The object of this paper is to show that there are no valid formal objections to the argument from design, so long as the argument is articulated with sufficient care. In particular I wish to analyse Hume's attack on the argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and to show that none of the formal objections made therein by Philo have any validity against a carefully articulated version of the argument.

The phrase, ‘political obligation’, is far more popular in English than in other European languages. Whether this may be due to historical circumstances, or to a peculiar bent of the English mind, is a fascinating question; but it is not the one which I propose to discuss here today. I am mentioning it only to explain the choice of my subject, a subject which would probably sound rather uncommon to an Italian audience, but which, I am sure, has a familiar ring to English ears. My subject, I would like to emphasise, is the nature of political obligation; my approach will be analytical rather than historical; and indeed, let me say at once that this lecture is a kind of examen de conscience in which I am myself involved, since I feel personally responsible for having introduced the phrase into my own native language, and for having used it during a life-time as if its meaning were self-evident, without ever raising the questions which I want to raise today.

Two types of criticism are frequently levelled at the history of ideas in general and the history of political theory in particular. The first is very much that of historians practising in other fields; that it is written as a saga in which all the great deeds are done by entities which could not, in principle, do anything. In it, Science is always wrestling with Theology, Empiricism with Rationalism, monism with dualism, evolution with the Great Chain of Being, artifice with nature, Politik with political moralism. Its protagonists are never humans, but only reified abstractions—or, if humans by inadvertence, humans only as the loci of these abstractions. The other charge, one more frequently levelled by philosophers, is that it is insensitive to the distinctive features of ideas, unconcerned with, or more often ineffectual in its concern with, truth and falsehood, its products more like intellectual seed-catalogues than adequate studies of thought In short it is characterised by a persistent tension between the threats of falsity in its history and incompetence in its philosophy.

It is usual to interpret Mill's understanding of liberty in terms deriving from his distinction in On Liberty between self-regarding and other-regarding conduct. Granted this distinction and Mill's genuine concern to define and defend it, it remains a relevant question why he attached so much importance to it. This raises a less familiar theme in Mill, namely the inter-connection of self-regarding and other-regarding conduct. An uncommitted reading of the main texts suggests an equivalent value is attached to this. Mill clearly and constantly asserts a close connection between each person's own attempt to improve himself, to cultivate his ‘affections and will’, and the social and political structure in which he acts. Self-regarding virtue and responsible social conduct are interdependent; the quality of each depends upon the quality of the other. A fuller recognition of this and its central place in Mill's revision of Bentham may be of help in examining some of the particular problems raised by recent scholarship on Mill.

Prof. Flew's main purpose in God and Philosophy (Hutchinson, London, 1966) is ‘to develop and to examine a case for Christian theism’ (1, 1). But in next to no time he shows his reader that here, as with the New York Commissioner for Air Pollution, ‘for’ really means ‘against’. For Flew's aim is to attack Christian theism and to develop the argument against it. One of his fellow-humanists rightly reviewed this book under the title ‘A Case for Atheism’. As the case for atheism is being developed one quickly loses faith in the assurance that this ‘philosopher of religion has … no business to be counsel for either the prosecution or the defence’ and aspires to resemble most of all the examining magistrate (2, 3). Soon we are told that an attack should and shall be launched against the heart of the quinta via of Aquinas (3, 19, etc.). This is not just a slip of the pen for indeed the book contains a number of attacks on Aquinas. Of course Aquinas is not the only Christian theist who is attacked but he is Flew's chief individual target.

Piety is not a theme that normally attracts the modern mind. In our own age rebellion has a more prominent position and the theme of impiety strikes a more sympathetic note. We are led to examine Plato's Euthyphro as much for the hints we find on the subject of impiety as for whatever it might contain on the seemingly drab subject of the holy. The Euthyphro is also a dialogue concerned with justice, a recurrent theme in the Platonic corpus, and it questions the accepted relationship of justice to piety and orthodoxy. The secular implications of the argument, which seem to be the more important to Socrates, himself, are as relevant to modern politics and religion as they were to the life of ancient Athens.

