In this chapter I focus on two problems facing immigration systems around the world, and Australia in particular. The topics addressed are chosen because each one involves important fundamental rights and because significant improvement in these areas is possible even if each state acts alone, without significant coordination with others. First, I examine refugee programmes, focussing specifically on the ‘two- tier’ refugee programmes pioneered by Australia with the introduction of Temporary Protection Visas by the Howard Government in 1999. Next, I (...) look at recent declines in refugee resettlement schemes from already stingy levels and, in relation to Australia in particular, I show how the tying of resettlement numbers to the number of affirmative asylum claims granted is both wrong- headed and counterproductive. The second area of immigration policy explored is family migration, another area where immigration systems around the world have been moving in the wrong direction, often via less than transparent administrative processes. Australia is no exception. While Australia’s family migration system is reasonably good on its face, in practice there are several factors which make the programme significantly less than satisfactory from the perspective of protecting the basic rights of migrants and, arguably more importantly, citizens. These problems can and should be fixed in straightforward ways, and since doing so would be more just, would have few— if any— significant negative consequences, and in fact would have a number of clear benefits, those changes should be made. (shrink)

It is now widely expected that climate change will be serious enough that a very large number of people will be displaced from their homes because of events relating to or resulting from climate change. Such events may include rising sea levels (and resulting increased salination of ground water), stronger hurricanes and tropical storms, drought, floods, increased and more intense wildfires, and other extreme or (previously) unusual weather events. Although estimates vary widely, it seems very likely that many millions of (...) people—perhaps hundreds of millions if sufficient precautions are not taken—will be forced from their homes by these events related to climate change. In the public imagination, much of the attention has been on ‘climate refugees’, where this is taken to mean people who have crossed borders. However, there is good reason to believe that a very large percentage—probably a significant majority—of displacement resulting from climate change will be, or could be, internal. In this chapter I argue that there are likely to be a large number of cases where internal displacement related to climate change is of international concern, and where, therefore, states have significant moral reasons to provide assistance, either directly to those displaced, or else to the state in which the displacement has taken place. My claim is that internal displacement arising from climate change is of international concern and so grounds a duty of aid by states able to provide it, when this displacement threatens the basic human rights of those displaced, and when the local or domestic government cannot or will not take the necessary steps to meet the needs and protect the rights of those who are displaced. (The uploaded version of this paper is an uncorrected proof. Please cite and refer to the published version.). (shrink)

A Significant percentage of the people outside their country of citizenship or residence who are unable to meet their basic needs on their own, and need international protection, do not fall under the definition set out in the UN Refugee Convention. This has led many - both academic commentators and activists - to call for a new, expanded refugee definition, preferably backed up by a new, binding, international convention. In earlier work I have resisted this call, arguing that there is (...) good reason to pick out a sub-stet of those in need of international aid - a set that largely, if not completely, corresponds to those picked out by the Refugee Convention - for special benefit and protection. However, even if Convention refugees are in some ways special, we are left with the question of what, if anything, is owed to those in need of aid who are not Convention refugees. In this chapter, I set out philosophical foundations for so-called complementary protection, and show how this may and should apply to people in need of international aid who are not Convention refugees. (shrink)

This is a short introduction to a book symposium on Paul Gowder's recent book, _The Rule of Law in thee Real World_ (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The book symposium will appear in the St. Luis University Law Journal, 62 St. Louis U. L.J., -- (2018), with commentaries on Gowder's book by colleen Murphy, Robin West, Chad Flanders, and Matthew Lister, along with replies by Paul Gowder.

In this short paper I hope to use some ideas drawn from the theory and practice of civil disobedience to address one of the most difficult questions in immigration theory, one rarely addressed by philosophers or other theorists working on the topic: How should we respond to people who violate immigration law? I will start with what I take to be the easiest case for my approach—that of so-called “Dreamers”—unauthorized immigrants in the US who were brought to this country while (...) still children (often as infants) and who have spent the majority of their lives in the US. Members of this group have engaged in wide-scale protests, making the civil disobedience paradigm all the more plausible. I will then move on to the case of unauthorized immigrants who have engaged in protests, but who do not fall into the “Dreamer” category. Finally, I will consider whether thinking about immigration law violations from the perspective of civil disobedience—and the proper response to that—can help us think about immigration enforcement more generally. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Does consciousness collapse the quantum wave function? This idea was taken seriously by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but is now widely dismissed. We develop the idea by combining a mathematical theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) with an account of quantum collapse dynamics (continuous spontaneous localization). Simple versions of the theory are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect, but more complex versions remain compatible with empirical evidence. In principle, versions of the theory can be tested by experiments with (...) quantum computers. The upshot is not that consciousness-collapse interpretations are clearly correct, but that there is a research program here worth exploring. (shrink)

An interview with Ed Casey where we discuss the intersections of his philosophical work with current political issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.

