Is that all there is?

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 10, Issue 1-2, 2006, Pages 75-106

  Smith, Michael ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Absurd; Absurdity; Albert Camus; Fulfillment; God; Godot; Good; Good for; Joel Feinberg; Justification; Pointless; Pointlessness; Self fulfillment; Sisyphus; Thomas Nagel; Tragedy; Tragic; Value; Worth

Indexed keywords

EID: 33747068207     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10892-005-4591-9     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1997).
2. Dramatic irony is "incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play" (Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, http://www.m-w.com/home.htm).
3. Joel Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment: Philosophical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 297-330.
4. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 11-23.
5. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, pp. 299-315.
6. The classic discussion is Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Justin O'Brien (trans.) (New York: Random House, 1955).
7. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, p. 300.
8. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, pp. 304-305.
9. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, pp. 301-302
10. quoting a cartoon by Handelsman in New Yorker (6 July 1981), p. 34.
11. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, p. 319.
12. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, pp. 309-310.
13. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, p. 315.
14. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, p. 315.
15. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, p. 325.
16. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, p. 323.
17. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, p. 325.
18. This is another example of dramatic irony because the Lord's answers to the prayers that are offered, audible to those of us who hear the song, are clearly not supposed to be audible to those depicted in the song as doing the praying.
19. Randy Newman, "God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)," (1972).
20. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, p. 306.
21. John Milton, Paradise Lost (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).
22. Nagel, Mortal Questions, p. 18.
23. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Section 4, Part 2.
24. Nagel, Mortal Questions, p. 19.
25. For a defence of this claim, see Michael Smith, "The Humean Theory of Motivation," Mind, 96 (1987), pp. 36-61;
26. "The Possibility of Philosophy of Action" in Jan Bransen and Stefaan Cuypers (eds.), Human Action, Deliberation and Causation (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), pp. 17-41,
27. reprinted in Michael Smith, Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
28. and "The Structure of Orthonomy," in John Hyman and Helen Steward (eds.), Action and Agency (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 55) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 165-193.
29. Nagel, Mortal Questions, p. 20.
30. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
31. See also David Lewis, "Dispositional Theories of Value," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 63, 1989, pp. 113-137,
32. and Richard Joyce, The Myth of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
33. Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994).
34. Michael Smith, "In Defence of The Moral Problem: A Reply to Brink, Copp and Sayre-McCord," Ethics, 108 (1997), pp. 84-119;
35. and Michael Smith, "Exploring the Implications of the Dispositional Theory of Value," Philosophical Issues: Realism and Relativism, 12 (2002), pp. 329-347,
36. both of which are reprinted in Smith, Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics.
37. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), Book 1, Part 4, Section 7;
38. a lso quoted in Nagel, Mortal Questions, p. 20.
39. Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, "Is That All There Is?" (1969). I cannot resist drawing the following very pleasing cosmic coincidence to everyone's attention.
40. Newman, the person who wrote "God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)" (Section 3),
41. was responsible for the orchestrations on Peggy Lee's original recording of Lieber and Stoller's "Is That All There Is?"