Results for 'Ben Davies'

764 found
Order:
  1. Responsibility and the recursion problem.Ben Davies - 2021 - Ratio 35 (2):112-122.
    A considerable literature has emerged around the idea of using ‘personal responsibility’ as an allocation criterion in healthcare distribution, where a person's being suitably responsible for their health needs may justify additional conditions on receiving healthcare, and perhaps even limiting access entirely, sometimes known as ‘responsibilisation’. This discussion focuses most prominently, but not exclusively, on ‘luck egalitarianism’, the view that deviations from equality are justified only by suitably free choices. A superficially separate issue in distributive justice concerns the two–way relationship (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  2. Medical need and health need.Ben Davies - 2023 - Clinical Ethics 18 (3):287-291.
    I introduce a distinction between health need and medical need, and raise several questions about their interaction. Health needs are needs that relate directly to our health condition. Medical needs are needs which bear some relation to medical institutions or processes. I suggest that the question of whether medical insurance or public care should cover medical needs, health needs, or only needs which fit both categories is a political question that cannot be resolved definitionally. I also argue against an overly (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  3. The right not to know and the obligation to know.Ben Davies - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (5):300-303.
    There is significant controversy over whether patients have a ‘right not to know’ information relevant to their health. Some arguments for limiting such a right appeal to potential burdens on others that a patient’s avoidable ignorance might generate. This paper develops this argument by extending it to cases where refusal of relevant information may generate greater demands on a publicly funded healthcare system. In such cases, patients may have an ‘obligation to know’. However, we cannot infer from the fact that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  4. ‘Personal Health Surveillance’: The Use of mHealth in Healthcare Responsibilisation.Ben Davies - 2021 - Public Health Ethics 14 (3):268-280.
    There is an ongoing increase in the use of mobile health technologies that patients can use to monitor health-related outcomes and behaviours. While the dominant narrative around mHealth focuses on patient empowerment, there is potential for mHealth to fit into a growing push for patients to take personal responsibility for their health. I call the first of these uses ‘medical monitoring’, and the second ‘personal health surveillance’. After outlining two problems which the use of mHealth might seem to enable us (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  5. From Sufficient Health to Sufficient Responsibility.Ben Davies & Julian Savulescu - 2020 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (3):423-433.
    The idea of using responsibility in the allocation of healthcare resources has been criticized for, among other things, too readily abandoning people who are responsible for being very badly off. One response to this problem is that while responsibility can play a role in resource allocation, it cannot do so if it will leave those who are responsible below a “sufficiency” threshold. This paper considers first whether a view can be both distinctively sufficientarian and allow responsibility to play a role (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  6. A new paradox for well-being subjectivism.Ben Davies - 2023 - Analysis 83 (4):673-682.
    Subjectivists think that our well-being is grounded in our subjective attitudes. Many such views are vulnerable to variations on the ‘paradox of desire’, where theories cannot make determinate judgements about the well-being of agents who take a positive valuing attitude towards their life going badly. However, this paradox does not affect all subjectivist theories; theories grounded on agents’ prudential values can avoid it.This paper suggests a new paradox for subjectivist theories which has a wider scope, and includes such prudential judgement (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. Deference or critical engagement: how should healthcare practitioners use clinical ethics guidance?Ben Davies & Joshua Parker - 2024 - Monash Bioethics Review 42 (1):1-15.
    Healthcare practitioners have access to a range of ethical guidance. However, the normative role of this guidance in ethical decision-making is underexplored. This paper considers two ways that healthcare practitioners could approach ethics guidance. We first outline the idea of deference to ethics guidance, showing how an attitude of deference raises three key problems: moral value; moral understanding; and moral error. Drawing on philosophical literature, we then advocate an alternative framing of ethics guidance as a form of moral testimony by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Utilitarianism and animal cruelty: Further doubts.Ben Davies - 2016 - De Ethica 3 (3):5-19.
    Utilitarianism has an apparent pedigree when it comes to animal welfare. It supports the view that animal welfare matters just as much as human welfare. And many utilitarians support and oppose various practices in line with more mainstream concern over animal welfare, such as that we should not kill animals for food or other uses, and that we ought not to torture animals for fun. This relationship has come under tension from many directions. The aim of this article is to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  9. ‘The right not to know and the obligation to know’, response to commentaries.Ben Davies - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (5):309-310.
