Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)

Are workers dominated? A recent suite of neo-republican and relational egalitarian philosophers think they are. Suppose they are right; that is, suppose that some workers are governed by an unjust and arbitrary power existing in labour relations, which persists even in the presence of the actual ability to exit. My question is this: does that give us reason to impose restrictions on firms? According to the so-called Efficiency Objection there are relevant trade-offs that need to be considered between the efficiency (...) of firms and the freedom of workers, and upon considering these trade-offs, we should reject workplace democracy. In this paper, I present a dilemma for the Efficiency Objection. I argue that either the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds or non-moral grounds; if the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds, then it fails because efficiency cannot be valued for its own sake (it is only instrumentally good); if the Efficiency Objection is justified on non-moral grounds, then it fails because of the respect that we owe to persons as persons; therefore, the Efficiency Objection fails. (shrink)

Dorothy Edgington’s work has been at the centre of a range of ongoing debates in philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. This work has focused, although by no means exclusively, on the overlapping areas of conditionals, probability, and paradox. In what follows, I briefly sketch some themes from these three areas relevant to Dorothy’s work, highlighting how some of Dorothy’s work and some of the contributions of this volume fit in to these debates.

Shows that the very same asymmetries that arise for intentionally also arise from deciding, desiring, in favor of, opposed to, and advocating. It seems that the phenomenon is not due to anything about the concept of intentional action in particular. Rather, the effects observed for the concept of intentional action should be regarded as just one manifestation of the pervasive impact of moral judgment.

Selective scientific realists disagree on which theoretical posits should be regarded as essential to the empirical success of a scientific theory. A satisfactory account of essentialness will show that the (approximate) truth of the selected posits adequately explains the success of the theory. Therefore, (a) the essential elements must be discernible prospectively; (b) there cannot be a priori criteria regarding which type of posit is essential; and (c) the overall success of a theory, or ‘cluster’ of propositions, not only individual (...) derivations, should be explicable. Given these desiderata, I propose a “unification criterion” for identifying essential elements. (shrink)

Physical boundaries and the earliest topologists. Topology has a relatively short history; but its 19th century roots are embedded in philosophical problems about the nature of extended substances and their boundaries which go back to Zeno and Aristotle. Although it seems that there have always been philosophers interested in these matters, questions about the boundaries of three-dimensional objects were closest to center stage during the later medieval and modern periods. Are the boundaries of an object actually existing, less-than-three-dimensional parts of (...) the object—that is, are solids bounded by two-dimensional surfaces, surfaces by one-dimensional “edges” or “physical lines”, edges by dimensionless “simples”? If not, how does a perfectly spherical object manage to touch a perfectly flat object—what part of the sphere is in immediate contact with the plane, if the sphere has no unextended parts? But if such parts be admitted, are we not then saddled with “actual infinities” of simples, lines, and surfaces spread throughout each continuous object—the boundaries of all the object’s internal parts? Does it help to say that these internal boundaries exist only “potentially”? (shrink)

Economic policy evaluations require social welfare functions for variable-size populations. Two important candidates are critical-level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU) and rank-discounted critical-level generalized utilitarianism, which was recently characterized by Asheim and Zuber (2014) (AZ). AZ introduce a novel axiom, existence of egalitarian equivalence (EEE). First, we show that, under some uncontroversial criteria for a plausible social welfare relation, EEE suffices to rule out the Repugnant Conclusion of population ethics (without AZ’s other novel axioms). Second, we provide a new characterization of CLGU: (...) AZ’s set of axioms is equivalent to CLGU when EEE is replaced by the axiom same-number independence. (shrink)

This paper introduces new logical systems which axiomatize a formal representation of inconsistency (here taken to be equivalent to contradictoriness) in classical logic. We start from an intuitive semantical account of inconsistent data, fixing some basic requirements, and provide two distinct sound and complete axiomatics for such semantics, LFI1 and LFI2, as well as their first-order extensions, LFI1* and LFI2*, depending on which additional requirements are considered. These formal systems are examples of what we dub Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFI) (...) and form part of a much larger family of similar logics. We also show that there are translations from classical and paraconsistent first-order logics into LFI1* and LFI2*, and back. Hence, despite their status as subsystems of classical logic, LFI1* and LFI2* can codify any classical or paraconsistent reasoning. (shrink)