Professor J. B. Schneewind's recent excellent volume Mill's Ethical Writings has drawn attention to the necessity of studying Mill's notes to chapter XXIII of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind for a clear understanding of his theory of the moral sentiments. There are notes, however, by J. S. Mill to other chapters of that work, which should not be forgotten, because they elucidate the associationist theory of motivation which is obscurely appealed to in chapter IV of Utilitarianism. Critics of Mill from F. H. Bradley onwards have made erroneous statements about the psychology that underlies Mill's justification of the principle of utility. But if Mill was going to support his ethics with a psychological theory, he should have expressed that theory at length and unambiguously in his ethical treatise. In what follows, it is pointed out where critics have been unfair to Mill through their apparent ignorance of his notes to the Analysis and of his conception of sympathy; but it is also shown that there is a puzzling inconsistency between the notes and a key passage in Utilitarianism, chapter IV. Finally, the theory of habitual volition, which is expressed at the close of that chapter, is examined. Critics have paid little attention to this theory, but it entails a serious modification of psychological hedonism, and Mill obviously attributed great importance to it.

In this Paper I am concerned to argue that the traditionally and contemporarily important arguments for a liberal society do provide a justification for what may fairly be called a liberal society. However, many liberals may wish to deny that the society which these arguments are seen to justify when their various limitations and qualifications are noted, can properly be called liberal, for it is less committed to non-interference with liberty than is the liberal society which those who advance these arguments believe to be justified by them.

The decade of criticism directed at The Political Philosophy of Hobbes has found the critics united in rejecting many of Warrender's conclusions, but it has not produced a generally accepted alternative interpretation. I shall argue in this paper that this has happened because the critics have not been searching enough in their criticism. Often they have taken over without discussion two crucial but highly questionable features of Warrender's book: first, his ignoring the definition of ‘obligation’ given in Leviathan; and, second, his presentation of logically independent conclusions about Hobbes's theory as if they were related. As a result of the first, Warrender's critics have sometimes followed him into error; and, as a result of the second, they have sometimes been led to dismiss correct conclusions in the belief that these were logically bound up with other conclusions that really were wrong. Too often they have thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater.

Certain primitive Yoruba carry about with them boxes covered with cowrie shells, which they treat with special regard. When asked what they are doing, they apparently reply that the boxes are their heads or souls and that they are protecting them against witchcraft. Is that an interesting fact or a bad translation? The question is, I believe, partly philosophical. In what follows, I shall propound and try to solve the philosopher's question, arguing that it has large implications for the theory of Social Anthropology.

In the essay On Liberty, Mill put forward his famous principle that society may only interfere with those actions of an individual which concern others and not with actions which merely concern himself. The validity of this principle depends on there being a distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding actions. But the concept of self-regarding actions has been severely criticised on the ground that all actions affect others in some way and are therefore other-regarding. The notion of self-regarding actions appears to be completely discredited. Very recently, however, there has been some dissatisfaction with the traditional debunking of Mill on this score. Two serious and important attempts to reinterpret the principle were made by Mr J. C. Rees in an article entitled ‘A Re-Reading of Mill on Liberty’, and by Mr Alan Ryan in two brief but extremely useful contributions. My aim is to discuss these reinterpretations of Mill, and on the basis of this, build up what I think is the correct account of Mill's notion of self-regarding actions.

A theory of punishment should give some account of mercy and yet it is true to say that very little has been said about it at all. It is commonly regarded as a praiseworthy element in moral behaviour—something to be practised occasionally both for the good of the one who punishes and the one who is punished. The suffering that punishment involves is unpleasant for all concerned, and if it is possible to avoid it or lessen it without moral injustice, then it is desirable to do so. We condemn as hard and unbending the judge who never shows mercy and the suggestion is that the poor unfortunates whose lot it is to be judged by him are poor unfortunates indeed. This is reflected in the fact that the opposite of merciful—merciless—means cruel. Presumably there are occasions when it is appropriate to show mercy to an offender, and other occasions when it is not. What are the conditions for the appropriate exercising of mercy, how do we decide how much mercy is appropriate, and when is a judge morally obliged to be merciful, if ever?

Berkeley's essay on vision was published in the spring of 1709. It was recognised at once as a book of considerable importance, and there was a second edition within the first year. The author was still only 24. His design, he wrote, was to show the ‘manner we perceive by sight the distance, magnitude and situation of objects’. Hitherto, writers on optics had ‘proceeded on wrong principles’.

