Numerous studies have found that many people believe that a provocatively dressed woman is at greater risk for sexual assault and bears some responsibility for her assault if she is attacked. Furthermore, in legal, academic, and public debates about sexual assault the appropriateness of the term ‘provocative’ as a descriptor of certain kinds of women’s clothing is rarely questioned. Thus, there is a widespread but largely unquestioned belief that it is appropriate to describe revealing or suggestive women’s clothing as ‘provocative’ (...) and that women who wear such clothing could provoke sexual assault and harassment from men. Yet it is rarely noted that only women’s clothing is described as sexually provocative. Men’s clothing, no matter how revealing, is never described as provocative. Why is this the case? This Article challenges the assumption that it is appropriate to describe women’s clothing as provocative. Drawing on on models of the legal defense of provocation and research on objectification and responsibility, this Article demonstrates that continued use of ‘provocative’ term normalizes and entrenches deeply problematic attitudes about women’s responsibility for men’s sexual behavior. The social interpretation of women’s clothing as provocative arises from the privileged social and legal status of men’s sexual arousal and the objectification of women’s bodies. Describing women’s clothing as provocative thus reinforces a problematic conception of women’s bodies and sexuality that is connected to women’s experiences of their bodies, their clothes, and shapes their vulnerability to sexual assault and social and legal attitudes to such attacks. (shrink)

Although the term "torture lite" is frequently used to distinguish between physically mutilating torture and certain interrogation methods that are supposedly less severe, the distinction is not recognized in international law.

Academics working on military ethics and serving military personnel rarely have opportunities to talk to each other in ways that can inform and illuminate their respective experiences and approaches to the ethics of war. The workshop from which this paper evolved was a rare opportunity to remedy this problem. Our conversations about First Lieutenant (1LT) Portis’s experiences in combat provided a unique chance to explore questions about the relationship between oversight, accountability, and the idea of moral risk in military operations. (...) In this paper, we outline a particular experience of 1LT Portis’s that formed the basis of our discussions, before elucidating the ethical issues this experience raised. In particular, we see 1LT Portis’s experience as, first, illustrative of the problem of moral risk – when military personnel are placed in situations of moral temptation. The problem of moral risk, we propose, is best understood through the framework of the military’s duty of care. Second, we see his experience as highlighting tensions within the dominant moralized warrior model of the military profession. What we call a toxic warrior identity — a distorted form of the moralized warrior identity — can negatively affect the attitudes of military personnel toward rules, policies, procedures, and accountability mechanisms, particularly in relation to non-combat related roles and duties and when leaders must choose between competing bureaucratic demands. We see 1LT Portis’s experience as illustrative of these tensions, yet his experiences also highlight important concerns about the impact of increasing bureaucratic demands on military functioning. In the conclusion, we address the need to balance concerns about toxic warrior identity with legitimate criticisms of overly demanding bureaucracy and suggest avenues for further research on this issue. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that an account of security as a basic human right must incorporate moral security. Broadly speaking, a person possesses subjective moral security when she believes that her basic interests and welfare will be accorded moral recognition by others in her community and by social, political, and legal institutions in her society. She possesses objective moral security if, as a matter of fact, her interests and welfare are regarded by her society as morally important—for example, when (...) violent crimes against her being taken to warrant the same punishment and condemnation as equivalent crimes against others. Moral security, thus characterized, is an essential part of what it is to be secure as a human person, and any right to security must include it. In the first part of the paper I critique alternative narrower accounts of the right to security, before defending my account of moral security in Section 2. Section 3 explores how acts of racialized and gendered violence are attacks on the moral security of the victims and of all members of the groups to which the victims belong. Broader structural and institutional forms of racial and sexual discrimination further compound the impact of such acts on moral security. Understanding how racial and sexual discrimination and violence are attacks on moral security offers a new way of thinking about the scope and urgency of a state’s duty to combat racial and sexual discrimination, an issue I explore in the final section of the paper. -/- . (shrink)