Since Boorse [Philos Sci 44(4):542–573, 1977] published his paper “Health as a theoretical concept” one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘value-laden’. Due to the apparent ‘failure’ of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativist accounts, much in the recent literature has appealed to more conciliatory approaches or so-called ‘hybrid accounts’ of health and disease. A recent paper by Matthewson (...) and Griffiths [J Med Philos 42(4):447–466, 2017], however, may bear the seeds for the revival of purely naturalist approach to health and disease. In this paper, I defend their idea of Biological Normativity against recent criticism by Schwartz [J Med Philos Forum Bioethics Philos Med 42(4):485–502, 2017] and hope to help it flower into a revival of naturalist approaches in the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of having to (...) deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call “pathological complexity.” By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals. (shrink)

This paper introduces and defends an account of model-based science that I dub model pluralism. I argue that despite a growing awareness in the philosophy of science literature of the multiplicity, diversity, and richness of models and modeling practices, more radical conclusions follow from this recognition than have previously been inferred. Going against the tendency within the literature to generalize from single models, I explicate and defend the following two core theses: any successful analysis of models must target sets of (...) models, their multiplicity of functions within science, and their scientific context and history and for almost any aspect x of phenomenon y, scientists require multiple models to achieve scientific goal z. (shrink)

The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to (...) make sense of them both as natural phenomena. (shrink)

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. -/- The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science (...) of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field’s periphery to its very centre, thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. -/- A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness. (shrink)

Imagine a world where everyone is healthy, intelligent, long living and happy. Intuitively this seems wonderful albeit unrealistic. However, recent scienti c breakthroughs in genetic engineering, namely CRISPR/Cas bring the question into public discourse, how the genetic enhancement of humans should be evaluated morally. In 2001, when preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and in vitro fertilisation (IVF), enabled parents to select between multiple embryos, Julian Savulescu introduced the principle of procreative bene cence (PPB), stating that parents have the obligations to choose (...) the child that is expected to have the best life. In this paper I argue that accepting the PPB and the consequentialist principle (CP) that two acts with the same consequences are morally on par, commits one to accepting the parental obligation of genetically enhancing one's children. (shrink)

Animal welfare has a long history of disregard. While in recent decades the study of animal welfare has become a scientific discipline of its own, the difficulty of measuring animal welfare can still be vastly underestimated. There are three primary theories, or perspectives, on animal welfare - biological functioning, natural living and affective state. These come with their own diverse methods of measurement, each providing a limited perspective on an aspect of welfare. This paper describes a perspectival pluralist account of (...) animal welfare, in which all three theoretical perspectives and their multiple measures are necessary to understand this complex phenomenon and provide a full picture of animal welfare. This in turn will offer us a better understanding of perspectivism and pluralism itself. (shrink)

In order to develop a true biological science of consciousness, we have to remove humans from the center of reference and develop a bottom-up comparative study of animal minds, as Donald Griffin intended with his call for a “cognitive ethology.” In this article, I make use of the pathological complexity thesis (Veit 2022a, b, c ) to show that we can firmly ground a comparative study of animal consciousness by drawing on the resources of state-based behavioral life history theory. By (...) comparing the different life histories of gastropods and arthropods, we will be able to make better sense of the possible origins of consciousness and its function for organisms in their natural environments. (shrink)

As scientific progress approaches the point where significant human enhancements could become reality, debates arise whether such technologies should be made available. This paper evaluates the widespread concern that human enhancements will inevitably accentuate existing inequality and analyzes whether prohibition is the optimal public policy to avoid this outcome. Beyond these empirical questions, this paper considers whether the inequality objection is a sound argument against the set of enhancements most threatening to equality, i.e., cognitive enhancements. In doing so, I shall (...) argue that cognitive enhancements can be embraced wholeheartedly, for three separate reasons. However, though the inequality objection does not sufficiently support the conclusion that cognitive enhancements should be prohibited, it raises several concerns for optimal policy design that shall be addressed here. (shrink)

In this paper we present a philosophical motivation for the logics of formal inconsistency, a family of paraconsistent logics whose distinctive feature is that of having resources for expressing the notion of consistency within the object language in such a way that consistency may be logically independent of non-contradiction. We defend the view according to which logics of formal inconsistency may be interpreted as theories of logical consequence of an epistemological character. We also argue that in order to philosophically justify (...) paraconsistency there is no need to endorse dialetheism, the thesis that there are true contradictions. Furthermore, we show that mbC, a logic of formal inconsistency based on classical logic, may be enhanced in order to express the basic ideas of an intuitive interpretation of contradictions as conflicting evidence. (shrink)

