Many ecological economists have argued that some natural capital should be preserved for posterity. Yet, among environmental philosophers, the preservation paradox entails that preserving parts of nature, including those denoted by natural capital, is impossible. The paradox claims that nature is a realm of phenomena independent of intentional human agency, that preserving and restoring nature require intentional human agency, and, therefore, no one can preserve or restore nature (without making it artificial). While this article argues that the preservation paradox is (...) more difficult to resolve than ordinarily recognized, it also concludes by sketching a positive way to understand what it means to preserve natural capital during the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Criticism directed at neoclassical economics has failed to replace it with a similar grand theory. The author argues that one possible explanation may lie in the failure of economists to formulate an opinion as to the philosophical foundations of the author’s object of study. The paper aims to discuss this issue. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, the authors review the prevailing philosophical view of “the self-interest theory (S)”, which is one of the most powerful constituents of today’s economics, (...) and social theorizing in general. Second, the authors present a reasoning framework in which rationality becomes intelligible within a schema of integrating the self’s external and internal conditionalities into a unified view of human reasoning. (shrink)

Drawing upon a concept of ‘critical bioethics’ [7] this paper takes a species-broad approach to the social and ethical aspects of enhancement. Critical Bioethics aims to foreground interdisciplinarity, socio-political dimensions, as well as reflexivity to what becomes bioethical subject matter. This paper focuses upon the latter component and uses the example of animal enhancement as a way to think about both enhancement generally, and bioethics. It constructs several arguments for including animal enhancement as a part of enhancement debates, and considers (...) some connections between human and animal enhancement. The paper concludes in a plea for an ‘enhancement’ to our critical abilities to examine some of the underlying social, moral and ethical assumptions bound up in varied anticipated ‘enhanced’ futures. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to take a closer look at an influential argument that purports to prove that the existence of cultural prohibitions could never be explained by biological inhibitions. The argument is two-pronged. The first prong reduces to the claim: inhibitions cannot cause prohibitions simply because inhibitions undermine the raison dêtre of prohibitions. The second strategy consists in arguing that inhibitions cannot cause prohibitions because the two differ importantly in their contents. I try to show that both (...) claims fail. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that it is possible to have an account of shame and guilt as mature concepts in moral psychology that sit alongside immature ones. In arguing for this, I adopt the critical r...

Against non-analytic naturalism and quietist realism, I defend a robust form of non-naturalism. The argument proceeds as follows: In the face of extensional underdetermination, quietist realism cannot non-question-beggingly respond to alternative accounts that offer formally identical but substantively different interpretations of what reasons are. They face what we might call the reasons appropriation problem. In light of this problem, quietists ought to abandon their view in favor of robust realism. By permitting substantive metaphysical claims we can then argue, based on (...) reasonhood being a relation, that reasonhood is an abstract universal. If reasonhood is an abstract universal, then we can non-question-beggingly assert that the counting in favor of relation is a general kind or genus. This poses a dilemma for non-analytic naturalists: either they need to give the same reductive analysis for epistemic and practical reasons, or they can give a different analyses by treating epistemic and practical reasons as a species of the larger genus. However, the former looks extensionally implausible epistemic reasons are not desire-based and the latter entails that the reduction, via a violation of irreflexivity, fails to ground reasonhood. Naturalistic reductions of the normative, accordingly, face a damning dilemma. We should, in the face of this argument, thus accept a robust form of non-naturalist realism. (shrink)