How to respond to unauthorized migration and migrants is one of the most difficult questions in relation to migration theory and policy. In this commentary on Gillian Brock’s discussion of “irregular” migration, I do not attempt to give a fully satisfactory account of how to respond to unauthorized migration, but rather, using Brock’s discussion, try to highlight what I see as the most important difficulties in crafting an acceptable account, and raise some problems with the approach that Brock takes. In (...) thinking about unauthorized migration, both while trying to craft positive policies and while critiquing existing practices, we need to ask if we are most interested in a general account of how to respond to unauthorized migration, one that would apply to the large majority of cases and provide us a default approach, or if we are better served by taking a piecemeal approach, looking at why certain people or certain groups should be exempt from removal, even if they would otherwise be liable to it. In this paper, I will focus primarily on this distinction, and argue that it is at least important to provide an account of the "generic unauthorized". (shrink)

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers debating the rationality of time-biases have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. First, there is evidence that our third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing; given access to some information about the preference target, third-person (...) preferences mirror first-person preferences. As a result, the simulation hypothesis has been proposed, according to which third-person preferences will mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. Second, there is evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past (we are first-person negatively hedonically future-biased) only when we view future events as fixed and in no way under our control. By contrast, when we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis, and which aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the heuristic version of the hypothesis, but no support for the squirrelling version. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...) their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

Philosophers often consider problems of free will and moral luck in isolation from one another, but both are about control and moral responsibility. One problem of free will concerns the difficult task of specifying the kind of control over our actions that is necessary and sufficient to act freely. One problem of moral luck refers to the puzzling task of explaining whether and how people can be morally responsible for actions permeated by factors beyond their control. This chapter explicates and (...) assesses skeptical, compatibilist, and libertarian approaches to moral luck. First, I argue that what makes the above problems of free will and moral luck distinct is largely their emphasis on different kinds of luck. Second, I describe and evaluate skeptical arguments from constitutive and circumstantial luck that it is impossible to act freely. Third, I explicate and assess various support and implication relationships between various kinds of compatibilism and libertarianism, on the one hand, and causal, constitutive, circumstantial, and resultant moral luck, on the other. (shrink)

Future-biased individuals systematically prefer pleasures to be in the future and pains to be in the past. Empirical research shows that negative future-bias is robust: people prefer more past pain to less future pain. Is positive future-bias robust or fragile? Do people only prefer pleasures to be located in the future, compared to the past, when those pleasures are of equal value, or do they continue to prefer that pleasures be located in the future even when past pleasures outweigh future (...) ones? Some arguments against the rationality of future-bias require positive future-bias to be robust, while others require it to be fragile. We empirically investigate and show that positive future-bias is robust. (shrink)

This paper contains a critical examination of the prospects for analyses of knowledge that weaken the factivity condition such that knowledge implies approximate truth.

Many manipulation arguments against compatibilism rely on the claim that manipulation is relevantly similar to determinism. But we argue that manipulation is nothing like determinism in one relevant respect. Determinism is a "universal" phenomenon: its scope includes every feature of the universe. But manipulation arguments feature cases where an agent is the only manipulated individual in her universe. Call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents "existential manipulation." Our responsibility practices are impacted in different ways by (...) universal and existential phenomena. And this is a relevant difference, especially on Strawsonian approaches to moral responsibility, which take facts about our responsibility practices to be deeply connected to the nature of responsibility itself. We argue that Strawsonian accounts of moral responsibility are immune to manipulation arguments, and no attempt to modify the scope of manipulation or determinism featured in these arguments will help incompatibilists secure their desired conclusion. (shrink)

