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I am concerned with values in the descriptive rather than in the normative sense. I am interested in theories that seek to explain one or another aspect of people's moral psychology. Why do people value what they value? Why do they have other moral reactions? What accounts for their feelings, their motivations to act morally, and their opinions about obligation, duty, rights, justice, and what people ought to do?A moral theory like (one or another version of) utilitarianism (or social-contract theory, natural-law theory, Kantianism, or whatever) may be put forward as offering the correct normative account of justice, or of the good, or of what people ought morally to do. The answers such a theory offers may be surprising in suggesting that what people ought to do is quite different from what they think they ought to do. I am not concerned with normative moral theories of this revisionary sort. Indeed, I am interested in less revisionary normative theories only to the extent that they can be reinterpreted as offering potential explanations of people's actual moral reactions.

INTRODUCTIONIn my view, justice is entirely conventional; indeed, all of morality consists in conventions that are the result of continual tacit bargaining and adjustment. This is not to say social arrangements are just whenever they are in accordance with the principles of justice accepted inthatsociety. We can use our own principles of justice in judging the institutions of another society, and we can appeal to some principles we accept in order to criticize other principles we accept.To use David Hume's model of the relevant sort of convention, two people rowing a boat each continually adjusts his or her rate of rowing to the other so that they come to row at the same rate, a rate that is normally somewhere between the rate at which each would prefer to row. In the same way the basic principles of justice accepted by people of different powers and resources are the result of a continually changing compromise affecting such things as the relative importance attached to helping others as compared with the importance attached to not harming others.Hume's rowers provide an example of a "convention" that is normally completely tacit. There are other models in which the bargaining can be more explicit, for example when a seller comes to set prices that are acceptable to customers, when employers reach understandings with employees concerning wages, or when political groups influence legislation.I want eventually to consider the implications for moral reasoning and argument of the thesis that principles of justice are entirely the result of implicit bargaining and convention of this sort.

Subjects, Speakers, and Roles -- Deep Structure as Logical Form -- Troubles about Actions -- Act -- Some Problems Concerning the Logic of Grammatical Modifiers -- Pragmatics and Intensional Logic -- General Semantics -- On the Frame of Reference -- Naming and Necessity -- Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions -- Pragmatics -- The Semantics of Modal Notions and the Indeterminacy of Ontology -- Opacity, Coreference, and Pronouns -- Methodological Reflections on Current Linguistic Theory -- Grammar and Philosophy -- Analytic/Synthetic and Semantic Theory -- A Program for Syntax -- A Program for Logic -- Linguistics and Natural Logic -- Semantical Archaeology: A Parable -- On the Semantics of the Ought-To-Do -- Inference and Self-Reference -- What Is Said -- The Role of Inductive Reasoning in the Interpretation of Metaphor -- Probabilistic Grammars for Natural Languages -- Addenda to Saul A. Kripke's Paper 'Naming and Necessity'.

This Companion brings together a team of leading figures in contemporary philosophy to provide an in-depth exposition and analysis of Quine's extensive influence across philosophy's many subfields, highlighting the breadth of his work, and revealing his continued significance today. Provides an in-depth account and analysis of W.V.O. Quine's contribution to American Philosophy, and his position as one of the late twentieth-century's most influential analytic philosophers Brings together newly-commissioned essays by leading figures within contemporary philosophy Cov

Gauthier's title is potentially misleading. The phrase "morals by agreement" suggests a social contract theory of morality according to which basic moral principles arise out of an actual or hypothetical agreement. John Rawls defends a hypothetical agreement version, arguing that the basic principles of justice are those that would be agreed to in an initial position of fair equality. I myself defend an actual agreement version, arguing that the moral principles that apply to a person derive from implicit conventions the person has accepted in dealing with other people. Gauthier's view is different from either of these sorts of contract theory. Instead, he holds that certain basic principles of impartiality are prior to actual agreements.