New scientific advances have created previously unheard of possibilities for enhancing combatants' performance. Future war fighters may be smarter, stronger, and braver than ever before. If these technologies are safe, is there any reason to reject their use? In this article, I argue that the use of enhancements is constrained by the importance of maintaining the moral responsibility of military personnel. This is crucial for two reasons: the military's ethical commitments require military personnel to be morally responsible agents, and moral (...) responsibility is necessary for integrity and the moral emotions of guilt and remorse, both of which are important for moral growth and psychological well-being. Enhancements that undermined combatants' moral responsibility would therefore undermine the military's moral standing and would harm combatants' well-being. A genuine commitment to maintaining the military's ethical standards and the well-being of combatants therefore requires a careful analysis of performance-enhancing technologies before they are implemented. (shrink)

Multi-user online environments involve millions of participants world-wide. In these online communities participants can use their online personas – avatars – to chat, fight, make friends, have sex, kill monsters and even get married. Unfortunately participants can also use their avatars to stalk, kill, sexually assault, steal from and torture each other. Despite attempts to minimise the likelihood of interpersonal virtual harm, programmers cannot remove all possibility of online deviant behaviour. Participants are often greatly distressed when their avatars are harmed (...) by other participants’ malicious actions, yet there is a tendency in the literature on this topic to dismiss such distress as evidence of too great an involvement in and identification with the online character. In this paper I argue that this dismissal of virtual harm is based on a set of false assumptions about the nature of avatar attachment and its relation to genuine moral harm. I argue that we cannot dismiss avatar attachment as morally insignificant without being forced to also dismiss other, more acceptable, forms of attachment such as attachment to possessions, people and cultural objects and communities. Arguments against according moral significance to virtual harm fail because they do not reflect participants’ and programmers’ experiences and expectations of virtual communities and they have the unintended consequence of failing to grant significance to attachments that we take for granted, morally speaking. Avatar attachment is expressive of identity and self-conception and should therefore be accorded the moral significance we give to real-life attachments that play a similar role. (shrink)

Self-control is integral to successful human agency. Without it we cannot extend our agency across time and secure central social, moral, and personal goods. But self-control is not a unitary capacity. In the first part of this paper we provide a taxonomy of self-control and trace its connections to agency and the self. In part two, we turn our attention to the external conditions that support successful agency and the exercise of self-control. We argue that what we call moral security (...) is a critical foundation for agency. Parts three and four explore what happens to agency when moral security is lacking, as in the case of those subject to racism, and those living in poverty. The disadvantages suffered by those who are poor, in a racial minority or other oppressed group, or suffering mental illness or addiction, are often attributed to a lack of individual self-control or personal responsibility. In particular, members of these groups are often seen as irresponsibly focused on short-term pleasures over long-term good, a view underwritten by particular psychological theories of self-control. We explore how narratives about racism and poverty undermine moral security, and limit and distort the possibility of synchronic and diachronic self-control. Where moral security is undermined, the connection between self-control and diachronic goods often fails to obtain and agency contracts accordingly. We close with some preliminary reflections on the implications for responsibility. (shrink)

Rita Floyd’s "The Morality of Security: A Theory of Just Securitization" is an important and insightful book that delineates a theory of just securitization (modified from the jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria in just war theory) involving three sets of principles governing the just initiation of securitization, just conduct of securitization, and just desecuritization. This book is a much-needed addition to the security studies and just war scholarship. -/- Here, I explore the potential of Floyd’s just securitization (...) theory (JST) to provide insights into the moral justifiability of non-state groups that are not political entities engaging in resistance against forms of structural violence that pose an existential threat to those groups. Using the case study of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the threat of white supremacy to African Americans as an illustrative example, I argue that structural forms of violence can meet Floyd’s definition of an objective existential threat, justifying the resort to securitization by groups such as BLM. (shrink)

Prison as a Torturous Institution Philosophers working on torture have largely failed to address the widespread use of torture in the U.S. prison system. Drawing on a victim-focused definition of torture, I argue that the U.S. prison system is a torturous institution in which direct torture occurs (the use of solitary confinement) and in which torture is allowed to occur through the toleration of sexual assault of inmates and the conditions of mass incarceration. The use and toleration of torture expresses (...) and reinforces the moral exclusion of those subjected to it, particularly African Americans. Importantly, this moral exclusion and the experience of torture may be created and reinforced through institutional practices independently of the intentions of individuals acting within those institutions. By prioritizing torture victims’ experiences and severing the link between torture and intention, my account forces a recognition that, far from being inconsistent with U.S. values, torture is deeply embedded within U.S. institutions. (shrink)