The social world contains institutions, groups, objects, and more. This essay explores a puzzle about the essences of social items. There is widespread consensus against social essences because of problematic presuppositions often made about them. But it is argued that essence can be freed from these presuppositions and their problems. Even so, a puzzle still arises. In a Platonic spirit, essences in general seem detached from the world. In an Aristotelian spirit, social essences in particular seem embedded in the world. (...) The puzzle is that these inclinations are individually plausible but jointly incompatible. The essay has four aims: to clarify and refine the puzzle; to explore the puzzle's implications for essence in general and for social essences in particular; to illustrate the fruitfulness of the general distinction between detached and embedded; and to develop this distinction to sketch a novel solution to the puzzle. (shrink)

As there is currently a neo-Aristotelian revival currently taking place within contemporary metaphysics and dispositions, or causal powers are now being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, more attention is beginning to be paid to a central Aristotelian concern: the metaphysics of substantial unity, and the doctrine of hylomorphism. In this paper, I distinguish two strands of hylomorphism present in the contemporary literature and argue that not only does each engender unique conceptual difficulties, but neither adequately captures the (...) metaphysics of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Thus both strands of contemporary hylomorphism, I argue, fundamentally misunderstand what substantial unity amounts to in the hylomorphic framework – namely, the metaphysical inseparability of matter and form. (shrink)

Brought to you by: Crop X editors: Jonathan Alexander Perez, Harmony Smith, Corinne Tendorf, David Turturo, and Derek Rahn Williams. Faculty Advisor: David Turturo; Crop X team included: Chaimae Alehyane, Zachary S. Casey, Suzanna Brinez, Jacob Brown, Elizabeth George, Francisco Javier Muniz Ituarte, Brodey Myers. -/- Credits: Huckabee College of Architecture; Graphic Designers: Studio BLDG (Blossom Liu + Danny Gray); English Editor: Luke Studebaker; Spanish Translator: Jessie Forbes; Printer: Die Keure. Cover Photo: Derek Williams. -/- Generously supported by the (...) Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University. (shrink)

(In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Psychology of Forgiveness, edited by Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright) This chapter discusses forgiveness conceived as primarily a volitional commitment, rather than an emotional transformation. As a commitment, forgiveness is distal, involving moral agency over time, and can take the form of a speech act or a chosen attitude. The purpose can be a commitment to repair or restore relationships with wrongdoers for their sake or the sake of the relationship, usually by forswearing (...) one’s hostile attitudes toward a particular wrongdoing; the commitment may also be to oneself for one’s own sake, to be a person with a virtue of forgivingness. It can be incident-specific, that is, a response to a particular occasion of harm, or a forward-looking disposition, an aim to cultivate the habit of being a forgiving person in advance. The enabling conditions of forgivingness as a virtue may be more basic master virtues including integrity and humility, motivations that also underpin commitments to be unforgiving, so this chapter concludes with some careful consideration of the ethics of unforgivingness to others, and the commitment to be unforgiving of oneself. (shrink)

A standard line in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that physical theories are equivalent only when they agree on their empirical content, where this empirical content is often understood as being encoded in the equations of motion of those theories. In this article, we question whether it is indeed the case that the empirical content of a theory is exhausted by its equations of motion, showing that (for example) considerations of boundary conditions play a key role in the empirical (...) equivalence (or otherwise) of theories. Having argued for this, we show that philosophical claims made by Weatherall (2016) that electromagnetism in the Faraday tensor formalism is equivalent to electromagnetism in the vector potential formalism, and by Knox (2011) that general relativity is equivalent to teleparallel gravity, can both be called into question. We then show that properly considering the role of boundary conditions in theory structure can potentially restore these claims of equivalence and close with some remarks on the pragmatics of adjudications on theory identity. (shrink)

Intersectionality has utilized various feminist theories that continue subculture of violence thinking about Black men and boys. While intersectional feminists often claim that intersectionality leads to a clearer social analysis of power and hierarchies throughout society and within groups, the categories and claims of intersectionality fail to distinguish themselves from previously racist theories that sought to explain race, class, and gender, based on subcultural values. This article is the first to interrogate the theories used to construct the gendered categories and (...) the assumptions behind Black male positionality under intersectional analyses. Contrary to its promises for more liberated Black identities, intersectionality merely replicates the pseudo-science of racist criminology and presents decades old theories as cutting-edge gender analyses. In short, while intersectionality has allowed Black women to create nuanced experiences and epistemological accounts of Black womanhood, the very same theory has confined Black male experience to the perpetration of violence and defined Black manhood as lesser—merely the exemplification of white masculinity’s pathological excess. (shrink)

