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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Leviathan
Baltimore,: Clarendon Press. Edited by Aloysius Martinich, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (1651)
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Cruelty is widely regarded to be a uniquely human trait. This follows from a standard definition of cruelty as involving the deliberate infliction of suffering together with the empirical claim that humans are unique in their ability to attribute suffering (or any mental state) to other creatures. In this paper I argue that this definition is not optimum for the purposes of scientific inquiry. I suggest that its intuitive appeal stems from our abhorrence of cruelty, and our corresponding desire to (...) |
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Constitutional liberal practices are capable of being normatively grounded by a number of different metaphysical positions. Kant provides one such grounding, in terms of the autonomously derived moral law. I argue that the work of Edmund Burke provides a resource for an alternative construal of constitutional liberalism, compatible with, and illumined by, a broadly Thomistic natural law worldview. I contrast Burke's treatment of the relationship between truth and cognition, prudence and rights, with that of his contemporary, Kant. We find that (...) |
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When Hegel first addresses moral responsibility in the Philosophy of Right, he presupposes that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do, but appears to offer little, if any, justification for this assumption. In this essay, I claim that the first part of the Philosophy of Right, “Abstract Right”, contains an implicit argument that legal or external responsibility (blame for what we have done) is conceptually dependent on moral responsibility proper (blame for what we have intended). This overlooked (...) |
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In this article, I present a neo-Confucian answer, by Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, to the question, "Why should I be moral?" I argue that this answer is better than some representative answers in the Western philosophical tradition. According to the Chengs, one should be moral because it is a joy to perform moral actions. Sometimes one finds it a pain, instead of a joy, to perform moral actions only because one lacks the necessary genuine moral knowledge—knowledge that is accessible (...) |
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Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.” Extrinsic value is value that is not intrinsic. |
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Rationality and reasonableness are often sharply distinguished from one another and are even held to be in conflict. On this construal, rationality consists in means-end calculation of the most efficient means to one's ends (which are usually taken to be self-interested), while reasonableness consists in equitableness whereby one respects the rights of other persons as well as oneself. To deal with this conflict, it is noted that both rationality and reasonableness are based on reason, which is analyzed as the power (...) |
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Teson critiques a recent article by John Rawls in which Rawls extends his acclaimed political theory to include international relations. |
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The objection Hobbes raises in the voice of the Fool against his own argument is, apparently, that it is sometimes rational to break covenant. Hobbes's answer is puzzling, both because it seems implausible and also because it seems at odds with some of his own views. This article reviews several strategies critics have taken in trying to show that Hobbes's answer is more plausible than it seems and one attempt to show that the Fool's objection concerns the action of breaking (...) |
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This article proposes a new theory of rational decision, distinct from both causal decision theory (CDT) and evidential decision theory (EDT). First, some intuitive counterexamples to CDT and EDT are presented. Then the motivation for the new theory is given: the correct theory of rational decision will resemble CDT in that it will not be sensitive to any comparisons of absolute levels of value across different states of nature, but only to comparisons of the differences in value between the available (...) |
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The current revival of communitarian thinking, alongside public journalism as its journalistic counterpart, is one response to thefractures that characterize modern society. I identifyfive symptoms/causes ofthefractured world. I then show, briefly, some contrasts between the communitarian ideal and that of liberal democracy. The conclusion calls for journalists to undertake the task of reworking our basic conceptual framework in ways that avoid the twin extreme, and naive anthropologies of individualism and collectivism in favor o f a communitarian view based upon acknowledgment (...) |
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The relationship between adults and children in liberal democracies is based on two flawed assumptions that are widespread: first, that childhood is an impediment, a passing phase of impaired maturity; and second, that children benefit from the proliferation of rights ascribed to them. Social institutions, and particularly the education system, are correspondingly misconstrued. This article focuses on the combined effect of vulnerability and autonomy as they construct contemporary childhood. I conclude that adults' obligations rather than children's rights are the appropriate (...) |
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This paper discusses an "expressive constraint" on accounts of thought and language which requires that when a speaker expresses a belief by sincerely uttering a sentence, the utterance and the belief have the same content. It will be argued that this constraint should be viewed as expressing a conceptual connection between thought and language rather than a mere empirical generalization about the two. However, the most obvious accounts of the relation between thought and language compatible with the constraint (giving an (...) |
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What psychological and philosophical significance should we attach to recent efforts at computer simulations of human cognitive capacities? In answering this question, I find it useful to distinguish what I will call "strong" AI from "weak" or "cautious" AI. According to weak AI, the principal value of the computer in the study of the mind is that it gives us a very powerful tool. For example, it enables us to formulate and test hypotheses in a more rigorous and precise fashion. (...) |