In the United States, all military personnel swear to obey “the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” Military personnel must obey orders promptly in order to facilitate effective military functioning. Yet, obedience to orders has been associated with the commission of war crimes. Military personnel of all ranks have committed torture, rape, genocide, and murder under orders. “I was just following orders” (respondaet superior) is no longer accepted as a (...) complete defense to a charge of war crimes. In the words of the Nuremberg court: “The obedience of a soldier is not the obedience of an automaton. A soldier is a reasoning agent”. This means that military personnel cannot evade responsibility for their actions under orders. But when and under what conditions should military personnel disobey orders? If obedience is sometimes morally wrong, how can obedience be a military virtue? In this chapter I argue that the only plausible conception of military obedience as a virtue is reflective obedience: obedience governed and constrained by the ends of the military profession serving a legitimate state and by the laws of armed conflict. Section 1 explains the concept of obedience and outlines the idea of virtuous obedience. Section 2 explores when the military has legitimate authority to compel obedience. Section 3 concludes by exploring the limits on obedience that derive from the military’s status as a profession and the legitimacy of the military’s authority to issue orders. (shrink)

Debates about terrorism and technology often focus on the potential uses of technology by non-state terrorist actors and by states as forms of counterterrorism. Yet, little has been written about how technology shapes how we think about terrorism. In this chapter I argue that technology, and the language we use to talk about technology, constrains and shapes our understanding of the nature, scope, and impact of terrorism, particularly in relation to state terrorism. After exploring the ways in which technology shapes (...) moral thinking, I use two case studies to demonstrate how technology simultaneously hides and enables terroristic forms of state violence: police control technologies and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones. In both these cases, I argue that features of these technologies, combined with a narrative of precision and efficiency, serves to mask the terroristic nature of the violence that these practices inflict and reinforces the moral exclusion of those against whom these technologies are deployed. In conclusion, I propose that identifying acts of terrorism requires a focus on the impact of technologies of violence (whether they are “high tech” or not) on those most affected, regardless of whether users of these technologies conceive of their actions as terroristic. (shrink)

When writing on forgiveness, most authors focus on when it is appropriate to forgive and the role that the offender’s attitudes play in determining the appropriateness of forgiveness. In this paper I will take a different approach. Instead of examining when forgiveness may or may not be appropriate, I discuss the moral attitude displayed by being unforgiving. I argue that we have reason to strive for forgiveness based on the kind of moral outlook we deplore in those who wrong us, (...) and that we strive to remove from our own moral worldview. Believing someone to be unforgivable can result in the adoption of aspects of the wrongdoer’s moral outlook and so forgiveness is worth attempting for reasons unconnected to the wrongdoer’s attitudes: reasons that arise from the kinds of moral agents we strive to be. (shrink)

As several scholars have argued, far from being antithetical to American values, the torture of nonwhite peoples has long been a method through which the United States has enforced (at home and abroad) a conception of what I will call “white moral citizenship." What is missing from this literature, however, is an exploration of the role that the erasure of torture, and the political and public narratives that are used to justify torture, plays in this function. -/- As I will (...) demonstrate in this article, the erasure of American torture takes at least three different but mutually reinforcing forms: erasure of the fact of torture, erasure of the experience of torture, and erasure of the victims of torture. Erasure of the fact of torture occurs when lack of education and public discussion creates widespread ignorance about the history of torture in America, as has occurred in relation to the post-9/11 torture program. Erasure of the experience of torture occurs when victims’ experiences of extreme suffering, and practices or institutions that inflict extreme suffering (such as solitary confinement), are not acknowledged as forms of torture. Erasure of the victims of torture occurs when victims are treated with indifference and even contempt, even when what they suffered is acknowledged to be torture, and their perspectives and experiences are dismissed, minimized, or ignored. -/- As I shall argue, both the use of the torture and the forms of erasure described above are essential components in the ongoing enforcement of the normative boundaries of American white moral citizenship and the myth of American exceptionalism and civilization. The repeating pattern of the use and erasure of torture leads to the ongoing toleration of practices that constitute torture and that overwhelmingly impact people of color. Until this pattern of justification and erasure is recognized and confronted, torture will continue to be embedded within American culture and institutions. (shrink)