Precision Medicine is driven by the idea that the rapidly increasing range of relatively cheap and efficient self-tracking devices make it feasible to collect multiple kinds of phenotypic data. Advocates of N = 1 research emphasize the countless opportunities personal data provide for optimizing individual health. At the same time, using biomarker data for lifestyle interventions has shown to entail complex challenges. In this paper, we argue that researchers in the field of precision medicine need to address the performative dimension (...) of collecting data. We propose the fun-house mirror as a metaphor for the use of personal health data; each health data source yields a particular type of image that can be regarded as a ‘data mirror’ that is by definition specific and skewed. This requires competence on the part of individuals to adequately interpret the images thus provided. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the role of attention in Kant’s aesthetic theory in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. While broadly Kantian aestheticians have defended the claim that there is a distinct way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, Kant himself is not usually acknowledged as offering an account of aesthetic attention. On the basis of Kant’s more general account of attention in other texts and his remarks on attention in the Critique of the Power of (...) Judgment, I reconstruct Kant’s account of aesthetic attention. On this account, aesthetic attention is simultaneously directed at the form of an object and at the judging subject’s own mental states as she attends to the object. In the experience of beauty, we specifically attend to the harmonious relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding. (shrink)

Many classically valid meta-inferences fail in a standard supervaluationist framework. This allegedly prevents supervaluationism from offering an account of good deductive reasoning. We provide a proof system for supervaluationist logic which includes supervaluationistically acceptable versions of the classical meta-inferences. The proof system emerges naturally by thinking of truth as licensing assertion, falsity as licensing negative assertion and lack of truth-value as licensing rejection and weak assertion. Moreover, the proof system respects well-known criteria for the admissibility of inference rules. Thus, supervaluationists (...) can provide an account of good deductive reasoning. Our proof system moreover brings to light how one can revise the standard supervaluationist framework to make room for higher-order vagueness. We prove that the resulting logic is sound and complete with respect to the consequence relation that preserves truth in a model of the non-normal modal logic _NT_. Finally, we extend our approach to a first-order setting and show that supervaluationism can treat vagueness in the same way at every order. The failure of conditional proof and other meta-inferences is a crucial ingredient in this treatment and hence should be embraced, not lamented. (shrink)

Although some previous studies have investigated the relationship between moral foundations and moral judgment development, the methods used have not been able to fully explore the relationship. In the present study, we used Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) in order to address the limitations in traditional regression methods that have been used previously. Results showed consistency with previous findings that binding foundations are negatively correlated with post-conventional moral reasoning and positively correlated with maintaining norms and personal interest schemas. In addition to (...) previous studies, our results showed a positive correlation for individualizing foundations and post-conventional moral reasoning. Implications are discussed as well as a detailed explanation of the novel BMA method in order to allow others in the field of moral education to be able to use it in their own studies. (shrink)

In this chapter, we argue that the web is a poietically- enabling environment, which both enhances and requires the development of a “constructionist ethics”. We begin by explaining the appropriate concept of “constructionist ethics”, and analysing virtue ethics as the primary example. We then show why CyberEthics (or Computer Ethics, as it is also called) cannot be based on virtue ethics, yet needs to retain a constructionist approach. After providing evidence for significant poietic uses of the web, we argue that (...) ethical constructionism is not only facilitated by the web, but is also what the web requires as an ethics of the digital environment. In conclusion, we relate the present discussion to standard positions in CyberEthics and to a broader project for Information Ethics. (shrink)

Engineers are traditionally regarded as trustworthy professionals who meet exacting standards. In this chapter I begin by explicating our trust relationship towards engineers, arguing that it is a linear but indirect relationship in which engineers “stand behind” the artifacts and technological systems that we rely on directly. The chapter goes on to explain how this relationship has become more complex as engineers have taken on two additional aims: the aim of social engineering to create and steer trust between people, and (...) the aim of creating automated systems that take over human tasks and are meant to invite the trust of those who rely on and interact with them. (shrink)