    Response to commentaries on 'The right not to know and the obligation to know'.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. Fair Innings and Time-Relative Claims.Ben Davies - 2015 - Bioethics 30 (6):462-468.
    Greg Bognar has recently offered a prioritarian justification for ‘fair innings’ distributive principles that would ration access to healthcare on the basis of patients' age. In this article, I agree that Bognar's principle is among the strongest arguments for age-based rationing. However, I argue that this position is incomplete because of the possibility of ‘time-relative' egalitarian principles that could complement the kind of lifetime egalitarianism that Bognar adopts. After outlining Bognar's position, and explaining the attraction of time-relative egalitarianism, I suggest (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  11. Healthcare Priorities: The “Young” and the “Old”.Ben Davies - 2023 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 32 (2):174-185.
    Some philosophers and segments of the public think age is relevant to healthcare priority-setting. One argument for this is based in equity: “Old” patients have had either more of a relevant good than “young” patients or enough of that good and so have weaker claims to treatment. This article first notes that some discussions of age-based priority that focus in this way on old and young patients exhibit an ambiguity between two claims: that patients classified as old should have a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. Ageing and Terminal Illness: Problems for Rawlsian Justice.Ben Davies - 2018 - Journal of Applied Philosophy:775-789.
    This article considers attempts to include the issues of ageing and ill health in a Rawlsian framework. It first considers Norman Daniels’ Prudential Lifespan Account, which reduces intergenerational questions to issues of intrapersonal prudence from behind a Rawslian veil of ignorance. This approach faces several problems of idealisation, including those raised by Hugh Lazenby, because it must assume that everyone will live to the same age, undermining its status as a prudential calculation. I then assess Lazenby's account, which applies Rawls’ (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  13. Paternalism and evaluative shift.Ben Davies - 2017 - Moral Philosophy and Politics 4 (2):325-346.
    Many people feel that respecting a person’s autonomy is not sufficiently important to obligate us to stay out of their affairs in all cases; but the ground for interference may often turn out to be a hunch that the agent cannot really be competent, or cannot really know what her decision implies; for if she were both of these things, surely she would not make such a foolish decision. This paper suggests a justification of paternalism that does not rely on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  14. Health(care) and the temporal subject.Ben Davies - 2018 - Les Ateliers de l'Éthique / the Ethics Forum 13 (3):38-64.
    Many assume that theories of distributive justice must obviously take people’s lifetimes, and only their lifetimes, as the relevant period across which we distribute. Although the question of the temporal subject has risen in prominence, it is still relatively underdeveloped, particularly in the sphere of health and healthcare. This paper defends a particular view, “momentary sufficientarianism,” as being an important element of healthcare justice. At the heart of the argument is a commitment to pluralism about justice, where theorizing about just (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  15. Institutional Responsibility is Prior to Personal Responsibility in a Pandemic.Ben Davies & Julian Savulescu - 2024 - Journal of Value Inquiry 58 (2):215-234.
    On 26 January 2021, while announcing that the country had reached the mark of 100,000 deaths within 28 days of COVID-19, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that he took “full responsibility for everything that the Government has done” as part of British efforts to tackle the pandemic. The force of this statement was undermined, however, by what followed: -/- What I can tell you is that we truly did everything we could, and continue to do everything that we can, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. Rationing, Responsibility, and Vaccination during COVID-19: A Conceptual Map.Jin K. Park & Ben Davies - 2023 - American Journal of Bioethics 24 (7):66-79.
    Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, shortages of scarce healthcare resources consistently presented significant moral and practical challenges. While the importance of vaccines as a key pharmaceutical intervention to stem pandemic scarcity was widely publicized, a sizable proportion of the population chose not to vaccinate. In response, some have defended the use of vaccination status as a criterion for the allocation of scarce medical resources. In this paper, we critically interpret this burgeoning literature, and describe a framework for thinking about vaccine-sensitive resource (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  17. Bursting Bubbles? QALYs and Discrimination.Ben Davies - 2019 - Utilitas 31 (2):191-202.