Liberal democracies who perpetrate torture represent an apparent paradox: a flagrant violation of human rights by states supposedly dedicated to protecting human rights. In liberal democracies, the political, social, and legal narratives used to justify torture portray torture as an individual act motivated by important moral values. This individualized torture narrative then shapes the moral framework through which the public, policy-makers, and individual torturers view torture, and masks the institutional nature of torture perpetration. It is this interaction between an individualized (...) torture narrative and the moral framework of torture that distinguishes democratic perpetrators (Critchell et al. 2017, 9-10) from nondemocratic perpetrators of torture. Yet, the implementation of a torture program in a democratic state is remarkably similar to the implementation of a torture program in a nondemocratic state. In both cases, torture is an institutionalized practice given moral and political meaning through broad social and political narratives. This chapter uses the post-9/11 US torture program as a case study of a democratic perpetrator in order to explore the interaction between democratic narratives of torture, state implementation of torture, and the moral psychology of individual torturers. This permits a way of thinking about torture perpetration that goes beyond a myopic focus on torture as individual act to understand the interaction and mutual reinforcement of different forms of torture perpetration. This analysis also offers a starting point from which to consider how to resist and oppose torture narratives that sustain democratic tortue, a question I explore in the conclusion of this chapter. (shrink)

In contemporary academic, political, and media discourse, terrorism is typically portrayed as an existential threat to lives and states, a threat driven by religious extremists who seek the destruction of Western civilization and who are immune to reason and negotiation. In many countries, including the US, the UK, and Australia, this existential threat narrative of terrorism has been used to justify sweeping counterterrorism legislation, as well as military operations and even the use of tactics such as torture and indefinite detention. (...) In this chapter I outline the components of the existential threat narrative, and explain how critical terrorism scholars have critiqued this narrative on two main grounds: that it is based on false empirical claims about the nature, scale, and motivations of modern non-state terrorism, and that counterterrorism policies and practices based on this narrative have had extremely destructive consequences for individuals, communities, and states—in some cases, causing far more destruction than terrorism itself. In the final section I offer some suggestions for the direction of future terrorism research in light of these critiques of the existential threat narrative. (shrink)

In international law and just war theory, war is treated as normatively and legally unique. In the context of international law, war’s special status gives rise to a specific set of belligerent rights and duties, as well as a complex set of laws related to, among other things, the status of civilians, prisoners of war, trade and economic relationships, and humanitarian aid. In particular, belligerents are permitted to derogate from certain human rights obligations and to use lethal force in a (...) far more permissive manner than is the case in other kinds of conflicts and in domestic law enforcement operations. Given war’s unique status, the task of defining war requires not just identifying the empirical features that are characteristic of war but explaining and justifying war’s special legal and moral status. In this chapter, I propose a definition of war that captures war’s unique features and can offer insights into when and how some forms of unarmed conflict could count as wars. (shrink)

In this chapter, we consider the plausibility and consequences of the use of the term “honest errors” to describe the accidental killings of civilians resulting from the US military’s drone campaigns in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We argue that the narrative of “honest errors” unjustifiably excuses those involved in these killings from moral culpability, and reinforces long-standing, pernicious assumptions about the moral superiority of the US military and the inevitability of civilian deaths in combat. Furthermore, we maintain that, given (...) the knowledge-distorting practices within the US military’s organizational structure, few if any civilian deaths from drone strikes meet the criteria of a genuinely morally excusing “honest mistake”. Instead, these accidental killings often reflect objectionable attitudes of relative disregard for the safety of civilians. These attitudes are, we argue, sufficient to warrant the attribution of blame and moral responsibility, both with respect to certain individual actions and with respect to the US military as an institution. In light of this, we propose incorporating a Principle of the Moral Equality of Non-combatants into military assessments of what counts as “acceptable risk” to civilians. This would go some way, we argue, to redressing the ongoing injustice inflicted on the victims of civilian killings by the failure of the US military and US political leadership to take moral responsibility for unjustified civilian deaths. (shrink)

Modern military organizations are paternalistic organizations. They typically recognize a duty of care toward military personnel and are willing to ignore or violate the consent of military personnel in order to uphold that duty of care. In this paper, we consider the case for paternalism in the military and distinguish it from the case for paternalism in medicine. We argue that one can consistently reject paternalism in medicine but uphold paternalism in the military. We consider two well-known arguments for the (...) conclusion that military organizations should not be entitled to use experimental drugs on troops without first obtaining the informed consent of those troops. We argue that both of these are unsuccessful, in the absence of an argument for the rejection of paternalism in the military altogether. The case for military paternalism is widely accepted. However, we consider three ways in which it could be challenged. (shrink)