In the ontology of music the Aristotelian theory of musical works is the view that musical works are immanent universals. The Aristotelian theory (hereafter Musical Aristotelianism) is an attractive and serviceable hypothesis. However, it is overlooked as a genuine competitor to the more well-known theories of Musical Platonism and nominalism. Worse still, there is no detailed account in the literature of the nature of the universals that the Aristotelian identifies musical works with. In this paper, I argue that the best (...) version of Musical Aristotelianism identifies musical works with structural universals. I first motivate the view by outlining its explanatory benefits. I then argue that Musical Aristotelianism is preferable to Musical Platonism and present a novel account of musical works as structural universals by developing D. M. Armstrong’s theory of structural universals. I discuss the consequences of Musical Aristotelianism with respect to on-going issues in debates about musical works and defend the view against an influential objection, concluding that Musical Aristotelianism is a genuine competitor in debates about the nature of musical works. (shrink)

Theorists attending to the epistemic condition on responsibility are divided over whether moral ignorance is ever exculpatory. While those who argue that reasonable expectation is required for blameworthiness often maintain that moral ignorance can excuse, theorists who embrace a quality of will approach to blameworthiness are not sanguine about the prospect of excuses among morally ignorant wrongdoers. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that moral ignorance always reflects insufficient care for what matters morally, and therefore that moral ignorance never excuses. Furthermore, (...) quality of will theorists treat their skepticism about excuses for the morally ignorant as a natural implication of their approach. It is therefore unsurprising that, while many have argued for the blamelessness of certain morally ignorant agents on grounds concerning reasonable expectation, the possibility that morally ignorant agents might be blameless even according to quality of will views has not been adequately addressed. I illustrate and explain how it is possible for morally ignorant agents to display sufficient care for the morally relevant features of their wrong behavior. Thus, even if quality of will views are correct, moral ignorance sometimes excuses. (shrink)

We address the ethics of scenarios in which one party entraps, intentionally tempts or intentionally tests the virtue of another. We classify, in a new manner, three distinct types of acts that are of concern, namely acts of entrapment, of intentional temptation and of virtue testing. Our classification is, for each kind of scenario, of itself neutral concerning the question whether the agent acts permissibly. We explain why acts of entrapment are more ethically objectionable than like acts of intentional temptation (...) and why these, in turn, are more ethically objectionable than like acts of virtue testing. Along the way, we scrutinize, and eventually reject, the view that acts of entrapment are ethically unacceptable because intentional temptation is involved in entrapment. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the level of promotion of entrepreneurship in the technical colleges in Palestine. The analytical descriptive method was used in the study. A questionnaire of 41 items was randomly distributed to the technical colleges in the Gaza Strip. The random sample consisted of (275) employees from the mentioned colleges, and the response rate were (74.5%). The results of the study showed that the technical colleges achieved a high level of promotion of entrepreneurship with a relative weight (...) of 73.45%. The results of the study showed that there is a high level of promotion of entrepreneurship (risk, preparedness, proactive competition, innovation orientation) in the technical colleges in Gaza Strip. The field of competition came in first place with a relative weight of 76.65%. In the second place came the field (the trend towards innovation) and relative weight (74.96%). In the third place came the field of pre-emptive preparedness with a relative weight of 74.07%. In the fourth and last place came the field of risk and a relative weight of 68.39%. The results confirmed that there are statistically significant differences in the promotion of entrepreneurship in the technical colleges in Gaza Strip due to the college variable in favor of UCAS. The results confirmed that there is no statistically significant relationship in the promotion of entrepreneurship in technical colleges in Gaza Strip due to the variable level of employment. The researchers suggest a set of recommendations, the most important of which is to draw the attention of the technical colleges to the importance of promoting entrepreneurship, because of their role in reducing the problem of unemployment, the importance of linking technical education and promoting entrepreneurship to the Palestinian society in general and Gaza Strip in particular. The importance of urging decision-makers in technical colleges to promote interest in leadership and to put their own courses in all technical education programs in these colleges, as well as enhancing the technical, technological and technical capabilities of technical education and keeping pace with the latest international standards by providing the necessary material resources. There is a need to urge researchers to conduct further studies of the future which deal with the same variables of the current study in the field of entrepreneurship and applied to other sectors. (shrink)

We explain and explore class-theoretic potentialism—the view that one can always individuate more classes over a set-theoretic universe. We examine some motivations for class-theoretic potentialism, before proving some results concerning the relevant potentialist systems (in particular exhibiting failures of the $\mathsf {.2}$ and $\mathsf {.3}$ axioms). We then discuss the significance of these results for the different kinds of class-theoretic potentialists.

