The article presents the nature of shared intentions and collective responsibility in simultaneous discussion of individualism, which views that collective agents and shared intentions are to be analyzed in relation between individual agents who are members of the collectives. It discusses as well the agent meaning theory that states that an agent moves against the interpretive background of action evaluation shared by the agent and the moral community.

Referred to as “a foundational concept” of bioethics, personhood has long figured prominently in discussions of entities’ moral status and attendant rights and duties (Farah and Heberlein 2007, 39)...

It remains at best controversial to claim, non-figuratively, that plants are cognitive agents. At the same time, it is taken as trivially true that many animals are cognitive agents, arguably through an implicit or explicit appeal to natural science. Yet, any given definition of cognition implicates at least some further processes, such as perception, action, memory, and learning, which must be observed either behaviorally, psychologically, neuronally, or otherwise physiologically. Crucially, however, for such observations to be intelligible, they must be counted (...) as evidence for some model. These models in turn point to homologies of physiology and behavior that facilitate the attribution of cognition to some non-human animals. But, if one is dealing with a model of animal cognition, it is tautological that only animals can provide evidence, and absurd to claim that plants can. The more substantive claim that, given a general model of cognition, only animals but not plants can provide evidence, must be evaluated on its merits. As evidence mounts that plants meet established criteria of cognition, from physiology to behavior, they continue to be denied entry into the cognitive club. We trace this exclusionary tendency back to Aristotle, and attempt to counter it by drawing on the philosophy of modelling and a range of findings from plant science. Our argument illustrates how a difference in degree between plant and animals is typically mistaken for a difference in kind. (shrink)

This paper challenges some leading views about the conditions under which the ascription of beliefs and desires can make sense of, or provide reasons for, a creature's behavior. I argue that it is unnecessary for behavior to proceed from beliefs and desires according to the principles of logic and decision theory, or even from principles that generally get things right. I also deny that it is necessary for behavior to proceed from principles that, though perhaps subrational, are similar to those (...) that we ourselves use. I then propose some conditions that are considerably weaker, and argue that they fulfill the descriptive and explanatory requirements of intentional ascription. (shrink)

US court decisions guaranteeing life-sustaining care to anencephalic infants have been viewed with disfavor, and sometimes disbelief, by some ethicists who do not believe in the necessity of life-sustaining support for those without cognitive abilities or an independently sustainable future. The distance between these two views – one legal and inclusive, the other medical and specific – seems unbridgeable. This paper reports on a program using multicriterion decision making to define and describe persons in a way which both acknowledges the (...) differences perceived by many as well as those commonalities insisted on in U.S. court decisions. It does this through application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process to a hierarchy of humanness criteria, and secondarily through reference to that concept''s subset, personhood. (shrink)

JOHANNES ROESSLER & NAOMI EILAN (Eds.)Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003ISBN 0199245622 (pbk, 415 pages, $39.95)In The Principles of Psychology, William James presents an interesting case of a ‘...

Cognitive archaeologists attempt to infer the cognitive and cultural features of past hominins and their societies from the material record. This task faces the problem of _minimum necessary competence_: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from the cognitive sciences and then assessing some aspect of (...) the material record through that lens. We give examples to show that background theoretical commitments in cognitive science that inform those models lead to different minimum necessary competence results. This raises an important question: what principles should guide us in selecting a model from the cognitive sciences? We outline two complementary responses to this question. The first involves using _independent_ lines of evidence to converge on a particular capacity. This can then influence model choice. The second is a broader suggestion. Theoretical diversity is a good thing in science, but is only beneficial over a limited amount of time. According to recent modelling work, one way of limiting diversity is to introduce extreme priors. We argue that having a broad spectrum of views in the philosophy of cognitive science may actually help cognitive archaeologists address the problem of minimum necessary competence. (shrink)

The essay examines Robin Cook’s Coma and Priscille Sibley’s The Promise of Stardust that dramatize the reified and disposable status of the brain-dead patients who are classified as nonpersons. The essay argues that the man-machine entanglement as depicted in the novels constructs a deterritorialized and entangled form of subjectivity that intervenes in the dominant biomedical understanding of personhood and agency that we notionally associate with a conscious mind. The essay concludes its arguments by discussing Alexander Beliaev’s Professor Dowell’s Head which (...) depicts human subjectivity as an essentially embodied and distributive phenomenon and interrogates the Cartesian mind body dualism embedded in the dominant biomedical narratives. (shrink)

On the basis of two thought experiments, I argue that self-building technologies are possible given our current level of technological progress. We could already use technology to make us instantiate selfhood in a more perfect, complete manner. I then examine possible extensions of this thesis, regarding more radical self-building technologies which might become available in a distant future. I also discuss objections and reservations one might have about this view.