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debate has primarily focused on principles—the (...) ‘what’ of AI ethics —rather than on practices, the ‘how.’ Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community’s ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the Machine Learning development pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs. (shrink)

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence, in particular machine learning, has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the theory of (...) AI ethics principles and the practical design of AI systems. In previous work, we analysed whether it is possible to close this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the use of tools and methods designed to help AI developers, engineers, and designers translate principles into practice. We concluded that this method of closure is currently ineffective as almost all existing translational tools and methods are either too flexible or too strict. This raised the question: if, even with technical guidance, AI ethics is challenging to embed in the process of algorithmic design, is the entire pro-ethical design endeavour rendered futile? And, if no, then how can AI ethics be made useful for AI practitioners? This is the question we seek to address here by exploring why principles and technical translational tools are still needed even if they are limited, and how these limitations can be potentially overcome by providing theoretical grounding of a concept that has been termed ‘Ethics as a Service.’. (shrink)

The object of realist metaphysics is generally thought to be to describe the structure of the world as it is in itself, or, alternatively, to determine precisely what is real. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that, although there have been many attempts to achieve this goal, they all fall down, not simply because they have misconstrued the nature of the in-itself or precisely what is real, but because, more fundamentally, they are not clear about what it is (...) to talk about the in-itself or the real. In short, contemporary realism, both continental and analytic, does not have an adequate concept of reality. (shrink)

Research groups around the world are currently busy trying to invent new life in the laboratory, looking for extraterrestrial life, or making machines increasingly more life-like. In the case of astrobiology, any newly discovered life would likely be very old, but when discovered it would be new to us. In the case of synthetic organic life or life-like machines, humans will have invented life that did not exist before. Together, these endeavors amount to what we call the emerging plurality of (...) lives because we see a future where we are surrounded by, and interact with, life of many different origins, as well as entities that we have not traditionally seen as being alive. In the future these entities will likely possess properties that we so far have only associated with living beings, thereby transcending and perhaps blurring the borders between life and non-life. (shrink)

This article highlights the limitations of the tendency to frame health- and wellbeing-related digital tools (mHealth technologies) as empowering devices, especially as they play an increasingly important role in the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. It argues that mHealth technologies should instead be framed as digital companions. This shift from empowerment to companionship is advocated by showing the conceptual, ethical, and methodological issues challenging the narrative of empowerment, and by arguing that such challenges, as well as the risk (...) of medical paternalism, can be overcome by focusing on the potential for mHealth tools to mediate the relationship between recipients of clinical advice and givers of clinical advice, in ways that allow for contextual flexibility in the balance between patiency and agency. The article concludes by stressing that reframing the narrative cannot be the only means for avoiding harm caused to the NHS as a healthcare system by the introduction of mHealth tools. Future discussion will be needed on the overarching role of responsible design. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the conflict between thought and speech that is inherent in lying. This is the conflict of saying what you think is false. The chapter shows how stubbornly saying what you think is false resists analysis. In traditional analyses of lying, saying what you think is false is analyzed in terms of saying something and believing that it is false. But standard cases of unconscious or divided belief challenge these analyses. Classic puzzles about belief from Gottlob Frege and (...) Saul Kripke show that suggested amendments involving assent instead of belief do not fare better. I argue that attempts to save these analyses by appeal to guises or Fregean modes of presentation will also run into trouble. I then consider alternative approaches to untruthfulness that focus on (a) expectations for one’s act of saying/asserting and (b) the intentions involved in one’s act of saying/asserting. Here I introduce two new kinds of case, which I call “truth serum” and “liar serum” cases. Consideration of these cases reveals structural problems with intention- and expectation-based approaches as well. Taken together, the string of cases presented suggests that saying what you think is false, or being untruthful, is no less difficult and interesting a subject for analysis than lying itself. Tackling the question of what it is to say what you think is false illuminates ways in which the study of lying is intertwined with fundamental issues in the nature of intentional action. (shrink)