Van Fraassen’s (1989) infamous best of a bad lot objection is widely taken to be the most serious problem that afflicts theories of inference to the best explanation (IBE), for it alleges to show that we should not accept the conclusion of any case of such reasoning as it actually proceeds. Moreover, this is supposed to be the case irrespective of the details of the particular criteria used to select best explanations. The best of a bad lot objection is predicated (...) on, and really only requires, the idea that in any real case of IBE where one hypothesis is favored as best over those with which it competes, it is always the case that it is more likely that the true explanation is to be found in the set of unformulated and unconsidered logical alternatives to the set of actually considered hypotheses. On this basis, Van Fraassen believes that accepting the conclusion of IBEs so understood is irrational and this is simply because such inferences are supposedly not probative. In this paper the best of a bad lot objection will be addressed and it will be shown that Van Fraassen’s notorious criticism of IBE depends on a problematic conflation of two notions of rationality and thus that his criticism of IBE involves a damning equivocation. In essence, he conflates ideal standards of rationality with epistemic standards of rationality and, in so doing, makes it appear to be the case that we should not accept the conclusions of IBEs. But, when we disambiguate the concepts of rationality at work in the argument Van Fraassen’s conclusion simply does not follow. (shrink)

The causal efficacy of a material system is usually thought to be produced by the law-like actions and interactions of its constituents. Here, a specific system is constructed and explained that produces a cause that cannot be understood in this way, but instead has novel and autonomous efficacy. The construction establishes a proof-of-feasibility of strong emergence. The system works by utilizing randomness in a targeted and cyclical way, and by relying on sustained evolution by natural selection. It is not vulnerable (...) to standard arguments against strong emergence, in particular ones that assume that the physical realm is causally closed. Moreover, it does not suffer from epiphenomenalism or causal overdetermination. The system uses only standard material components and processes, and is fully consistent with naturalism. It is discussed whether the emergent cause can still be viewed as ‘material’ in the way that term is commonly understood. (shrink)

Can groups really be agents or is group agency just a fiction? Christian List and Philip Pettit argue influentially for group-agent realism by showing how certain groups form and act on attitudes in ways they take to be unexplainable at the level of the individual agents constituting them. Group agency is therefore considered not a fiction or a metaphor but a reality we must account for in explanations of certain social phenomena. In this paper, I challenge this defence of group-agent (...) realism by showing how it is undermined by individual-level analysis of how individuals interact within groups. While group agency can be a useful fiction, real agents are at the individual level, not the collective level. (shrink)

In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticized for implying that no one can ever be free to perform any action. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. To assess the possibility of different conceptions of freedom, I consider the trade-offs they make between these two dimensions. I find that pure negative freedom is (...) clearly possible. Republican freedom might also be possible, though its protection requirement is too vague for a definitive verdict. Finally, the recently proposed ‘freedom as independence’ is impossible since it is an attempt to avoid the unavoidable trade-off. (shrink)

In the heart of southeast Texas, an industrial powerhouse often referred to as the 'Golden Triangle', the oil refineries and petrochemical plants stand as stalwart testaments to the region's economic evolution. Interestingly, before the discovery of oil at Spindletop, the lumber and cattle industries powered this region's economy. A profound shift occurred when the Lucas Gusher, a fountain of oil spurting thousands of feet into the air, struck the lands of Spindletop Hill on January 10, 1901. This remarkable discovery of (...) the Spindletop oilfield on a slat dome formation south of Beaumont, Texas, marked the birth of the modern petroleum industry and fundamentally transformed the region's geopolitical, economic, and cultural landscapes. People from all over the country relocated to Gladys City and Beaumont in search of work and new opportunities, creating a boomtown as the town's population swelled from 10,000 to 50,000. The newfound urbanization brought by the oil industry transformed the town and the surrounding areas, creating a ripple effect across the region that would be felt for generations to come. The surge in oil-driven economic activity transmuted the region into a vibrant nexus of commerce, with the oil industry emerging as a critical architect of growth and advancement. This newfound affluence incited by the petroleum sector ushered in an era of economic diversification, laying the groundwork for industrialization’s further evolution. The Spindletop Oil Fields not only underscored the United States’ ascent as the foremost petroleum-producing nation but also signaled the nation’s initiation into the Petroleum Age. It was Spindletop that solidified its position as America’s first significant oil field, becoming an enduring symbol of its industrial might. By 1985, over 153,000,000 barrels of oil had been produced and extracted from the Spindletop oil fields, underscoring the magnitude of this extraordinary resource. (shrink)