    The use of Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) in healthcare allocation has been criticized as discriminatory against people with disabilities. This article considers a response to this criticism from Nick Beckstead and Toby Ord. They say that even if QALYs are discriminatory, attempting to avoid discrimination – when coupled with other central principles that an allocation system should favour – sometimes leads to irrationality in the form of cyclic preferences. I suggest that while Beckstead and Ord have identified a problem, it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18. Enhancement and the Conservative Bias.Ben Davies - 2017 - Philosophy and Technology 30 (3):339-356.
    Nicholas Agar argues that we should avoid certain ‘radical’ enhancement technologies. One reason for this is that they will alienate us from current sources of value by altering our evaluative outlooks. We should avoid this, even if enhancing will provide us with novel, objectively better sources of value. After noting the parallel between Agar’s views and G. A. Cohen’s work on the ‘conservative bias’, I explore Agar’s suggestion in relation to two kinds of radical enhancement: cognitive and anti-ageing. With regard (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. No Blame No Gain? From a No Blame Culture to a Responsibility Culture in Medicine.Joshua Parker & Ben Davies - 2020 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (4):646-660.
    Healthcare systems need to consider not only how to prevent error, but how to respond to errors when they occur. In the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, one strand of this latter response is the ‘No Blame Culture’, which draws attention from individuals and towards systems in the process of understanding an error. Defences of the No Blame Culture typically fail to distinguish between blaming someone and holding them responsible. This article argues for a ‘responsibility culture’, where healthcare professionals are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  20. Feeding Infants: Choice-Specific Considerations, Parental Obligation, and Pragmatic Satisficing.Clare Marie Moriarty & Ben Davies - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (2):167-183.
    Health institutions recommend that young infants be exclusively breastfed on demand, and it is widely held that parents who can breastfeed have an obligation to do so. This has been challenged in recent philosophical work, especially by Fiona Woollard. Woollard’s work critically engages with two distinct views of parental obligation that might ground such an obligation—based on maximal benefit and avoidance of significant harm—to reject an obligation to breastfeed. While agreeing with Woollard’s substantive conclusion, this paper (drawing on philosophical discussion (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  21. Teaching Philosophy through Lincoln-Douglas Debate.Jacob Nebel, Ryan W. Davis, Peter van Elswyk & Ben Holguin - 2013 - Teaching Philosophy 36 (3):271-289.
    This paper is about teaching philosophy to high school students through Lincoln-Douglas (LD) debate. LD, also known as “values debate,” includes topics from ethics and political philosophy. Thousands of high school students across the U.S. debate these topics in class, after school, and at weekend tournaments. We argue that LD is a particularly effective tool for teaching philosophy, but also that LD today falls short of its potential. We argue that the problems with LD are not inevitable, and we offer (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  22. (Draft) In defence of welfare subjectivism.Benjamin Davies - manuscript
    Subjectivists about welfare face two problems that pull them in opposite directions. The Paradox Problem, outlined by Ben Bradley, is that, for an agent who desires that her life go badly, subjectivist theories are sometimes unable to give a determinate answer about how well her life goes. This problem demands that subjectivists choose a complex mental attitude to ground well-being. The Infant Problem, from Eden Lin, is that many subjective theories end up denying that infants (and some others) have welfare. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. Introduction to Ethics: An Open Educational Resource, collected and edited by Noah Levin.Noah Levin, Nathan Nobis, David Svolba, Brandon Wooldridge, Kristina Grob, Eduardo Salazar, Benjamin Davies, Jonathan Spelman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Kristin Seemuth Whaley, Jan F. Jacko & Prabhpal Singh (eds.) - 2019 - Huntington Beach, California: N.G.E Far Press.
    Collected and edited by Noah Levin -/- Table of Contents: -/- UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The Ethics of our (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  24. Digestão dos Alimentos e Desenvolvimento do Rúmen em Bezerros.Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva - manuscript
    PRINCÍPIOS DA DIGESTÃO DOS ALIMENTOS NOS BEZERROS -/- -/- E. I. C. da Silva -/- Departamento de Agropecuária – IFPE Campus Belo Jardim -/- Departamento de Zootecnia – UFRPE sede -/- -/- PRINCÍPIOS DA DIGESTÃO DOS ALIMENTOS NOS BEZERROS -/- -/- INTRODUÇÃO -/- Se todos os bezerros pudessem ser criados por suas mães, haveria pouca necessidade de inúmeros livros, artigos e trabalhos, como esse, sobre a criação e o manejo básico desses animais. A maioria das vacas desempenha um ótimo papel (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25. Why Decision-making Capacity Matters.Ben Schwan - 2021 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (5):447-473.