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be sick? These two questions are much closer to one another than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, both raise a number of related, albeit very complex, philosophical problems. In recent years, the phenomenology of health and disease has become a major topic in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine, owing much to the work of Havi Carel (2007, 2011, 2018). Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to (...) the phenomenology of animal health and suffering. This omission shall be remedied here, laying the groundwork for the phenomenological evaluation of animal health and suffering. (shrink)

For decades Darwinian processes were framed in the form of the Lewontin conditions: reproduction, variation and differential reproductive success were taken to be sufficient and necessary. Since Buss and the work of Maynard Smith and Szathmary biologists were eager to explain the major transitions from individuals to groups forming new individuals subject to Darwinian mechanisms themselves. Explanations that seek to explain the emergence of a new level of selection, however, cannot employ properties that would already have to exist on that (...) level for selection to take place. Recently, Hammerschmidt et al. provided a ‘bottom-up’ experiment corroborating much of the theoretical work Paul Rainey has done since 2003 on how cheats can play an important role in the emergence of new Darwinian individuals on a multicellular level. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, I argue for a conceptual shift in perspective from seeing cheats as a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved for multi-cellularity to evolve to the very ‘key’ for the evolution of multicellularity. Secondly, I illustrate the consequences of this shift for both theoretical and experimental work, arguing for a more prominent role of ecology and the multi-level selection framework within the debate then they currently occupy. (shrink)

Researchers often lack the necessary data to credibly estimate racial discrimination in policing. In particular, police administrative records lack information on civilians police observe but do not investigate. In this article, we show that if police racially discriminate when choosing whom to investigate, analyses using administrative records to estimate racial discrimination in police behavior are statistically biased, and many quantities of interest are unidentified—even among investigated individuals—absent strong and untestable assumptions. Using principal stratification in a causal mediation framework, we derive (...) the exact form of the statistical bias that results from traditional estimation. We develop a bias-correction procedure and nonparametric sharp bounds for race effects, replicate published findings, and show the traditional estimator can severely underestimate levels of racially biased policing or mask discrimination entirely. We conclude by outlining a general and feasible design for future studies that is robust to this inferential snare. (shrink)

Darwin provided us with a powerful theoretical framework to explain the evolution of living systems. Natural selection alone, however, has sometimes been seen as insufficient to explain the emergence of new levels of selection. The problem is one of “circularity” for evolutionary explanations: how to explain the origins of Darwinian properties without already invoking their presence at the level they emerge. That is, how does evolution by natural selection commence in the first place? Recent results in experimental evolution suggest a (...) way forward: Paul Rainey and his collaborators have shown that Darwinian properties could be exogenously imposed via what they call “ecological scaffolding.” This could solve the “black box” dilemma faced by Darwinian explanations of new levels of organization. Yet, despite “scaffolding” recently becoming a popular term in the study of cognition, culture, and evolution, the concept has suffered from vagueness and ambiguity. This article aims to show that scaffolding can be turned into a proper scientific concept able to do explanatory work within the context of the major evolutionary transitions. Doing so will allow us to once again extend the scope of the Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection. (shrink)

Research Articles Dean Moyar, Kantian Review, FirstView Article.

There has been much criticism of the idea that Friston's free-energy principle can unite the life and mind sciences. Here, we argue that perhaps the greatest problem for the totalizing ambitions of its proponents is a failure to recognize the importance of evolutionary dynamics and to provide a convincing adaptive story relating free-energy minimization to organismal fitness.

