Razor’ Peter Glassen argues that it was inconsistent of me both to assert that realism is true and that Occam's razor (or any other principle for that matter) is a reason for the materialist thesis. Glassen says that Occam's razor ‘is not a physical thing, state or process at all’. A little further down on the same page he uses the phrase ‘material or physical thing, state, or process’. It is possible, therefore, that Glassen regards the distinction between ‘material’ and ‘physical’ as unimportant in the present context. I think however that one way of replying to Glassen turns on this distinction.

In ‘Considering Equality’, Mrs Margaret Coady criticizes my discussion of Professor Bernard Williams's justly renowned essay ‘The Idea of Equality’. During the course of her paper, Mrs Coady ascribes to me views that I do not hold. But I shall not consider these points of detail because they deflect from the substantive disagreement between Professor Williams and myself. I shall merely examine what, as I see it, is the core of Mrs Coady's case against me. This certainly does relate to the substantive issue.

A philosophical tradition is in part identified by its more durable controversies. The British tradition in moral philosophy running, roughly, from Hobbes to the present day, involves several fine examples of the type—the plausibility or otherwise of the compatibilist view of free will, the case for and against utilitarianism, and perhaps above all the implications of the fact/value distinction. It is always pleasing to find some new variation on such themes; you have a comforting sense of the inherent permanence of this corner of the intellectual universe. Thus R. G. Swinburne's paper ‘The Objectivity of Morality’ (Philosophy, January 1976) is much to be welcomed as a contribution to a well-matured debate. Even more, perhaps, it is welcome on account of its considerable clarity. But clarity often comes at a high price, and the price in this case is too high. By setting out his version of the objectivist position with such precision and lack of ambiguity Professor Swinburne has made its difficulties and weaknesses accessible to all but the meanest intellect.

A prolonged (obsessive?) professional interest in the problems of obsessional disorder has led me to a consideration of Professor Hare's arguments for prescriptivism. It is perhaps a tribute to the elegance of Hare's argument and the lucidity with which it is presented that the present paper is concerned with the exceptions he cites.

Can I toss a small but important and oddly neglected point into the debate between Roger Trigg and the Social Anthropologists like Professor Beattie whom it may or may not be right to call Relativists?