To some extent, perhaps under Moore's chastening influence, eccentric philosophical denials of the existence of physical objects, other people's minds, the past, and so on, have gone out of fashion. All the same there is at least one very common philosophical conclusion which, though not as extravagant as these, is no less paradoxical. This is the dogma that ethical statements could not describe anything at all, and the collateral claim that they could not be true or false. This is, I suggest, as paradoxical as traditional denials of the existence of chairs and tables, since the denial that ethical statements could be descriptive, like the denial that chairs and tables could exist, is opposed by the common observation that ethical statements do describe, just as the other is opposed by the common observation that chairs and tables do exist. I hope to make two things perfectly clear. First of all, that ethical statements do describe states of affairs; and secondly, that the reason ultimately given for saying that they could not describe anything, namely that they differ in verification from statements of fact, is only partly true, and its uncritical acceptance has led to the canonisation of the belief that ethical statements are non-descriptive and have no truth-values.

A law, say, prohibits homosexual conduct or punishes the prostitute for plying her trade. According to some it is a bad law, according to others a necessary one. Those who argue that it is a bad law do so on a variety of grounds—that it is sheer folly to try to change human nature by law, that such legislation can only be effective at the price of the right to privacy, that the punishment of acts arising from compelling desires is cruel and excessive, that the law has no business meddling in what people do to others with their consent. Those who argue that it is a necessary law do so on one ground, that the act in question is immoral, and that what is wrong must be punished, lest the law itself fall into disrepute by failing to carry out a consistent campaign against wrong-doing.

An appeal to the inexplicable has always been a favourite tactic of the Supernaturalist; and even today those Supernaturalists that remain seem to derive some comfort from it. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, the orthodox Protestant apologetic in this country laid great stress on the ‘inexplicable’ events allegedly associated with Christ's life as anthenticating the truths of revelation. (A. G. N. Flew, God and Philosophy, London, 1966, p. 142–3.) A more general thesis has been put forward as often, and even more often assumed: that the occurrence of inexplicable events demonstrates the reality of a ‘spiritual’ realm. And in current literature we can find it claimed that the hegemony of science or the tenability of materialism is threatened by those inexplicabilities which are now known as the phenomena of ESP. (See, for example, ‘A World of Spirits’, a dialogue between J. Pearce-Higgins and C. Evans in Theoria to Theory, Vol. I, No. 4.)

Philosophers constantly discuss Responsibility. Yet in every discussion of which I am aware, a rather obvious point is ignored. The obvious point is that responsibility is ascribed to collectives, as well as to individual persons. Blaming attitudes are held towards collectives as well as towards individuals. (It should be noted that I am discussing that sense of Responsibility—moral or social—in which Responsibility is related to attitudes of blame, praise, indignation, remorse, reward, and punishment; not that sense of Responsibility in which even material objects can be responsible, and which is broadly equivalent to ‘causally operative’.) Responsibility is often ascribed to nations, towns, clubs, groups, teams, and married couples. ‘Germany was responsible for the Second World War’; ‘The club as a whole is to blame for being relegated’. Such statements are not rare.

On A number of occasions in the Principles, Berkeley defends himself against the possible objection that

‘by the foregoing principles, all that is real and substantial in nature is banished out of the world; and instead thereof a chimerical scheme of ideas takes place. All things that exist, exist only in the mind.… What therefore becomes of the sun, moon, and stars? … Are all these but so many chimeras and illusions on the fancy ?’

First a word about my title: ‘Happiness’ is ground upon which so many angels have feared to tread that it seemed not inappropriate for me to rush in. It is a subject to which we all do give thought, not only with the force majeure of professional philosophising, but in our personal lives; however, in trying to sort the subject out a little, and it is one about which both our literature and our thinking are notoriously muddled, I fear I may rather have generated confusion than diminished it. In attempting by a somewhat roundabout method to clarify a little the sort of question, though scarcely, I am afraid, the sort of answer, that is appropriate to such thought, it has, perhaps inevitably, seemed necessary to consider in almost as much detail the more fashionable subject of Pleasure; and here too, with less excuse, the points I wish to make are abbreviated and unashamedly oversimplified. An Aunt Sally, however, has its uses, and my neck is not so precious that it cannot afford to be stuck out.