    Decision-making Capacity matters to whether a patient’s decision should determine her treatment. But why it matters in this way isn’t clear. The standard story is that dmc matters because autonomy matters. And this is thought to justify dmc as a gatekeeper for autonomy – whereby autonomy concerns arise if but only if a patient has dmc. But appeals to autonomy invoke two distinct concerns: concern for authenticity – concern that a choice is consistent with an individual’s commitments; and concern for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  26. Identity display: another motive for metalinguistic disagreement.Alexander Davies - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (8):861-882.
    ABSTRACT It has become standard to conceive of metalinguistic disagreement as motivated by a form of negotiation, aimed at reaching consensus because of the practical consequences of using a word with one content rather than another. This paper presents an alternative motive for expressing and pursuing metalinguistic disagreement. In using words with given criteria, we betray our location amongst social categories or groups. Because of this, metalinguistic disagreement can be used as a stage upon which to perform a social identity. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  27. Deception by topic choice: How discussion can mislead without falsehood.Ben Cross - 2021 - Metaphilosophy 52 (5):696-709.
    This article explains and defends a novel idea about how people can be misled by a discussion topic, even if the discussion itself does not explicitly involve the making of false claims. The crucial aspect of this idea is that people are liable to infer, from the fact that a particular topic is being discussed, that this topic is important. As a result, they may then be led to accept certain beliefs about the state of the world they consider necessary (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  28. Knowledge by constraint.Ben Holguín - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):1-28.
    This paper considers some puzzling knowledge ascriptions and argues that they present prima facie counterexamples to credence, belief, and justification conditions on knowledge, as well as to many of the standard meta-semantic assumptions about the context-sensitivity of ‘know’. It argues that these ascriptions provide new evidence in favor of contextualist theories of knowledge—in particular those that take the interpretation of ‘know’ to be sensitive to the mechanisms of constraint.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  29. Thinking, Guessing, and Believing.Ben Holguin - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (1):1-34.
    This paper defends the view, put roughly, that to think that p is to guess that p is the answer to the question at hand, and that to think that p rationally is for one’s guess to that question to be in a certain sense non-arbitrary. Some theses that will be argued for along the way include: that thinking is question-sensitive and, correspondingly, that ‘thinks’ is context-sensitive; that it can be rational to think that p while having arbitrarily low credence (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  30. “They're Not True Humans:” Beliefs about Moral Character Drive Denials of Humanity.Ben Phillips - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (2):e13089.
    A puzzling feature of paradigmatic cases of dehumanization is that the perpetrators often attribute uniquely human traits to their victims. This has become known as the “paradox of dehumanization.” We address the paradox by arguing that the perpetrators think of their victims as human in one sense, while denying that they are human in another sense. We do so by providing evidence that people harbor a dual character concept of humanity. Research has found that dual character concepts have two independent (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  31. Mereology.Ben Blumson - 2021 - Archive of Formal Proofs.
    The interactive theorem prover Isabelle/HOL is used to verify elementary theorems of classical extensional mereology.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  32. (1 other version)A Framework for the Emotional Psychology of Group Membership.Taylor Davis & Daniel Kelly - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-22.
    The vast literature on negative treatment of outgroups and favoritism toward ingroups provides many local insights but is largely fragmented, lacking an overarching framework that might provide a unified overview and guide conceptual integration. As a result, it remains unclear where different local perspectives conflict, how they may reinforce one another, and where they leave gaps in our knowledge of the phenomena. Our aim is to start constructing a framework to help remedy this situation. We first identify a few key (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  33. The Roots of Racial Categorization.Ben Phillips - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (1):151-175.
