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What Ethics Might Be

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2025

Sophie-Grace Chappell
Sophie-Grace Chappell*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: Sophie-grace.chappell@open.ac.uk
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Abstract

What are epiphanies, and might they be of use in doing philosophy? This essay explores how a great deal of philosophy – and in particular ethics – adopts methods that make no room for epiphanies and the insights they can provide.

Keywords

ethicsmoral philosophydeliberationimaginationWar and PeaceUnger

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 24 , Issue 69 , Spring 2025 , pp. 37 - 44
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of Philosophy.

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References

Notes

1. James Joyce, Stephen Hero [1944], ed. Theodore Spencer (London: Paladin, 1991), 216‒18.

2. Sophie Grace Chappell, Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 8–9.

3. Quoted, with minor corrections, from The Project Gutenberg eBook of War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy.

4. David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (London: Vintage, 2002), 10‒13.

5. Philip Larkin, Required Writing (London: Faber 1977), 58, 82.

6. Joseph Conrad, quoted in Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel, 13.

7. See Epiphanies 3.2, pp. 115ff.

8. In three books in particular: Ethics and Experience (Durham: Acumen, 2009), Knowing What to Do (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Epiphanies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

9. Quite a lot of the material in the rest of this article is adapted from Knowing What to Do, ch. 2, pp. 45–50.

10. Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

11. Unger’s other stipulation about his cases is also a be-boring stipulation – it is to hold motives constant (Living High and Letting Die, 26): ‘As much as can make sense, the agent’s motivation in one contrast case, and its relation to her conduct there, is like that in the other.’