When I see a tree through my window, that particular worldly tree is said to be ‘in’, ‘on’, or ‘before’ my mind. My ordinary visual link to it is ‘intentional’. How similar to this link are the links between me and particular worldly trees when I see them in photographs, or in paintings? Are they, in some important sense, links of the same kind? Or are they links of importantly different kinds? Or, as a third possibility, are they at once (...) links of the same important kind and also links of importantly different sub-kinds within that kind? This paper takes up these taxonomical questions. After fleshing out (a bit) the characterisation of these different subject-object links, I explain and expand upon an approach to answering the taxonomical questions originally set out by Kendall Walton. I then follow this approach a certain distance, connecting it with the question of how to mark the boundary between perception and cognition. My investigations support the conclusion that the three types of links just described are not importantly different in kind. (shrink)

This paper defends the following principle: For any visually perceptible set of objects and any visual phenomenal character, there could be a veridical perception of exactly those objects with that character. This principle is rejected by almost all contemporary theories of perception, yet rarely addressed directly. Many have taken the apparent inconceivability of a certain sort of “shape inversion” — as compared to the more plausible, frequently discussed “color inversion” — as evidence that the spatial characters of our perceptions are (...) uniquely suited to and/or revelatory of the structure of their objects, such that alleged perceptions of those objects that differed radically in spatial character could not be veridical. I argue that these conclusions are unjustified: I claim that the difficulty involved in constructing coherent “shape inversion” scenarios is attributable to the complex relations among visual and tactile shape experiences, as opposed to relations between shape experiences and worldly shape properties. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explore to some extent the relationship between identity and necessity in logic and metaphysics. First, I provide a historically-based summary of proofs of the necessity of identity, highlighting the importance of the role that self-identity plays. Second, I introduce two examples of metaphysical topics where the necessity of identity has played a pivotal role: the necessary a posteriori, and the coincidence of material objects. I argue that important aspects of these debates rest on (...) how we represent identity. Third, I consider some recent work on generalized identity. This opens up new prospects for explaining why identity is necessary. (shrink)

Recent work in quantum gravity has prompted a re-evaluation of the fundamental nature of spacetime. Spacetime is potentially emergent from non-spatiotemporal entities posited by a theory of quantum gravity. Recent efforts have sought to interpret the relationship between spacetime and the fundamental entities through a mereological framework. These frameworks propose that spacetime can be conceived as either having non-spatiotemporal entities as its constituents or being a constituent part of a non-spatiotemporal structure. I present a roadmap for those interested in exploring (...) the role of composition in understanding the emergence of spacetime. I establish a taxonomy based on four crucial parameters that should be considered when constructing potential mereological models. Subsequently, I connect these models to a spectrum of perspectives found in current literature, with the aim of pinpointing areas that require further exploration. Finally, I identify three potential challenges facing mereological models of spacetime emergence, rooted in issues of mereological harmony, the distinction between continuous and discrete spacetime, and the implications of quantum superposition. (shrink)

Imogen Dickie's book Fixing Reference promises to reframe the investigation of mental intentionality, or what makes thoughts be about particular things. Dickie focuses on beliefs, and argues that if we can show how our ordinary means of belief formation sustain a certain connection between what our beliefs are about and how they are justified, we will have explained the ability of these ordinary means of belief formation to generate beliefs that are about particular objects. A worry about Dickie's approach is (...) that the explanation it offers is circular and thus not a genuine explanation of mental aboutness. This article develops a version of that worry in detail and turns it aside. Nonetheless, I argue that the explanatory value of the account remains unclear. While it does promise a dialectical advance over traditional theorizing about aboutness, it does not reveal how our ordinary means of belief formation make beliefs be about what they are about. (shrink)

We suggest that the emerging field of the conservation humanities can play a valuable role in biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where most land remains under collective customary clan ownership. As a first step to mobilising this scholarly field in PNG and to support capacity development for PNG humanities academics, we conducted a landscape review of PNG humanities teaching and research relating to biodiversity conservation and customary land rights. We conducted a systematic literature review, a PNG teaching programme (...) review, and a series of online workshops between the authors (10 PNG-based, 7 UK-based). We found a small but notable amount of PNG research and teaching focused on biodiversity conservation or customary land rights. This included explicit discussion of these topics in 8 of 156 PNG-authored humanities texts published 2010-2020 and related teaching content in the curricula of several different humanities-based programmes. We discuss current barriers to PNG academic development. The growth of fully fledged in-country conservation humanities will require a joint collaborative effort by PNG researchers, who are best placed to carry out such work, and researchers from abroad who can access resources to support the process. (shrink)