    I examine the origins of ordinary racial thinking. In doing so, I argue against the thesis that it is the byproduct of a unique module. Instead, I defend a pluralistic thesis according to which different forms of racial thinking are driven by distinct mechanisms, each with their own etiology. I begin with the belief that visible features are diagnostic of race. I argue that the mechanisms responsible for face recognition have an important, albeit delimited, role to play in sustaining this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  34. Unknown pleasures.Ben Bramble - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (5):1333-1344.
    According to attitudinal theories of pleasure and pain, what makes a given sensation count as a pleasure or a pain is just the attitudes of the experiencing agent toward it. In a previous article, I objected to such theories on the grounds that they cannot account for pleasures and pains whose subjects are entirely unaware of them at the time of experience. Recently, Chris Heathwood and Fred Feldman, the two leading contemporary defenders of attitudinal theories, have responded to this objection, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  35. Comprehensive or Political Liberalism? The Impartial Spectator and the Justification of Political Principles.Nir Ben-Moshe - 2021 - Utilitas 33 (3):253-269.
    John Rawls raises three challenges – to which one can add a fourth challenge – to an impartial spectator account: (a) the impartial spectator is a utility-maximizing device that does not take seriously the distinction between persons; (b) the account does not guarantee that the principles of justice will be derived from it; (c) the notion of impartiality in the account is the wrong one, since it does not define impartiality from the standpoint of the litigants themselves; (d) the account (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  36. Anti-perfectionisms and autonomy.Ben Colburn - 2010 - Analysis 70 (2):247-256.
    I provide support for a liberal political philosophy that is fully committed to the state promotion of autonomy, and which also counts Anti-perfectionism amongst its other commitments. I do so by defending it against the serious charge that it is prima facie self-contradictory. After all, Anti-perfectionism appears to demand that the state refrain from promoting any value – it looks as though that must preclude the promotion of autonomy, if the latter is conceived of as a value. I argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  37. Procreation, Carbon Tax, and Poverty: An Act-Consequentialist Climate-Change Agenda.Ben Eggleston - 2020 - In Dale E. Miller & Ben Eggleston (eds.), Moral Theory and Climate Change: Ethical Perspectives on a Warming Planet. London, UK: Routledge. pp. 58–77.
    A book chapter (about 9,000 words, plus references) presenting an act-consequentialist approach to the ethics of climate change. It begins with an overview of act consequentialism, including a description of the view’s principle of rightness (an act is right if and only if it maximizes the good) and a conception of the good focusing on the well-being of sentient creatures and rejecting temporal discounting. Objections to act consequentialism, and replies, are also considered. Next, the chapter briefly suggests that act consequentialism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  38. Distance and Dissimilarity.Ben Blumson - 2018 - Philosophical Papers 48 (2):211-239.
    This paper considers whether an analogy between distance and dissimilarlity supports the thesis that degree of dissimilarity is distance in a metric space. A straightforward way to justify the thesis would be to define degree of dissimilarity as a function of number of properties in common and not in common. But, infamously, this approach has problems with infinity. An alternative approach would be to prove representation and uniqueness theorems, according to which if comparative dissimilarity meets certain qualitative conditions, then it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  39. A New Defense of Hedonism about Well-Being.Ben Bramble - 2016 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3.
    According to hedonism about well-being, lives can go well or poorly for us just in virtue of our ability to feel pleasure and pain. Hedonism has had many advocates historically, but has relatively few nowadays. This is mainly due to three highly influential objections to it: The Philosophy of Swine, The Experience Machine, and The Resonance Constraint. In this paper, I attempt to revive hedonism. I begin by giving a precise new definition of it. I then argue that the right (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  40. The paradox of colour constancy: Plotting the lower borders of perception.Will Davies - 2021 - Noûs 56 (4):787-813.
    This paper resolves a paradox concerning colour constancy. On the one hand, our intuitive, pre-theoretical concept holds that colour constancy involves invariance in the perceived colours of surfaces under changes in illumination. On the other, there is a robust scientific consensus that colour constancy can persist in cerebral achromatopsia, a profound impairment in the ability to perceive colours. The first stage of the solution advocates pluralism about our colour constancy capacities. The second details the close relationship between colour constancy and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  41. Science Communication, Cultural Cognition, and the Pull of Epistemic Paternalism.Alex Davies - 2022 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (1):65-78.