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Let libertarianism be the view that humans are capable of making decisions that are simultaneously undetermined and appropriately non-random. It’s often argued that this view is incoherent because indeterminacy entails randomness (of some appropriate kind). I argue here that the truth is just the opposite: the right kind of indeterminacy in our decisions actually entails appropriate non-randomness, so that libertarianism is coherent, and the question of whether it’s true reduces to the wide-open empirical question of whether certain of our decisions (...) |
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Mental imagery (varieties of which are sometimes colloquially refered to as “visualizing,” “seeing in the mind's eye,” “hearing in the head,” “imagining the feel of,” etc.) is quasi-perceptual experience; it resembles perceptual experience, but occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli. It is also generally understood to bear intentionality (i.e., mental images are always images of something or other), and thereby to function as a form of mental representation. Traditionally, visual mental imagery, the most discussed variety, was thought (...) |
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In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) |
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This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. (...) |
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A threat to women is obscured when we treat “abortion-as-evacuation” as equivalent to “abortion-as-killing.” This holds only if evacuating a fetus kills it. As technology advances, the equivalence will fail. Any feminist account of abortion that relies on the equivalence leaves moral room for women to be required to give up their fetuses to others when it fails. So an account of the justification of abortion-as-killing is needed that does not depend on the equivalence. |
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In justifying punishment we sometimes appeal to the idea that the punished offender has, by his criminal action against others, forfeited his moral right (and therefore his legal right) against hard treatment by the state. The imposition of suffering, or deprivation of liberty, loses its prima facie morally objectionable character, and becomes morally permissible. Philosophers interrogating the forfeited right theory generally focus on whether the forfeiting of the right constitutes a necessary or a sufficient condition for punishment to be permissible; (...) |
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Equal freedom is the common starting point for most contractual theories of justice from Hobbes and Rousseau to Rawls. But while equal freedom defines a common starting point for these theories, this does not result in a general consensus on the conception of justice. On the contrary, different ways of conceptualizing the contractual starting point leads to different conceptions of the demands of justice. To fully understand the relationship between equal freedom and justice we therefore first need to explicate how (...) |
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One approach to moral economy wishes to show that it is rational to be moral. As rational morality has received little attention from economics, as opposed to political philosophy, this article examines it in an economics framework. Rational morality refers primarily to individual behaviour so that one may also speak of it as moral microeconomics. When a group of agents are disposed to constrain their maximisation, that behaviour may be considered rational. However, this relies on ‘moralised’ assumptions about individual behaviour. (...) |
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Philosophical anarchists have made their living criticizing theories of state legitimacy and the duty to obey the law. The most prominent theories of state legitimacy have been called into doubt by the anarchists' insistence that citizens' lack of consent to the state renders the whole justificatory enterprise futile. Autonomy requires consent, they argue, and justification must respect autonomy. In this essay, I want to call into question the weight of consent in protecting our capacity for autonomy. I argue that if (...) |
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One of the pressing challenges we face today—in a post-Westphalian order and post-Bretton Woods world —is how to design the right kind of MAS that can take full advantage of the socio-economic and political progress made so far, while dealing successfully with the new global challenges that are undermining the best legacy of that very progress. This is the topic of the article. In it, I argue that in order to design the right kind of MAS, we need to design (...) |
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Public reason accounts commonly claim that exercises of coercive political power must be justified by appeal to reasons accessible to all citizens. Such accounts are vulnerable to the objection that they cannot legitimate coercion to protect basic liberal rights against infringement by deeply illiberal people. This paper first elaborates the distinctive interpersonal conception of justification in public reason accounts in contrast to impersonal forms of justification. I then detail a core dissenter-based objection to public reason based on a worrisome example (...) |
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Seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz's contributions to metaphysics, mathematics, and logic are well known. Lesser known is his ‘invention’ of deontic logic, and that his invention derives from the alethic logic of the Aristotelian square of opposition. In this paper, I show how Leibniz developed this ‘logic of duties’, which designates actions as ‘possible, necessary, impossible, and omissible’ for a ‘vir bonus’ . I show that for Leibniz, deontic logic can determine whether a given action, e.g. as permitted, is therefore (...) |
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Envy and resentment are generally thought to be unpleasant and unethical emotions which ought to be condemned. I argue that both envy and resentment, in some important forms, are moral emotions connected with concern for justice, understood in terms of desert and entitlement. They enable us to recognise injustice, work as a spur to acting against it and connect us to others. Thus, we should accept these emotions as part of the ethical life. |
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Locating the history of male honour in the perspective of his philosophical anthropology, Mandeville is able to show that the rituals of modern honour are an exemplary expression of that spontaneous, artificial order stemming out of a natural disposition of human passions. For Mandeville, duelling provides decisive evidence that the desire for approval from others, even at the cost of one's life, is a dominant motive in man's behaviour. The aim of this paper is to review selected Scottish responses to (...) |
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This paper discusses Bernard Mandeville's (1670–1733) conception of governability. It grounds his key distinction between a submissive and a governable subject in terms of his alternative account of human sociability to demonstrate the nature and structure of relationships that are necessary for upholding stable and flourishing societies. Using Sir William Temple as an interlocutor (1628–1699), it also explores the role played by the cultivation of reverence to authority in Mandeville's analysis of governability. |