This paper explores the debate between personists, who argue that the concept of a person if of central importance for moral thought, and personists, who argue that the concept of a human being is of greater moral significance. On the one hand, it argues that normative naturalism, the most ambitious defense of the humanist position, fails to identify moral standards with standards of human behavior and thereby fails to undermine the moral significance of personhood. At the same time, it contends (...) that a more focused attention on the morally relevant features of human life may indeed play a crucial role in enhancing our moral understanding. (shrink)

I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue (...) that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on sentience and cognition. (shrink)

Attributing moral responsibility to an agent requires that the agent is a capable member of a moral community. Capable members of a moral community are often thought of as moral reasoners (or moral persons) and, thus, to attribute moral responsibility to collective agents would require showing that they are capable of moral reasoning. It is argued here that those theories that understand collective reasoning and collective moral agency in terms of collective decision-making and commitment – as is arguably the case (...) with Christian List and Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency – face the so-called “problem of the first belief” that threatens to make moral reasoning impossible for group agents. This paper introduces three possible solutions to the problem and discusses the effects that these solutions have in regard to the possibility of attributing moral responsibility to groups. (shrink)

Can machines be conscious and what would be the ethical implications? This article gives an overview of current robotics approaches toward machine consciousness and considers factors that hamper an understanding of machine consciousness. After addressing the epistemological question of how we would know whether a machine is conscious and discussing potential advantages of potential future machine consciousness, it outlines the role of consciousness for ascribing moral status. As machine consciousness would most probably differ considerably from human consciousness, several complex questions (...) must be addressed, including what forms of machine consciousness would be morally relevant forms of consciousness, and what the ethical implications of morally relevant forms of machine consciousness would be. While admittedly part of this reflection is speculative in nature, it clearly underlines the need for a detailed conceptual analysis of the concept of artificial consciousness and stresses the imperative to avoid building machines with morally relevant forms of consciousness. The article ends with some suggestions for potential future regulation of machine consciousness. (shrink)

The literature of bioethics suffers from two serious problems. (1) Most authors are unable to take seriously both the rights of the great apes and of severely disabled human infants. Rationalism—moral status rests on rational capacities—wrongly assigns a higher moral status to the great apes than to all severely disabled human infants with less rational capacities than the great apes. Anthropocentrism—moral status depends on membership in the human species—falsely grants all humans a higher moral status than the great apes. Animalism—moral (...) status is dependent on the ability to suffer—mistakenly equates the moral status of humans and most animals. (2) The concept person is widely used for justificatory purposes, but it seems that it cannot play such a role. It seems that it is either redundant or unable to play any justificatory role. I argue that we can solve the second problem by understanding person as a thick evaluative concept. This then enables us to justify assigning a higher moral status to the great apes than to simple animals: the great apes are persons. To solve the first problem, I argue that certain severely disabled infants have a higher moral status than the great apes because they are dependent upon human relationships for their well-being. Only very limited abilities are required for such relationships, and the question who is capable of them must be based on thick evaluative concepts. Thus, it turns out that to make progress in bioethics we must assign thick evaluative concepts a central role. (shrink)

Saul Kripke's influential ‘sceptical paradox’ of semantic rule-following alleges that speakers cannot have any justification for using a word one way rather than another. If it is correct, there can be no such thing as meaning anything by a word. I argue that the paradox fails to undermine meaning. Kripke never adequately motivates its excessively strict standard for the justified use of words. The paradox lacks the resources to show that its standard is truly mandatory or that speakers do not (...) frequently satisfy the well-motivated competitor I offer. So the paradox fails. (shrink)

In recent philosophy of science there has been much discussion of both pluralism, which embraces scientific terms with multiple meanings, and eliminativism, which rejects such terms. Some recent work focuses on the conditions that legitimize pluralism over eliminativism – the conditions under which such terms are acceptable. Often, this is understood as a matter of encouraging effective communication – the danger of these terms is thought to be equivocation, while the advantage is thought to be the fulfilment of ‘bridging roles’ (...) that facilitate communication between different scientists and specialisms. These theories are geared towards regulating communication between scientists qua scientists. However, this overlooks an important class of harmful equivocation that involves miscommunication between scientists and nonscientists, such as the public or policymakers. To make my case, I use the example of theory of mind, also known as ‘mindreading’ and ‘mentalizing’, and broadly defined as the capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others. I begin by showing that ‘theory of mind’ has multiple meanings, before showing that this has resulted in harmful equivocations of a sort and in a way not accounted for by previous theories of pluralism and eliminativism. (shrink)

_Examines the implications of Aristotle’s political thought for contemporary political theory._.