    There is a correlation between positions taken on some scientific questions and political leaning. One way to explain this correlation is the cultural cognition hypothesis (CCH): people's political leanings are causing them to process evidence to maintain fixed answers to the questions, rather than to seek the truth. Another way is the different background belief hypothesis (DBBH): people of different political leanings have different background beliefs which rationalize different positions on these scientific questions. In this article, I argue for two (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  42. A Never-Ending Story.Ben Blumson - 2014 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1):111-120.
    Take a strip of paper with 'once upon a time there'‚ written on one side and 'was a story that began'‚ on the other. Twisting the paper and joining the ends produces John Barth’s story Frame-Tale, which prefixes 'once upon a time there was a story that began'‚ to itself. I argue that the ability to understand this sentence cannot be explained by tacit knowledge of a recursive theory of truth in English.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  43. Pictures, perspective and possibility.Ben Blumson - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 149 (2):135 - 151.
    This paper argues for a possible worlds theory of the content of pictures, with three complications: depictive content is centred, two-dimensional and structured. The paper argues that this theory supports a strong analogy between depictive and other kinds of representation and the platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  44. Consequentialism about Meaning in Life.Ben Bramble - 2015 - Utilitas 27 (4):445-459.
    What is it for a life to be meaningful? In this article, I defend what I call Consequentialism about Meaning in Life, the view that one's life is meaningful at time t just in case one's surviving at t would be good in some way, and one's life was meaningful considered as a whole just in case the world was made better in some way for one's having existed.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   38 citations  
  45. The truth behind conscientious objection in medicine.Nir Ben-Moshe - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (6):404-410.
    Answers to the questions of what justifies conscientious objection in medicine in general and which specific objections should be respected have proven to be elusive. In this paper, I develop a new framework for conscientious objection in medicine that is based on the idea that conscience can express true moral claims. I draw on one of the historical roots, found in Adam Smith’s impartial spectator account, of the idea that an agent’s conscience can determine the correct moral norms, even if (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  46. Autonomy and Adaptive Preferences.Ben Colburn - 2011 - Utilitas 23 (1):52-71.
    Adaptive preference formation is the unconscious altering of our preferences in light of the options we have available. Jon Elster has argued that this is bad because it undermines our autonomy. I agree, but think that Elster's explanation of why is lacking. So, I draw on a richer account of autonomy to give the following answer. Preferences formed through adaptation are characterized by covert influence (that is, explanations of which an agent herself is necessarily unaware), and covert influence undermines our (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  47. Communicating in contextual ignorance.Alex Davies - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12385-12405.
    When A utters a declarative sentence in a context to B, typically A can mean a proposition by the sentence, the sentence in context literally expresses a proposition, there are propositions A and B can agree the sentence literally expressed, and B can acquire knowledge from this testimonial exchange. In recent work on linguistic communication, each of these four platitudes has been challenged, and on the same basis: viz. on the ground that exactly which proposition the sentence expressed in context (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  48. Lying and knowing.Ben Holguín - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5351-5371.
    This paper defends the simple view that in asserting that p, one lies iff one knows that p is false. Along the way it draws some morals about deception, knowledge, Gettier cases, belief, assertion, and the relationship between first- and higher-order norms.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  49. Apocalypse Without God: Apocalyptic Thought, Ideal Politics, and the Limits of Utopian Hope.Ben Jones - 2021 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Apocalypse, it seems, is everywhere. Preachers with vast followings proclaim the world's end and apocalyptic fears grip even the non-religious amid climate change, pandemics, and threats of nuclear war. But as these ideas pervade popular discourse, grasping their logic remains elusive. Ben Jones argues that we can gain insight into apocalyptic thought through secular thinkers. He starts with a puzzle: Why would secular thinkers draw on Christian apocalyptic beliefs--often dismissed as bizarre--to interpret politics? The apocalyptic tradition proves appealing in part (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  50. Is Death Bad for a Cow?Ben Bradley - 2015 - In Tatjana Višak & Robert Garner (eds.), The Ethics of Killing Animals. New York: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 51-64.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
1 — 50 / 764