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The book under review offers a novel approach to politicizing the "animal issue." Drawing on liberal citizenship theory, the authors argue that key concepts of international justice such as "citizen," "denizen," and "sovereignty" may be mapped onto human-animal relations in order to protect individual animal rights as well as ecosystem integrity. The ambition is also to overcome some well-known problems of traditional animal rights theory in relation to ecological concerns. Yet the argument that ecosystems, like human states, ought to be (...) |
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Social thinkers often use the concept of intersubjectivity to mark out a problem of theoretical sociology: If people are unable to look into each others' minds, why do they often understand each other nonetheless? This issue has been debated extensively by philosophers and sociologists in three largely disconnected discourses. The article investigates the three discourses for isolable ideas that can be fitted into a sociological answer to the problem of intersubjectivity. An interactional solution, fully coherent with key insights from the (...) |
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The article analyses the components of the presumption of innocence and tries to clarify some of the conceptual and logical difficulties surrounding the notion of ‘innocence’ and the structure of legal presumptions. It is argued that all conceivable literal interpretations of the maxim make little or no sense, and that the presumptions form is, as such, devoid of original content: presumptions do not explain nor justify anything but are auxiliary norms which refer to the legal consequences spelled out in other (...) |
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Vitoria and Suárez defend the categorical immunity of the innocent not to be intentionally killed. But they allow for inflicting collective punishment on the innocent and the noninnocent alike during and after a just war. So they allow for deliberately harming them. Inflicting harm on the innocent can often result in their death. Hence, holding both claims seems incoherent. First, the objections against using the term “innocent” are explained. Second, their views on just war are explored. And third, by appealing (...) |
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This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal education from their own intellectual and religious experience, which was informed by a specifically Christian conception of the place of education in a fully developed (...) |
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While there is a growing body of work on moral issues and global governance in the fields of global justice and international relations, little work has connected principles of global health justice with those of global health governance for a theory of global health. Such a theory would enable analysis and evaluation of the current global health system and would ethically and empirically ground proposals for reforming it to more closely align with moral values. Global health governance has been framed (...) |
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Peter Winch, in his political philosophy, wanted to rethink the concepts of political authority, legitimacy and political culture, with a starting point in Wittgensteinian ideas. This essay brings together Winch's thoughts on political authority. Developing insights from Wittgenstein's work on certainty, Winch emphasised the unstated background behind any normative stand concerning authority. Ideas of legitimacy and civil society are formed within historically specific political cultures. In the 1990s, Winch was increasingly inclined to emphasise disagreement, which was related to his developing (...) |
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The “welcome return” to “substantive political philosophy” that Rawls'sA Theory of Justicewas said to herald has resulted in forty years of proposals seeking to show that philosophical reflection leads to the demonstrable truth of almost every and any conceivable view of the justice of property rights. Select any view—from the justice of unregulated capitalist markets to the most extreme forms of egalitarianism—and one will find that some philosophers have proclaimed that rational reflection uniquely leads to its justice. This is, I (...) |
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Machine ethics and robot rights are quickly becoming hot topics in artificial intelligence and robotics communities. We will argue that attempts to attribute moral agency and assign rights to all intelligent machines are misguided, whether applied to infrahuman or superhuman AIs, as are proposals to limit the negative effects of AIs by constraining their behavior. As an alternative, we propose a new science of safety engineering for intelligent artificial agents based on maximizing for what humans value. In particular, we challenge (...) |
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In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke maintains that ?Reason must be our last Judge and Guide in every Thing,? including matters of religious faith, and this commitment to the primacy of reason is not abandoned in his later religious writings. This essay argues that with regard to the relation between reason and religious faith, Locke is primarily concerned not with evidence, but with consistency, meaning, and how human beings ought to respond to their inclinations, including their inclinations to believe. (...) |
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Are the robots coming? Is the singularity near? Will we be dominated by technology? The usual response to ethical issues raised by pervasive and ubiquitous technologies assumes a philosophical anthropology centered on existential autonomy and agency, a dualistic ontology separating humans from technology and the natural from the artificial, and a post-monotheistic dualist and creational spirituality. This paper explores an alternative, less modern vision of the “technological” future based on different assumptions: a “deep relational” view of human being and self, (...) |
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Altruism is a deep and complex phenomenon that is analysed by scholars of various disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, biology, evolutionary anthropology and experimental economics. Much confusion arises in current literature because the term altruism covers variable concepts and processes across disciplines. Here we investigate the sense given to altruism when used in different fields and argumentative contexts. We argue that four distinct but related concepts need to be distinguished: (a) psychological altruism , the genuine motivation to improve others’ interests and (...) |
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