Research Articles Lloyd P. Gerson, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

The Termination Thesis (or “TT”) is the view that people go out of existence when they die. Lots of philosophers seem to believe it. Epicurus, for example, apparently makes use of TT in his efforts to show that it is irrational to fear death. He says, “as long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.”1 Lucretius says pretty much the same thing, but in many more words and more poetically: “Death (...) therefore to us is nothing, concerns us not a jot, since the nature of the mind is proved to be mortal; . . . when we shall be no more, when there shall have been a separation of body and soul, out of both of which we are each formed into a single being, to us, you may be sure, who then shall be no more, nothing whatever can happen to excite sensation.”. (shrink)

Simon Evnine examines various epistemic aspects of what it is to be a person. Persons are defined as finite beings that have beliefs, including second-order beliefs about their own and others' beliefs, and are agents, capable of making long-term plans. It is argued that for any being meeting these conditions, a number of epistemic consequences obtain. First, all such beings must have certain logical concepts and be able to use them in certain ways. Secondly, there are at least two principles (...) governing belief that it is rational for persons to satisfy and are such that nothing can be a person at all unless it satisfies them to a large extent. These principles are that one believe the conjunction of one's beliefs and that one treat one's future beliefs as, by and large, better than one's current beliefs. Thirdly, persons both occupy epistemic points of view on the world and show up within those views. This makes it impossible for them to be completely objective about their own beliefs. Ideals of rationality that require such objectivity, while not necessarily wrong, are intrinsically problematic for persons. This "aspectual dualism" is characteristic of treatments of persons in the Kantian tradition. In sum, these epistemic consequences support a traditional view of the nature of persons, one in opposition to much recent theorizing. (shrink)

Many debates in arenas such as bioethics turn on questions regarding the moral status of human beings at various stages of biological development or decline. It is often argued that a human being possesses a fundamental and inviolable moral status insofar as she is a “person”; yet, it is contested whether all or only human beings count as persons. Perhaps there are non-human person, and perhaps not every human being satisfies the definitional criteria for being a person. A further question, (...) which will be the primary focus of this paper, concerns what essential features of personhood endow persons, human or otherwise, with their moral status and the inherent rights they concomitantly possess. A survey of the history of philosophical theorizing on what it means to be a person yields a broad consensus upon the key capacities being rational thought, self-consciousness, and autonomous volition. It is not sufficient, however, simply to cite these capacities, but to explain why these particular capacities bear moral import. A more recent concern has developed regarding the possible future existence of so-called “post-persons” who, due to their enhanced cognitive and emotive capacities, may be morally superior to mere persons and thereby possess a higher moral status. This paper will conclude with an analysis of the extent to which this concern is warranted. (shrink)

In the Dune universe, humans relied on computers for thousands of years. Their immense capacity for mathematical calculations made space travel possible, until the Butlerian Jihad ended that era. Humans found the means to cognitively and physically enhance themselves to replace and outmatch intelligent machines by using nootropic drugs, revolutionary training methods, artificial selection, and genetic engineering. There are also moral and social problems that come along with human enhancement technologies. In a society where enhancement is popular, the poor would (...) have fewer chances to succeed in social and economic competitions. Many moral philosophers argue that our freedoms and basic rights are guaranteed by a special moral status, personhood. Nicholas Agar has proposed that post‐personhood could be seen as the end of a continuum of intelligence and reasoning abilities. The Bene Gesserit education and selective breeding program claims to be all about producing human beings who maximize the well‐being of all humankind. (shrink)

The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other states to systems and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires. Any system whose performance can be thus predicted and explained is an intentional system, whatever its innards. The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of but is also exploited in artificial intelligence and cognitive science (...) more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. An analysis of the role of the intentional stance and its presuppositions supports a naturalistic theory of mental states and events, their content or intentionality, and the relation between levels of explanation and neurophysiological or mechanistic levels of explanation. As such, the analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body. (shrink)

Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is sketched. The (...) underlying assumptions of this approach can be seen to ally it directly with theorizing in evolutionary biology, which has recently come under attack from Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who castigate it as the Their arguments, which are strongly analogous to B. F, Skinner's arguments against point to certain pitfalls that attend the careless exercise of such thinking (and rival varieties of thinking as well), but do not constitute a fundamental objection to either adaptationist theorizing or its cousin, intentional system theory. (shrink)