Unlike any other field, the science of morality has drawn attention from an extraordinarily diverse set of disciplines. An interdisciplinary research program has formed in which economists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers have been eager to provide answers to puzzling questions raised by the existence of human morality. Models and simulations, for a variety of reasons, have played various important roles in this endeavor. Their use, however, has sometimes been deemed as useless, trivial and inadequate. The role of models (...) in the science of morality has been vastly underappreciated. This omission shall be remedied here, offering a much more positive picture on the contributions modelers made to our understanding of morality. (shrink)

Metaphors abound in both the arts and in science. Due to the traditional division between these enterprises as one concerned with aesthetic values and the other with epistemic values there has unfortunately been very little work on the relation between metaphors in the arts and sciences. In this paper, we aim to remedy this omission by defending a continuity thesis regarding the function of metaphor across both domains, that is, metaphors fulfill any of the same functions in science as they (...) do in the arts. Importantly, this involves the claim that metaphors in arts as well as science have both epistemic and aesthetic functions. (shrink)

If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the twenty-first century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy to address differences in intuitions about concepts. It is, therefore, surprising that the philosophy of medicine has so far not drawn on the tools of experimental philosophy in the context of a particular conceptual debate that has overshadowed all others in the field: the long-standing dispute between so-called naturalists and normativists about the concepts of (...) health and disease. In this paper, I defend and advocate the use of empirical methods to inform and advance this and other debates within the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

Are a material object, such as a statue, and its constituting matter, the clay, parts of one another? One wouldn't have thought so, and yet a number of philosophers have argued that they are. I review the arguments for this surprising claim showing how they all fail. I then consider two arguments against the view concluding that there are both pre-theoretical and theoretical considerations for denying that the statue and the clay are mutual parts.

In his 2009 monograph, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith accuses biologists of demonstrating ‘Darwinian Paranoia’ when they engage in what he dubs ‘agential thinking’. But as Daniel Dennett points out, he offers neither an illuminating set of examples nor an extended argument for this assertion, deeming it to be a brilliant propaganda stroke against what is actually a useful way of thinking. Compared to the dangers of teleological thinking in biology, the dangers of agential thinking have unfortunately rarely (...) been discussed. Drawing on recent work by Samir Okasha, I attempt to remedy this omission, through analyzing the nature of agential thinking, and providing a philosophical treatment of the unexamined dangers in this peculiar, yet tempting way of thinking. (shrink)

Nietzsche has been accused by Habermas of abandoning the pursuit of emancipation and truth. Ironically, this pursuit is at the core of Nietzsche’s works, though radically transformed. The pursuit of knowledge requires emancipated sovereign individuality, a severe honesty, and the courage to follow one's most rigorous use of reason and creative insight wherever they may lead, including the most disturbing insights about truth, language and reason themselves. The first part of this paper discusses Nietzsche’s ideas of individual sovereignty and the (...) associated ideas of emancipation and transformation necessary to this. The next section entitled The Question of Truth: Beyond Universalism and the Quest for Foundations and Certainty deals with how knowledge and truth are intelligible notions in the absence of certainty and absolute standards of truth. The following section, Nietzsche, Habermas and Social Solidarity shows how Habermas’s attempt to ground morality in his discourse ethics cannot succeed once the Nietzchean insight into truth is understood. In the final part, The Irony of Sovereign Individuality, I argue that morality is inconsistent with the individuality that it is supposed to uphold. Nietzsche’s ethical ideal provides a model for concrete individuality that offers the most powerful ethical contribution to social solidarity, given the failure of any grounded morality. (shrink)

We welcome Mikhalevich & Powell’s (2020) (M&P) call for a more “‘inclusive”’ animal ethics, but we think their proposed shift toward a moral framework that privileges false positives over false negatives will require radically revising the paradigm assumption in animal research: that there is a clear line to be drawn between sentient beings that are part of our moral community and nonsentient beings that are not.

As a result of the world-wide COVID-19 epidemic, an internal tension in the goals of medicine has come to the forefront of public debate. Medical professionals are continuously faced with a tug of...

The broad spectrum revolution brought greater dependence on skill and knowledge, and more demanding, often social, choices. We adopt Sterelny's account of how cooperative foraging paid the costs associated with longer dependency, and transformed the problem of skill learning. Scaffolded learning can facilitate cognitive control including suppression, whereas scaffolded exchange and trade, including inter-temporal exchange, can help develop resolve.

In this summary I introduce the interpretive framework for Hegel's Conscience and then provide an overview of the book’s six chapters.