Employers seeking to control employee behavior outside of working hours is nothing new. However, recent developments have extended efforts to control employee behavior into new areas, with new significance. Employers seek to control legal behavior by employees outside of working hours, to have significant influence over employee’s health-related behavior, and to monitor and control employee’s social media, even when this behavior has nothing to do with the workplace. In this article, I draw on the work of political theorists Jon Elster, (...) Gerald Gaus and Michael Walzer, and privacy scholars Daniel Solove and Anita Allen, to show what is wrong with this extension of employer control of employee’s outside of work behavior. I argue that there are ethical limits on the controls that employers may put on their employees’ out of work behavior, and that many of these limits should be enshrined into legal protections which would prevent employers from conditioning employment on the regulations criticized. -/- (Please note that the version of this paper on SSRN is a pre-publication version. Please cite and refer to the published version when possible.). (shrink)

Some philosophers contend that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility for wrongdoing. An agent is concomitantly ignorant with respect to wrongdoing if and only if her ignorance is non-culpable, but she would freely have performed the same action if she were not ignorant. I, however, argue that concomitant ignorance excuses. I show that leading accounts of moral responsibility imply that concomitant ignorance excuses, and I debunk the view that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility.

The norm of assertion, to be in force, is a social norm. What is the content of our social norm of assertion? Various linguistic arguments purport to show that to assert is to represent oneself as knowing. But to represent oneself as knowing does not entail that assertion is governed by a knowledge norm. At best these linguistic arguments provide indirect support for a knowledge norm. Furthermore, there are alternative, non-normative explanations for the linguistic data (as in recent work from (...) Van Elswyk). Direct arguments would rely on normative judgments about the permissibility or impermissibility of assertions with and without the speaker knowing the content asserted. John Turri's work experimental results purport to show that our norm of assertion is factive, and probably knowledge. But as a number of recent experimentalists (Kneer, Reuter and Broessel, Marsili and Wiegmann) have shown, Turri's results rely on the problemmatic use of 'should' as in 'Maria should assert that she owns a 1990 watch.' Correcting for this, these experimentalists provide strong evidence that our norm of assertion is not factive. The standard reply to evidence like this from the assertion of unlucky falsehoods is the excuse maneuver. But Marsili and Wiegmann, following Turri's protocol for testing for excuse validation, show that participants who judge that assertions unlucky falsehoods are permissible are not guilty of excuse validation. Given our current understanding of the experimental evidence, knowledge is not our norm of assertion. (shrink)

Drawing on Françoise Dastur’s suggestion that the event is a permanent possibility that shapes lived experience, but also, when it occurs, a distinctive temporal rupture, I argue that the initial weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic constitute an event, in her sense. Connecting this phenomenological point to literatures on the politics of temporality, I suggest that the distinction between event and normal experience maps to that between epidemic and endemic. Understanding some of the political and ethical erasures of death and debility (...) in COVID times can thus be mutually informed by phenomenological analysis. (shrink)

What is it to base a belief on reasons? Existing attempts to give an account of the basing relation encounter a dilemma: either one appeals to some kind of neutral process that does not adequately reflect the way basing is a content‐sensitive first‐personal activity, or one appeals to linking or bridge principles that over‐intellectualize and threaten regress. We explain why this dilemma arises, and diagnose the commitments that are key obstacles to providing a satisfactory account. We explain why they should (...) be rejected anyway, and then offer a new, knowledge‐first virtue epistemological theory of the basing relation that shows how we can substantially theorize about mental processes without these commitments. The resulting view plausibly captures the way in which basing is an inherently mental and content‐sensitive process. (shrink)