If there is any consensus about knowledge in contemporary epistemology, it is that there is one primary kind: knowledge-that. I put forth a view, one I find in the works of Aristotle, on which knowledge-of – construed in a fairly demanding sense, as being well-acquainted with things – is the primary, fundamental kind of knowledge. As to knowledge-that, it is not distinct from knowledge-of, let alone more fundamental, but instead a species of it. To know that such-and-such, just like to (...) know a person or place, is to be well-acquainted with a portion of reality – in this case a fact. In part by comparing classic Gettier cases to cases in which one has true impressions of but fails to know a person, I argue that this account not only respects our intuitions about knowledge-that – in particular that it is or entails non-accidentally true justified belief – but also explains them, providing a compelling analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Kant has a far more communitarian theory of aesthetic life than is usually acknowledged. I focus on two aspects of Kant’s theory that might otherwise be taken to support an individualist reading, namely, Kant’s emphasis on aesthetic autonomy and his characterization of judgments of taste as involving demands for agreement. I argue that the full expression of autonomy in fact requires being a member of an aesthetic community and that within such a community, judgments (...) of taste are issued as invitations to others to engage their faculties towards the goal of shared aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

Technologies to rapidly alert people when they have been in contact with someone carrying the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 are part of a strategy to bring the pandemic under control. Currently, at least 47 contact-tracing apps are available globally. They are already in use in Australia, South Korea and Singapore, for instance. And many other governments are testing or considering them. Here we set out 16 questions to assess whether — and to what extent — a contact-tracing app is ethically justifiable.

_ Source: _Volume 63, Issue 1, pp 64 - 86 Five times in the extant corpus, Aristotle refers to a distinction between two ways of being a ‘that for the sake of which’ that he sometimes marks by using genitive and dative pronouns. Commentators almost universally say that this is the distinction between an aim and beneficiary. I propose that Aristotle had a quite different distinction in mind, namely: that which holds between something and the aim or objective it is (...) in the business of producing or achieving, and that which holds between some instrument and the user of that instrument. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a novel interpretation of the role of the understanding in generating the unity of space and time. On the account I propose, we must distinguish between the unity that belongs to determinate spaces and times – which is a result of category-guided synthesis and which is Kant’s primary focus in §26 of the B-Deduction, including the famous B160–1n – and the unity that belongs to space and time themselves as all-encompassing structures. Non-conceptualist readers of Kant (...) have argued that this latter unity cannot be the product of categorial synthesis. While they are correct that this unity is not the product of any particular act of category-guided synthesis, I argue that conceptualists are right to nevertheless attribute this unity to the understanding. I argue that it is a result of what we can think of as the ‘original’ synthesis of understanding and sensibility themselves – it is a synthesis, moreover, in which the whole is logically prior to the parts. (shrink)

The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more precisely. A common theme in this nascent philosophical (...) discussion is that contemporary fake news is not a new kind of phenomenon, but just the latest iteration of a broader kind of phenomenon that has played out in different ways across the history of human information-dissemination technologies. While we agree with this, we argue that newer sorts of fake news reveal substantial flaws in earlier understandings of this notion. In particular, we argue that no deceptive intentions are necessary for fake news to arise; rather, fake news arises when stories which were not produced via standard journalistic practice are treated as though they had been. Importantly, this revisionary understanding of fake news allows us to accommodate and understand the way that fake news is plausibly generated and spread in a contemporary setting, as much by non-human actors as by ordinary human beings. (shrink)

This article argues for an interpretation of Aristotle’s biological account of familial resemblance that allows us to read Aristotle’s embryology as employing the same concept of “form” as he employs in his Metaphysics. The dominant view for the last several decades has been that in order to account for the phenomenon of inherited characteristics, Aristotle’s biology must appeal to a “sub-specific” form, one that includes all of the traits that parents pass on to their offspring. That view, however, is not (...) only inconsistent with Aristotle’s essentialist metaphysics, but it also renders the embryological theory internally inconsistent. The interpretation I offer avoids both inconsistencies, and better coheres with what he actually says in Generation of Animals. (shrink)

