How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental (...) questions lie beyond our powers of comprehension. We can be certain only that the truth—whatever it is—is weird. Philosophy, he proposes, can aim to open—to reveal possibilities we had not previously appreciated—or to close, to narrow down to the one correct theory of the phenomenon in question. Schwitzgebel argues for a philosophy that opens. According to Schwitzgebel’s “Universal Bizarreness” thesis, every possible theory of the relation of mind and cosmos defies common sense. According to his complementary “Universal Dubiety” thesis, no general theory of the relationship between mind and cosmos compels rational belief. Might the United States be a conscious organism—a conscious group mind with approximately the intelligence of a rabbit? Might virtually every action we perform cause virtually every possible type of future event, echoing down through the infinite future of an infinite universe? What, if anything, is it like to be a garden snail? Schwitzgebel makes a persuasive case for the thrill of considering the most bizarre philosophical possibilities. (shrink)

Philosophers from Hart to Lewis, Johnston and Bennett have expressed various degrees of reservation concerning the doctrine of double effect. A common concern is that, with regard to many activities that double effect is traditionally thought to prohibit, what might at first look to be a directly intended bad effect is really, on closer examination, a directly intended neutral effect that is closely connected to a foreseen bad effect. This essay examines the extent to which the commonsense concept of intention (...) supports a reasonably consistent and coherent application of double effect. Two important conclusions are these: (1) a number of traditionally proscribed activities involve a kind of “targeting” of innocents that can be taken to exhibit a direct intention to harm them; (2) a direct intention to harm need not involve a desire to harm in any ordinary sense of the latter expression. (shrink)

In three experiments involving 104 children and 86 adults we investigated the extent to which harm brought about by physical contact is judged to be worse than harm caused by impersonal, no-contact actions. In Experiment 1, Italian monolingual children aged 4 to 6 were asked to indicate whether they would prioritize saving five persons through contact over saving three persons without contact with both courses of action involving harm to a single victim. A preference for saving more persons did not (...) emerge until the age of 6 years. By contrast, in Experiment 2, children with a Slovenian-Italian linguistic and cultural background judged that to save five with contact was preferable even at the age of 4 and 5 years. In Experiment 3, Slovenian-Italian adults were also significantly more likely than Italian-only speakers to advocate using contact, although in a direct comparison, both groups prioritized saving five over three persons, regardless of the means. Moral diversity is discussed in terms of cultural and linguistic constraints that may serve to mediate the use of considerations of contact in an intuitive moral psychology. (shrink)