I argue that rejection is a speech act that cannot be reduced to assertion. Adapting an argument by Huw Price, I conclude that rejection is best conceived of as the speech act that is used to register that some other speech act is (or would be) violating a rule of the conversation game. This can be naturally understood as registering *norm violations* where speech acts are characterised by their essential norms. However, I argue that rejection itself is not to be (...) characterised by a norm. Instead, registering violations is a necessary condition for understanding the normative framework in the first place. The core observation is that the concept of an 'illegal move' is intelligible, so a speech act can be (say) an assertion, despite violating the essential norm of asserting. Rejection has the function of pointing out that a move is illegal. But registering rule violations is a precondition of playing games with rules (it is part of the concept 'game'), not itself a rule in a game. A similar special role of rejection (that it is not explicable in the terms provided by a framework, but needed to conceptualise these terms) likely occurs in other frameworks as well, e.g. characterising speech acts by commitments or their effect on a common ground. (shrink)

It is often said that some kind of peripheral (or inattentional) conscious awareness accompanies our focal (attentional) consciousness. I agree that this is often the case, but clarity is needed on several fronts. In this paper, I lay out four distinct theses on peripheral awareness and show that three of them are true. However, I then argue that a fourth thesis, commonly associated with the so-called "self-representational approach to consciousness," is false. The claim here is that we have outer focal (...) consciousness accompanied often (or even always) by inner peripheral (self-)awareness. My criticisms stem from both methodological and phenomenological considerations. In doing so, I offer a diagnosis as to why the fourth thesis has seemed true to so many and also show how the so-called "transparency of experience," frequently invoked by representationalists, is importantly relevant to my diagnosis. Finally, I respond to several objections and to further attempts to show that thesis four is true. What emerges is that if one wishes to hold that some form of self-awareness accompanies all outer-directed conscious states, one is better off holding that such self-awareness is itself unconscious, as is held for example by standard higher-order theories of consciousness. (shrink)

As a response to the opioid epidemic in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain in 2016. This document served as a means to reduce risks and address harms of opioid use by recommending that clinicians conduct periodic urine drug testing for patients on chronic opioid therapy. As an unintended result of this recommendation, providers began using unexpected urine drug test results as a reason to dismiss (...) patients from practice, both out of concern for their patients’ wellbeing as well as their own legal risks. Using Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, we argue that this science-based, black-and-white practice does not heed the patient as a whole person. Instead, we recommend a more contextual, patient-centered approach that can help us to better understand and manage patient needs in such contexts. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant claims that genius is a talent for art, but not for science. Despite his restriction of genius to the domain of fine art, several recent interpreters have suggested that genius has a role to play in Kant’s account of cognition in general and scientific practice in particular. In this paper, I explore Kant’s reasons for excluding genius from science as well as the reasons that one might nevertheless be tempted to think that his account (...) allows room for the scientific genius. I then argue that Kant’s concerns are not only epistemic, but also moral, and together, they give us good reason for resisting the veneration of genius. (shrink)

Through extensive training, experts acquire specialized knowledge and abilities. In this paper, I argue that experts also acquire specialized visual experiences. Specifically, I articulate and defend the account that experts enjoy visual experiences that represent gestalt properties through perceptual learning. I survey an array of empirical studies on face perception and perceptual expertise that support this account. I also look at studies on perceptual adaptation that some might argue present a problem for my account. I show how the data are (...) subject to an interpretation that is friendly to it. Last, I address two theoretical objections to the claim that visual experiences represent gestalt properties. (shrink)

THIS IS A PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION OF THE PAPER. The New Testament speaks of our having faith rather than sight. This distinction is not made to distinguish faith from knowledge. Rather, it is to distinguish one kind of knowledge from another. We may know by trust in reliable authority; this knowledge is necessarily secondhand, but it is knowledge all the same. This, I argue, is the New Testament idea of faith. Another way of knowing is firsthand. Sight in the New Testament, (...) I argue, is a metonym for firsthand knowledge. In this article I consider the meaning of faith and sight in the relevant New Testament passages, with an extended exegesis of 2 Cor. 5:7 and Heb. 11:1. (shrink)