Variable-Value axiologies avoid Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion while satisfying some weak instances of the Mere Addition principle. We apply calibration methods to two leading members of the family of Variable-Value views conditional upon: first, a very weak instance of Mere Addition and, second, some plausible empirical assumptions about the size and welfare of the intertemporal world population. We find that such facts calibrate these two Variable-Value views to be nearly totalist, and therefore imply conclusions that should seem repugnant to anyone who (...) opposes Total Utilitarianism only due to the Repugnant Conclusion. (shrink)

In Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Robert Stern argues that Hegel has a social command view of obligation. On this view, there is an element of social command or social sanction that must be added to a judgment of the good in order to bring about an obligation. I argue to the contrary that Hegel's conception of conscience, and thus the individual's role in obligation, is more central to his account than the social dimension. While agreeing with Stern that (...) Hegel's conception of Sittlichkeit does preserve a role for obligation, and that the social plays an important part in that account, I argue that there is no extra social component that converts the morally good into obligation. Rather, Hegel's conception of Sittlichkeit as the “living good” means that judgments of the moral facts are simultaneously judgments of obligation. (shrink)

While we agree in broad strokes with the characterisation of rationalization as a “useful fiction,” we think that Fiery Cushman's claim remains ambiguous in two crucial respects: the reality of beliefs and desires, that is, the fictional status of folk-psychological entities and the degree to which they should be understood as useful. Our aim is to clarify both points and explicate the rationale of rationalization.

Are counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents automatically true? That is, is Conjunction Conditionalization: if (X & Y), then (X > Y) valid? Stalnaker and Lewis think so, but many others disagree. We note here that the extant arguments for Conjunction Conditionalization are unpersuasive, before presenting a family of more compelling arguments. These arguments rely on some standard theorems of the logic of counterfactuals as well as a plausible and popular semantic claim about certain semifactuals. Denying Conjunction Conditionalization, then, requires (...) rejecting other aspects of the standard logic of counterfactuals, or else our intuitive picture of semifactuals. (shrink)

In this response I first address the criticisms of omission by discussing some of the elements of the original project that were excluded in the final version (section 1). In section 2 I respond to Howard’s criticism that I assume too much transparency in conscience. In section 3 I discuss the problem of evil and the transition in the Phenomenology of Spirit from conscience to religion. I focus here especially on the distinction between Objective and Absolute Spirit, and on how (...) that distinction plays out differently in the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right. In section 4 I take up the specifically political issues of conscience, responding to Speight’s suggestion that conscience should have a transformative role and to De Nys’s query about the State’s relationship to dissenting moral and religious views. Finally, in section 5 I take up the issues of whether I and Hegel do justice to the range of uses of conscience and whether or not the Hegelian view is too optimistic about modernity. (shrink)

This paper is a response to a recent paper by Bobier and Omelianchuk in which they argue that the critics of Giubilini and Minerva’s defence of infanticide fail to adequately justify a moral difference at birth. They argue that such arguments would lead to an intuitively less plausible position: that late-term abortions are permissible, thus creating a dilemma for those who seek to argue that birth matters. I argue that the only way to resolve this dilemma, is to bite the (...) naturalist bullet and accept that the intuitively plausible idea that birth constitutes a morally relevant event is simply mistaken and biologically misinformed. (shrink)

One of the most expected properties of a logical system is that it can be algebraizable, in the sense that an algebraic counterpart of the deductive machinery could be found. Since the inception of da Costa's paraconsistent calculi, an algebraic equivalent for such systems have been searched. It is known that these systems are non self-extensional (i.e., they do not satisfy the replacement property). More than this, they are not algebraizable in the sense of Blok-Pigozzi. The same negative results hold (...) for several systems of the hierarchy of paraconsistent logics known as Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFIs). Because of this, these logics are uniquely characterized by semantics of non-deterministic kind. This paper offers a solution for two open problems in the domain of paraconsistency, in particular connected to algebraization of LFIs, by obtaining several LFIs weaker than C1, each of one is algebraizable in the standard Lindenbaum-Tarski's sense by a suitable variety of Boolean algebras extended with operators. This means that such LFIs satisfy the replacement property. The weakest LFI satisfying replacement presented here is called RmbC, which is obtained from the basic LFI called mbC. Some axiomatic extensions of RmbC are also studied, and in addition a neighborhood semantics is defined for such systems. It is shown that RmbC can be defined within the minimal bimodal non-normal logic E+E defined by the fusion of the non-normal modal logic E with itself. Finally, the framework is extended to first-order languages. RQmbC, the quantified extension of RmbC, is shown to be sound and complete w.r.t. BALFI semantics. (shrink)