The thesis that in order to genuinely think about a particular object one must be (in some sense) acquainted with that object has been thoroughly explored since it was put forward by Bertrand Russell. Recently, the thesis has come in for mounting criticism. The aim of this paper is to point out that neither the exploration nor the criticism have been sensitive to the fact that the thesis can be interpreted in two different ways, yielding two different principles of acquaintance. (...) One principle uses the notion of content in distinguishing genuine thinking-about things from a merely derivative kind of thinking-about things. The other principle is quiet about content, focusing instead on a distinction between satisfactional and non-satisfactional means of bringing things into thought. Most work has focused on the first, content-based principle of acquaintance. But criticisms of this principle do not apply straightforwardly to the non-content-based principle. I shall argue that the latter principle merits independent assessment as part of the broader effort to account for genuine thinking about particular objects. In the final section of the paper, I will sketch a roadmap for this assessment. (shrink)

Introduction to the collection "Knowledge Ascriptions" (eds. Brown, J. and Gerken, M.).

Architectural research forms the basis of design in seeking a solution that considers the site’s sociopolitical and spatial-cultural factors and the built environment surrounding it. In addressing industrial heritage, industrial revolutions, energy transitions, and technological innovation uniquely shape the city. The transformation and new discourse between similar heritage and different sites allow for a combination of ideas with transnational and interdisciplinary depth, bolstering individual designs through a developed perspective on industrial architecture. This studio addresses the socio-political and spatial-cultural challenges of (...) post-industrial cities. This article uses a critical, comparative, and analytical problem-based design research approach to examine collaborative pedagogical practices that can build a new image and identity through adaptive reuse strategies in the post-industrial urbanscape. (shrink)

Digital Health Tools (DHTs), also known as patient self-surveilling strategies, have increasingly been promoted by health-care policy makers as technologies that have the capacity to transform patients’ lives. At the heart of the debate is the notion of empowerment. In this paper, we argue that what is required is not so much empowerment but rather a shift to enabling DHTs as digital companions. This will enable policy makers and health-care system designers to provide a more balanced view—one that capitalises on (...) the benefits of DHTs, while minimising the risks of potential harms. -/- . (shrink)

Despite his awareness that organisms are well suited to the habitats they are typically found in, Aristotle nowhere tries to explain this. It is unlikely that he thinks this “fit” (as I call it) between organisms and their habitats is simply a lucky coincidence, given how vehemently he rejects that as an explanation of the fit between organisms’ various body parts. But it is quite puzzling that Aristotle never explicitly addresses this, since it is a question that seemed so pressing (...) to later philosophers and biologists such as Darwin. In this paper I offer a solution to that puzzle. As I argue, the type of habitat an organism lives in is partly constitutive of its essence or nature. The reason Aristotle does not ask, for instance, why marsh-dweller birds live in marshes, is that it is simply constitutive of their nature that they do so. Given that habitat is built into a kind’s essence, the answer to such a question is obvious and the question would have seemed to him trivial. By attending to the details of his biological treatises, I show that Aristotle’s conception of a living being’s essence is much more nuanced than one can glean from his discussions in the Physics and Metaphysics alone. (shrink)

In this review essay, I discuss three recent books on Kant's third Critique: Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World by Ido Gieger; Kant on Freedom, Nature, and Judgment by Kristi Sweet; and Kant’s Worldview: How Judgment Shapes Human Comprehension by Rudolf Makkreel.

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to objects in (...) aesthetic experience, we can explain how the faculties are free, even when the subject already possesses a concept of the object and is bound to the determinate form of the object in perception. (shrink)

In liberal moral theory, interfering with someone’s deliberate engagement in a self-harming practice in order to promote their own good is often considered wrongfully paternalistic. But what if self-harming decisions are the product of an oppressive social context that imposes harmful norms on certain individuals, such as, arguably, in the case of cosmetic breast surgery? Clare Chambers suggests that such scenarios can mandate state interference in the form of prohibition. I argue that, unlike conventional measures, Chambers’ proposal recognises that harmful, (...) discriminatory norms entail a twofold collective moral obligation: to eliminate the harmful norm in the long run, but also to address unjust harm that is inflicted in the meantime. I show that these two obligations tend to pull in opposite directions, thus generating a serious tension in Chambers’ proposal which eventually leads to an undue compromising of the second obligation in favour of the first. Based on this discussion, I develop an alternative proposal which, instead of prohibiting breast implant surgery, offers compensation for the disadvantages suffered by individuals who decide not to have surgery. (shrink)